Tainted: The Problem with the 90's, Part 2

Tainted (1998) 

Dir. Brian Evans

Written by Sean Farley

Starring Dean Chekvala, Greg James, Sean Farley

 

 

 

 

“Somebody there is having stupid sandwiches, and that’s for damn sure”

           

           

            Ah, and here we discover the other side of the 1990’s. With I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, we had an opportunity to examine the bland, homogenizing corporate iron curtain that descended upon the culture in the second half of the decade. But with TAINTED, we have something quite different: a relic of the multi-media indie boom that shattered the recursive stasis of the remnant 80’s culture and briefly infused the American artistic scene with some energy and unpredictability. There is a side of the 90’s that was Boy Bands and WB teen dramas, but there was another side that was PULP FICTION, FARGO, CLERKS, Twin Peaks, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips, Public Enemy, Digable Planets. Legitimately offbeat, adventurous art with a hip, self-aware edge and a plethora of distinct artistic voices so unexpected and compelling that for a few years in the early 90’s they managed to knock the corporate behemoth back on its heels. Movie and record execs never saw it coming, and responded by fumbling around, blindly handing out checks to every new weirdo who showed up with some new project they didn’t understand but seemed hip, disaffected, and dangerous. 

 

            This was for the best, all things considered, and some of the defining art of my life came from this period. But of course, you can’t have the kind of success that these (initially) independent artists enjoyed without everyone else wanting a piece of the pie. Imitators quickly surged into the newly-opened space, beguiled by that most persistent and compelling of questions: If Kevin Smith can do it, why not me?

 

            TAINTED is a pretty definitive answer to that question. You cannot do it, it turns out, because you are not Kevin Smith. Very few people these days would be eager to defend the idea that Smith is a visionary artistic genius or that CHASING AMY has held up well, but on the other hand, he does have something. There’s a voice there, a point-of-view, and, more than anything, a relentless drive to get that point of view out there, so strong, in fact, that Smith has more or less abandoned cinema altogether and become a podcaster, cutting out the middle man and just getting to deliver his monologues directly. In short, he made CLERKS not because he had any expectation that it would make money and cement a comfortable three-decades-long career as a cultural fixture; he made it because he had to, because he was compelled by something inside him that could not be ignored. You can argue about the merits of the art he produced, but you cannot argue about the specificity of his voice, or the compulsion that produced it. Like much of the art of the 90’s, its value was in its distinctness: it was produced wholly and without reservation from the subconscious of a genuine weirdo, and not something you could fake or recreate.

 

            But faking and recreating it was exactly what the next wave of indie wannabes had in mind. They were inspired by Smith and Tarantino and Nirvana and NWA, but they were not compelled the same way the best of the 90’s indie artists were, and so they sought to imitate, rather than produce their own unique vision. They didn’t, by and large, have their own vision, they just recognized something cool and thought it looked easy enough that they could do it too.

 

Hell yeah, NADJA

 

            Hence, TAINTED, which wears its influence so proudly that it’s all but impossible to ignore. In its seven-sentence writeup of TAINTED, VideoHound namechecks CLERKS in the very first sentence. I mention this because it’s the reason I watched the film. Around 20 years ago, I, like the protagonists here and like Randall in CLERKS, was employed at an independent video store, and back then, since you weren’t gonna see IMDB unless you dialed into your desktop PC browser at home, we had a physical media substitute: VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever “The Complete Guide To Movies on Videocassette, DVD, and Laserdisc” (which I’m just now discovering is still an annual print publication to this very day!). Much of my workday back then was spent trawling through this book for new movie suggestions, and here, in their brief write-up of TAINTED, I found something that sounded kind of interesting. “Script has many laughs, lots of attitude, and plenty of pop culture knowledge,” raves the review (which is what we wanted back then), and I thought I’d give it a try. Except that I never found it available anywhere. Our normal supplier didn’t have it. Our arch-enemy Blockbuster Video didn’t have it. Hollywood Video didn’t have it. Nextflix, when it came along as a mail-order-service, didn’t have it, and has never gotten it. So this year, I figured I’d waited long enough, and ordered it from Troma (who distributed, but were not involved in its production). So this review is, in a way, the culmination of a 20-year quest.

