Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  Here and there are countercultural messages, such as when Max (Hopper) calms Paul, assuring him that “there’s nothing to be afraid of, man” or when Sachse tells him, “I don’t believe in police” at a drive-in restaurant. But the main point of the movie is to serve as a detailed guide, or “Acid for Dummies,” that throws in promises of uninhibited sex as further inducement.

  A corporate hack, who makes “a living” but hasn’t “done anything” of import, seeks enlightenment and freedom. Friends help him on his journey. Women love him. Strangers welcome him or fear him. He makes it through nightmarish visions and samples based on foreign art films. But “there’s nothing to be afraid of, man.” At least until AIP undermined the entire vision and intent by tacking on a near-parody spoken warning before the official beginning of the film and by editing on an abrupt, tacky, broken glass freeze frame at its conclusion. (Get it? Paul cracked up because of his bum trip!)

  * * *

  If you had been a member of the TV-band-that-became-a-real-band known as the Monkees, you could be forgiven if you retrospectively viewed Nicholson’s next screenwriting credit (shared with director Bob Rafelson) as a bum trip. Head accomplished one of the goals of its filmmakers, to destroy the group. The other goal, to be responsible for an artistic and countercultural hit, was not realized.

  Rafelson and Bert Schneider created the show as a television cash-in on the Beatles and A Hard Day’s Night and cast the group as personalities who also happened to possess musical talent.

  Cash in they did. The series, hit singles and albums, merchandising from dolls and novelizations to trading cards and posters, made these men wealthy. One of the odd characters in Head, Lord High’n’Low (played by Timothy Carey), valued these “byproducts” as worth “millions!”

  Rafelson and Schneider made money. They did so for the wrong reasons (at least from their viewpoint). They felt guilty. They used Head in part to clear that guilt and to regain (or gain) some street cred. The TV show was a lampoon of movies and television shows and music, irreverent and formless, and on which they often broke the fourth wall.

  Many have characterized Head as the Monkees committing suicide. But it’s not suicide if you are forced into it. The four are driven to jump off a bridge, chased to its edge. Behind the script, the group’s creators decided the band must end its own commercial life. Forced suicide is not a self-inflicted death. Head therefore stands as the creators’ filicide, as well as its attempted entry into the world of serious, artistic cinema.

  In filicide, they succeeded. The show had just been canceled and the group’s recordings had ceased to be automatic top-sellers. The movie exposed their “manufactured image,” though really to those who already knew about it. It depicted the group as a plastic and commercial venture, from the viewpoint of those who had the fortunate access to do so and benefitted the most from it.

  In art, they also succeeded. The film may have flopped at the time and may have been inaccurately tossed together with other pop music exploitation flicks or unfairly tagged as uncool because of the Monkees, but the cult knew better, and today, more also know better.

  Thanks to Nicholson’s avant garde script; Rafelson’s adventurous direction and risky view toward a more expansive and less commercial future; and the collective talents of Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Davy Jones and Peter Tork, this film remains a psychedelic treat filled with timely commentary, exploratory style and musical celebration. Take the six music video masterpieces and you have six testaments to the evolved Monkees maturity, deftly balancing their individual songwriting and performing strengths with the enhancement of outside tunesmiths Carole King and Harry Nilsson, alongside instrumental talents Neil Young, Ry Cooder, Jerry Scheff, Earl Palmer and Leon Russell.

  Despite the powerful and often beautiful depiction of the music, the film destroys the group behind that music. It has to, in order for Rafelson and Nicholson to move forward toward Five Easy Pieces and Schneider to advance into serious endeavors such as Hearts and Minds, an Academy Award–winning documentary about the Vietnam War. Coincidentally (or not so coincidentally), Monkees money made Easy Rider, no doubt more hippie-palatable than its benefactor TV property.

  Head is an exploration based around the art of the juxtaposition. Juxtaposing images, sounds, plot devices and archetypes turns the familiar into the new and the ordinary into the special. Using the modes of media to comment on his society while resolving the story of a media creation, elevates Nicholson’s work beyond a trippy turn-on or merely a ride into the whirlwind within a pop phenomenon.

