jon moritsugu

Three by Jon Moritsugu

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

There was a brief, glorious time a couple years back when AGFA’s scan of Jon Moritsugu’s 1993 trash-art classic Terminal USA was streaming on The Criterion Channel. Not only did that ungodly godsend set distorted expectations of Moritsugu’s working being legally & conveniently available for home viewing, but it also distorted my expectations of the director’s political themes. In Terminal USA, Moritsugu reached through the TV sets of suburban America (via highly improbable PBS broadcast) to mock & torment the suburbanites on the other side, offering a grotesque reflection of the nuclear family unit as performed by a punk-rot regional theatre troupe straight out of Mortville. Having not seen his other work, I assumed that John Waters-style strain of freaking-out-the-normies antagonism echoed throughout the rest of Moritsugu’s catalog, but it turns out he generally could not care less what suburbanites are up to. I recently lucked into purchasing a trio of lesser-seen Moritsugu films second-hand on DVD, which together painted a picture of a much more insular, flippant director concerned more with petty punk-culture preoccupations than any of the ideals those punks supposedly buck against. These are movies about young wannabe iconoclasts who are desperate to stand out, look cool, get famous, and be celebrated for doing nothing in particular, all while enjoying the street-cred status of never “selling out.” This trio finds Moritsugu mocking his own people rather than mocking the off-screen suburbanite conservatives whose phoniness is taken for granted, which in a way makes them more personal works than the bigger-picture political statement of Terminal USA.

Moritsugu’s first feature film was funded by a settlement from a factory-work accident that nearly tore off his arm. The only reason it qualifies as feature-length is that he stretched it past the 1-hour runtime mark on a dare from a friend who was tired of seeing him waste his time on shorts. The resulting ramshackle, barely held-together energy of 1990’s My Degeneration is about as D.I.Y. punk as cinema gets. It perfectly captures the editing style, snotty sarcasm, and punk-scene snobbery of a vintage Xerox’d zine . . . now in motion on the big screen! “A story of Greed, Scum, and Filth,” it follows a trio of California teens (despite being filmed in Rhode Island) whose punk band Bunny Love is co-opted by The American Beef Institute to promote meat consumption among disaffected, MTV-era youth. The movie opens with Bunny Love’s lead singer praying to portraits of Jesus Christ & Madonna in her bathroom mirror to make her famous – a prayer that’s immediately answered by an evil corporation that purchases her band, renames it Fetish, and starts landing her national headlines like “Is Meat Art? Fetish Thinks So!” The girls are quickly corrupted by “the stench of stardom,” but selling out their punk ideals registers as a small price to pay in exchange for national fame. Even the inevitable burnout & breakup part of the rock ‘n’ roll rise-to-fame cliché seems to be a career goal for them, rather than a dire warning. They want it all. Meanwhile, Moritsugu teases this short-film premise to feature length by filling the screen with hideous video-art footage of mimed punk performances and meat-industry waste, with detours featuring a talking pig head that romances the lead singer of Fetish in her spare time between gigs. It’s the much rougher, meaner version of proto-riot-grrrl classics like Times Square & The Fabulous Stains, with an incredibly cynical worldview about what punk iconoclasts really want to achieve with their music.

1994’s Mod Fuck Explosion is much more realistic about the kind of fame most teenage urbanite punks can achieve. It’s the story of one girl’s quest to earn her own leather jacket, so she can look as tough & cool as the motorcycle gangs who regularly clash in her neighborhood. Most reviews of Mod Fuck Explosion cite it as Moritsugu’s dirt-cheap remake of West Side Story, but really it’s his dirt-cheap remake of Quadrophenia: a gang warfare drama about a pathetic, meaningless clash between traditional rock ‘n’ roll bikers and nerdy scooter-riding Mods. It goes one step beyond Quadrophenia by graciously extending Kenneth Anger biker-gang fetishism to include moto-scooters, making that fetish much more financially accessible to its cast of terminally bored teenage wastoids. Otherwise, it allows that turf war to fade into a background hum while Amy Davis (Bunny Love’s fictional drummer & Moritsugu’s real-life spouse) frets about where she fits into the world of street-toughs as a teenage brat who doesn’t even have her own leather jacket. Despite all of Moritsugu’s snotty flippancy elsewhere, Davis gets genuinely introspective here in her frustrated teenage boredom. While roaming an industrial art-instillation piece, she worries in voiceover that she’ll never truly fight, never truly fuck, and never truly be cool. It’s later revealed that she’s mostly been comparing herself to her much cooler older sister, who has retired from local punk-scene notoriety to enjoy a static life consuming “schizophrenic painters, tortured writers, fashion designers, low & vulgar literature, porno movies, video games, punk music, motorcycles, tattoo artwork, homo poetry, disaster & murder magazines, and horoscopes.” Even though she no longer needs it herself, her sister still won’t hand over her own leather jacket, which sits in the closet unworn as a symbol of her past teen-years fame on the local scene.