 

 

             My confidence in VideoHound’s bullish assessment of the film’s merits –which had left such a strong impression on me all those years ago-- was quickly thrown into question when my buddy noticed that there is an extremely prominent product placement in the one of the first scenes… for none other than VideoHound! Uh-oh. Possibly a little conflict of interest here. Not a great sign. And the assertion that the “script has many laughs” quickly began to seem dubious as well, as the introduction of our arguable protagonist Ryan (Greg James, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA “Submarine Sailor, uncredited”) finds him awkwardly kicking a one-night-stand out of his apartment (“Willing to bet you never pull any sensitivity muscles, huh?” she fumes) and then turning to the camera to deliver a monologue about easy women so harrowingly wrongheaded and smugly certain that it’s an in-your-face bit of ballsy truth-telling that it might just turn your hair white. A little sample, which is as much as I can bring myself to transcribe:

 

“I didn’t promise her a thing. I stuck my dick in her! Last time I checked, that wasn’t proposing!...There’s no way you can respect, let alone commit, to a woman who will sleep with you on the first date! Am I wrong or what?”

 

It probably doesn’t help that he has the long-on-top-short-in-back-parted-down-the-middle haircut that every dipshit had when I was in middle school, but this Ryan has to be one of the most unwittingly intolerable characters this era produced, and there’s no shortage of competition. This is the kind of thing I need you to warn me about, VideoHound. 

 

#HoundGate #CorruptionInVideoReviews

 

             In short, this monologue (and basically every line that follows it during the unhurried and uneventful 98 minute runtime) sums up the fundamental problem with this era of indie outsiders clambering out of the shadows and into the spotlight: they had all listened to a little too much Bill Hicks. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Bill Hicks too – remember, I grew up in the 90’s, these are my people. But having emerged from the fatuous 80’s –an era so culturally regressive and conservative that people were genuinely scared of Heavy Metal bands that now seem about as dangerous as Benny Goodman—we emerged with a burning, insatiable desire to cut through the stifling niceties and tell it like it is. This was a laudable impulse, and a much-needed course correction after spending a whole decade where the most dangerous thing in music was, like, Phil Collins. The problem, in retrospect, was that when “we” –the legion of disaffected, largely white male artistes and pop-culture nerds who gained ascendency in the 90’s indie boom— got a yin to tell it like it is, we may not have known what it is as much as we assumed. That’s how you can end up with a movie that kicks off with a lecture about clingy one-night stands, as if we’re just going to naturally be on board with that. Or, for that matter, a movie entirely set and filmed in the Detroit area which has exactly zero black people in it, (give or take the prominent placement of a mural which I believe to be Detroit Pistons’ small forward Grant Hill, based on his #33 uniform). Or a gay vampire who delivers his own cringe-worthy monologue about “fence-sitting” bisexuals.

 

            Oh yeah, the movie is about vampires. Probably should have led with that. I mean, it’s really about the late 1990s, of course, but the plot is literally CLERKS meet Anne Rice: intolerable deadwood Ryan and his sarcastic, noticeably Randall-like video-store co-worker J.T. (screenwriter Sean Farley, who apparently had a small role in fellow Michigander Sam Raimi’s ill-fated CRIMEWAVE) hitch a ride to a midnight showing of BLADE RUNNER with their new colleague Alex (Dusan “Dean” Chekvala, who would revisit the vampire game years later with a run in True Blood), only to get dragged into an underworld of unflashy midwestern vampires when Alex reveals he’s a bloodsucker and gets embroiled in a plot by a crazed vampire to contaminate (or, “taint” if you will) the city’s blood supply.

 

            That’s the plot, and it’s largely structured as a kind of vampire procedural, where Alex, with an unwilling Ryan and J.T. in tow, travels around to various secret vampire locations and shakes down the locals for info on the rogue vamp.* But in practice, this is all very transparently a flimsy excuse to set up an endless series of painfully overwritten pop culture diatribes, in which no idea is ever stated in five words that could not be overstated in 50. This is lamentable, but perhaps more understandable in context: people forget this today, but there was a time --and not all that long ago!-- where bickering all day about comic books or sci-fi movies was not looked upon as a socially acceptable activity. It was the province of weird, socially awkward outsiders, and if you were known to engage in this sort of tomfoolery, you were likely to be branded a “nerd,” which back then was an epithet with the power to significantly limit your social options, rather than something gorgeous celebrities call themselves as they do press tours for 250-million-dollar comic book adaptations. 

