American Popaganda

IN AMERICAN POP, Ralph Bakshi tries to do for pop music what Walt Disney did for classical in Fantasia, expanding the melodies into coherent, complex visual experiences. Unfortunately, while Bakshi's animation technique often stupefies, his jumbled, negative vision drags his effort down.

Bakshi seems almost to be the next generation's Disney, provoking blushes (Fritz the Cat, rated X) and gushes (Wizzards, Lord of the Rings). By animating from real-life shots, he limns every nuance of motion, creating a super-reality. Land-scapes and interiors glow with a beauty and vividness that challenge the work of many non-animator cinematographers.

But now Bakshi has taken on more than a lusting feline or a surreal novel, and tackles pop music of the twentieth century. That he seeks unity and tries to place it on the screen is admirable, but his attempt to attribute such various forces as blues and punk under one man's family is lunacy.

The opening titles chart out the ambitious journey: photos of America--at the turn of the century, through art-deco, to the protests of the sixties--swirl before the camera to a medley of the songs that will mark the movie's progress. Throughout, Bakshi returns to pictures by Jacob Riis or film clips from The War at Home to stress the parallels between his work and the real world. Yet it all rings false, especially given the true origins of today's popular music.

The first half of the movie drags and jerks along, as Bakshi introduces characters without sub-stantiating their dialogue. An orthodox rabbi, singing Hebrew, is murdered by Cossacksin Russia; his son Zalmie immigrates to America, hanging out in smoky vaudeville dance halls, entranced by the grotesque bodies of showgirls. He grows up fast, losing his virginity in a dressing room after a mock strip tease. Trying to appear tender and symbolic, Bakshi never fleshes out the people enough to make them more than the cartoons they are.

Zalmie is wounded while performing in a USO show during World War One and returns home, maturing into a sort of Vito Corleone. America becomes the battleground, and Al Capone-style gang killings flash left and right, suspended in a vacuum, as "Sweet Georgia Brown" trumpets on the soundtrack. After Zalmie's wife is gunned down, he goes to his son Benny who is playing jazz with blacks, and pleads, "If you won't live my dream, at least live my life"--a characteristically melodramatic clinker that calls embarassing attention to itself.

Benny enlists for World War II, as bombs drop and people dance to Benny Goodman's "Sing Sing Sing." He plays a piano which remains in an otherwise demolished town and a German soldier arises from the rubble. Benny tries to soothe him with a German song. The soldier says "Danke" and proceeds to gun him down. Those nasty Krauts! Those poor, great musicians! Sigh! Gasp! Weep! Once again, comic book emotions don't jibe with the attempted realism.

BUT IF THE FILM'S FIRST HALF contrives, the second lies and confuses. The most prominent fault lies in the skipping of the 50s, the decade in which blues and r&b spawned rock and roll. Bakshi's chronology jumps from World War II to Greenwich Village poet-beatniks, but misses a beat--the beat.

Tony, Benny's son (the bildungs roman continues), travels across the country, stopping briefly in Kansas and seducing a young blond waitress in the cornfields by telling her, "This country is my Cracker Jack Box, and you're my prize," in typical Bakshi Americana style.

Tony then heads West (to the strains of the Mamas and Papas' "California Dreamin," of course) and the movie enters the land of Oz. Before, the music served mainly as an audio calendar, or a mood piece; suddenly, we are supposedly at the very heart of the pop-making scene. A druggie band living in a Haight-Ashbury boarding house picks up Tony and he becomes some sort of mythical rock and roll guru. He composes (Dylan's folk) "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" on a bus, the band plays (Jefferson Airplane's rock) Somebody to Love" in concert and later (Jimmy Webb's, pop) "Up, Up, and Away" in a studio.

This historical inaccuracies might be forgiven in view of the scope of Bakshi's project, but it seems crucial that the people over 30 in the audience (if there are any, given the ad campaign) get a clearer picture of sixties music.

Bakshi also condemns the use of drugs without delving into the pressures which cause their use. The band plays in Kansas, and, what do you know, a kid who visits backstage turns out to be Tony's (from that first backstage tryst). Tony suffers a series of painful flashbacks that seem to assert: "Oh, why did I go across the country and take all those drugs when I could have stayed, married, and washed dishes all my life? This attitude is so antithetical to the adventuresome spirit of pop music one wonders why Bakshi even bothered.

THE ROLLER COASTER of a movie barrels toward hell: the lead singer dies, and Tony deserts his kid ("Little Pete") on a NYC street. Bakshi decides to bring the story up to the present while linking it with the past, so Pete struts the street to Pat Benatar's recent "Hell is for Children" (a dismal choice for an anthem!) and stops to look in a doorway where an orthodox rabbi is chanting and moves on. Young punks denying their past! Oy vey! The screen explodes into surreal dance on the edges of razor blades, mouth-piercing safety pins, and the Sex Pistols growling. "We're so pretty, oh so pretty--vacant!"

Huh? The Sex Pistols are as American as the Queen. To use this song as the culmination of 75 years of American pop denies any unity Bakshi once promised.

Pete becomes a cocaine dealer, topping off a family involved with gangsters, sleazy dancehalls, and sex, and American Pop slips and slides into the ooze as Pete sings a medley of "Blue Suede Shoes/Devil with the Blue Dress/crazy on you," trying to span three decades but making no sense. Why these songs? Why have all the other characters lip-synch or listen to original recordings, but now inject a studio band's tepid interpretation?

The classic point to be made about American pop music is that so many types of music emerged with so few lines in common. Bakshi seems to realize this, putting Scott and Janis Joplin, Fabian, and Lou Reed songs in the same movie. But by trying to make more connections than actually exist, he stretches the attractive canvas he has drawn into a demented and confused statement, encompassing family, war, drugs, love, and music, but saying nothing about them.