Hello Dankness For over 20 years, the Australian video artists Soda Jerk have been making work that samples movie, music and different numerous kinds of popular culture. Their movies are kaleidoscopic and psychedelic, irreverent and continually stunning. Their latest movie, Hello Dankness, is not any completely different. Set in a fictional suburbia populated by Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, and Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World, Dankness is a response to–and a movie about–the 2016 election and its aftermath. After all, an period of American historical past and politics that so ferociously shred away societal norms and imbued each day life with a long-lasting weirdness deserves a movie simply as bizarre.
I spoke to Soda Jerk about how they acquired their begin as video artists, and the way they made one of the vital distinctive and defiantly goofy movies in latest reminiscence. Hello Dankness is currently playing at New York’s Film Forum.
Filmmaker: When and the way did you two start working collectively as Soda Jerk?
Soda Jerk: We’ve been collaborating on this approach because the early 2000s, after we have been child queers preoccupied by debates round shared tradition, P2P networks and utopian concepts concerning the cypherpunk way forward for the web. It all appears very naive now, however on the time Napster had simply been decimated in courtroom and the untapped potentials of the online felt very actual to us. We have been psyched for the sorts of prospects that the web would possibly allow for constructing new modes of financial system and neighborhood exterior of current authorized and social buildings. These sorts of concepts have been additionally interconnected with so many different issues that we have been into at the moment, like unlawful raves and artist squats and anti-corporate activism. It felt just like the ethics of theft was having a second. Lots of our pals have been additionally working with audio sampling throughout the experimental hip-hop and breakcore scenes, and we turned concerned with how these type of plunder methods could be utilized to cinema.
So round that point in 2002 we began working collectively on our large, bizarre first work, Hollywood Burn, an anti-copyright epic made completely from pirated movies and television samples. It was very a lot within the spirit of trash cinema, a type of free tradition manifesto disguised as a sci-fi biblical narrative starring Elvis Presley and an intergalactic outpost of video pirates together with Snake Pliskin and Jack Sparrow. The factor was that neither of us had any coaching in movie or video, and it was earlier than YouTube and on-line tutorials, so we have been simply messing round fairly chaotically at first, asking pals find out how to do stuff as we went alongside. We have been sampling instantly from VHS and DVDs leases from Blockbuster, capturing on mini-DV tape and modifying on a cracked copy of Final Cut. It was most likely our cluelessness that stored us going, as a result of we actually had no concept how tough it was going to be, or how lengthy it might take. We labored on Hollywood Burn for 4 years, after which in some way managed to maintain the collaboration going with different sample-based tasks, first throughout the context of visible arts, and extra lately inside cinema and experimental movie worlds.
Filmmaker: How would you describe Hello Dankness?
Soda Jerk: The baseline could be that it’s a suburban stoner musical a couple of group of neighbors and the way they relate and evolve collectively as they navigate the unfurling shitstorm of the years from 2016 to 2021. It’s additionally a political fable of types, a type of Greek tragedy, the place every of the characters operate as a type of masks, within the sense that they’re extremely codified or emblematic. So throughout the neighborhood, Tom Hanks performs an idealistic Bernie bro, Annette Bening is a histrionic Hillary supporter and Bruce Dern is the trad Republican who finally will get pilled on Infowars and QAnon. Wayne and Garth play alt-right YouTubers, and Putin makes an look because the Phantom of the Opera. Lots of different Broadway bangers like Cats, The Producers, Annie and Les Misérables too. A good friend lately mentioned that she thought Hello Dankness was what would possibly occur if Andrew Lloyd Webber, Joe Dante and George A. Romero collaborated on a documentary undertaking. Mostly although, we hope that the overriding feeling that the movie emits is one in all deep weirdness. Because finally what we try to get at with Hello Dankness is the encroaching sense of unhinged-ness that has begun to characterize politics and expertise on this period. Our wager is that this isn’t nearly a specific solid of political characters, however relatively has to do with the cumulative affect of the web and the emergence of a memetic sensibility that’s profoundly reshaping society.
Filmmaker: The movie begins with a chilly open of types. The Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial performs in full, unaltered. Some unaware viewers might imagine it’s a part of your development, nevertheless it’s completely earnest. What is it about that industrial that spoke to you two?
Soda Jerk: That 2017 Pepsi advert has been a real muse for us by way of excited about the way in which that the language of the left has been co-opted by trade, and in making an attempt to grapple with the query of what alternate types of left articulation and protest could be potential and essential past this cringe horizon. We have been teenagers of the ’90s so the idea of company cringe runs deep for us. We get that it’s develop into completely commonplace for manufacturers to advantage sign, however with this industrial it’s like they forgot so as to add the advantage half, it’s simply pure unadulterated model synergy. Watching Kendall hand that Pepsi can to the cop is like staring instantly into the nihilistic void on the soul of crap-stage capitalism.
Filmmaker: How did you determine what movies you’ll use as the premise for Hello Dankness?
Soda Jerk: There’s at all times lots of wrestling between the belongings you wish to work with and the issues that truly work greatest within the edit. So typically you’re guided by grand conceptual motivations and at different instances you would possibly select a supply due to concrete pragmatics like preserving continuity, or the structural logistics of find out how to advance from one scene to the following. So whereas some folks would possibly know lots of film trivia, our cinema data aggregates round issues like understanding which movie has tidy cutaways, or how the colour profiles of movies of a sure period will match, or which movies are most conducive to classical modifying or no matter.
