Mercurial, Magnetic Merritt

I wouldn't try to rank Stephin Merritt's importance among American songwriters, but I will say that none of the great ones have seemed to do it so aloofly as he. In the film Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields ([opening this week at Film Forum]), we get a long look at the man behind the detachment (if not the man behind that man). Strange Powers, a documentary 11 years in the making, lays out Merritt's early years, his songwriting creed, his small notorieties and the platonic love he shares with his closest cohort.

"At best you could maybe find parts of his life maybe obliquely in his work," Daniel Handler, author of the Lemony Snicket books, tells the filmmaker, "but that's not what he's doing."

Handler is not the only celebrity who speaks on Merritt's behalf early in the film. Other voices include Peter Gabriel, who does call him one of the all-time greatest songwriters, and Sarah Silverman, who describes Merritt as a sensitive poet with a mean exterior. Most of the sources emphasize the lack of candor in Merritt's music. The head creator of The Magnetic Fields, The Gothic Archies and The 6ths once told an interviewer: "Sincerity has no place in popular music, any more than it does in cooking."

Merritt lays out the ideology behind his catchy, meticulous, erudite songs quite clearly in the film. He talks about his favorite artists—ABBA, Ella Fitzgerald and Doris Day—who recorded "incredibly simple songs with extremely well-worked arrangements, making every song iconic in a way that you can't believe it hadn't been thought of before." He discusses the cinema vérité movement in the 1970s as a turning point, with which the new convention became ugly realism rather than glamour. That's how Merritt feels about other recording artists, he says. "They're emphasizing convention over beauty and interest. I'm emphasizing beauty and interest over convention."

Claudia Gonson, who manages the band, sings occasionally, plays piano, and appears even to co-compose at times, at one point in the film reads aloud from "The Formulists' Manifesto," written by a young Merritt. "We the formulists renounce the deluded striving for expression by moderns through novelty," it reads.

One of the films main plot lines is the happily codependent relationship between Merritt and Claudia Gonson, who manages the band, sings occasionally, plays piano, and appears even to co-compose at times. By Merritt's admission, she takes care of most practical matters for him, so that he can concern himself solely with the music. Providing for him in this way seems to be her greatest joy in life. The tolls of long-term intimacy, meanwhile, show in the occasional spats that the cameras catch. The two sustain a tense, restrained dispute over the time signature of "In an Operetta," as Gonson at the piano tries to follow Merritt's instructions.

Gonson gives plenty of good intel about the teenage Merritt, who apparently made Morrissey look like a positive thinking guru. The film also includes the obligatory scene wherein his mother recounts Merritt's early adolescence while he moans with his face in his hands.

Merritt reports that he and his mother lived in 33 different places by the time he was 23. His mother was a hippie who would treat his medical problems with holistic cures. "I still haven't met my father," Merritt says, "and I feel like if I ever do I should do it on Oprah," showing just how deep his ironic dissociation runs.

The film goes on to take us through the life of the band, beginning with its days playing small hardcore clubs and upending audience expectations. Cello player John Woo confesses he likes to think that on good nights, "We were bigger than the room." Cut to modern day shows at Lincoln Center and similar venues in world cities. Likewise its fans progressed from 15-year-old straight girls and gay boys who took the music as serious emotional therapy to, per a middle-aged couple the film depicts outside of a Manhattan concert, those who discovered the band on NPR and refer to Merritt's "economy of language."

Another topic of the movie is Merritt's prolificness, which according to one source is inspired by the Tin Pan Alley hit-factory culture. He literally sits at one point in a pile of notebooks filled with song lyrics, most of which made it onto albums. Some of them comprise thoughts written to himself, like the journal entry about an idea for "100 love songs." "I hereby swear to do this," he wrote. Titles that were apparently discarded from the "69 Love Songs" track list include "Mrs. Me" and "An Infinite Number of Kisses." 

Twice the film addresses touchy subjects that are presented via white letters that slowly fade onto a black screen. One is a racism scandal that flared up and out in 2006, and seemed to be only the overly PC prattling of bloggers with important titles. Another is Merritt's apparent gruffness with interviewers. The filmmakers must have won him over after 11 years, though, because he is rather frank with them. Sometimes he seems tired or exasperated during an interview, but less with the process than with what he himself has to say.

Hearing Merritt speak so much in his unassuming lisp, seeing him bumble with his little Chihuahua around West Village streets, in a way it sort of demystifies the gothic rumble of his singing voice. But when listeners try and build a personality from the songs, it would seem, we have the wrong idea to begin with.