Penelope Spheeris’s trilogy about LA’s punk and hair metal scenes is both hopeful and bleak, with revealing interviews with future stars
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When Penelope Spheeris was making the first part of her landmark documentary The Decline of Western Civilization in 1979 and 1980, none of the people she was chronicling were known outside of Los Angeles’s dank punk scene. They played furious music in clubs that looked and smelled like bathrooms, and lived in squats that looked and smelled like squats. (Or, like bathrooms.) But The Decline of Western Civilization is the first and best film of what would become a loosely linked trilogy exploring different LA subcultures over three decades.
Featuring rough-ready footage shot at gigs and candid interviews with future punk stars, this film is a slim time capsule of a nascent music scene not yet exploited through commerce or destroyed by day jobs. Spheeris enters a world filled with runaways, drug addicts and squatters, where audience members spit on bands to signal some form of vile, violent appreciation, where Nazi regalia is worn and confused as being a symbol of anarchy. One memorable moment sees a young woman flippantly telling a story about a house painter who died in her backyard; before they called the cops, she and her friends posed for photos with the corpse.
We meet Pat Smear, some 15 years before he joined Nirvana as their second guitarist. We visit Black Flag at home, still a few months off meeting Henry Rollins; the band’s singer is sleeping in an overhead closet fit to store spare blankets. A young Exene Cervenka is charming and excitable, on the cusp of ascending with future LA punk legends X, and aware of the importance of what she is trying to achieve. Everyone seems tragic and hopeful.
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