While My Degenration & Mod Fuck Explosion are the much cooler and more recognizable Moritsugu titles in this trio, 1997’s Fame Whore is by far the funniest. That superlative is mostly earned by Amy Davis’s robotically verbose performance as a socialite sycophant who will not stop monotonously bragging about her accomplishments in her 27 simultaneous careers as a “video artist, fashion designer, painter, actress, photographer, producer, art director, image consultant, playwright, performance artist,” and the list goes on. That NYC wannabe fashionista splits the runtime with two other titular fame whores: a hothead tennis pro who brags about his insatiable libido in the third person and an animal-rights activist who’s reluctant to share his do-gooder cred with any coworkers at his New Jersey dog shelter, so he spends his work hours talking to an imaginary sports-mascot dog instead. They’re all pathetic losers, just like the rest of us. As with Terminal USA, there’s something especially heightened & subversive about Moritsugu’s freak-show characters escaping punk-scene containment and doing decidedly un-punk things like, in this case, filing their taxes & negotiating endorsement deals. It’s like when John Waters left the trailer park & Mortville behind to instead terrorize the normies in his own suburban-invasion comedies post-Polyester. Shot on a grainy, degraded 16mm film stock just like the rest of his punk-zine-in-motion features, Fame Whore would never be mistaken for a mainstream studio comedy, but it does find Moritsugu pretending that he has “made it” as a filmmaker. If he had included a sarcastic live-studio-audience soundtrack, it would’ve played exactly like a primetime multi-cam sitcom — complete with a goofball sidekick character in the imaginary Mr. Peepers, whose smartass quips follow in a long tradition of Great Gazoos, Alfs, and Mister Eds.

The only bonus feature to speak of on any of these mid-2000s discs is a feature-length commentary track for My Degeneration, but it does offer major insight into the bigger-picture ethos of Moritsugu & Davis’s film company Apathy Productions. They basically act as their own Beavis & Butthead-style stoner hecklers, complete with vocalized guitar noises and bored digressions from anything happening on the screen. The entire exercise is meant to mock anyone who’d take this work seriously as academic fodder (i.e., me) instead of what it truly was: a group of friends playing around with camera equipment in a quest to make something Cool. The way Moritsugu scratches up the celluloid for shots that didn’t come out right, films television sets at incompatible frame rates, and frequently fills the screen with punk-show-poster block text of phrases like “THE SHIT GENERATION” & “TEEN SUICIDE EXPLOSION” is all D.I.Y. formal experimentation to make art that visually appeals to his scuzzy friends (who’d assumedly rather be pounding beers than watching art films, if asked). There’s a tension between his own punk-rock credibility and his desire to reach a wide audience as a Famous Artist, then, as evidenced by his films being submitted to international film festivals instead of just being screened as opening acts at basement punk shows. In that context, his career highlight likely wasn’t hijacking PBS’s public funds to make Terminal USA. It was when Roger Ebert made a show out of walking out of My Degeneration seven minutes into its premiere at Sundance. That way, he became famous (on the independent film scene, anyway) without becoming marketable, so his films couldn’t be used to promote beef sales or tennis shoes.