 

Would you believe there was a time that this guy wasn't considered cool?

 

Back in the 90’s, though, the conventional social order was deep in the throes of a violent upheaval. CLERKS, of course, had blazed the trail, turning unabashedly nerdy conversations which had previously been confined to basements and comic-book shops into something that played on-screen as a little bit edgy and rebellious, which was exactly what the kids were looking for. And when the movie became a minor hit, the culture noticed, and the gatekeepers eagerly ushered the once-maligned nerds (and their wallets, fattened with disposable income by a burgeoning tech industry and no dependents) into the mainstream. By the late 90’s, the nerds, emboldened by Tarantino and Smith’s nonstop pop-culture pontification, hadn’t just gotten their revenge, but were well on their way to overthrowing the popular kids altogether and establishing their brutal hegemony over the culture which persists to this day.

 

            Even by 1998, however, it wasn’t obvious that the tide had turned, and that in just a little under two decades, BLADE RUNNER would have a sequel with a budget of 150 million bucks, while nobody under the age of 30 would know who Jennifer Love Hewitt was. The nerds were still feeling newly liberated from the unwanted margins of society, and ready to flaunt their newfound countercultural chic, by, for example, making a movie where two video store clerks and their vampire pal blather on endlessly about the merits of RAISING ARIZONA and BLADE RUNNER and smugly trash the hoi polloi who fail to adequately appreciate their charms.

 

That trashing is an important thread here, because if part of this newfound feeling of liberation took the form of celebration, it also had a darker side, as newly empowered dorks turned to some sadistic score-settling with old enemies. The most immediate and deeply resented of those enemies were women, who by 1998 were being dealt the opening salvo of a relentless, bone-deep campaign of misogyny perpetrated by the bitter beta-males they had ignored in high school, but who had finally seized some power of their own and were anxious to pay back with interest the indignities they felt they had suffered as unwanted adolescents with no social skills. Consequently, the 90’s was a time of roiling, omnipresent misogyny, barely concealed beneath a cresting wave of smug sarcasm and edgy provocations. And thus it is that we wind up with the situation at hand, which cheerfully introduces us to its protagonist reciting a bitter harangue against women who would have the gall to sleep with him and expect him to remember their name the next day, as though this was a lot of impish fun.

 

I mean, this fuckin' guy, amiright?

 

In the defense of TAINTED, I would point out that it took time before it was clear that the balance of power had shifted, and that the nerds had definitively shifted from taking cathartic pot shots at their social betters to ugly, sadistic punching down. They still felt powerless, and their own misery blinded them somewhat to their burgeoning position to do real harm.

 

In fact, that misery is a key element to understanding the form this cultural shift took. The angsty early 90’s had turned self-destructive anguish into something akin to heroism, and the culture was ready to lean into it. Even at their most savagely misogynistic, the nerds knew, at least on some level, that their grievances were more deeply rooted in self-hatred than in unfair oppression. In yet another cringy monologue, TAINTED’s J.T. drives away a friendly female bar patron with his caustic self-loathing, and the movie clearly recognizes that he’s the problem, not her. But at the same time, it’s so consumed by his self-sabotaging unhappiness that it’s utterly incapable of imagining her as a being with any inner life whatsoever. Ryan has a similar scene just minutes later, when another former one-night stand excoriates him for… well, again it’s not really clear, exactly. The movie seems to vaguely understand from pop culture that women want you to call them back after sex, but has no more explanation as to why that might be than it has explanation for why women are so desperate to sleep with this doofus in the first place. Women are, if not actively hostile, at least alien creatures whose desires and motivations are inscrutable to the point of meaningless abstraction. These scenes are about the boys’ feelings about themselves – the women are just props, objects by which the men to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses. The movie wants Ryan to have some conflict over his status as an unmoored lothario –something it obviously takes from CLERKS**, which locates its own pathos in its characters self-destructive misery—but the point is to foreground his own alienation, not to seriously interrogate his behavior and its consequences for others. Which has the effect of seriously limiting TAINTED's perspective. It understands why socially awkward pop-culture nerds feel alienated and put-upon, but is utterly unable to see anything beyond them. It's why the movie so persistently mistakes whiny sarcasm for comedic truth-telling. Self-flagellation, it turns out, is a kind of all-consuming narcissism in its own right. Telling it like it is sounds great, but you also reveal something about yourself by what subjects you choose to tell about, and what subjects you ignore. 

