Magnetic Personality
Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
Directed by Kerthy Fix and Gail OHara
At Film Forum Oct. 27-Nov. 9
Runtime: 85 min.
"Hes 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 Merritts 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 Merritts The Magnetic Fields is not original; its simply too smug to identify as showbiz and so prides itself on the delusion that it is somehow better, smarter, cooler.
Merritts 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, Merritts dubious emotionalism withholds the pleasure of cathartic, emotional singing in favor of filigree. (His songs are tweemore coy than expressive.) By being limp, Merritt avoids the stigma of traditional showbiz sentimentalityanti-sentimentality has itself become a hipster tradition. Strange Powers gives an inside peek at this self-righteous indie-pop: Merritts proudly schlubby, artfag demeanor (thats not necessarily an insult) makes him the Pillsbury poster boy for its smugness and casual racism.
If documentary duo Kerthy Fix and Gail OHara were more experienced, inquiring journalists and not simply fans, they might have explored the peculiarity of Merritts 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 hipsterisms post-everything ethic: Hes 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. Hes shown writing lyrics while sitting in the window box of a West Village gay bar, yet bragging about this ironic habitI like writing in gay barswhich 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 OHara are inured to the snobbery of that comment. Worse, theyre incurious about the social maladjustment and cultural intolerance it revealsand where it came from. (Merritt never knew his father, an obscure pop singer seen in archival footage.) Merritts withdrawal from discoone of the major sources of gay, black, Latino, intellectual, sensual and artistic expressionproves what is lacking in lily-white indie pop. Without discos 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 headnot his diaphragm or heartproducing a flat, unmelodious drone. It illustrates something damaged in Merritts psyche.
Hes obstinate about true pop (read: vulgar) music and indifferent to it as a force of genuine, deep, social revolution and political subversion. Strange Powers cant disguise this personality defect an introversion that uses braininess as a defensive postureyet 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. Merritts passiveaggressive snobberypretending to ultra sophisticationtakes out its envious hostility on music of the common folk.
Fix and OHara celebrate The Magnetic Fields indie-pop for being smart folks music that distances itself from movement and sensual pleasure. Bookish in the worst way, Merritts 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 Merritts 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 Handlerweigh in on Merritts gifts, its 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 Gaimans childrens book Coraline.)
Strange Powers says so little about what Merritts music and cultural status represents (Fix and OHara 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-hopthe 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 Merritts cultural/
racial preferences, then drops it. The New Yorkers music critic Sasha Frere-Jones once labeled Merritt a racist cracker. Fix and OHara trace the source of this appraisal to an Experience Music Project panel in Seattlea bizarrely unintelligible seminar where Merritt mutters his admiration for the song Zippity Do-Dah from Disneys 1947 Song of the South. That unfairly maligned film is determined racist by a magazine editor, then an Internet blogger slandered Merritts suspicious appreciation, which led to Jones defamation.
At this point comes the single nonwhite face in Merritts cosmology: Gaylord Fields, a black journalist, defends Merritt and validates his contempt for hip-hop. Then Jones follows up with a perfectly wimpyconsidering the subjectapology: I dont have any real defense for my position. This insipid lack of standards or integrity fits the whiny music Merritt records. Its also disconcertingly in sync with his behaviorthat doughy, deadpan, dry humor and indolence that mutates into snobbery, arrogance and solitude. Strange Powers should be a cautionary cultural prognosis. Instead, its a promotional film.