"Scattered Junk"

When I was work­ing at Video Review magazine in the mid-1980s, I and most of the oth­er staffers had mul­tiple occa­sions to look at videos made by our read­ers. A col­league and I noted that many of the chil­dren in the videos “related” to the video cam­era in a way that we intu­ited was decidedly dif­fer­ent from the way we might have related to hav­ing an 8mm cam­era trained on us in our youths. Film cam­er­as, in “our” day, were not as ubi­quit­ous as cam­cord­ers were then becom­ing; there was also a ques­tion of pro­cess. Video did­n’t need pro­cessing; once shoot­ing fin­ished, you could just plug your device in the back of your tele­vi­sion, and, voila, there you were. “Seeing your­self on tele­vi­sion used to be kind of a big deal,” a col­league mused. “Now we’re rais­ing a gen­er­a­tion of kids for whom see­ing them­selves on tele­vi­sion is noth­ing special.”

This proved true, I think, but not exactly in the way that we might have envi­sioned. There are dif­fer­ent degrees of tele­vi­sion, as you will learn by com­par­ing how the mooks from Jersey Shore behave on the actu­al show that bears the name as opposed to how they behave sit­ting across from Billy Bush and the hil­ari­ously named (if you’re British) Kit Hoover on a giv­en epis­ode of Access Hollywood Live. But people in their twen­ties today DO seem to nego­ti­ate the pres­ence of a cam­era in their day-to-day lives in a way that’s dif­fer­ent from that of my own generation.

In the short, shot-on-video fea­ture Scattered Junk, described in some ven­ues as a “doc­u­ment­ary col­lage,” there’s a sec­tion in which the cam­era and cam­era­man (who I pre­sume is also the film’s dir­ect­or, Timothy Morton, intrudes on Greg Cushing while he’s tak­ing a bath. Cushing and some of his mostly male friends are in the pro­cess of mourn­ing Greg’s broth­er Tim Cushing (shown above), a Louisville, Kentucky-based musi­cian who killed him­self in 2004 in the wake of a depres­sion that was surely exacer­bated, if not pre­cip­it­ated, by ear dam­age that had squelched his abil­ity to con­tin­ue play­ing. In the bath sequence, Cushing’s get­ting razzed by anoth­er friend, and he’s respond­ing to the razz­ing in a nor­mal, unaf­fected way; there’s noth­ing like a “per­form­ance” in the way he’s behav­ing. But, the whole while, even after the friend not hold­ing the cam­era has left the room, Cushing’s hold­ing on to his privates, pretty pro­tect­ively. He’s clearly used to being seen/recorded, clearly does­n’t mind being seen/recorded, but is going to con­trol how much of him­self is going to be seen/recorded in whatever way he can, albeit without mak­ing too much of an overt big deal about it. 

I found this pretty fas­cin­at­ing, the most poin­ted such node in a work in which the people on screen often address the cam­era as if it is the actu­al per­son point­ing the cam­era at them, which moments exist in very dis­tinct con­trast to those in which a sub­ject actu­ally “per­forms” for the cam­era. Most of the “per­form­ing” done for the cam­era is done by Tim, the sui­cide, in foot­age that is boxed and recessed into the lar­ger (square­ish) frame of the piece. He mugs, he nar­rates, he is goo­fily ebul­liant and unkempt; his pres­ences in this con­text, as it weaves in and out of the frag­ments show­ing Greg and friends dealing/not-dealing with his absence, cast him as, sort of, the over­see­ing vis­ion­ary and/or slob—if you’ll excuse the word.  Tim is the absence that the slobs he’s left behind—the ones who, in a sui­cide note of which por­tions are dis­played on screen, he says he loves “bey­ond reason”—are obliged to reck­on with. 