 

The cumulative effect is of a film –and a time and place—which feels itself to be on the bleeding edge of woke canniness, and yet constantly reveals the unexamined ignorance of its creators –and, by extension, the ethos of its era. It’s a tragic portrait of people eager to speak truth, but too unable to see beyond the limits of their own navel-gazing to discern the truth they want to proclaim. To whit: the movie is very proud of itself for its openly gay vampire –which, in 1998, was at least a little edgy and provocative—but its idea of portraying an out-and-proud, in-your-face gay character is to have him arrogantly bash bisexuals, just to let you know the movie isn’t fucking around with any watered-down half-assed gayness. It recalls Willem Dafoe’s equally cringey homophobic gay character in THE BOONDOCK SAINTS; obviously intended to shake up the squares and dispel some lazy stereotypes about gay men, but at the same time so profoundly lacking in any real understanding of their life and circumstances that it ends up feeling empty and ignorant. It is as clear a case as any you could hope to create as to why simple on-screen representation is not enough. I genuinely believe the filmmakers’ hearts were in the right place, and they showcased a gay character with the intention destigmatizing and challenging stereotypes (as well as showing off how cool and down with it they are), but without any genuine insight into this culture, it just comes off as performative and phony. It certainly makes one consider that there’s a possible upside to having no black characters in the script at all.

 

The only black person in the movie. Sorry, Grant Hill. Your tenure with the Pistons didn't turn out so hot, but you deserved better than this.

 

 

The movie’s inability to consider the perspective of anyone other than its perpetually adolescent white pop culture nerds unfortunately extends to its generic elements as well; for all the time spent bumbling through the vampiric underworld of the Detroit suburbs, it feels disappointingly underdeveloped. And that’s a shame, because there was something potentially kind of funny, maybe even genuinely subversive here. The low budget means that these vamps must eschew the standard Eurotrash decadence we associate with the trope, and tend to lurk in drab apartments and aging, dingy commercial properties. They’re Midwestern vampires; unglamorous, gloomily polite, suffused with a nameless sense of glacial, inevitable societal decay. They’re mostly unhappy but resigned to their vampiric condition, more interested in trying to live semi-normal lives than embracing their supernatural otherness. Here, at least, the filmmakers are on more familiar footing, even if they're not necessarily aware of that fact enough to make much of it. I don’t think this is intentional, but they do somewhat capture the scrappy, mordant angst of the real-life lower-class Rust Belt white people who are more or less playing themselves here. There’s a sense of being quietly damned that comes along with this milieu, the inheritors of a fifty-year-long backslide from dimly remembered glory days, but also a kind of ramshackle pride at soldiering on and building a life amidst the ruins. Vampirism turns out to be a worthwhile evocation of that spirit, and so it’s a shame that the surface is only barely scratched, mostly for the purposes of tin-eared exposition. The movie, of course, never seems remotely aware that it might actually be onto something subtly interesting here; all the protagonists want to do is get back to bickering about BLADE RUNNER. Figures.

 

Consequently, all things considered, TAINTED does not offer the good time promised by VideoHound. But it is something of a timely warning about how wretchedly miserable the 90s were. And not just in terms of amateurishness and stylistic awkwardness and way, way too much agonizingly overwritten "clever" dialogue --although also those things, and very very much of all of them—but just in the sense of how myopic and self-centered much of the vaunted 90’s indie wave was. Part of its initial charm was in the foregrounding of distinct artistic voices, but that turned out to have something of an unforeseen dark side, as the very distinctness of those voices was frequently an effect of their unrelenting self-absorption. Kurt Cobain was a hero to so many young people because of how deeply in touch he was with his own pain – but that very insight was so overwhelming that it made him selfish, in a way, so unable to see beyond his own pain that he ended up killing himself, in the process orphaning his two-year-old daughter. A suitable metaphor, maybe for the whole decade: taking stock of one’s own inner world was a necessary course correction after the punishing emotional superficiality of the preceding Reagan years, and arguably a step towards a kinder, more empathetic culture. But, in retrospect, also a good signpost of how much further we had to go before that same intense awareness of our own pain could be broadened out to include other people.