  The film is a media manipulation. Fame is juxtaposed with oppression. The Monkees know they are owned and controlled by a corporate entity, and in the film we see and hear their controllers at points where the crew and their writers-producers-director Nicholson and Rafelson are visible or audible. This self-referential break with cinematic convention had already been established as a convention on their TV show, but with neither the malevolent undercurrent nor the identification of the four as human chattel.

  Joy is juxtaposed with horror. We see the youthful, beloved group and the effect their mere presence has on its fans, the love pouring from teenyboppers during a staged concert in Salt Lake City. The band is tight. The group has never been captured as gloriously, their talent and charisma spotlighted by their cracking performance of the Nesmith composition “Circle Sky.” Interspersed, we see disturbing images from the Vietnam War. Recall that this was a group whose main audience was teenagers or younger girls. Yes, the film was meant for an older, more mature audience, but fan magazine features and interviews about the movie talked about “the kids” and used words like “zany.”

  Here, Monkees concert material is intercut with a repeated view of the execution of a Viet Cong leader by a South Vietnamese major general. What other mainstream film, marketed as entertainment by a major studio, would show clear, close-up, complete footage of a man being shot in the head point-blank by another man? How’s that for “zany?”

  Freedom is juxtaposed with imprisonment. The boys are shown in a groovier update of their TV pad, often having a groovy time with groovy chicks, groovy music and groovy happenings. Ultimately, they come to the realization that they are trapped, having been led into a black box and escaping, only to be fooled back inside that prison. Peter Tork has commented that the black box represents Rafelson’s bleak view of life and insensitivity to others, most notably the band.25

  The utility of technology is juxtaposed with its futility. The film itself remains a tribute to moviemaking technology, with innovative special effects and inventive editing. Nevertheless, the frustration and failure associated with machines portends a future overreliance on fancy gadgets.

  At the beginning of the film, a malfunctioning public address system ruins a local politician’s repeated attempts to dedicate a new bridge, itself a “magnificent marvel of modern architecture.” Comically, only the politician suffers this indignity. Elsewhere, Micky’s confounded by an empty Coke machine, his only remaining form of thirst-quenching in the desert. A manufacturing plant responsible for producing the black boxes is beset by many hazards and unsafe conditions. Boxes fall, people slip, thirsty workers gratefully gulp sludge, one of a group of secretaries is revealed to be a mannequin whose head falls off, and the supervisor has his middle finger encased in a medical apparatus. All this happens while he takes the group on a tour of the facility, mechanically intoning about the wonders of automation and productivity toward a future in which all that matters will be finding new ways to amuse oneself (Nicholson at his most prescient!). This irony of mishaps in such a computer-controlled environment underscores the parallel message that the band’s biggest tragedy (and by extension that of American society) will be to get exactly what they (and we) want.

  That is the true prison, according to the filmmakers. Scriptwriters Nicholson and Rafelson, director Rafelson and the editors (Mike Pozen and an uncredited Monte Hellman) juxtapose old movie clips, snippets of televisio
n commercials, samples from cartoons and sound bites from man-on-the-street interviews to create new meanings. Media are manipulated to make new realities, new wholes from appropriated fragments. In one now-eerie example, a piece from the film Salome shows Charles Laughton (as King Herod) pointing camera left as he identifies the Messiah, only to cut to news footage of then Governor Ronald Reagan as this messianic prophecy. We hear about a powerful narcotic from Bela Lugosi; see one of the largest Ford dealerships from its huckster owners; witness a hapless hippie’s lack of perception about the world; and get mini-sneak previews that foreshadow future scenes in the movie itself; all controlled by a literally larger-than-life Victor Mature. As Micky Dolenz put it, “The idea was that the movie was kind of circular. In fact, when we had this press opening screening in New York, it wasn’t in a theater, it was in this weird warehouse and they set up all these Moviolas, old school editing machines.”

