Groupies by Sarah Priscus

 Are we all groupies one way or another?

With Groupies, Sarah Priscus has produced a fine first novel with an engaging story and a handful of believably human characters.

It is a period piece set in the late 1970s mostly in Los Angeles. This is the world of young women orbiting around the male power center of a famous, very successful, rock band.
How successful? There is a scene in which the band, Holiday Sun, flies to NYC to appear on a TV show modeled after Saturday Night Live, so THAT successful and high profile. 

The story is told in first person by Faun, a young woman from Massachusetts who has just arrived in LA to live with a childhood friend. 

This old friend has been out there for a while and has become the girlfriend of the lead guy in Holiday Sun, a British musician Cal. Faun is a photographer who shoots polaroid instant image film. She intends to use the association with the band to help launch herself into a successful photography career.

Given the time/place setting in high profile showbiz the novel could attract readers interested in the music business and this LA period in particular. In that way, it could find readers who look at the story closely, search for clues, and speculate on historic models of the characters and band.
Perhaps the novel is better viewed in the wide angle of American culture beyond the music biz; seeing it as a story of people attracted to power and attempting to get something for themselves from it. This gives the whole story and greater meaning and a significance beyond a rock or showbiz novel.

Much of the dynamics of the theme could be shifted to a story about cults or political power. In the story the rock dudes find themselves in power. That offers them via female fans. In this way the novel looks into the world of male stars who feel entitled to “grab them by the pussy”. Priscus tells us that the women, the groupies are primarily there for a type of supportive loyalty that can be assumed and relied upon by the power males. They pump the boys up.

The men/boys are at core needy, insecure in their precarious power positions. They need the backup of these attractive young women. The women are expected to be “true fans”, sincere and loyal. They need them in a way similar to a Keith Raniere, Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, or back to the LA music scene, Phil Specter, who was so needy he would repeatedly, for decades, put a pistol to the heads of women who wanted to leave to make them stay with the ultimate result of that.

In a way it is a crime fiction novel.
Who is the perp?
USA cultural and political life as we have it and must deal with it.

The time setting of 45 years ago is not more innocent, merely less equipped. The technology of social media and continuing media business consolidation/centralization with algorithmic personalized diffraction and separation, empowers marketing, powermen and corporations. The boys in the band are not all that bright and don’t have the power of certain tools of control. No one in the novel is super villain sinister and about to build a multl-level marketing system of branded sex slaves, but at core is all sadly the same. None of this takes anything away from this interesting and entertaining novel and story.

Is this a hero's journey type of tale? It’s better than that. Maybe a more realistic anti-hero novel. The groupies provide support for the band but every one of them has their own angle, their own wish for transcendence and immortality by their sucking up to glory. If they do THIS, they can maneuver themselves to THAT. The novel provides a clear view of a culture gone wild with need, greed, and lust for some kind of meaningful life within the atmospheric chaos of the marketplace. .  

Are we all groupies one way or another?

Page 348

“It was a study in groupiedom. In pain. In joy. In good. In evil.

In life.”

Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

 Cecil B, DeMented (2000)

Written & Directed by John Waters

This could be looked at as a clever witty fun violent comedy romp. It certainly scores in that. It is a terrific, very fast paced entertainment but it’s deeper than that. It has youth rebellion, but more. The violence is a lot of fun, but there are consequences and deaths. There is really something else going on here. 
 
  The setup is simple enough. Fading Hollywood movie star Honey Whitlock, played by Melanie Griffith, is in Baltimore for the premiere of one of her movies. The scene is infiltrated by the Demented crew, disguised as the worker staff at the premiere; waiters, etc. They kidnap her and force her to act in their underground movie.
  “Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented, the director tells her as she sits bound and taped up in a chair in the gang’s old movie house hidaway. The colorful crew and cast introduce themselves. Each has a tattoo of the name of  a legionary, off mainstream, or maverick, director hero. Cecil’s is Premminger. The crew, Warhol, Peckinpah, Anger and others. This establishes that these outlaw film crew terrorists are products of the influence of movies. It is the movies, by highly successful internationally renowned filmmakers that have made them what they are.

They proceed in shooting their movie with the captive Honey. Lots of other movie reference stuff familiar to most movie fans goes on, plus more inside production material that would delight anyone who has worked on mainstream movie or TV productions. There is a tone of revenge flick. They attack movie related events and eventually a big production of a Forest Gump sequel as armed outsiders righteously enraged at being left out riding in on a high horse of disgust at the entire bloated big money system and the boring redundant products it continuously spews forth.

“Death to mainstream cinema!” cries former mainstream tool Honey who, after some resistance, has become a convert by way of passage through a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Honey, now one of them, is attacking the very thing that created her. She is along with the others who are attacking what has made them, through manipulation of their consciousness, but leaving them confused wannabe outsiders without any of the success of Honey the movie star.

  The movie is filled with really great movie connected locations and set pieces, including a very funny scene in a porn theater among the wankers and the climax at a drive-in movie theater.
  The viewer can easily be pulled into the revolutionary fervor of the lovable outsider terrorist crew. Aren’t we all movie lovers? But are we not movie haters too? We love the products that we love but hate some other stuff with a vengeance. We know it’s a big eliete money game that we aren't a part of no matter how strong our wannabe dreams might be. We know it’s just another enormous global big business but one that we are more hypnotically sucked into. We know how powerful it is, akin to That Ol’ Time Religion which it has been partly responsible for replacing. We feel how it has implanted and distorted much of what makes us human, our ideas of what love is, what success is, what is right and wrong. We can resent that and are enraged within at how we have been manipulated by this outside and out of our control power, even if we are not consciously aware of that manipulation and the resulting rage. Yet we can’t turn away and continue to feed in the endless streaming of big budget products. We are addicted to the dopamine thrill of the 2 million dollar action scene and the empathy we feel for the coming together of the play-acting yet completely convincing lovers. We watch people interacting with their “Friends” while we, in viewing isolation, have no friends. We know we love it, and are constantly told we ought to so that we bury rage at it all within us. This is the rage that can reemerge in self-hatred knowing that we can never measure up or really be involved. We are just enslaved consumer couch potatoes.

Cecil B DeMented and John Water knows all this. He is the one, the unique individual who more than any of the others came up out of us, out of the deep filthy underground our fandom and rage and breached that gated community. Yet the movie shows it all to be a suicide mission. A åfailed attempt to fight fire with fire.
“Lots of kids dream of making a movie but only those willing to die for it are able to succeed.”, - Cecil B, Demented. Indeed!

There is also a real story fictionalized, hidden in plain sight in this great and culturally astute movie. Patricia Hearst has a small acting role in it but her real life story parallels that of the Honey Whitlock character. Patricia Hearst was a princess of the ruling class and kidnaped in 1974. She sooned joined that ragtag band of revolutionaries biting the hand that created her, either a converted revolutionary or a victim of coercion, the Stockholm Syndrome. She participated in bank robbery until her eventual capture.

In view of this the Cecil B Demented crew is also revelied as a unhealthy personality cult following their leader into destruction or others and themselves. There is even a long scene where Cecil demands that they all submit to being branded with his initials. Was Keith Raniere (NXIVM) influenced by this movie? The same demand for control and submission in his cult many years after the movie was released particularly stands out, the branding of the DOS sex slaves.  

Cecil B Demented is a great movie.