-Brandon Ledet

Terminal USA (1993)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Three cheers for the American Genre Film Archive, who are doing the heroic work of preserving & distributing vintage outsider art in an age when practically every movie over a decade old is being snuffed out of existence, no matter how mainstream.  AGFA platforms works as essential as the coming-of-age riot grrrl sex comedy Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and as disposable as the home-movie porn parody Bat Pussy, always with respect. My latest discovery in their catalog was, as always, a real doozy.  Terminal USA is less of a feature film than it is a Cali punk’s cracked plastic ash tray that was kicked under a mildewed couch, then given a quick spit shine after decades of nihilistic neglect.  It’s shot in a sound-stage suburban home seemingly constructed out of cardboard.  Every pronunciation of letters “s” & “t” tops out its rickety mics.  The cast aren’t acting so much as they’re talk-shouting while modeling history’s cheapest wigs.  Its cheapness is its greatest asset, a juvenile middle finger shoved in the face of the American public, who were outraged that tax money paid for its production and broadcast on PBS.  Personally, I can’t think of anything worthier of public funding than weirdo D.I.Y. art projects like this.  It would almost make me patriotic, if the film weren’t specifically about the moral, cultural rot in this nation’s arrhythmic heart.  We likely won’t ever see public funding for abrasive outsider cinema like Tongues Untied, Dottie Gets Spanked, or Terminal USA ever again, thanks to Reagan-era efforts to gut the National Endowment for the Arts.  At least niche distributors like AGFA are around to preserve the truly American art we got when the getting was good, though.  That history is always under threat of being erased from the record.

It’s worth talking broadly about mainstream America here, because Terminal USA makes such a mockery of the nation’s cultural decline, as indicated by the title.  While most satirical takes on the wounds festering just below suburbia’s manicured surface tend to come from white filmmakers (think John Waters, David Lynch, Tim Burton, etc.), Jon Moritsugu offers their lesser seen, lesser discussed Asian-American counterbalance, a grainy broadcast from the immigrant communities of the West Coast.  Moritsugu “stars” in dual roles as a snotty Cali mall punk who spits in the face of his parents’ desire to assimilate and as their better-behaved son, who fits more cleanly in the Asian-American stereotype of a model student with no social life.  It quickly turns out, of course, that the bookworm brother is the more depraved of the two, jacking off to Nazi muscle mags in his bedroom when he’s pretending to be studying math.  Their sister is a bratty cheerleader who’s desperate to sleep with the family lawyer.  Their mother is addicted to their bedridden grandfather’s prescription morphine; and the most depraved of all is their stand-up citizen father figure who’s oblivious to all his family’s barely concealed sins, frequently slipping into deranged monologues about Faith, purity, and The American Dream.  Despite all its gunshots, space aliens, and leaked porno tapes, there isn’t much of a plot to Terminal USA.  It’s a moldy family portrait, where every bizarre resident of a bland suburban home de-evolve into their worst possible selves over the course of one wretched night.  Oh yeah, and a young Gregg Turkington shows up as a local skinhead.

This is the kind of microbudget, limited-location production where the background graffiti artists get their own production design credit (attributed to Twist & Reminisce, in case you’re wondering).  Moritsugu & crew spruce up their sparse, flimsy sets with neon lights and the kinds of plastic gems you’d expect to see glued to a middle-schooler’s make-up kit.  It’s all so beautifully ugly.  The performances are just as preposterous & cheap; my biggest laugh (of many) was when Moritsugu’s dirtbag mall punk is shot in the kneecap and complains “This sucks!”.  His fingerprints & personality are highly visible all over every inch of the production, making him a true trash auteur.  And he’s accomplished a lot since he first started making 16mm punk films in the late 80s, cranking out attention-grabbing titles like Mod Fuck Explosion, Hippy Porn, and My Degeneration to consistently muted acclaim.  Terminal USA is a great introduction to his catalog, both as a snapshot of how he feels his work & persona fit in American pop culture and as proof that he’s a genuine provocateur, pissing off a lot of uptight conservatives with a seething hatred for The Arts.  I have no clue how easily accessible the rest of his titles are, but I doubt many have been as lovingly restored & presented as this AGFA scan of that trashteur calling card – a pristine image of a hideous nation.

-Brandon Ledet