The Who’s well-loved 1969 rock opera album Tommy has been adapted for the screen, and is almost the furthest thing from a feel-good picture that you can get.  Who knew that the sound of childhood trauma could be so goddamn catchy?

When I was a young girl, my father would play the album Tommy, he really liked the band.  Tommy was one of those albums I played on repeat when I was elementary school-aged.  My dad had copied the album to a cassette, and me and my yellow Walkman would head to the bus stop every morning blasting “The Acid Queen”.  I’ve mentioned before I was an obnoxious kid, and one memory that has unfortunately stuck with me for like 25 years is this guy on the bus asking my sister to tell me to stop singing out loud to “Pinball Wizard” because it was annoying.  I sunk into my seat as if he had punched me straight in the gut.

Being young, my understanding of the plot was pretty basic, and oh boy, the movie translation of this was um… I was not prepared for the ride I had boarded.   Even as someone who is unbelievably familiar with the source material, this was a rough watch.

Tommy begins during World War 2, and England is getting bombed by Nazis.  Tommy’s mom and dad are on their honeymoon, and when they return, Tommy’s father is sent off to war and is presumably killed in action.  Tommy is born on V.E. Day and never knows his biological father.  His mother (Ann-Margret) hooks up with a dude she met on vacation, Uncle Frank, and when Tommy’s father returns unannounced 6 years later, her lover kills him by hitting him with a lamp.  Dude lived through a plane crash, and its the bedside lamp that finally gets him.  Tommy witnesses the murder, and Uncle Frank and his mom plead with him not to tell anybody.  The trauma of this event triggers psychosomatic deafness and blindness in Tommy.  His parents are understandably concerned about him, even though they are the whole reason this happened in the first place.

His mom is weirdly fixated with his salvation, and takes Tommy to church to see if a supremely uncharismatic Eric Clapton and statue of Marilyn Monroe can heal him.  The congregation, in a very classy move that is not at all disparaging to Marilyn Monroe’s legacy, downs alcohol and prescription medication as communion.  The healing goes about as well as expected.

After this, his Uncle Frank takes Tommy to a prostitute, who drugs and presumably rapes him, thinking it might snap him out of it.  When that doesn’t work, his parents then leave him with one babysitter that beats and tortures him, and another that sexually molests him, so… fun times.  My notes perfectly illustrate how glad I was to watch this series of events unfold.

Realizing Tommy can entertain himself just by looking in a mirror, his parents get loaded on the couch, leaving him alone to wander out of the house.  He stumbles upon a pinball machine in a junkyard.  His parents discover he’s really fucking good at it, and introduce him into the very financially lucrative world of pinball competitions.

My favorite scene in this movie is watching Elton John play a keyboard attached to a pinball machine while wearing the largest shoes I’ve ever seen on a human.  They hinder his movement so much he can only point with his left arm over and over again to show his enthusiasm.  When Tommy wins the Pinball championship, a pack of Waldos haul away Elton’s defeated body.

Now that Tommy’s family is rolling in dough, his parents buy a mansion and a yacht, and Ann-Margret tries to bury her guilt surrounding Tommy’s condition through retail therapy, and literally smothering her grief with chocolate pudding.

I swear to god, Ann-Margret is the only person who actually knew what kind of movie she was filming.  She’s crazed, dramatic, and her voice is so fucking awesome (unlike some of the other actors they cast…).  Still, the disservice of making her swim in a sea of baked beans… which, FUN FACT: sent her into the ER because part of the broken champagne bottle rocketed out of the television when they were pelting bubbles at her and cut her hand large enough that she needed 27 stitches to close it.  She came back to film the next day because she is a fucking queen.

Tommy’s parents take him to Jack Nicholson putting on an haughty accent to see if he can fix Tommy, and all he succeeds in doing is putting the moves on Ann-Margret.  She takes Tommy back to the house and dances him into the mirror, which sets him free to swim and run shirtless across the country without shoes on.

It’s around this point of the movie that I realize Ann-Margret and I have *a thing* for young Roger Daltrey, and I don’t know what to do with this knowledge.

Seriously, she’s only like 3 years older than him and she’s supposed to be playing his mother.  The film industry is so fucked up.

Tommy tells his mother than she needs to relinquish all her material possessions, baptizes her in the ocean, and forms his own pinball-based religion.  His followers treat him like a messiah, looking for him to provide the path to salvation.  He invites them onto his compound, puts his child molester Uncle Ernie in charge of a bunch of children, and Uncle Frank in charge of recruitment and merchandising. 

His campers are fairly pissed they’re being milked for every dime they have, but Tommy is all, “I haven’t handed out my syllabus yet, wait until you hear what the curriculum is going to be!”  When they discover it’s about turning off all distractions and only playing pinball, his congregation are all like, “Fuck that!” and riot, murdering both of Tommy’s parents.  Now that his oppressors are dead, Tommy is truly free.  He runs through literal fire, jumps into a lake in jeans, and climbs a slippery waterfall AND a mountain in bare feet, making me wonder what kind of insurance they had on this picture that they allowed Roger Daltrey to do all of that and hang glide into a sea of bikers. The 1970s were an unencumbered time.

