Beyond the Multiplex

It's springtime and a bumper crop of indie films -- about air-guitar gods, faux celebs, lusty Frenchwomen -- is bustin' out all over!

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Stanley Kubrick, Movie Reviews, Irony, Arts & Entertainment, John Malkovich, Documentaries, Guitar, Independent Film, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

"Air Guitar Nation", "The Page Turner" and "Color Me Kubrick"

March 22, 2007 | It must be spring, because just as those of us in the frozen half of the country are beginning to venture outside, blinking into the watery late-winter sun like late-rising groundhogs, a bumper crop of new movies sprouts like weeds between the paving stones, luring us back into the dark, nurturing cave of the local art house. We've got the compelling human drama of a man wearing a Hello Kitty backpack and playing air guitar, we've got a kinky French revenge thriller, we've got John Malkovich pretending to be a guy who's pretending to be Stanley Kubrick, we've got teenage Iranian girls defying the authorities, and an Iraqi journalist trapped in the Kafkaesque hell of Abu Ghraib. So to heck with nice weather. Isn't that ironic?

OK, no, it's not. As my late English-professor dad would have told you at great length, "irony" does not signify something annoying or irritating, or even a strange coincidence. In its purest sense, irony is a rhetorical mode in which you say one thing and mean the opposite ("Dude, what a lovely spring day we're having!" as you walk across town in a driving sleet-storm), although it also refers to a cosmic phenomenon in which human acts produce effects contrary to those intended. (One could say that the results of the Iraq war have been ironic, for example, but only if you believe the war was actually intended to produce a peaceful, democratic Iraq.)

But I'm also not here to rail against the slippery, postmodern sense of the word "irony," the one infamously referenced by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter when he declared that irony was dead after 9/11. Carter, I suppose, was trying to say that insincerity and dispassion and a permanent attitude of poking fun had to go on hold temporarily in the wake of that disaster, and Jeez, I hope he was looking in the mirror when he said it. (In fairness, he later acknowledged that it was a dumb-ass thing to say, although perhaps not in those words.)

Nay, I am here to honor that indefinable form of irony in all its treachery and instability, its tendency to reverse the polarities of meaning or to render them indecipherable. This is the form of irony that will make all of us, as we grow older, unable to tell whether the younger people around us are behaving sincerely or not. We will find no comfortable recourse, no safe haven. This kind of irony is both a form of self-knowledge and a form of self-mockery, it is a defense against the world of late capitalism and an embrace of it. I say it is a proud and noble thing, and I say bring it.

Is the film "Air Guitar Nation," a crowd-pleasing documentary that follows two American contestants to the World Air Guitar Championship in a small town in northern Finland -- where they must do battle with deadly air-ax wielders from Austria, Australia, the Scandinavian countries, Britain and elsewhere -- a joke? Do these people really take themselves seriously, as they jump around in front of a few dozen strangers and pretend to play along to a decades-old Motörhead song? Are these events real? Is this movie -- ahem -- serious or ironic?

I bring no answers to these questions, Grasshopper. Or anyway I bring only irritating answers, like "maybe" and "it depends" and "it doesn't really matter." The important thing to say is that I was really dreading seeing "Air Guitar Nation" (which is directed by Alexandra Lipsitz) and that now that I've seen it and partway understood it, and it has rocked my world, I can't remember why. I guess I was afraid it would be some VH1-style celebration of pathetic meathead wannabe rock stars who make fools of themselves in public. And I guess it kind of is.

But in the tradition of the finest forms of American entertainment, both "Air Guitar Nation" and the geekcraft it chronicles go way beyond shtick and self-parody into some meta-meta-ironic zone, where it's never clear from one moment to the next what is a joke and what is deadly earnest, until the two concepts finally merge into a sort of Buddhist singularity. I think it hardly needs saying that Homer Simpson would make a brilliant air guitarist (if only he would get off his lard ass and practice).

Next page: The air-maestros face off