I am writing this review in a modestly sized, concerningly musty hotel room in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which still feels like the height of modern luxury in the way that all hotel rooms do. We are staying at the century-old resort hotel The Arlington, which overlooks the main stretch of the city’s historic bathhouse spas, towering above the punier tourist traps below as a monument to the timeless joys of a hotel getaway. Unbeknownst to me when booking this vacation, The Arlington is also the central screening hub for the longest-running documentary film festival in the United States, which happened to overlap with our stay. The one film in this year’s program that I was able to squeeze into my busy schedule of resting & relaxing around town also happened to be about the one person who could credibly claim to love mediocre hotel rooms more than anyone else who ever lived: Joe Engressia, whose unmatched obsession with the Holiday Inn hotel chain somehow doesn’t rank among his top ten most eccentric character quirks. Engressia was a man of many quirks, just as he was a man of many names: High-Rise Joe, The Whistler, and—most notably—Joybubbles, the last of which provided the eponymous name of his documentary profile that just screened at the 35th annual Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (after premiering at Sundance earlier this year).
Joybubbles first earned fame as The Whistler in his college years, when his uncannily perfect whistling pitch enabled him to bypass telephone system infrastructure to make expensive long-distance phone calls free of charge. He was a naturally gifted pioneer of the practice, which made him a legend among other Phone Phreakers of the 1960s & 70s, who later went on to become the earliest computer hacker subculture of note. His own whistling hack was an innovation inspired more by loneliness than by mischief, though. Joybubbles was born blind and spent long childhood hours isolated indoors, with only the telephone connecting him to the outside world. By listening to the equipment’s clicks & whirs and pestering the phone operators on the other end of the dial tone, he gradually figured out how to extend the reach of his phone line even further, which is how he earned the Batmanesque moniker The Whistler. Even when arrested for these violations of phone-company policy, Joybubbles always used his national notoriety as a means of expanding his social network so he’d have more people to talk to on the phone. He played the media’s bottomless hunger for “human interest” stories by becoming a human of great, continual interest — not to hack the planet but to just feel less alone.
Before he legally changed his name to Joybubbles, this first-wave phone phreaker was also known as High-Rise Joe, named after his lifelong goal of living independently in his own high-rise apartment. Being visually disabled a half-century ago made that goal a lot more daunting than it sounds now, as most people in Joe’s life attempted to limit his independence & mobility for their convenience, in the guise of ensuring his safety. He learned independence in his early 20s by booking extended stays at Holiday Inns, however, which he had to treat with the same problem-solving bravery of mankind traveling to the moon as he worked his way up to full-time high-rise living. As a result, Joybubbles ends up playing as a celebration of mundane hotel getaways just as much as it is a celebration of humanity’s intimate relationships with mundane technology. Joybubbles loved Holiday Inns and high-rise apartments with the same childlike wonder which he loved rotary-dial telephones. As interviewees put it, he made a lifelong mission out of maintaining that childlike wonder with the mundane in a commitment to “staying 5-years-old forever.” His resulting personality fell somewhere between Daniel Johnston & Mister Rogers — half age-regression as art-project coping mechanism and half age-regression as defiance against an increasingly crass & cruel modern world.
As a documentary, Joybubbles mostly functions as a feature-length human interest story akin to the news clippings that profiled its subject while he was alive. These news reports & televised interviews from Joe’s phone phreaker days are helpful in providing some visual archival material of interest, while the rest of the runtime is padded out with vintage industrial footage, modern animation, and still photographs. With a few changes to how its interviewees are introduced via chyron, the whole project could be easily reworked into a podcast instead of a feature film, which would be just as well for a documentary about a blind man. In an especially telling segment, one of Joybubbles’s friends relates his age-regressed personality to Tom Hanks’s character in Big, as he recalls describing the imagery of the film to Joybubbles in real time at the movies, since he otherwise only had the sounds of the dialogue to go by. Oddly enough, this segment includes footage of the “Zoltar” fortune teller machine that grants Hanks’s wish to become “big” in the first place, and there are multiple replicas of that machine decorating the tourist-packed sidewalks of downtown Hot Springs, just outside of the festival. Stepping outside of my own city to breathe some crisp mountain air, enjoy a couple late-night beers in my overly air-conditioned hotel bed, and meet some sweetheart strangers along the way has been a truly restorative experience for my soul. And I owe the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival for introducing me to the biggest, quirkiest sweetheart of them all.
-Brandon Ledet
