For a genre that has always professed a higher-than-average intelligence quotient among its fan base, for whatever reason, documents (books, magazines and so on) and documentary films extolling the virtues and historical merit of punk rock always seem to pander to the lowest intellectual common denominator. The House Of The Rising Punk? What a lousy title; it’s trite, situationist at best, cheesy and requires no thought at all. If the film is going to talk about the venue that started it all in New York, CBGB, and the bands that played there, great – be that film but at least call it something marginally thought-provoking or that uses a bit of code to entice the desired fan base. Call it “Country, Bluegrass & Blues” – that would still be accurate and would have a bit of punk spirit. However, Rising Punk only brushes upon that subject matter before cutting to stock footage of The Stooges in an arena – it makes no sense.
Perhaps the unspoken point: punk rock – especially in its embryonic years, was evenly divided into two sub-generic camps: the “thinkers” and “thugs.” The thugs tend to be more vocal and talkative and are always good for a sound byte so, to this point, the story of punk rock has been told, for the most part, by a couple of Ramones, any Sex Pistol willing to go on camera and Legs McNeil but, at least at the outset, the thinkers were the driving force behind the cultivation of the sound and they do get the opportunity to sound off here as Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell and Patti Smith talk about how the movement was actually inspired by the Beat Poets and Rambeau as well as a need to make music – except that they weren’t virtuosos like Led Zeppelin or pretty like Donna Summer so they did it on their own, their own way. Other people started to get interested in the more attainable goals this style represented and so Blondie and The Ramones soon appeared.
It’s at this point that Rising Punk quietly separates itself from the pack. Typically, a filmmaker will corner Johnny and Joey Ramone (while it was only recently released, the film was shot in 1998) and pin them together at a table in CBGBs (always hilarious because, at the time of Joey’s death in 2001, he and Johnny hadn’t spoken directly in about sixteen years in spite of the fact that they played together during this time) to get the background on The Ramones but Rising Punk chooses instead to talk to Dee Dee (again, this film was shot before his passing in 2002) and get the inside track from the key songwriter in the band (this illustrates that the creators of the film did their homework instead of going after the two most recognizable members).
And again, immediately thereafter, the film jump cuts to a much more modern clip of Sonic Youth on a not-so-CeeBees stage before jump cutting again to an interview with Alan Vega of Suicide and cutting again to Richard Hell’s departure from Television and the formation of The Heartbreakers and The Voidoids. This is all done within ten minutes of footage and, justifiably, the heads of viewers are left spinning at the seeming lack of direction the film has.
And then the whole thing just sort of snaps into focus in another jump cut. From the beginning of the documentary, clips of interview footage with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch pop in and out at random intervals. They don’t hobble the film at all, but don’t really add anything either until, in what almost seems like an accident while discussing the parallels between his early films and the original punk movement, he lets it slip:
“The spirit is more important than technique.”
At that point, it becomes clear that the music isn’t the central theme for this picture, it’s the entire punk movement through film, print, music, performance and visual art and the alterations to the basic fabric, artistic values and ethics made by the first group of punks. “The House Of The Rising Punk” is, in this case, a metaphor for the values that spawned the genre and also the space that those values cleared in the cultural landscape to let the music grow and develop. And, of course, ‘Punk’ was also the name of a home-grown magazine that featured all of the bands as well as being the ad hoc namesake for the genre.
At that point, of course, the film feels compelled to once again reiterate that the Brits discovered what was happening in New York, pasteurized it into the Sex Pistols and sold it back to the States who finally got it then – even if they didn’t exactly get it.
As the film carries on, it contends that the original wave of punk bands was already dead by the time Sid Vicious overdosed in everyone’s eyes other than the mainstream media and defused in one hundred different directions before Nirvana revived and updated the sound in front of the MTV cameras; flourishing and proving to have some staying power ever since.
…And right there – without any reasonable warning at all – the credits roll and the film’s over. One has to wonder – did the production run out of money? Is it to be part of a series? Because no notice is given indicating what’s to happen next and this film’s close appears to have been edited with a butcher knife, viewers are left to speculate on what, why and how this ending is supposed to imply. To call it an artistic ending that is supposed to imply a parable or hyperbolic commentary on the nature of the music in question is utter bullshit; there is simply no ending at all here and somebody either ran out of money or ran out of ideas.
So let’s quickly take stock. House Of The Rising Punk does a couple of things that no one else has had the gumption to tackle before and that’s gratifying; the early focus on the poet/philosophers of punk that actually started the scene as well as getting Dee Dee Ramone on camera for interview are motions to be respected and betray a love of the music, but unfortunately the film is just too fractured to be of any real value. At this point, few filmmakers if any have been able to capture the spirit of punk on camera and, in this case because of the way the proceedings end, Jarmusch’s earlier sentiments that felt like the exhilarating modus for the film now feels like a cultivated way of attempting to excuse cinematic ineptitude. Even staunch or completist punk archivists will raise an eyebrow and question the validity of House Of The Rising Punk as an addition (good or bad) to the storyline and legacy of the genre.
