A frequent lament you’ll hear from Millennial cineastes is that we, as a generation, deeply miss the Directors Label DVDs from the early 2000s. Collecting the music-video catalogs of then-young auteurs like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Jonathan Glazer, the series wasn’t just fun background texture for dorm-room hangouts; it was also a crash course in surrealistic filmmaking techniques, finding some of that era’s most expressionistic directors taking their biggest creative swings in the only commercially viable medium that would support that kind of experimentation. Since the music-licensing deals that made those DVD collections possible have become too convoluted & expensive to justify a reissue, those long out-of-print DVDs now resell for exorbitant sums, effectively rendering them extinct (unless you were able to protect your personal copies from scratches and friendly-fire splashes of beer & bong water). However, there is an equally vital DVD collection of music videos from that early-aughts era that’s still affordable on resale: The Complete Truth About De-Evolution. A DVD reprint of a music video anthology originally published on Laserdisc in the 1990s, The Complete Truth About De-Evolution collects all of the music videos produced by the American rock band DEVO from their proto-punk days in 1970s Akron, Ohio to their commercial-product days in 1990s Los Angeles, California. It documents the gradual mutation of the music video format from art-film experimentation to the crass commercialism of MTV, positioning the band as a sarcastic Prometheus of the medium. I watched those videos obsessively in college, inferring the creative & professional trajectory of what became my favorite band by studying how their cinematic output evolves across the disc, never fully understanding how all the pieces fit.
The new Netflix documentary DEVO is a wonderful addendum to that music video collection, reinforcing the band’s legitimacy as an intrinsically cinematic project. Director Chris Smith (of American Movie notoriety) has a lot of fun playing around with the pop-art iconography DEVO satirized in their music videos and graphic art, charting the intellectual & cultural decline of post-WWII America through a constant montage of its most absurdly inane commercial imagery. He also invites the band to discuss the ideology behind their songs & videos at length in the kinds of talking-head interviews standard to the straight-to-streaming infotainment doc. The main project of DEVO the film is to explain the political messaging of DEVO the band to a worldwide audience of Netflix subscribers who only remember them as the one-hit-wonder dweebs responsible for “Whip It.” The interviews mostly reinforce the intellectual seriousness of the project, explaining the band’s early history as a response to the Kent State Massacre and its career-high sarcastic mockery of the pop music industry that paid their bills. As a result, it goes out of its way to downplay the more ribald sex jokes of tracks like “Jerkin’ Back ‘n’ Forth”, “Penetration in the Centerfold,” and “Don’t You Know” (the “rocket in my pocket” song) in order to convey the overall sense that they were a highbrow political act that was merely satirizing the ape-brain sexuality of fellow MTV-era pop groups. The narrowness of that argument doesn’t fully capture what makes the band so fun to listen to on full-volume repeat, but it allows Smith to deploy them as a soundtrack to America’s cultural decline in the 20th Century, which flashes in nonstop montage like a feature-length version of their video for “Beautiful World.”
There are plenty of vintage DEVO clips included here that I’ve never seen before, scattered among the more familiar lore of the band’s career highlights: their violent relationship with the factory workers of Ohio barrooms, their significance to the CBGB punk scene, their early brushes with David Bowie & SNL, their political-pamphlet arguments that humans evolved from “insane mutant apes”, etc. My biggest thrill, however, was seeing clips from the music videos on The Complete Truth About De-Evolution restored in HD for the first time, since I’ve been watching them on the same ancient DVD for the past two decades. Formally, there isn’t much variation on the typical straight-to-Netflix pop doc template that points to Smith as an especially significant filmmaker; it’s more in line with his recent, anonymous docs on Fyre Festival, Wham!, and Vince McMahon than his career-making doc on the production of the regional horror film Coven. If there’s any one choice that makes the film stand out among other infotainment docs of its ilk, it’s the narrowness of scope. Of DEVO’s nine studio albums, Smith only covers the first five — their most artistically significant (and each an all-timer). There’s no obligatory reunion & redemption footage in the third act after the band’s initial break-up, either, because the film is not about DEVO as a rock ‘n’ roll act; it’s about DEVO as a political act. It juxtaposes their most overtly political lyrics with the most overtly asinine cultural detritus of their era in order to convincingly argue that their music was more subversive than it was cynically mercenary. That’s something you can gather by directly engaging with the work yourself in The Complete Truth of De-Evolution, but it doesn’t hurt that the truth about DEVO is now even more complete.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 