I watched several interviews with Peter Townshend to understand where the idea of this rock opera came about, and holy shit, this story is just based in his own traumatic childhood experiences.  From his perspective, after WW2, the people in England who had lived with the constant fear of sudden death internalized all of their associated trauma.  They had children they weren’t emotionally equip to parent, leaving them to be vulnerable to people who wanted to exploit them.

Tommy’s constant plea in the movie was to be seen and heard by those who were supposed to protect and care for him, only for them to be ignorant to the effect their negligence was having on him.  Tommy tries to save other broken people who need to feel safe, only for them to revolt, take the only family he’s ever known away from him, and abandon him.  This is an unbelievably depressing movie, and the fact it resonated with so many people, I just… I don’t know how to process that, because it’s heartbreaking.

So, yeah, this movie is weird as shit, but it does try to impart that people who are exposed to repeated stressful events will only hurt themselves and those around them if they try to repress those experiences.  I’m not sure the movie effectively communicated what The Who was trying to convey in the original album, however.  I think the message is overshadowed by the strong aesthetic.  

I suffered with intense anxiety as a child (still do, although I have mechanisms now as an adult to help manage it) and my parents didn’t know what the fuck to do with me.  I would say 90% of the time they’d treat my anxiety like I was personally trying to inconvenience them, and the other 10% they’d make fun of me for it.  So there I’d be, trying to hide my anxiety attacks and feeling like I was going to die (or if I was lucky, just vomit) because they’d get angry or tell me to suck it up if they knew what was going on.  I did not have a happy childhood.  I, like Tommy, just wanted them to understand me and show any amount of compassion.  However, watching this movie, I somehow did not find myself relating to his story at all.  I was too distracted by Marilyn Monroe-dressed nuns, a 2-story tall Elton John, child abuse and molestation played off as a joke, and Ann-Margret drowning in bean syrup that I completely missed the intention.  I also think 1970s religious movements had a tendency to be rather exploitative, and I have regrettably listened to far too many My Favorite Murders to not see Tommy’s fans and think, “You’re in a cult, call your dad.”  It’s hard to be automatically empathetic to the abused when they lead others to be victimized by their abusers.

I would 1000% recommend Tommy the album.  This movie is worth a watch if you like The Who, but even as someone who loves the original music, I’m probably not going to put it in my constant rotation.

That concludes rock band movie musical week!  The orchestra nerd inside of me is excited to move on to Carmen Jones next.

From the minds of Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, is a 110 minute acid trip featuring The Monkees.  Their television show had been recently cancelled, and Head is essentially their former-Disney star “I’m an adult!” moment in an attempt to break free of their preassigned roles and become Serious Artists.

I cannot adequately express the despair I felt when Head literally announced there would be no plot to this movie, and would instead be a series of skits.  It makes sense in the context of The Monkees, since they were formed for a television show.  Each section of the movie has a different genre, ranging from a traditional Western, a boxing movie, a television commercial, a stage-performed musical number, horror… they are all here, which makes an overall narrative pretty hard to discern, other than The Monkees’ general discontentment with their current position.

It begins similarly to A Hard Day’s Night, where the Monkees are being chased by… we don’t know what yet, but we can assume it is not excited teenage girls.  They then launch themselves off of a bridge, trip on LSD, find some mermaids, and hold a kissing contest that only triggered my Covid-spread panic.  The movie doesn’t give you much time to breathe before it comes in hot with a football player attacking soldiers, a football stadium cheering for war, and The Monkees playing a live concert with a screaming crowd cut together with scenes of civilians being killed during the Vietnam war.

Not gonna lie, I didn’t think I’d have to address the Vietnam War at all during this project (unfortunately, Meet the Feebles took that assumption away from me rather quickly).  To be honest, I was really expecting this more from The Beatles, especially with John Lennon’s very famous pivot to anti-war protest songs.  In college, I wrote a sociology paper on the Vietnam War’s influence on popular culture and the function of the media created, and not once in all my research were The Monkees even seriously cited, other than some coy allusion that “Last Train to Clarksville” might have had something to do with a soldier travelling to an army base.  I was so taken aback by the opening scene of this movie, that I literally pulled out my paper and the books I had purchased to write it to see if I had missed something.  There was ONE sentence about Mike Nesmith singing a protest song before he joined The Monkees.  Granted, if you were alive during the 1960s, to be ignorant of the war in general would have been so incredibly tone-deaf.  Had I realized this movie would be political in any way, I would have expected this.  In one book, the author had compiled over 750 songs that directly addressed the war.  Record sales tripled during the decade, and Woodstock might be the most famous festival we’ve ever held in the US – processing the war through music was very much *a thing*.  So, of course, I had to dive into this, because my brain can’t just be like, “Well, I guess The Monkees hated the Vietnam War like the majority of the population, I guess.”

