16. An American Hippie in Israel (Amos Sefer, 1972)

My boyfriend and I have something of a running gag whenever we talk about his grandmother, by saying ‘she means well’. See, the thing is, she often does or says things that are really quite unacceptable when you come right down to it, but if I were to complain about this to someone, the stock answer would always be ‘but she means well’. I don’t doubt for a second that she indeed does mean well, but it bugs me no end that for most people this seems to be something of an excuse, like meaning well exempts people from all further responsibility. Obviously meaning well is much better than not meaning well, but in itself isn’t nearly enough, because if something that’s well meant isn’t accompanied by an execution that’s also up to snuff, these intentions will become quite worthless. One of the major examples of people meaning well, but even so doing almost more harm than good, is that peculiar phenomenon called ‘hippies’. It’s clear as day that the basis of the whole hippie movement was undeniably well-meant, but by unfortunately remaining stuck in intentions and not being able to come up with any solid plan of action, these hippies in the end probably destroyed more than they anticipated.

Perhaps we mustn’t be too harsh on them, as they did carry the rather heavy burden of being the very first generation of the entire Western civilization to have widespread access to psychedelic drugs like LSD and mescalin and, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in one day. Terrence McKenna said the psychedelic revolution failed because the hippies didn’t have anything like a plan or agenda, which is hard to disagree with and which is to say: they basically just didn’t have a clue what they were doing. This problem of giving LSD, the most powerful drug on the planet, into the hands of such irresponsible youngsters has often been compared to the situation of a knife and a child: when a child cuts himself with it, is the knife to blame and should therefore all knives be forbidden? Or are the parents to blame for carelessness by not making sure the knife should have been out of reach for the child? It would certainly be rather impractical if we were to suddenly forbid the use of all knives, just because some kid was bestowed more responsibility than it could reasonably handle. Yet, this has been exactly the solution to the LSD problem by merely banishing it completely, thereby also entirely ignoring all the profound possibilities the drug unquestionably possesses. Because let’s face it, the hippie movement did generate some amazing things, like the development of something like a general feeling of awareness and care. For once, more than just a handful people actually cared enough to protest a war and other social injustices. And with this heightening of awareness also came an unparalleled platform for more demanding art, as all kinds of experimental techniques and styles came crashing into the mainstream. If all this was already made possible even with so much confusion and lack of commitment on the part of the hippies, the mind boggles to think what could indeed be accomplished with a little more guidance and knowledge. If people had given up at the first sign of trouble when a few planes crashed down and killed some brave pioneering souls, we still wouldn’t be able to fly now. 

But again, as the history of the psychedelic revolution has made so painfully clear, intentions are in themselves not enough, no matter how well they are meant. No one’s a better example of this than Timothy Leary, a name that’s bound to elicit widely divergent reactions. But while I do agree he may not have been the ideal poster boy for LSD and in the end could’ve done a much better job by going somewhat deeper instead of relying so much on catchy sound-bites, I also feel he is often treated much too cruelly. His famous phrase ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ proves this point well: if you truly understand its meaning, it’s an almost scientific truth, but because it’s so obscure, it’s also very easy to misinterpret, something that seems to have happened all too frequently. The first two parts don’t pose a real problem: ‘turn on’ means basically just the taking of LSD and setting the process in motion; the ‘tune in’ part is already somewhat more difficult, if not in meaning than in execution, as everybody understands it to mean something like this: tuning in to the own inner wavelength that’s often referred to as ‘Soul’, but this is much easier said than done, and in any case involves much more work and discipline than just eating acid. But it seems the last part has given rise to the most misunderstandings, as a film like ‘A Hippie in Israel’ all too vividly illustrates. Because all too often it has been interpreted in a rather facile way, as people used it as an excuse for some escape into hedonism by just dropping out of society and relinquishing all responsibility. Like one of my drug pushers once said to me: ‘after I took acid for the first time, I got myself a tattoo and never worked again a day in my life’. While I understand where these feeling are coming from, I never regarded it as a real solution, nor do I think Leary meant it that way – he was not that shallow. I have given away one of his books and never got it back, so the exact phrasing escapes me at the moment, but if memory serves, he said something like ‘dropping out of the matrix or chessboard of society’ – or some words to that effect. What I take that to mean is not at all dropping out of society entirely, but quite simply this: to become aware of the many ideas, concepts and ideologies society imposes on everybody (and that most people remain unaware of) and by becoming conscious of them, being able to reject them in order to build something new instead. Like R. Buckminster Fuller reminds us:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”.

