Two movies, both alike in indignity, in the ’90s, where we lay our scene. Because neither Videoheaven nor Pavements—both putatively non-fictional pop-culture essay films written and directed by Alex Ross Perry—have officially been released, programmed at a festival, or even announced via trailers or posters, it’s tricky to write about their intricacies, either as standalone works or in conversation with one another. Even if you don’t believe in the scourge of spoilers, it’s different to deconstruct a movie following its Sundance premiere than via a Vimeo link, on top of which a movie like Videoheaven, which unfolds as a three-hour voiceover meditation on the cinematic depiction (and metaphysics) of American video-store culture since the early ’80s, is so dependent on fair-use laws for its excerpt-heavy contents that talking about specific sequences feels like asking for trouble. As for Pavements, which is more conventionally accessible than Videoheaven yet exponentially harder to describe as a “documentary”—owing to the fact that a good portion of its scenes are not, expressly speaking, “real”—its production has been so freeform that Perry wasn’t totally sure of what was in the version that he had just recently sent my way.
Those who have been paying attention online about the current status of Cinema Scope can probably understand why Perry—very much a Friend of the Magazine—would have been persuaded to jump the gun. Provisionally speaking (which would seem to be the fairest way to go about things at this point), I can say that both Videoheaven and Pavements are absorbing, funny and, in their respective ways, rigorous works of pop-cultural scholarship whose respective forms are appropriate to their subject matter. The cool, academic style of the former, with its obvious influence from Thom Andersen’s epochal Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), showcases Perry in big-picture film-critical mode, coolly elucidating the inception, expansion, corporatization, and dissolution of the VHS (and DVD) rental era. The latter, which seems indebted to Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007), is a kaleidoscopic meditation on the Stephen Malkmus–led ’90s indie rock outfit Pavement, or what an opening title card refers to as “the best and most important band of all time”—a gauntlet that’s also a wink at a self-selecting audience who are just as likely to laugh at themselves for nodding along at this assessment as they are to chide non-believers.
What’s at stake in these movies is, on one level, nothing more than an influential and yet increasingly obsolete cohort’s melancholic nostalgia—a look back in, if not anger, than regret at a landscape whose pleasures were less ephemeral and whose literal and figurative heroes and villains (including, for Perry’s purposes, Ethan Hawke’s Malkmus-like slacker-heartthrob in [1992] and Blockbuster-patronizing student filmmaker in [2000]) were more easily pegged and hierarchized along a mainstream-versus-indie dialectic. Because Perry is a very smart guy—a writer who thinks like a scholar without ever lapsing into jargon—both and rise above the level of a’ most hilarious metafictional gambit—which shadows the production of an –style jukebox musical cobbled together out of the band’s catalogue—a misanthropic shish-kebabing of millennial Poptimism and profitous postmodernism on the same skewer.