Although we’ve leaned into lots of completely different genres for this work, we have been notably drawn to movies which have a deep engagement with the American suburbs. A movie like The Burbs is already such a deft suburban satire, and we have been concerned with what it would imply to think about it concurrently with one thing like American Beauty from a decade later. We have been interested by what sort of insights and resonances would possibly emerge from collapsing their proximity and permitting them to inhabit the identical narrative matrix. I suppose we’re at all times excited about the sources relationally, how they gel and the sorts of frictions they generate.
Filmmaker: There’s a number of layers of meta narratives and inside jokes taking place within the movie. For occasion, Tom Hanks’s character is sick with COVID, and Tom Hanks was one of many first high-profile COVID instances. Did you’ve these sorts of connections deliberate out beforehand, did some come to you within the second?
Soda Jerk: Tom Hanks getting sick was positively one thing we hadn’t anticipated, in reality we have been fairly deep into the edit by the point of the pandemic so COVID was itself an enormous plot twist that we needed to instantly reroute into the narrative. We’d additionally sampled Hanks watching Mr Rogers on tv, earlier than he was solid as Fred Rogers within the movie A Beautiful Day within the Neighborhood. So Hanks weirdly turned out to be fairly a lightning rod for these sorts of uncanny meta conjunctions. We’ve additionally been considering recently concerning the sorts of issues that reverberate for the movie even after it’s completed. Like lately when Hello Dankness performed to audiences throughout peak Barbenheimer, you may sense that Greta Gerwig’s presence within the remaining scene had shifted in some type of palpable approach. Films actually are these ridiculously encrypted paperwork, these advanced webs of connection and have an effect on which are continually shapeshifting as they transfer by time. Deciphering these encrypted dimensions of cinema is a part of what we’re excited about after we use a pattern, however on the similar time we’re additionally drawn to the truth that the which means of a piece can by no means be fully locked down, there’ll at all times be an extra that essentially escapes our greatest efforts. And the viewers are themselves a part of that unquantifiable equation, bringing their very own unknowable associations and private historical past to the textual content.
Filmmaker: There’s been lots of speak about AI and the way that could be utilized in the way forward for the movie trade. What do you make of all that?
Soda Jerk: We’ve acquired some difficult feels on this. On one hand, by way of labor and jobs, there’s little question that AI will probably be devastating for sure fields of follow. But actually if we had a sturdy common fundamental revenue, or one thing like that, then all this unemployment and restructuring wouldn’t be such a difficulty. So in that sense maybe we’re worrying an excessive amount of about the specter of AI overlords and are lacking the larger image, that we’re already dwelling an financial nightmare dominated by a robotic elite of billionaires like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk. So that’s one aspect to the present AI hysteria that’s justified and regarded. But if we come at these type of debates purely from the perspective of the expertise, then we’re really actually down for it. We don’t purchase into the entire binary between human and mechanic creativity. Artists have at all times been cyborgs, we’ve at all times labored with instruments and used expertise as a type of prosthetic. Our movie follow is already deeply enmeshed with tech and coding and algorithms, so we don’t see AI as being categorically completely different. We’re fascinated for the type of evolutions in our follow that it would propel.
Filmmaker: Were you stunned that your movie was capable of get a theatrical launch, given the fabric you made it with?
Soda Jerk: We’ve actually acquired to credit score Film Forum for making this theatrical launch occur, it’s wild. These are deeply threat averse instances, particularly for establishments, however Film Forum acquired behind Hello Dankness actually early on once they noticed it on the Berlinale. The authorized provocation of our work can be very a lot part of it, of its supposed motion, and we consider the movie as a essential probe to check the contours of the legislation, so we welcome no matter unfolds in that respect. Also maybe price noting that, having studied legislation in Australia and the US, the Fair Use doctrine that we have now right here within the States is definitely fairly sturdy and engaging.
Filmmaker: Why do you suppose the institution failed so miserably of their underestimation of Donald Trump?
Soda Jerk: This goes again to what we have been saying earlier concerning the emergence of a brand new digital regime, a memetic paradigm that has been unleashed by the web. What folks didn’t anticipate was how well-suited Trump was to this new media panorama. It’s just like the political debates of the Nineteen Sixties, the place Kennedy smashed Nixon on tv, as a result of he had the best demeanor for television. He runs cool like television whereas Nixon runs sizzling like radio. And Trump has one thing completely different altogether. His scattershot presence surpasses tv in some way, there’s one thing about his mode of presentation that meshes extremely effectively with the virality of latest politics. We consider Trump as the primary meme to carry workplace within the Whitehouse.
But additionally let’s be actual, the institution Democrats didn’t simply fail of their estimation of Trump, in addition they failed on their very own phrases. Failure to enact vital legislative change, failure to alleviate the very actual materials pressures and precarity that individuals face, and failure to make the type of audacious strikes essential within the face of local weather disaster. Guess we really feel fairly bleak concerning the present political state of affairs and the fractured state of the progressive left that adopted Bernie’s defeat. Electoral politics simply appears like a shit sandwich whichever approach you slice it, and the one constant winner appears to be Daddy Warbucks.
Filmmaker: Were you hoping, in making this movie concerning the final seven years or so, that you may present some type of catharsis to your viewers? Or do you suppose your movie might traumatize folks yet again?
Soda Jerk: You know, what’s traumatizing is having to face a Trump Biden rematch.