As ‘An American Hippie in Israel’ illustrates so forcefully, the hippies failed miserably exactly because they were only fighting existing reality. For a movement that was ostensibly built on self-awareness and insight, most of the hippies showed very little of that and instead seemed only interested to use LSD either as party drug or to escape the realities, instead of confronting them – most hippies never seemed to have grasped the fact that psychedelics, like LSD, are highly unsuited for such escapism, which remains the forte of the narcotics like alcohol and cocaine. In the beginning of the movie, the girl asks the hippie of the title why he’s a hippie, something he answers with a rather silly diatribe about the horrors of the world and what an awful experience the fighting in Vietnam has been. Very little in the way of a real argument can be given against this, yet only talking about it isn’t going to change anything and his running away to Israel is only the first of many indications that the man is totally blind to himself. This contradictory feeling of simultaneous freedom and imprisonment is probably what  the film most powerfully evokes: all the dialogue and the actions of the characters are about freedom and the wide spaces of the Israel landscape also reinforce this idea of openness; yet by making absolutely certain from the very beginning all of this is an undermined by a lack of inner freedom, Amos Sefer undercuts this sense of freedom and transforms it into a confining nightmare of illusion: in the very first scene Hippie Mike comes across two pale guys who, he complains, keep following him around and evidently function as his own unconscious mind trying to remind him of his own inner blindness. He may run, but he cannot hide and all his future actions (which are kept to a minimum anyway as most hippies were content to be just bumming around instead of doing anything constructive) consequently take on a sense of doom and utter futility. 

By not having any sensible outlet for all their energy, the hippies were all dressed up with nowhere to g, and in the end see their energy dissipated by loafing – or dancing around as if their life depended on it. Most hippies were basically just a couple of really scared kids that were on the right path but came frightfully unprepared and which took Leary’s dictum of ‘dropping out’ a little too literally and did just that: they escaped dominant society and ran away from it, which is also what the hippies in the movie rather naively do when they go to a deserted island. Once arrived, they state their noble intentions with force and conviction, shouting things about freedom and corrupt society, all the while being entirely ignorant to the fact that you first got to have a free mind if you are to have any true sense of freedom in any society. By only impulsively following their hedonistic instincts and rushing to the island without any thought of what to even do there, their lack of purpose comes to bite them in the ass. Finally cut off from the society they so desperately wanted to escape, they only too quickly come to realize their inner emptiness as they forgot to ‘tune in’ and because of this can only fall back into the very trap of dominant civilization they claim to despise so much. The moment the going gets tough, they immediately start behaving like the irresponsible children they really are and begin complaining about hunger and start to behave as nasty to each other, exactly as they accused society of. Significantly, Hippie Mike, despite his earlier dreams about a civilization without orders, is quite unaware of the fact he begins doing just that when he’s talking with the other guy (who looks very much like Dario Argento) whose knowledge of the English language seems limited to the word ‘freedom’. Mike’s saying things in English, with the other guy talking back in Hebrew, but Mike even gets angry at him because he can’t understand a word he says, quite oblivious to the fact that Argento doesn’t understand him either. But because he’s so blind to himself, he comes down all imperialistic and dominant, thereby obviously doing everything he wanted to escape from. From this moment on, things only get worse, as the men descend to being cavemen who drag their females by the hair, before eventually all turning on each other in a grunting match and a fight for the last bit of food on the island – the goat they brought along. It’s a wonderful allegoric dissection of what happens when people remain stranded in good intentions and why the hippie movement failed like it did. It’s impossible to deny the core truth of every bit of dialogue that’s delivered with as much conviction as the actors could possibly muster. If only these hippies would have found some balance by doing something that showed even a bit of the insight of their diatribes, they could perhaps have countered their now actions, which now remained senseless.  

While the hippies in the movie didn’t do but at least meant well, the same unfortunately couldn’t be said of the general reception the film has received, something that the truly disgusting liner notes accompanying the Grindhouse blu-ray release bears out all too well. Without even the slightest bit of exaggeration, they may be the worst liner notes I’ve ever read in my life. But then again, I may be one of the only people alive who truly doesn’t understand what it means to be ‘so bad, it’s good’. I see the phrase everywhere I look and I’ve tried to wrap my head around this concept for years, but with no success whatsoever. Like Richard Dyer once said: ‘some art is good, some of it is bad, most of it is neither’ and that’s all there is to it – so where the ‘so bad, it’s good’ category should fit, I really don’t know. And this has little to do with my seeing the world in black and white or my being autistic – I simply don’t know what it means. Or as Stephen Thrower once put it succinctly: “there are no bad films, only boring ones”, which would go a long way toward freeing ourselves from the restrictiveness of the good-bad dichotomy and would liberate us from judging everything from the dominant paradigm. Because what scares me most about this strange category of ‘so bad, it’s good’, is that it forces people into an uncomfortable split and precludes any possibility of true harmony: they claim to love something, yet the most positive thing they can say about it, is how bad it is? How fundamentally absurd this is, can already be gleaned when somebody gives a rating to a movie, obviously wreaking havoc with their entire ratings system as they are forced to give it a rating of, say 2,5 stars out of five, which according to their own system should mean it’s a bad film. Yet, they claim to love it and if they are sincere, shouldn’t the rating reflect their feelings and if not, what’s the point of having a rating system in the first place? Because if you’re gonna use one and start giving 2,5 stars to both movies you really don’t like or think are bad and to those which you claim to like or even love but are somehow still magically bad, it would make the whole system pointless.

