AH, THE NINETIES. Weren't they just such A Simpler Time?
Only a mere 32 TV channels. Telephone modems that ran as fast as 28.8 kbps, and connected you to bulletin-board systems and the original Prodigy. Easy-to-hiss-at national villains like Newt Gingrich. Crude but understandable gender politics (anything "The Woman" did was presumed to be always right). A Seattle music scene in which all you had to do to be considered cool was to pronounce how Not-grunge you were.
All this and more was brought back when I re-viewed Kristine Peterson's 1997 movie Slaves to the Underground, finally out on video.
It was a make-or-break "art film" career-change for director Peterson, who'd moved from Seattle to L.A. in the '80s and had been stuck ever since in the career purgatory of directing direct-to-video horror movies, "erotic thrillers," and Playboy Channel softcores. Its largely-local starring cast also all moved to L.A. after making the film. I don't know of anything either they or Peterson has done since.
The plot is relatively simple. A Seattle slacker-dude zine publisher reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, who'd left him when they were both Evergreen students after a mutual acquaintance had raped her (she'd never told the ex-boyfriend about the attack). Now, she's playing guitar in a riot grrrl band fronted by her lesbian lover. The ex-girlfriend leaves the lesbian lover, and the band, to re-hook-up with the ex-boyfriend, who vows to do anything for her (even go to work at Microsoft to support her musical career!).
All this is a mere premise for the film's real purpose--depicting Peterson's vision of oversimplified riot grrrl/slacker boy stereotypes. They're basically the same old gender roles, only completely reversed. All the riot grrrls are depicted as stuck-up brats and/or sexist bigots. All the slacker dudes are depicted as shuffling, submissive cowards, deathly afraid of ever doing anything that might incur a woman's wrath.
(Non-slacker males are shown in the form of the rapist "friend," who appears briefly at the film's start, and assorted right-wing authority figures; all of whom are depicted as fully deserving the riot grrrls' vengeances. Non-riot-grrrl females do not appear at all.)
Aside from this annoying Hollywood oversimplification of sex roles, the rest of the film's depiction of the seattle scene at the time is fairly accurate. The scenery (the Crocodile, Fallout Records, Hattie's Hat restaurant, and the late Moe's club) is right. So are the characters' stated motivations--to make music and art and political action, not to Become Rock Stars. (A subplot toward the end, in which the riot-grrrl band is courted by an L.A. record label, is Peterson's one betrayal of this.)
Slaves to the Underground is OK, but would undoubtedly had been better had Peterson not felt the need to dumb down the characters and the sexual politics to a level stupid Hollywood financiers could understand. The best fictionalization of the '90s Seattle rock scene remains The Year of My Japanese Cousin (still not out on home video), made for PBS the previous year by Maria Gargiulo (sister of Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who was the film's cinematographer).
TOMORROW: Low-power radio, high-powered lobbying.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Times wine columnist Tom Stockley was on the doomed Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico. I'd known his daughter Paige at the UW; my few recollections of him are of a decent enough gent, even though my punk-wannabe ideology made me pretty much opposed to the whole concept of wine writing.... Turns out a friend of mine had flown on that route just days before the crash. This is the third such near-miss among my circle. In '96, another friend flew TWA from Paris to N.Y.C. en route to Seattle; that plane's N.Y.C.-Paris return flight (which my friend wasn't on) crashed. In '98, I was on Metro bus route 359 exactly 24 hours before a disturbed passenger shot the driver, sending the bus plunging off the Aurora Bridge.
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