Ari Aster’s sprawling nightmare comedy Beau is Afraid earned a lot of automatic comparisons to the insular storytelling style of Charlie Kaufman last year, since Kaufman’s signature works like Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York tend to follow a lonely man’s journey into his own mind similar to the one Joaquin Phoenix takes in Beau.  Looking back, maybe the works of undersung auteur John Payson should’ve been cited in those discussions as well, since the grotesque caricature of New York City that Phoenix navigates in Beau is Afraid is much more similar to the crime-ridden, roach-infested NYC that Jerry O’Connell navigates in Payson’s sole directorial feature Joe’s Apartment.  O’Connell begins his journey as a fresh bus station arrival who’s mugged by three separate, sequential assailants as soon as he steps off his Greyhound chariot.  Outside the bus depot, he is horrified by the discovery of a bloodied corpse on the sidewalk that his fellow, jaded New Yorkers ignore as they scurry about from one hostile confrontation to another.  His walk-and-talks down city streets are frequently interrupted by deadly shootouts between generic, nameless cops & robbers.  Once he lands a place to live, he is tormented by two crooked, roided-out landlords who spend their entire day trying to lethally “evict” him so they can spike the rent.  And, of course, his apartment is filled to the brim with billions upon billions of cockroaches, as every NYC apartment is.  It’s the same paranoid, misanthropic view of Big City urban living that plagues the perpetually afraid Beau of Aster’s film, which equates picking up anxiety meds from the pharmacy across the street to walking through a warzone.  I can’t recall ever seeing anything that explosively chaotic in a Charlie Kaufman picture, since those tend to be controlled & self-serious to the point of stuffiness.

There are a couple very good reasons you won’t often see John Payson’s magnum opus cited alongside the works of Charlie Kaufman, no matter how applicable.  For one, not many people bothered to watch Joe’s Apartment upon its initial release in 1996, when it only earned $4 million box office off of a $13 million budget.  Moreover, it’s also just a deeply silly film, and I’m mostly just goofing off by bringing it up.  I have not yet mentioned that the cockroaches that flood the titular apartment are self-aware beings who sing & dance their way through this roach-themed comedy musical, chirping life advice at O’Connell’s Joe in sped-up Alvin & The Chipmunks speak.  This is the kind of movie that earns a “Roach Songs By” credit in the opening scroll, effectively parodying the nice-guy-in-the-big-mean-city narrative tropes that link it to Beau.  It’s less akin to the headier comedy of a Charlie Kaufman or an Ari Aster than it is a Minions prototype for people who are intimately familiar with the taste of bongwater.  And yet, by the time one of the roaches is introduced as a “cousin from Texas” who lassos and rides a housecat out of the apartment like a rodeo cowboy, I found myself having a great time with it.  Despite all of the slime & grime that coats every surface of Joe’s Apartment, it’s a weirdly wholesome film.  Forever in hiding because humans tend to “smush first and ask questions later”, the roaches decide to reveal their ability to converse with Joe because they love how naturally gross he is.  They feel affinity with the slovenly behavior of the standard-issue Straight Boy slacker, who leaves half-emptied food containers out for the little pests as he sleeps away the daylight fully clothed – body unbathed, clothes unwashed.  When he’s understandably freaked out by their decision to speak to him, they attempt to win him over with song & dance.  It’s cute.  Absolutely fucking disgusting, but cute.

For what Payson may lack in maturity of subject, he more than makes up for in attention to craft.  At the time of release, the big deal about Joe’s Apartment was its innovative use of CGI, which allowed the cockroaches to sing & dance in surprisingly convincing close-ups (an effect created by the animation studio Blue Sky in their first feature film, pre-Ice Age).  The computer-animated shots only account for a small portion of the film’s multi-media approach, though, and more traditional modes of cockroach animation are just as frequently deployed: stop-motion, collage, puppetry, time-elapse photography, etc.  Joe’s Apartment started as a short-film visual experiment in MTV’s psychedelic Liquid Television program.  When it was later developed into a feature film, it was released as the very first project under the MTV Films brand, predating even Beavis & Butthead Do America.  As a result, the movie includes constant cultural markers to posit Joe as a hip, aspirational slacker for a young audience to look up to – having him read Love & Rockets comics when he should be job hunting, decorating his apartment with Sonic Youth posters, and overstuffing the soundtrack with wall-to-wall needle drops to sell tie-in CDs at the shopping mall outside your local multiplex.  The thing is that Payson’s style is inherently cool, though, as long as you have the stomach for it.  When Joe is mugged at the Greyhound station, the camera takes the first-person-POV of the criminals’ fists as they repeatedly pound into his face.  Later, presumably to save money on costly CGI shots, the roaches puppeteer random objects in his apartment to give the production a grimy Pee-wee’s Playhouse effect. I begged my parents to take me to Joe’s Apartment when it first came out because it looked so cool, but they said I was too young to see it.  In retrospect, I realize they just didn’t want to sit through the CGI cockroach musical, which is fair, but I feel like they (and most of America) really missed out on a Gen-X comedy gem.

-Brandon Ledet