Cine-Trash

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)
by William Ham

With the tenth annual Monkees reunion tour in full swing, I thought it apropos to assay the Prefab Four’s sole cinematic effort, without question one of the weirdest and most nonsensical music movies ever made (and I’m counting Xanadu, so you know I mean it). Forget plot – there is none. Even for the late sixties, Head shows a stunning lack of coherence. It starts with the boys leaping off a very tall bridge and ends with them trapped in a giant fishtank, which provides some insight into the thrust of this pic – the singin’ simians’ bitterness and self-loathing over their manufactured creation. You could say that Head is the Monkees’ No Exit , but I really wish you wouldn’t; existentialism pre-supposes a shared sense of futility, but how many of us can sympathize with their circumstances? Give me meaty royalty checks for the rest of my life and I think I can handle miming playing the tambourine and doing that weird sideways shuffle quite happily, danke, I certainly wouldn’t think to intercut performance footage with Vietnam atrocity shots, though I will credit them for beating the Doors to it. It’s kind of a fun view if you switch off your critical faculties and let go – how many other flix feature cameos by Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, and Frank Zappa? (Beach Blanket Freak Out?) In addition, it includes a couple of the best songs they ever recorded (or stood near the studio during the mixing of) – Goffin/King’s gorgeous “Porpoise Song” and Mike Nesmith’s countrified “Circle Sky.” And to top it off, this mammoth slice of psychedopia was co-penned by one Jack Nicholson (who appears very briefly in a Gatsbyesque slouch cap), who, as a scenarist, is an excellent actor.