Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You by Charles Taylor

Author:Charles Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781632868176
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

ALOHA AND GOOD NIGHT, TWO BY FLOYD MUTRUX: ALOHA, BOBBY AND ROSE AND AMERICAN HOT WAX

If God really wanted to show off his work, he’d be a DJ. In the films of Floyd Mutrux, 1975’s Aloha, Bobby and Rose and 1978’s American Hot Wax, the music that pours forth from thousands of car radios seemingly tuned to the same station, from portable radios in kitchens and teenage bedrooms and garages—hell, that might be coming out of the air itself—becomes the filigreed settings some unseen creator has chosen to show off the jewels of ’70s Los Angeles and 1959 New York City.

The cities might not look like jewels. L.A. is horizontal sprawl and car headlights coming at us through the haze and the sodium glare of the streetlights and billboards. New York isn’t the teeming metropolis of Times Square and Broadway, the images that the movies usually give us. The city here is all shadowed, nearly deserted nighttime streets. It’s as if fifty years after Drug Store and Automat and Night Shadows, Edward Hopper were still working the same territory. Neither L.A. nor New York, as we see them here, are pretty. But they are beautiful. They provide spaces through which the characters move, creating their dramas, finding their places in already existing dramas. What unites the solitary New Yorkers—the teenage girl listening in her Brooklyn bedroom, the fledgling doo-wop group on the street corner, the janitor mopping up a midtown building while the DJ playing the music on his transistor radio works several stories above him, the Los Angelenos shooting pool or pulled into drive-ins or cruising Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard—is the music. The deliberate, unhurried pace of “Bennie and the Jets” complementing the cars cruising Hollywood Boulevard at Sunset. The Drifters’ soaring “There Goes My Baby,” with a sound and a heart big enough to hold the disappointments and dreams of New Yorkers, from a middle-aged man thinking of his estranged father in Akron, to the teenagers who are listening to the radio and longing for a community they can’t imagine but trusting it exists because someone is making music that tells them it does. We are, in these two movies, in the province of night owls, the ones staying up to brood over some lost dream, or the dreamers too keyed up to sleep because, in the next few minutes, they might hear the song, might meet the person, that unlocks all the mysteries. We can let the singer Maria McKee speak for them all:

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