  Dolenz remembers the publicity events as a ’60s happening of sorts:

  They had little rolls of film and little tiny screens and they set all these Moviolas up around the room. And it was totally psychedelic and out there, this party thing launch.

  They put one reel of the film on every Moviola and they just started running them, because the idea was, kinda weird and crazy….

  They played the movie, all the reels, and it could go on simultaneously. And you can, you can watch that movie from almost any part in the movie and it all just comes back around.26

  Structurally, the circular nature of the action—another example of inevitability and futility at the core of Jack’s scripts—plays against a salute of sorts for Hollywood forms, the signifiers of genre. The movie takes off on a cavalcade of motion picture varieties:

  • The film’s overall comedy format is undercut by message and atrocity through an intentionally uncomfortable mix of fiction with current event documentation;

  • The war movie genre gets punctured by depicting confusion, non-heroic behavior, and showing a shell-shocked soldier in a football helmet;

  • The desert epic, including a less-than-epic spat between the protagonist and his interior voice, climaxes with a tank attack on a soda machine and the less-than-politically correct surrender by cowardly Italian soldiers;

  • The classic “cowboys and Indians” western is shown to be a sham, complete with obviously fake arrows and cavalry officer Micky unromantically kicking Teri Garr with a snotty, “Get up, lady. You’re not dead!”;

  • The mythic rise of an unknown boxer lives up to all the expected clichés for exaggerated effect, as the diminutive Davy Jones plays a local tenement boy who leaves behind his musical ambitions to make quick money by taking a dive in the ring, much to the dismay of his family, “Father Duffy” and girlfriend Annette Funicello;

  • Timothy Carey’s deliciously over-the-top run-in with the boys turns the spaghetti western into a bizarre, otherworldly affair, summed up best when he gets trapped in his own cloak while exhibiting a little too much dramatic flair;

  • Industrial spy movies like In Like Flint are pushed to another level of mystery and paranoia when the Monkees find the factory that produces the black box which imprisons them (a sewage treatment plant in real life);

  • Dancing around in Victor Mature’s hair, pretending to be dandruff, lets them take a poke at TV advertising and science fiction “incredible shrinking” and “attack of the giant” favorites at the same time;

  • Mike’s birthday takes the gang into a haunted house, where we get a few scares and learn that he does not like surprises;

  • A lengthy scene excised from the original script worked the Samurai genre into the mix, centering its action around a character named Godzilla;

  • Hippie flix like The Trip, the Hollywood musical, harem backlotters and pastoral love stories are touched upon in the music video segments;

  • The Monkees themselves are the prime targets for parody, whether it’s lampooning their assigned character traits from the TV show, their plastic phoniness or how helpless they’d be without their creators;

  • We also sample prison melodrama and damsel-in-distress pastiches in this journey through the commercial cinema factory—all the way through to the film burn over the Paramount logo at the movie’s conclusion.

  “The movie was essentially about the deconstruction of the film industry, the Hollywood corporate studio film industry, which was going on at that time,” said Dolenz. “There was a movement to try and break through the Hollywood studio system and Head was one of the first films to try to do that.” The former child star pinpointed a key point in the film that helped symbolize its meaning:

  The one scene that I think is the theme of what that movie is all about is the cavalry thing with Indians and Mike and I are in cavalry outfits. And Teri Garr, in maybe her first [film], was in that scene. And Mike and I am there and we’re fighting off the Indians, and there’s a big set with the landscape and the backdrops and I get hit with four or five arrows which are fake, obviously. And I go, “Bob (meaning Bob Rafelson), I don’t wanna do this any more, it’s just crap, it’s just stupid” and I break the arrows and I walk through the backdrop and burst out of this fake Hollywood scene.27

  Michael Nesmith explained the unusual genesis of the unusual film to me. “We all went up to Ojai, which is a little place with a country club, a golf club, and we’d sit around and told tales.”28 Reportedly copious quantities of the type of grass not found on that golf course opened up the four band members, along with Nicholson and Rafelson, for some mighty brainstorming. Dolenz explained,

  Jack spent months, actually, going around and meeting all of us, and hanging out, partying, just kind of getting a sense of us individually. And then we had this weekend in Ojai, sitting around this tape recorder sitting on the floor and just talking, just groovin’ about what we wanted to do, what we didn’t want to do.

