When the makers of “This Is Spinal Tap” first showed their movie to test audiences in 1984, the reaction was noteworthy. The people hated it. Shot in deadpan documentary style, the film tells the story of a fictional heavy metal band blazing a spandex trail across America. The audience did not get it. Some objected that the band was too obscure and poor; others thought the filmmakers should have chosen a good band, like Led Zeppelin. One answered every question about the movie with three cryptic letters, DNA.
“It took us a long time to figure out what this meant,” said Michael McKean, who played the band’s singer and guitarist, David St. Hubbins. “Finally, we realized it meant Does Not Apply. She disliked everything about the movie so much that no possible standards could apply to any part of it.”
The people had spoken. “It was kind of scary,” McKean said. As the St. Hubbins character observes in the film, “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” The filmmakers had found this line, and their audience was on the other side of it.
Sixteen years later, “This Is Spinal Tap” returns to theaters on Friday as an established language, a universal shorthand for unintended farce. When a video at the Democratic National Convention showed President Clinton making his endless march to the stage, USA Today observed, “It looked more like a scene out of `This Is Spinal Tap.”‘ The film’s title has become a punch line waiting to reveal any subject as a joke, the more deadly serious the better.
For cultists, MGM Home Entertainment is also releasing a digital videodisc of the film, with more than an hour of added footage, most of which has been circulating for years on bootleg videocassettes. The longer version includes, among other things, a chance to see the band’s Sinatra-obsessed limo driver, played by Bruno Kirby, getting stoned and singing “My Way” in his underpants.
The difference between the first reception of “Spinal Tap” and its current status is the story of an American mode of viewing. In 1984, test audiences could not recognize the movie’s knowing wink; the pretensions of the heavy rock experience were still sacrosanct.
Now even the pomp of the presidency is wrapped in quotation marks, humbled as it stands straight-faced before people who know too much about the contrived conditions of its manufacture. Musicians like Kid Rock, and movies like the “Scream” series, now routinely build self-parody into their voices, having their camp and eating it too. This rockumentary — directed by Rob Reiner and improvised by McKean, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and others — helped usher in the era of reflexive irony.
The movie follows the American tour of an aging English heavy metal band whose fortunes are turning sour — or, as their perpetually harassed manager, played by Tony Hendra, puts it, whose “appeal is becoming more selective.” As gigs go bad, or don’t go at all, the stage gimmicks and corporate weaselry that bands like Spinal Tap depend on to generate the effect of spontaneous hysteria at their shows start to clamber into the foreground.
All the gears become visible. Stage props don’t work; a Stonehenge megalith, meant to tower 18 feet over the band, comes in at 18 inches, a dramaturgic whammy lost to bungled paperwork. Even anthems like “Big Bottom,” the band’s paean to full-bodied women (“How can I leave this behind?”), are no longer enough to rally the faithful.
The boys in the band remain charmingly benighted, but the magic becomes tortured; once we see it, it loses its spell. In the gap between the effect the band thinks it creates and the one it really does, the film’s satire works its mischief.
“This Is Spinal Tap” arrived in theaters just as the public fascination with the processes of the entertainment business was beginning to take the place of simple interest in stars. Reiner’s deft grasp of the small details — the barracuda record company liaison, the tragic bad luck with drummers — anticipated Robert Altman’s arch film “The Player” as well as all the “Access Hollywood”-type syndicated television shows and Web sites dedicated to behind-the-scenes arcana.
The movie’s satire escaped some early audiences in part because the band was so generic. It was the industry architecture around it that resonated. The band members just had to seem small enough to live in it.
Unlike Altman’s 1975 movie “Nashville,” which poked into the machinery of country music as a metaphor for the moral smarm of post-Watergate America, “This Is Spinal Tap” does not aim at any larger cultural game. Reflexive irony runs broad, but it does not run too deep. With its droll wit, the film sends up the band members’ affectations while leaving their souls unscathed. The music industry is silly but not craven. The band meets even its harshest criticism — one review read on camera describes them as “treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry”– with addled equanimity.
“That’s nit-picking, isn’t it?” responds Nigel Tufnel, the band’s fecklessly thick guitarist, played by Guest in a performance so low-key as to be near subsonic. They’re ridiculous not because they fail to live up to rock’s ennobling promise, but because they believe it has one. And they’re lovable, because to them, at least, it does. As hopeless as they are on the road, they’d be even more lost off it.
The actors wrote and played all the music themselves, striving to be the best poor heavy metal band they could be. By the time they revived the characters for the “Break Like the Wind” concert tour in 1992, the audience was ready to join in the gag.
“We finally figured out what was so much fun,” McKean said. “We were pretending to be this big rock ‘n’ roll band, and they were pretending to be our fans. So they built these Stonehenge monuments and threw them onstage, made us T-shirts. It was just the best. We know that there’s a big lie at the center of this. We know there really is no Spinal Tap.” But in the movie’s gentle parody, you could play along without being splashed by the bile.
For the record, the fictional band claims to have been misrepresented by the movie. Speaking by telephone, Shearer slipped into his character, Derek Smalls, to convey the band’s feelings of betrayal.
“There were dozens of days when we found our way to the stage” without getting lost, he said.
But he said the musicians were taken in by the director’s guile, and by their own need for attention. Smalls described a seduction in which the director “comes in as, `Oh, I’m your biggest fan.’ Right away, we should have been suspicious. But we were so desperate for people who were our biggest fans that we let down our guard.”
This desperation runs underneath the Rolling Stones to “Spinal Tap” to the president, an aching to be loved that, once exposed, lends itself to easy satire. “This Is Spinal Tap” asked audiences to split their gaze, to see the band as both real and parody at the same time.
