HEY, GOOD LOOKIN' (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though HEY GOOD LOOKIN' was released in the early 1980s, in its original conception it would have been released as the fourth of Ralph Bakshi's "urban cartoons" of the early seventies, following FRITZ THE CAT, HEAVY TRAFFIC and COONSKIN. According to this Wikipedia article, Bakshi initially filmed a version of LOOKIN' with a similar plotline, but in a format that combined animation with live action. Warner Brothers became antsy over the film's potential box office, in part due to negative publicity for COONSKIN, and refused to give Bakshi the funds to complete the movie. About seven years later, Warners became bullish on animated projects again. The sequence of events seems unclear, but apparently Bakshi decided at some point to rework LOOKIN' into a more traditional animated film, using money from other projects to fund the second version. Thus he managed to release the new LOOKIN' in American theaters, to lukewarm response given that the cultural moment had largely passed for "adult animation" in the United States. But LOOKIN' still became a cult film through video and cable release, though it's not clear if Bakshi esteems the finished version.

My estimation is unambivalent: I think it's Bakshi's finest feature-length work. All of Bakshi's features have an episodic feel-- the result of the famed director having honed his craft in gag-oriented cartoon shorts. But in Bakshi's attempt to capture a semblance of his experience in urban Brooklyn of the early 1950s, he captured a "myth" far more substantial than his attempts to render Tolkienian fantasies-- a myth I like to denote as "the clash of civilizations."

The first twenty minutes of LOOKIN' don't seem to reference any major sociological myths. Most of the setup follows the antics of two Brooklyn guys in their early twenties, who don't do anything but drink, hang around poolhalls, and talk about women: Italian-American Vinnie Genziani and Jewish-American Crazy Shapiro. Neither one seems to have a job, so there's no telling where they get money for booze (though it would be easy to buy Vinnie as a pool-hustler). Vinnie apparently has no relatives, while Crazy has just one: his father Solly, an overweight hulk who has no compunctions against shooting at his son when annoyed, and who can get away with such actions because he (Solly) is a cop. The audience also sees that both smooth-looking Vinnie and geeky Crazy are members of a gang of white youths, the Stompers, but the only consequential event in those first twenty minutes is that Vinnie enjoys a "meet-violent" encounter with a girl he used to babysit years ago: Roz Featherschneider. Roz is definitely not a little girl now, as evinced by how all the guys ogle her ginormous hooters, and Vinnie begins thinking seriously about dating her, though he's too cool to give away his feelings. As for Roz, though she's initially stand-offish, she falls hard for Vinnie, at least according to what her hormones tell her.

The clash of civilizations-- or at least, of cultures-- looms large when night falls, and Vinnie and Crazy, tired from their escapades, sack out on the nearest beach. In the morning Crazy gets himself in trouble, and Vinnie panics, deserting his boon companion. (To be sure, Crazy extricates himself from his difficulties on his own.) But Vinnie's loss of coolness carries a harsher penalty. In his fear he runs past the boundaries of "the white part" of the beach and enters the forbidden terrain of "the black part." Vinnie finds himself surrounded by big black beachgoers, many of whom wear leather jackets at the beach and are members of the Black Chaplains, an urban youth-gang with which Vinnie's gang has frequently locked horns. Vinnie also meets the Chaplains' leader, the implicit pimp Boogaloo Jones. Boogaloo incarnates for the period "The Great White Fear," in that he's a clever, smooth-talking conniver. As soon as Boogaloo sees Vinnie, he wants to renew old hostilities just for the sake of sheer nastiness. He smooth-talks Vinnie into setting up a rumble between the two gangs, and adds that if the Stompers won't fight, the cool Italian will have to battle all the Chaplains by himself.

At the same beach, Vinnie not only locates Crazy, he also stumbles across Roz and her girlfriend Eva, though romance is no longer Vinnie's main concern. Roz and Crazy are particularly hot to fight the Black Chaplains, and the four seek out the other Stompers-- who could care less about Vinnie's crusade. Eventually, though, the white gang gets fired up to attack the black gang, when the former get provoked by one of Boogaloo's actions. So on the surface, Vinnie's problem is solved. 

