Greetings

THE FIRST Electric Flag album has a song that opens with Lyndon Johnson saying, "I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the ...." He is cut of by uproarious laughter, and then the twanging of hard rock guitars. The son is called "Killing Floor."

Greeting is a new film that opens with Lyndon Johnson speaking before a labor union audience. He says, "I don't mean to say that you never had it so good, but that's true, isn't it?" O.K. Johnson's criminal insanity aside, his remarks are the ideal preface to a film that shows just how horrible the paranoid lives we lead in the shadow of Vietnam are. The film is about three young New Yorkers, Jon, Paul, and Lloyd--apparently students--and their hassels with the draft and sex. Greeting has a very hip perspective on both; unlike so many films today that speak to the student, Greetings speak for them. It was made by anonymous young group, shot on location in New York City, with much of the dialogue improvised. In these respects it is like some of Godard's films, though it lacks 2Godard's ideological commitment.

Lloyd has beater the draft by convincing the psychiatrist that he is a homosexual, while Jon and Paul pretend that they are manic right-wingers. Jon asks to be put in the "middle" lines so that he can pick off a few "niggers, spics, Jews, and other commies" while he is shooting "the chinks." Vietnam, and the ways in which it has changed and bedeviled young people, runs through this film like a leitmotif.

Sexually, the three have at best some frustration; at worst are absolute screaming perverts. Lloyds, who is a Kennedy assassination buff, spends an evening in bed with a naked girl using her as a dummy to check the accuracy of the Warren Commission documentation of bullet holes. The scene ends with the girl asleep and Lloyd stouting, "This will crack the case wide open. Kennedy would have had to be standing on his head to be shot like the commission says."

Jon is a voyeur who tells girls he is a movie maker to get them to take off their clothes. Paul is a computer dater. He has one "premature ejaculation scene" which sounds like it should be very sexy, but is rather just very funny. Don't go to this film expecting to be aroused. The sex scenes are mostly about the horniness of the trio, and made me all the more embarrassed at the horniness that kept my eyes glued on the screen.

GREEN IS HONEST. It paints the student in the patchwork mix we all live. We hope we are against the war for better reasons than that we are scared, and we hope that we want sex for other reason than fucking itself. But there is a dualism of high values and a debased reality in a lot of what we do. Our response to this dual nature may take the radical form of blaming corporate power for the evil we live, but this is often self-deluding and hopelessly illogical. In one scene of Greetings, a man is selling an underground newspaper called "The Rat" and he is shouting out to passers-by, "You've seen the Empire State building and the Colonial Theater. Well man, that proves it. That's where this country is at."

Greetings is doom comedy about searching amidst chaos, and the half-assed things young people do when they are confused. It's a good film. There are a lot of funny lines, and I laughed very hard. But someday we won't laugh about the draft, the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, or perverse sex. Someday Greetings will remind us of a time when we got hip, and made a Heaven out of a national Hell, but got debased, and arrived at something which was just a new hell all over again.