THE BANGER SISTERS (2002)
Directed by Bob Dolman
Starring Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon
ME WITHOUT YOU (2002)
Directed by Sandra Goldbacher
Starring Anna Friel, Michelle Williams
I have this thing about groupies. I'm almost a groupie scholar. I guess it started when I dated someone who had groupies of his own (one or two, anyway), and when I learned a good friend of mine was a former New Kids on the Block groupie (a very observant, thoughtful, not too promiscuous one). I like to read about them, and I've read everything from the special groupies issue Rolling Stone put out in 1969 to I'm With the Band by Pamela Des Barres to The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. I'm also interested in women who actually marry rock stars, which has led me to read such works as Backstage Passes by Angela Bowie (if you're ever in the mood to be completely annoyed, just read that) and Rock Wives: The Hard Lives and Good Times of the Wives, Girlfriends, and Groupies of Rock and Roll, a book published in 1986 that compiles interviews with various women who talk about how they know their husbands cheat on them, but they want to stay married, so what can they do? I'm familiar with the male point of view and the most famous stories (the Led Zeppelin "shark" incident, for example).
I've never been a groupie, but I think I understand them. I've also dated enough musicians that I know what that's like, too. I know what it's like to, as a character in Almost Famous says, "truly love some silly little piece of music or some band so much that it hurts." And I know what it's like to be a music fan who's a girl, and worse, a music fan who's a girl with no musical talent to speak of. How can you get close to that music you love if you can't play it, and even if you could, nobody would take you seriously? Obviously, the easiest, quickest, surest way is to hook up with a male musician.
Anyway, The Banger Sisters, a story of former groupies who are now middle-aged and need to reconnect to their pasts, doesn't talk about any of these issues. In contrast to the girls in Me Without You, a movie that isn't even about music (and that, unlike The Banger Sisters, was directed by a woman), Goldie Hawn's and Susan Sarandon's characters don't even really seem to be music fans. While Me Without You features music by Wreckless Eric, Nick Drake, and the Clash, and characters who have Velvet Underground posters on their walls, The Banger Sisters can't even muster up a name-check that goes any deeper than Jim Morrison. In an homage to Pamela Des Barres and her groupie supergroup the GTOs, the Banger Sisters, aka Suzette and Vinnie, were christened by Frank Zappa. And in a rip-off of the Plaster Casters, Suzette and Vinnie collect Polaroid photos of rock cocks. There's a fairly derisive reference to Ginger Baker, and a non-groupie character has a framed photo of George Harrison, but as far as music goes, that's it.
Well, this is a very mainstream movie, a movie that one review I read compared to a Lifetime movie with superlative casting. Most people who see it aren't going to care about the issues I care about. So it's okay that Vinnie and Suzette have no better reason for sleeping with dozens of musicians (and a few roadies) than that it was fun. They may as well have been sleeping with basketball players or astronauts. And they seem to have had no further relationship with any of these men, just sex and that's it. There's no sense of what they were like when they were in LA in the sixties. No history of how they did it or why or what they learned or what it was like. In the end, all we know is that back then, they were wild.
The movie is the story of Suzette, who is fired from her job as a bartender at the Whisky A Go Go, traveling to Phoenix, where Vinnie is now a perfect, uptight, suburban mother of two, and helping Vinnie remember who she truly is (evidently, someone who wears tight leopard-print pants and plunging necklines) and reconnect with her family.
Goldie Hawn, who plays Suzette, is great. I mean, she's perfect. If you need some better emotional background for her character, imagine her as a grown-up version of Penny Lane, her daughter's character in Almost Famous. There are so many little moments where Goldie just shines--my favorite is a split second in which she prissily puts her feet up on a desk--and her perennial long-blonde-hair-with-bangs-and-saucer-eyes look works here just great. She's sexy, confident, compassionate, and very, very funny.
But if you start thinking about it too hard, it becomes too obvious that her life, considered in the movie to be much more virtuous than Vinnie's, is really not so great at all. A fifty-something woman (or maybe she's really supposed to be forty-something, I don't know) tending bar at the Whisky, trying to convince a boss who's half her age that she's part of the history of the Sunset Strip, coming on to a too-young-for-her rock boy, returning home to a lonely apartment and looking at old photos--well, it's really kind of sad. Early in the film, she's shown watching wistfully as a very young woman, evidently a member of the new generation of groupies, fawns over a rock singer. While I know how she feels--at 25, even I feel old when I go to shows these days--it seems like it might be time for her to make something for herself. In the end, that's the problem with groupies, especially the popular imagination's idea of them. They don't create. They don't make anything for themselves or anyone else. Vinnie's rigid upper-middle-class life is no good either, of course, but it's hard to see why Suzette is held up as an ideal, as something to strive for.
These are all concerns I've had time to think about. When I was watching the movie, I just enjoyed it. It was fun and funny, and everyone in the crowd seemed liked it. The supporting characters, notably Geoffrey Rush as a failed writer and Vinnie's two daughters, helped bring it to life, it had a happy ending, everything was fine. As a popcorn movie, there's no problem. It just wasn't as honest or as true as I would have liked it to be.
Next: Me Without You