Magnetic Personality

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields

Directed by Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara

At Film Forum Oct. 27-Nov. 9

Runtime: 85 min.

"He’s in denial,” a musician-filmmaker friend said, quickly sizing up Stephin Merritt, the song/writer/musician subject of the documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields. “He should be writing showtunes for musical theater.” This assessment goes against Merritt’s media rep as a pop genius, but it pinpoints the real difference between hipster trends and showbiz tradition. An indie or alt-pop group like Merritt’s The Magnetic Fields is not original; it’s simply too smug to identify as showbiz and so prides itself on the delusion that it is somehow better, smarter, cooler.

Merritt’s primary distinction comes from writing and recording songs that deny traditional aesthetic satisfaction. Perhaps best known for 69 Love Songs, the three-disc 1999 album, Merritt’s dubious emotionalism withholds the pleasure of cathartic, emotional singing in favor of filigree. (His songs are twee—more coy than expressive.) By being limp, Merritt avoids the stigma of traditional showbiz sentimentality—anti-sentimentality has itself become a hipster tradition. Strange Powers gives an inside peek at this self-righteous indie-pop: Merritt’s proudly schlubby, artfag demeanor (that’s not necessarily an insult) makes him the Pillsbury poster boy for its smugness and casual racism.

If documentary duo Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara were more experienced, inquiring journalists and not simply fans, they might have explored the peculiarity of Merritt’s style for its roots in the social fragmentation of contemporary music culture. Oddly enough, Merritt parades his own idiosyncrasy with delusional pride that is the hallmark of hipsterism’s post-everything ethic: He’s post-rock, post-Sondheim, post-gender, post-racial, post-political. His persona is defined by a brazen insularity (that is, loneliness), typified by bland sexual candor. He’s shown writing lyrics while sitting in the window box of a West Village gay bar, yet bragging about this “ironic” habit—“I like writing in gay bars”—which he admits he does for hours on end, despite the background thump of disco music which he disdains. “I would never write a song that went bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump.”

Fix and O’Hara are inured to the snobbery of that comment. Worse, they’re incurious about the social maladjustment and cultural intolerance it reveals—and where it came from. (Merritt never knew his father, an obscure pop singer seen in archival footage.) Merritt’s withdrawal from disco—one of the major sources of gay, black, Latino, intellectual, sensual and artistic expression—proves what is lacking in lily-white indie pop. Without disco’s populist and personal fervor, indie pop like Magnetic Fields’ seems weak, unpersuasive and elitist.

Performance footage shows Merritt and band exchanging nerdy banter and Merritt singing through his head—not his diaphragm or heart—producing a flat, unmelodious drone. It illustrates something damaged in Merritt’s psyche.

He’s obstinate about true pop (read: vulgar) music and indifferent to it as a force of genuine, deep, social revolution and political subversion. Strange Powers can’t disguise this personality defect— an introversion that uses braininess as a defensive posture—yet celebrates it as a source of inspiration, perhaps even proof of artistic integrity. This “integrity” seems a class- and race-based rejection of the mainstream. Merritt’s passiveaggressive snobbery—pretending to ultra sophistication—takes out its envious hostility on music of the common folk.

Fix and O’Hara celebrate The Magnetic Fields’ indie-pop for being “smart folks” music that distances itself from movement and sensual pleasure. Bookish in the worst way, Merritt’s “10000 Butterflies” lyrics are also “literary” in the worst way. A brief tribute from Peter Gabriel credits Merritt as one of the best contemporary songwriters, yet neglects the Broadway show tune tradition that Merritt’s subjective songwriting and character-study tunes (“Long Forgotten Fairytale”) most resembles. When a parade of indie types— Carrie Brownstein, Cyndi Stivers, LD Beghtol and, unexpectedly, cult authors Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler—weigh in on Merritt’s gifts, it’s a procession of reclusive, middle-class, all-white loners. (It should be noted Merritt actually wrote the music and lyrics for a stage adaptation of Gaiman’s children’s book Coraline.)

Strange Powers says so little about what Merritt’s music and cultural status represents (Fix and O’Hara offer no perspective that recognizes the rest of the showbiz firmament) that one is forced to confront what his celebrity lacks: The fact that his contempt for hip-hop—the most inclusive music genre there ever was— reveals an effete, exclusionary attitude. So the film fails completely when it wades into the small controversy of Merritt’s cultural/

racial preferences, then drops it. The New Yorker’s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones once labeled Merritt a “racist cracker.” Fix and O’Hara trace the source of this appraisal to an Experience Music Project panel in Seattle—a bizarrely unintelligible seminar where Merritt mutters his admiration for the song “Zippity Do-Dah” from Disney’s 1947 Song of the South. That unfairly maligned film is determined “racist” by a magazine editor, then an Internet blogger slandered Merritt’s suspicious appreciation, which led to Jones’ defamation.

At this point comes the single nonwhite face in Merritt’s cosmology: Gaylord Fields, a black journalist, defends Merritt and validates his contempt for hip-hop. Then Jones follows up with a perfectly wimpy—considering the subject—apology: “I don’t have any real defense for my position.” This insipid lack of standards or integrity fits the whiny music Merritt records. It’s also disconcertingly in sync with his behavior—that doughy, deadpan, dry humor and indolence that mutates into snobbery, arrogance and solitude. Strange Powers should be a cautionary cultural prognosis. Instead, it’s a promotional film.