There wasn’t much to find, other than this bizarre clip of Davey Jones on an 80s talk show bragging and singing about how he had evaded the draft.  Turns out, the writer/director of this picture, Bob Rafelson, really controlled the message of this movie, and he inserted these scenes as commentary on the performative aspect of war, and how television “…makes you inured to the realities of life.  Oh yes, it brings it into the living room, but then you don’t have to fucking deal with it.  There is no distinction made between the close-up of the young girl responding hysterically to the appearance of The Monkees and to the shot of the assassination at the same time.  And then the hysterical girls attack the stage where The Monkees are playing and shred their clothing off.  But they’re not The Monkees, they are wooden dummies.  They’ll shred anything, as long as it’s the thing to do.  Rape the stage, attack the musicians, real or unreal, who cares?  And it was just pointing out that there was a sort of a mindlessness to, as The Beatles used to complain all the time, to the appreciation of the music.”

There’s a lot going on in this statement…  I’ll agree that the constant barrage of violence and unrest eventually numbs you to it.  Especially now, with a 24-hour news cycle, and twitter just bombarding you with every fucking egregious thing going on in the world at once.  A sense of hopelessness overtakes you; The doom-scrolling will only pacify you into not acting, because what the fuck can you do to change anything?  There are too many problems, and they’re too large to solve on your own.

The second part of this statement, where teenage girls will do anything “as long as it’s the thing to do” is pretty insulting.  I suppose the attitude of teenage girls being easily manipulated to enjoying things was amplified with Beatlemania.  Its continued on, where bands like New Kids on the Block, The Backstreet Boys, and One Direction are immediately dismissed as superfluous because teenage girls like them, and teenage girls are shallow because they’re driven by their hormones.  What’s unbelievably frustrating about this mindset is it has been disproved time and time again, INCLUDING with The Beatles.  I know more dudes who rep for them than I do women.  Shit, in this dumpster fire of a year, Harry Styles’ new album has been one of the few positive things that has kept me going, and that came out 10 months ago.  With the success of k-pop as well, a lot more people are starting to come around to “manufactured content that teenage girls like can be good, actually”.

The Beatles complaining about how their music is secondary to the mania about them is really rich, considering their legacy now.  It’s not like they were that attractive or charming… I sat through 2 of their movies and the only person I even mildly connected with was Ringo, because he was a goofy dope.  I’m fairly certain teenage girls were buying their records and going to their shows because they liked the music.  As a former teenage girl, let me tell you, the illusion of depth and sensitivity is way more attractive than a pretty face.

Teenage girls made The Monkees and The Beatles successful, and for the director, who directly profited off of that success, to make a movie that criticizes them really rubs me the wrong way.  Also, it was the fucking 1960s, about as volatile of a decade as you could get *until* now.  Maybe teenage girls focused so much on The Monkees and The Beatles because it was one of the few uncomplicated things that could bring them reprise from the violence unfolding around them.  But whatever, disparage their money lining your pockets, I guess.

The skits afterward are pretty unremarkable.  Micky is in the middle of a desert trying to get happiness out of a Coke machine, only to find it, and the task itself empty.  He then blows up the Coke machine with a tank given to him by the Italian army.

The Monkees are given a tour of a manufacturing facility, only to see what they are producing isn’t a quality product, and the workers themselves are either fake, or endangered by the endeavor.  There’s a few scenes where they fight against their predetermined personalities in the band, or what their fans might think of their behaviors.  They are used in a dandruff shampoo advertisement and vacuumed up and held hostage in a black box.  There is an outstanding upbeat musical number performed by Davy (and Toni Basil!) about a boy whose father left him.  He lays it all out on the dance floor, only to be criticized by Frank Zappa of all people, for not having a message in his music that will save the youth of America.

While they are searching for answers on how to escape the box they’re trapped in, or purpose in what they’ve accomplished, they find nothing.  Peter tries to enlighten them with a bunch of culty bullshit, but instead Davy loses his shit and starts physically attacking literally everything featured throughout the movie, culminating in The Monkees running from their movie studio and jumping off a bridge to free themselves.  They unfortunately are captured and shoved back in the black box, awaiting the next time they will be carted out to market something else for The Teens to buy.

I probably don’t need to tell you that this movie flopped.  The studio purposely left The Monkees out of all the promotional material because they thought it might detract from the serious motion picture they were trying to release.  The problem with this, however, is if you don’t know anything about The Monkees, this movie is not going to make sense to you.  I had to watch several behind-the-scenes clips to get any semblance of an idea what they were trying to achieve.  Sure, the Capitalism and Manufactured Entertainment is Bad theme is pretty easy to pick out, but why The Monkees were the ones saying this after being immersed in the middle of it for three years is an important position to understand beforehand.  And even if you were a Monkees fan, like my mother was, this basically shits on their entire experience in show business, so it probably doesn’t hit too well with their core demographic, either.  I respect what they were trying to do here, but it’s no mystery to me why this movie has almost entirely been lost to time.

I’d like to say this ends my series on rock bands that decided to make musical movies, but next on the list is a little story about a pinball-wizard-that-could, Tommy.