Maybe you've seen two Smiths shirts this afternoon, and you figure if you'd spent the day in Manchester, it would have been three or four. But vagary has it that the real hardcore Morrissey fanatics are Hispanics from Southern California. In his new documentary Is It Really So Strange?, William E. Jones runs with this crowd, and tries to crack their code by way of commentary on idol worship.
For the most part a straight interview project, the film allows several theories to bubble as ingredients of the Latino interest in and empathy with Morrissey. Mexican youth relates both to his flamboyance and to his repression; the Irish and the Mexican share outsider identity; Catholicism is a bond as well. But ultimately ethnicity seems somewhat incidental, and the fabulous icon somewhat arbitrary. Indeed, this community, which revolves around a Hispanic-fronted Smiths cover band and what Jones calls its "D.I.Y. fan events," came into being only in the mid-90's -- at the nadir of respect for Morrissey. But Jones has little interest in the arbitrariness, and parallels fly as deadpan history. The interviewees' twin traits of exhibitionism and shyness are deemed "curiously appropriate for fans of an entertainer who transforms his solitude and social discomfort into spectacle."
Jones is so busy fitting in with the worshippers -- he films himself getting an up-do, and is very serious and time-consuming about establishing his Smiths credentials -- that he doesn't quite create the stage for his subjects' perversity. Though extreme idiosyncrasy is the very kernel of documentary, it is indeed so strange when a family of three, including a child way too young to have internalized the New Romantic hit parade, considers it good fortune to have trapped Morrissey's car in its Hollywood Hills driveway. This event might well have involved Morrissey's life flashing before his eyes, including the casting of a Latino Jared Leto assassin in his biopic. That the film buries the retelling of this tale among staid confessions of idolatry speaks perhaps to a shortcoming in critical perspective.
Jones opts out of holding anyone to account: "...there lies the problem of making any claims at all about pop music. Often people who love it are searching for themselves..." Admittedly, it's tough to criticize when you yourself are culpable. At one point in the movie, Jones and a friend have the opportunity to photograph Morrissey for a magazine spread. It is accidentally a great moment: Moz shows profound understanding of his power -- picture Monica Vitti at her finest -- as he whines to his salivating admirers about encroaching crow's feet.
But of course Jones knows the fans are ravenous, and is also smart about his fawning. In conversation, he reveals a lack of interest in controversial Morrissey questions -- that is, his sexuality, his political beliefs and his racism -- and professes his personal "hope that Morrissey doesn't 'come out' as anything, ever. Any revelation would be an anticlimax." It's a comforting idea that frustrating silence is Morrissey's answer to Bowie's Nazi regalia, and it betrays a distance between the interviewer and the subjects agonized by the Great One's public persona.
The filmmaker also showed himself ecstatically on point when I asked him why Morrissey has to be so private that the cover band's faux Morrissey is reduced to I-jumped-on-stage-and-touched-his-hand-once memories. For Bigmouth's sake, we're living in an age when INXS hired their best impressionist to lead their band! But Jones tells me that Morrissey is the first English pop star "to change his image in an effort to cultivate this audience." Indeed, a surreal moment in this saga involves Morrissey checking in with Strange's niche at a desert concert: "How are things in San Bernardino [a heavily Hispanic area]?" he asked.
Jones is positively savvy here: "The effect is appropriately recherché, and I sometimes find myself wondering if he will one day take his act to Vegas; this may well be a case in which Morrissey, while appearing to be mired in nostalgia, is actually catching a wave of the future."
Indeed. What musician has ever done nostalgia so perfectly? Maybe once you've got enough fans with wrist tattoos of your signature, and enough sense of humor to entertain a pleather jumpsuit, you might be able to live out your Golden Rhinestone Years on a permanent stage at the Mirage. Because let's not forget, blasé attitude aside, the author of the track "The more you ignore me, the closer I get" knows where he stands.
Is It Really So Strange? screens at Anthology Film Archives on Sun., Feb. 26. Visit www.anthologyfilmarchives.org for more info.
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