Out of the emptiness: salvation
Salvation, rhythm and light and sound
This Is Spinal Tap (1984): 11 out of 10: There is always a certain danger in revisiting something you loved when you were young. We never step in the same river twice, and all that. Sometimes a movie you disliked twenty or thirty years ago suddenly clicks with you, I generally use Galaxy Quest as my example of that, and sometimes a movie you adored as a teenager turns out to have been held together by nostalgia, hormones, and the fact that you had much lower standards when you were sixteen. I hadn’t watched This Is Spinal Tap in quite a while, and I was prompted to return to it after watching the ridiculously disappointing Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Having now revisited the original, I have come to an unfortunate conclusion: I was probably too kind to the sequel.
Because This Is Spinal Tap is in absolutely no danger of falling apart with age. Forty-plus years later, this thing is still hysterically funny. I was around sixteen when it came out, so admittedly I have an advantage here. This is the music I listened to. These are the bands I knew. The people standing in the audience look like people I went to school with (complete with the feathered hair). There is a cultural shorthand here that somebody born after 9/11 simply will not possess, and some of the finer nuances may be lost as a result.
But the important part survives because the movie isn’t simply making jokes about 1980s heavy metal. It is making jokes about ego, pretension, friendship, failure, show business, and the ability of grown men to remain utterly convinced of their own brilliance while standing beside a miniature Stonehenge.
Part of what makes Spinal Tap feel almost radical today is that it expects you to actually watch the damn movie. The comedy isn’t announced with flashing lights. It doesn’t stop every three minutes to remind you what the plot is because somebody might be looking at their phone. Some of the best jokes are sitting quietly in the background, tossed away in a single line, or delivered by characters who have absolutely no idea that what they’ve just said is funny.
There is a confidence to the humor that comes from trusting the audience to notice things. The good news for modern viewers is that the film runs around eighty-two minutes, which is almost exactly how long a comedy should run. Put the phone away. You’ll survive.
This Is Spinal Tap didn’t invent the mockumentary. Woody Allen had played with the format years earlier with films such as Take the Money and Run, and there were other examples floating around before 1984. But much like Airplane! didn’t invent the spoof movie so much as permanently define what people expected from one, Spinal Tap became the template against which mockumentaries would be measured.
Christopher Guest in particular would spend a good portion of his career carrying that torch with movies such as Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. Those are funny films. Very funny films, even. Are they Spinal Tap funny? No. Spinal Tap is something else.
It is also worth remembering that this was Rob Reiner’s first feature as a director, which is frankly ridiculous considering what followed. Reiner would go on one of the great directing streaks of modern American cinema, making excellent films in wildly different genres rather than simply repeating himself. Here, he and his cast found exactly the right tone. Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer don’t play David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls as comedians performing punchlines. They play them as musicians. Completely sincere musicians.
That sincerity is the entire engine of the movie. These men believe in the songs, believe in the band, and believe in themselves, even as virtually every piece of evidence around them suggests perhaps they should reconsider.
Everyone has their favorite bits, and I will not turn this into my Airplane! review and simply list every joke in chronological order. Spinal Tap has been absorbed into popular culture to a degree that makes it difficult to remember how fresh its jokes originally were. More importantly, there are probably another twenty jokes you don’t remember until you see them again and suddenly start laughing before the punchline even arrives.
It isn’t flawless. The Paul Shaffer record-store sequence has never done much for me, despite the fact that I love Paul Shaffer. It just sort of sits there. The Air Force base concert is important structurally for the band breaking up subplot, but as a comedy sequence it also feels slightly flat compared with the material surrounding it.
These aren’t bad scenes so much as stretches where Spinal Tap briefly drops from brilliant to merely amusing. In most comedies, they would probably be highlights. Here they qualify as something to complain about because everything around them is so good.
And then there is the music, which is the dirty little secret behind the entire enterprise: Spinal Tap is actually a pretty good band. They’re supposed to be mocking heavy metal, and they certainly are, but the songs are catchy, convincing and performed well enough that they work outside the joke.
The original soundtrack is genuinely enjoyable. That fact became even more apparent after the sequel, where the new material is mostly dreadful. There were so many other problems with Spinal Tap II that I somehow neglected to mention the lousy songs, but after returning to the original, the contrast is impossible to ignore. These 1984 songs have survived. I’ve even attended more than one wedding where “Sex Farm” was played while the father and daughter had their first dance. Brings a tear to the eye just thinking about it.
So yes, revisiting This Is Spinal Tap could have ended badly. Instead, I found myself laughing at the same jokes, discovering little jokes I’d forgotten, appreciating the construction more than I probably did at sixteen, and wondering how the same people who made this were the people responsible for the sequel.
If you were a child of the ’80s (Or a fan of The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years), This Is Spinal Tap is mandatory viewing. If you’re younger, keep an open mind, understand that the film isn’t going to explain every joke to you, and for eighty-two minutes put the phone somewhere you can’t reach it.