I’ve asked someone about this once, as he wrote a glowing review of ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’ while giving it a rating that would mean it’s a piece of shit, and he answered quite confusingly that it may have been entertaining, but wasn’t of any high quality. But is being entertaining not a quality in itself? The crux of this matter, of course, is what constitutes a good or a bad movie or how you deal with a rather obscure concept like ‘quality’. When people talk about quality they invariably seem to be talking about the well-made, professional movie that’s exemplified in most Hollywood productions or an Ingmar Bergman film. But whoever decided this yardstick could and should be used for all other expressions? While the sheer professionalism of those films can certainly very attractive, why should that also mean that everything else immediately fails the moment it doesn’t meet those standards? Is it really so difficult to embrace several different standards and try to meet every artistic expression on its own terms, instead of those imposed by society? I remember reading an interview with Irmin Schmidt, keyboardist of legendary Krautrockers Can years ago, where the interviewer kept harping on the fact that by modern standards the keyboards he used back in the days were old-fashioned or obsolete, something Schmidt quite aggressively kept denying. He maintained, quite rightly I think, that those keyboards were not inferior to those of today, but really just different. Every single thing or mode of expression has its own intrinsic qualities and should be embraced and celebrated for that and by insisting, for some reason, all things have to be measured by the same homogenizing standards of ‘quality’ is to deny all this diversity. It’s really the imperialistic and domineering sensibility that forms the basis for our Western culture, that people seem to internalized so much they have become blind to it, without realizing this way of thinking has always destroyed other cultures or modes of expression by deeming them inferior. Indeed, it is also the very same arrogance that has enabled us to destroy most of the natural world.

I love the music of George Jones, who’s by many considered to have been the finest vocalist ever brought forth by Country & Western music. He is technically perfect, without ever becoming slick and combines an impeccable sense of phrasing with a rich voice. Now someone like Floyd Tillman on the other hand couldn’t have been further removed from Jones, as he constantly sings off-key, has the oddest way of rhythm and phrasing and generally sounds like a trash heap. If we were to judge Tillman by way of the professional norm set by George Jones, he would never make the cut and would only come off as rather amateurish. But doing so, also completely overlooks his own qualities, which are rooted into his very eccentricity and strong personality. When you get down right to it, they both possess something the other person almost by necessity lacks: Jones may be technically perfect, yet sometimes a tad impersonal because of it, while Tillman may lack the professionalism but does have that personal touch that’s mostly absent in Jones. Neither one of them is better than the other and both can easily be embraced for what they represent, but when it comes to film this has seemed incredibly hard to do for most. Because when cast into movie terms, George Jones would be the equivalent of the mainstream norm, while Tillman would squarely fall into the ‘so bad, it’s good’ category, thereby immediately implying some critique on the latter by blaming him for not living up to the standards he probably never was interested in anyway.

 

But more damagingly than the inherent lack of harmony of such an attitude, is the fact people don’t seem to realize they are quite literally shut off from the world by it. By condescendingly treating everything as a joke or laughing at the ‘so bad, it’s good’ attributes, they fall into the trap of that horrible post-modern ironic way of looking at life again, where people use this irony as a wall to close themselves off from any real experience. Because it is very easy to try to position yourself above it all and laugh at what you perceive as bad, all the while not realizing it’s your own stupidity you’re laughing at. It quite neatly exempts you from truly engaging with something, as you (perhaps unconsciously) create a distance between yourself and that which you encounter, the exact same distance that creates all the separation that’s raging rampant in our society and which I’ve talked about endlessly on this blog. It’s far easier to behave like those Roman emperors who laughingly looked down upon those slaves being torn apart by lions, than it would be to place yourself in the position of those slaves. Because then you would have to give up your safe distance and get your hands dirty and expose yourselves to risks most would rather avoid. That by doing so these people inadvertently cut themselves off from true experience is something I could live with, as they are the ones who content themselves with a mere facsimile of life, but what’s more problematic is the fact they also hurt quite a lot of films along the way.

