The Big Rave Roll-Out - films that depict rave dance party culture - Brief Article

Interview, June, 2000 by Graham Fuller

FLY-BY-NIGHT DANCE PARTIES HIT THE BIG SCREEN

Just as the documentary Hype! (1996) addressed grunge after its sell-by date, so three new films endorsing rave culture are coming to the party a little tardily--yet perhaps too early for nostalgification. It was thirteen years ago that the Chicago-spawned acid house and a mood of ecstasy-inspired, anti-rockist egalitarianism irrevocably altered British dance culture, before the beat and the peace-and-love vibe were imported back into America around 1990-91 to launch the California rave scene. Rave's propulsive soundtrack evolved and splintered into subgenres--house, garage, techno, ambient, hardcore, trance, jungle, drum and bass--so fast that "electronica" was invented as a catch-all. How could anyone expect the movies to keep up when the average Hollywood composer still thinks, to judge by an average year's Best Song Oscar nominees, that "Lady in Red" and its sorry ilk are music?

As one might expect, given rave's grassroots origins, its D.I.Y. spirit, and its anti-star imperative, it was the indie scene that yielded this summer's Sundance-premiered features, the Anglo-Irish Human Traffic and the San Francisco-produced Groove, as well as Better Living Through Circuitry, directed on digital video by Jon Reiss. The latter documentary, preceded in 1998 by lara Lee's estimable electronica primer, Modulations, reveals that, like much of the fizzing, bleeping, and chugging that sonically engenders it, rave culture is, beyond the dance floor at least, a storm without a vortex, a movement with no apparent direction, center, or locus. (Raves are where you find them, Ticketmaster not required, which is part of their illicit allure--although not for the gay couple that spends a frustrating night failing to find Groove's party.)

Given this intrinsic directionlessness, Camille Paglia would no doubt think of rave as an essentially feminine, Dionysian phenomenon compared with rock music and its masculine, Apollonian linearity. Rock is frequently "hard," after all; its songs have beginnings and endings, and its concerts still hum with the threat of sexual violence. Raves, on the other hand, are considered nonthreatening experiences, lubricated as they are by a desire for communal love. Although in Groove we see plenty of those thrilling moments when DJs manipulating their sequencers send surges of physical energy through the crowd, these are not so much climaxes as peaks in an orgy of prolonged foreplay.

Justin Kerrigan's relentlessly upbeat Human Traffic has a likable young cast, a genuine affection among its live main characters, a sense that club culture is a stepping stone in their path to adulthood, and no discernible plot. The film is also short on psychological insight, but it tries. Jip (John Simm) is a hyperactive Cardiff lad, who can't show any affection to his prostitute mother and therefore suffers from performance anxiety whenever he takes a willing female to bed. No matter--he's determined to have a good time when he heads out on Friday night with his chemically-enhanced mates.

Human Traffic is too fidgety and too stylized to give more than a cursory whiff of late '90s British club culture. After Jip, in the film's funniest set piece, has conned his way into a club by pretending to the gangsta-like proprietor that he's a journalist doing a story on the place, the film's energy dives. The story does build to a sexual climax of sorts, and Jip realizes that love and empathy--ecstasy's gift?--are more important than getting laid: It's an old, old ending for an entertaining but self-consciously modish flick that lacks for a resonant pulse and could just as easily have had Northern Soul or New Romanticism for its backdrop.

Greg Harrison's Groove is a rave culture Nashville that strives for verisimilitude. As a rave crew prepares for a party in an abandoned warehouse, we see how kids liaise on the Internet to bum rides and what they bring with them to survive the night. Later, we get glimpses of how a turntablist can succeed or fail in his art; of the hippy-dippy dynamics that prevail in a chill-room (where one girl mislays her teddy bear); of the drug dealer's dedication to his alchemy and of the risks run by an overindulger. Boosting rave's potential for mass euphoria and fellow-feeling, Groove is not without wryness, though the night we spend with its benign characters leaves us longing for psychological or moral disturbance.

When historians opined that we had reached the end of history in the '90s, were they also talking about the end of the history of pop music? See these three films and you may think so, for they suggest that, although the beat goes on, in the enclaves of rave there'll never be anything worth changing or fighting about.