 

Still, at least Nirvana rocked. TAINTED very much does not rock. It isn’t even mic’d adequately. What few appealing ideas it possesses get completely lost in a sea of bloviating pop culture doggerel and petty sarcasm, which it disastrously offers as entertainment. Maybe in 1998, it really was a little bit exciting for nerds like me to see ourselves on screen – but today, in 2020, it reads more like a wince-inducing cautionary tale of just how intolerable people like me are capable of being, especially when they were trying to emulate others. Speaking of which, the credits end with an extensive list of “Thank yous” to other artists, “for their inspiration.” The list includes the expected Kevin Smith and Tarantino, along with David Fincher (who had only just released THE GAME), Tim Burton, um, Dennis Miller (?), and Martin Brest (BEVERLY HILLS COP, MEET JOE BLACK[?], GIGLI). But also Ken Russell, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers, Peter Greenaway, Abel Ferrara, John Woo, and Carl Franklin (ONE FALSE MOVE, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS). Honestly, it's a pretty good list of inspirations. Those guys were, by and large, the real deal.

 

Proof enough that you can like the right things and still not get it at all.

 

 

 

Still, the movie begins with a Sarah McLachlan quote, apparently in complete earnestness. That's just barely lame enough to be endearing, and I find myself unable to wholly condemn it. It's pretty rough watching, but it's also a little unfair for me to saddle this one tiny indie flick with the accumulated social problems of an entire era. And after all, I'm just some asshole writing reviews on the internet; these guys actually did what I desperately wanted to back in 1998: they made a film. A film that looks a heck of a lot like it probably would have looked if I had scraped together enough pennies to shoot one of my own impossibly-pleased-with-its-own-cleverness teenage pitches. If it's hard to watch, it's at least in part due to my own chagrin at this time-capsule mirror into my own myopic adolescence. I take it, then, as a humbling opportunity to do what TAINTED can't: introspect. Take stock of where I am, what I'm doing to others, and how far I still have to go to get where I should be. After all, in 20 years I'll probably be looking back at myself and whatever the 2020 equivalent of TAINTED might be with just as much disgust. 

 

Even so, I like to think that if I'd made this movie I'd at least have got some gore in there somewhere. I mean, I'm not a monster. The 90's were bad, and that's not TAINTED's fault. But at least they usually had more whammy than this. 

 

             

 

*In fact, the movie it most structurally resembles is Steven Seagal’s OUT FOR JUSTICE. But it really makes one realize that the Aikido, and possibly the ponytail, were a big part of what makes that one good.

 

** Since his influence is never far from the movie, I think it’s worth noting that whatever Kevin Smith’s problems may be, I don’t think this sort of passive misogyny is among them. The female characters in his films are typically about as well-drawn as his male characters, which makes sense, given that everyone in a Kevin Smith movie, regardless of sex, race or creed, all just talk like Kevin Smith anyway. Still, it’s worth noting that the vanguard of the indie film boom of the 90’s featured more interesting and varied female roles than most of the films that subsequently tried to rip them off.

 

 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2020 CHECKLIST!

The Man Who Queue Too Much

 

TAGLINE	If it ever had one, it’s not included on the blatantly misleading Troma DVD cover, which depicts two buxom vampires who are absolutely not in the movie.
TITLE ACCURACY	The plot sort of centers around a vampire “tainting” the water supply, although it’s a weird title any way you want to look at it
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampires, horror-comedy
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None; although Ryan is depicted as a bit of a cad, there’s never any suggestion that his sexual encounters were anything but wholeheartedly consensual.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Nope
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None, as far as we know these vamps cannot turn into bats or wolves or anything
VOYEURISM?	A short, and unusually adequately-constructed, stalking sequence opens the film
MORAL OF THE STORY	The cooler something seems at the time, the more embarrassing it’s going to seem 20 years later.