Which brings us again to John Skipp’s liner notes for ‘An American Hippie in Israel’, which blithely perpetuates this sorry state of things by simply encouraging people to laugh loudly during the whole movie. But let me be absolutely clear on this: I’m not at all advocating some hugely grave and serious way of looking at everything with all laughter banished, as I am a very strong adherent to camp and deeply in touch with my own outrageousness. But by treating everything as a joke and even inviting people to create this distance, these people hurt not only their own sanity but also quite a lot of these movies in the process, as they will create an aura of superficiality which will inevitably make it impossible to truly perceive the world. Simply put, I don’t see what’s supposed to be bad about this movie. John Skipp talks about ‘all its astonishing flaws’, but it’s a real pity he doesn’t point out what those flaws may be, as perhaps then his piece could have been illuminating instead of the pure garbage it now is. Of course it could be that Skipp is much more refined than me, but aesthetic idiot that I am, I’ll have to try to figure out those flaws for myself then, taking his lead. He writes:

“the chief culprit, as usual, is the script: full of dialogue so ripely insane it rivals Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert. But as a fable, it has a weird cohesion. It knows what it’s trying to say. Tries to say it really hard.”

One would wish Skipp’s writing has the same cohesion as he endows the film with, because I can’t figure this out. Now, I’m not saying the film is impossible to penetrate and does everything it can to hide its meaning, but at the same time one wonders if Skipp knows exactly what that meaning is. He never explains what he thinks the movie is about, as he seems to presume it’s all self-explanatory, but I doubt that. In fact, it could never be that transparent, as the entire film is told through metaphor, which Skipp even acknowledges, so how can the dialogue be both on the nose and metaphoric all at once? Even the most simple fables have to be translated and thus makes interpretation necessary, which is what Skipp so conveniently forgot to do. Since he is so evasive on the subject (it’s all so bad anyway, so why bother, right?) I’ll have to assume he sincerely seems to think all the dialogue about freedom really is meant to be taken at face value. But if this were so, if the movie is nothing but a naïve celebration of hippie values, then how are we to explain the mysterious fact everybody dies because of those values? What are we to make of the two death-like figures and the trajectory of the film into barbarism? Apparently, the film tries to say something really hard, but for the life of me I can’t make out what Skipp seems to think what exactly that something is and since he’s entirely silent on the subject, we have to assume he himself doesn’t it know either. Because if he hadn’t been so busy laughing at everything and being such a condescending prick, he may have found time to notice the film is quite obviously a critique on hippies instead of a celebration, which would also explain the ‘ripely insane’ dialogue Skipp apparently finds so hilarious. It is meant to be ‘screamingly on-the-nose’ as the portrait of hippies is anything but flattering and they are supposed to look like a couple of babbling idiots who have taken the road to nowhere. It’s the whole ‘Showgirls’ thing all over again, with people apparently not even noticing it’s a parody and mistaking the supposed shallowness of the script for their own. The “wonderful yet painfully redundant soundtrack does its folk/mariachi best to make a fake Judy Collins and the Tijuana Brass upstage Harold and Maude’s Cat Stevens and the half-a-jillion rock stars propping up Easy Rider”, according to Skipp. What it exactly means I’m not even sure of, as my mind usually starts breaking down at the sight of so much condescending cleverness, but in any case would only make sense if the film were really so purely sincere as Skipp sincerely seems to think it is. Things change considerably the moment you start reading it as a parody, which in fact makes all his ‘criticism’ irrelevant. Because it would only leave the ‘committed’ performances of the actors, which is basically a given for films of this budget, and in any case to critique it for this can only be possible when you use that imperialistic yardstick I referred to earlier.

So with all these hilariously bad facets of this movie suddenly vanishing like snow in the Israeli desert, I have to wonder aloud what is to be gained by all this condescension and why this film is a ‘glorious disaster’? Because to me, even though it may be technically rough around the edges, it’s decidedly assured from start to finish. At the ending the two couples are even color-matched, which admittedly is nothing but a small detail but does point toward the fact Sefer did have at least some inkling of what he was doing instead of being the well-intentioned but blind fool Skipp makes him out to be. It has all the emptiness and desperation of the hippie experience nailed and makes its point through what may seem like broad allegory, but which is apparently still too subtle for some to get its finer points. What is ironic in this respect, is that John Skipp falls into the same trap as the hippies he can laugh so safely at, as they are both unable to extricate themselves from the domination of Western ideology: the hippies think they can escape society only to be confronted by their own emptiness, while Skipp also attempts a vanishing act with similar results by trying to hide behind laughter only to expose his own blindness. He laughs at Sefer and his film and chides it for only meaning well, but his arrogance has blinded him for the fact it’s much more profound than Skipp seems to realize. And if John Skipp would mean well, I suppose he could be forgiven. But can condescension ever be meant well?  

An American Hippie In Israel (Limited Edition/Blu-ray/DVD Combo-3 Disc Set)