Except that Crazy is, well, crazy. He's not just the amiable geek he usually seems to be, as when he becomes irate at Vinnie and puts a knife to his friend's throat. That night, while the four youths are farting around, Roz sees a car in a white neighborhood, driven by two Black Chaplains. Crazy's triggered by the "jungle bunnies," chases them down in his car. Then, over the feeble objections of Vinnie and Eva (the latter protesting, "I don't understand. Negroes are like people, too"), Crazy shoots both men dead. Unlike Crazy and Roz, who are jazzed by the incident, Vinnie knows that this is serious shit. (We don't know what if anything Eva sees or thinks, for she disappears from the story after the shooting.) Vinnie then separates himself from his friend and his potential lover.

With atypical swiftness, the NYPD sends one of their best men to investigate: Solly Shapiro. He interrogates Boogaloo, and though the pimp has no way of knowing who killed his followers, he makes the Iago-like suggestion that Solly ought to ask one of the Stompers about the crime-- such as Solly's own son. During what seems to be the exact same night as the shooting, Roz gives herself to the flustered Crazy, precisely as if she deemed herself a hero's prize. But then Solly shows up, driving Roz off as the corrupt cop beats the hell out of his son. The beating is so brutal that the average viewer can't help but pity the ignorant youth despite having seen him murder two people. Crazy then breaks the code of the streets, telling his father that Vinnie killed the victims.

Vinnie doesn't know of the betrayal but packs his bags to leave town, apparently the next morning. But he manages to run into the very area where the Stompers and Chaplains have arranged to hold their rumble. Solly shows up there as well, happy to frame Vinnie for the crime. The real killer, though, has some sort of mental breakdown. Crazy gets up on a roof overlooking the rumble, dressed up in a wacky superhero-costume, and begins firing down on everyone in the street. Both sides shoot at each other until one of the white guys is slain, at which point it becomes too real for both groups, and they fade.

The weird psychedelia in Crazy's head could justify a couple of paragraphs of explication, as the mad youth seems to be warring on the city in which he was born while encountering various grungy versions of Jungian birth-imagery. Bakshi then works in one non-psychedelic threat, for the all-knowing Boogaloo shows up on the roof. But instead of directly taking action against the murderer-- say, by pushing him off the roof-- Boogaloo confines himself to breaking into Crazy's frenzied reverie with the odd words, "You ain't got no rhythm, baby." For some reason, this has the same effect. Crazy launches himself off the roof, unintentionally making up for his betrayal by landing on Solly, killing both of them instantly. And Vinnie is left to a joyless existence without his closest amigo.

Well, except that all of these events take place within a frame story. The first half of the frame shows a sketchy middle-aged dude approaching a fat, middle-aged tart on the New York streets, offering to tell her the story of Vinnie and Roz. Then the other half of the frame concludes by revealing that the two old farts are Vinnie and Roz. Old Roz berates Old Vinnie for his past cowardice but gives him one last chance to redeem himself.

Although Bakshi as author clearly denounces the meaningless violence and racism of gang-culture, he manages to do so without becoming in any way preachy. For example, when the Stompers and the Chaplains meet for the rumble, the black gang-members perform a big flamboyant dance-number (rotoscoped from real performers) while the white bangers advance in a march, looking like goose-stepping Nazis. Yet Bakshi certainly doesn't make the Chaplains into sinless angels. The racism of both groups implicitly stems from both their poverty and resulting ignorance, and one of the songs Bakshi chose for LOOKIN' argues that despite all the claims about masculine honor, "the truth is, we were bored."

This may be the only film I've reviewed so far that I've categorized as having both the uncanny and naturalistic versions of the "delirious dreams and fallacious figments" trope. That's because all the "figment-tropes"-- such as Crazy inexplicably being able to massacre about a dozen men, just for the sake of a joke-- don't violate the naturalistic content of the narrative. However, Crazy's breakdown-fantasy has a coherence that goes beyond the bounds of naturalism, and so Crazy's mad dream projects HEY GOOD LOOKIN' into the domain of the uncanny.