  Jack, in his brilliance took away—and Bob Rafelson, it must be said—took away all of this Monkeeness, and Jack penned this incredible, weird, psychedelic movie. I have no friggin’ idea what it is supposed to be about … but now I look back and see that was sort of the point of the whole movie, beyond the Monkees thing, beyond the whole Monkees paradigm. It was about breaking out of the traditional old school Hollywood and they did.

  Ironically enough, particularly with a running theme about the dangers of machines, Nicholson enthusiastically embraced the technology as a way to capture the individual personalities and incorporate some of the many fragmented ideas, jokes and random streams of altered consciousness. “He had a really important part, but he didn’t think it up, it was thought up by seven or eight of us who sat around,”29 the singer explained.

  Peter Tork credited the screenwriter for more than narrative, setting and character. “I know that he upped the level of energy and … just a little bit of vinegar to keep from getting too sweet. I know that was Jack’s contribution.” Tork also explained the relationship between the writer and the director, while playacting one of Nesmith’s scenes as the mob boss for a fixed boxing match between Davy Jones and ex-champ Sonny Liston—with the boss’s style of speech based on Nicholson himself. “Jack brought an attitude and Bob fell in love with Jack, artistically speaking … that was something special, extra energy, that we all liked…. And so we went for Jack in a big way.”30

  Director Bob Rafelson prepares his co-creation, the pop/rock group The Monkees, for a scene in the movie Head (1968). Did they then know that one of the main purposes of the film was to destroy them? Shown left-to-right are Rafelson, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork.

  The completed story follows a loose circular narrative that chases the group toward their demise, settling in the end for trapping them and removing them from the movie studio. As in Flight to Fury and Ride in the Whirlwind, the motif of false escape that merely postpones the inevitable also ends this picture, albeit within a less threatening context.

  The chase starts on a n
ewly erected bridge, where the Monkees crash an official ribbon-cutting ceremony as Micky breaks through the ribbon like a victorious marathon runner rather than a man being pushed toward a suicidal leap from a bridge.

  An honor guard is entirely black except for one stupidly grinning white guy. Audio problems with the mayor’s microphone comment on technology with an anti-authority bent. The finish line meshes two disparate elements, sports and politics (which might not be too dissimilar after all) into one cohesive concept.

  As Dolenz hits the water, an entrancing underwater scene featuring mermaids provides the foundation for a visual effects feast, using a new solarization imaging process to add further magic to the theme song music-video-within-a-movie. Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Porpoise Song” remains a Monkees classic, one of their most accomplished recorded tracks, and a perfect psychedelic score.

  We’re then introduced to the guys at their home base, as they engage in a standard practice for any rock group. A kissing contest with Nicholson’s then-current squeeze I.J. Jefferson makes sense, at least as a reflection of Nicholson’s own Reichian openness about sex. As the glamorous hippie chick moves from Monkee to Monkee, the sequence exposes the benefits of stardom while parodying the Davy Jones character—through an exaggerated version of his typical “stars in the eyes” love-at-first-sight persona.

  Head sports a unique musical montage that’s part message machine, part summary of the movie, and part disclaimer for its lack of standard narrative structure and its circular mode. Nicholson and Rafelson rewrote the Tommy Boyce–Bobby Hart “(Theme from) The Monkees” specifically for this purpose. It’s a cynical send-up that paints the band as pandering, manufactured, money-grabbing puppets. Performed in a mechanical singsong manner as directed in the recording studio by Nicholson himself, “Ditty Diego” works within the film as soundtrack to the TV screens montage that juxtaposes old movie and contemporary television clips against portions of the film itself. Interestingly, after deflating the group and their film, this blackout segues into the powerful concert footage that shows the band to its best advantage, for yet another example of juxtaposition (this time unintentionally).