I saw Scattered Junk on the site No Budge, which was con­ceived and is run by region­al film­maker Kentucker Audley and dis­plays work by him­self and his con­freres. I was not par­tic­u­larly wowed by the last Audley work I saw, Open Five, which I found a rel­at­ively tired entry in the already too-well-worn ultra-indie sub­genre of Semi-Lost-Weekends Of The Young, White, And Poorly Groomed. While the sub­jects of Scattered Junk, as per­son­al­it­ies, dis­play par­tic­u­lar gen­er­a­tion­al and region­al idio­syn­cra­cies that are poten­tially bey­ond bordeline-irritating (tak­ing pic­tures of them­selves hold­ing switchblades, say­ing things like “I want more art…immersing me,” “relat­ing” to African-American cul­ture in the pre­dict­able pat­ron­iz­ing way that says Gil Scott Heron=awesome while breakdancing=hilarious, and, most infuri­at­ingly, using a toi­let plun­ger to unclog a kit­chen sink), Morton’s approach does not priv­ilege their per­son­al­it­ies as such. And with canny edit­ing, and a num­ber of unex­pec­ted moments in which his cam­era takes a sort of flight in a way that’s not what you’d call strictly “doc­u­ment­ary” (I won’t call it tech­nique, because even when wax­ing lyr­ic­al the cam­era does­n’t seem to be taxed; this is not, to say the least, what you would call a con­ven­tion­ally “beau­ti­ful” work), he acheives moments of near serene detach­ment. And it’s through such moments that the film most effect­ively con­veys its theme, which is the nego­ti­ation between the thor­oughly quo­tidi­an and the nearly unima­gin­able that is, in a sense, a defin­ing com­pon­ent of our exist­ence. And the artic­u­la­tion of this theme, I would argue, suc­cess­fully tran­scends (if you will) the rather squal­id and some­times seem­ingly silly cir­cum­stances of its sub­jects. Which isn’t to say that the laughs in the film, and there are a few, are all at the sub­jects’ expense. Yes, it’s funny when the rather dread­ful band Greg drums in (whose lead sing­er seems to envi­sion him­self as a cross between Damo Suzuki and Rasputin) set up at a dreaded “cof­feshop gig” and about half a dozen people (who look to have been half of the assembled to begin with) get up and walk out. (And it’s pretty effect­ively poignent when we put togeth­er that Tim once worked in that self­same cof­feshop.) On the oth­er hand, anoth­er bit involving the loc­a­tion of a tooth­brush under­cuts I’m-gonna-hate-this-dude-too expect­a­tions by deliv­er­ing actu­al com­ic pay­off. So against a num­ber of poor expect­a­tions, I found myself glad to have spent time with the film. 

Which I came to, incid­ent­ally, through the recom­mend­a­tion of crit­ic/filmmaker/DVD pro­du­cer Craig Keller, whose writ­ing on the film, I have to admit, I read as some­thing of a dare. I don’t think that the DIY tech uto­pi­ans could have pre­dicted the par­tic­u­lar kind of fuck-you insularity/grandiosity that cer­tain strains of no-budget film­mak­ing have engendered. It’s odd to see such an open-hearted work praised in tones prac­tic­ally chok­ing on spite (“your sick little poll;” “the revolu­tion is not a craft-service table;” “Everyone will be cruel to this film—let’s have no illu­sions that the crit­ics are any­thing oth­er than anim­als”). I myself am famil­i­ar with the crit­ic­al pos­ture of the guy hunched over at the end of the bar mut­ter­ing in a stage whis­per about what assholes all the oth­er pat­rons are, and while I under­stand its attrac­tions, I nev­er really con­sidered it to be actu­ally per­suas­ive. 

UPDATE: On Twitter, Craig Keller has taken excep­tion to my char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of his piece on Scattered Junk, aver­ring that I missed the post’s “lev­ity.” I bring this up not to rally com­menters to my side; rather, I’ll take Keller at his word and allow that it’s entirely pos­sible I haven’t kept up suf­fi­ciently with his writ­ing to fully recog­nize where he’s com­ing from, ton­ally. So I apo­lo­gize for both the char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion and its attend­ant implications.