This Is Spinal Tap’s backward showbiz parody predicts Hollywood liberalism on the wrong side of culture and history.
Has any modern director made as many lousy yet popular films as Rob Reiner? It’s probably this conundrum that gave Reiner the impetus to spout off about political issues more regularly than any other Hollywood celebrity. Reiner must think he earned public attention in the same way that his hit movies The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally, and This Is Spinal Tap strain to be taken seriously.
The undeniable partisanship of Reiner’s political commentary was most offensive last month when he blatantly warned MSNBC about the current administration:
The two big things that an autocrat needs. They need control of the media, which is what they’re trying to do. And they need military control of the streets. And that’s the other thing that we’re seeing. So we’re in it right now, and we’re sliding downhill in a very, very fast way, and we have to find a way to stop it.
Ironically, Reiner’s filmmaking is conservative, even Boomer-friendly in its appeal to the Reagan babies his punditry attacks. Reiner’s cultural contribution amounts to a hysterical liberal slant, a slippery slope most apparent in the new Blu-Ray of This Is Spinal Tap, a Criterion release implying ratification by the cultural elite. This fallacy started when derelict reviewers praised the inanity in Reiner’s films.
The stature conferred upon Reiner came from establishment media — not a celebratory Vanity Fair cover story or fawning CBS Sunday Morning profile, but the New York Times critic Vincent Canby putting This Is Spinal Tap on his 1984 Ten Best list. It was almost a biblical directive, the same as those gray old lady front-page Times articles headlined “Analysis” that intentionally confuse opinion with fact. Canby’s endorsement turned This Is Spinal Tap’s mild popularity into a cultural axiom. It was a predecessor of Obama’s annual cultural diktats that reframe aesthetic standards for the worse.
Canby hailed Spinal Tap as “the funniest film of 1984 and maybe even of 1983 and perhaps of 1985” and then originated the term ”rockumentary” to describe its following “the not-so-triumphant American tour of a fictitious British heavy-metal group called Spinal Tap.” Canby’s slightly off-target projection anticipated what came to be known as “mockumentary,” the film’s distortion of reality and truth. Since then, Reiner has been credited with popularizing the “mockumentary” trend, although This Is Spinal Tap was actually a collaboration (acting and screenwriting) with three other comic performers, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer.
Reiner’s directorial career-boost was a fluke. (Guest would be revealed as the true, consistent Spinal Tap visionary when he directed such satirical mockumentaries as Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration.) Under Reiner’s guidance, satire exposed a shallow, fatuous mindset, similar to what we saw in subsequent vapid Reiner projects Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men, The American President, Ghosts of Mississippi — each one appallingly sentimental.
Reiner wasn’t just play-acting what Canby described as “the solemnly earnest director of the film-within-the-film,” but initiating the self-righteous imbecility of his Millennial political stances and punditry. It was as if Reiner had taken to heart his breakthrough role on TV’s All in the Family as the liberal standard-bearer whom his conservative-bigot father-in-law called Meathead.
Back in 1984, This Is Spinal Tap seemed particularly ludicrous because it premiered not long after Alex Cox’s Repo Man, a genuine counterculture film — one of the most profound pop-music-based comedies ever made — that was inspired by the social-cultural revolution of punk rock. This Is Spinal Tap is a backward parody by behind-the-times showbiz professionals. Reiner and company’s disrespect for the generational differences of rock and punk (the latter developing out of the former) makes the heavy-metal, hard-rock pastiche hard to stomach.
In Criterion’s liner notes, Alex Pappademas mentions the film’s in-joke: “There’s a thin line between clever and stupid,” but the problem is that the dumb jokes blur the line between pop-music affection and disrespect, expertise and cultural ignorance. Some funny bits reveal showbiz vanity, as in Guest’s spot-on impersonation of Jeff Beck’s egotism (perhaps admitting Guest’s own); the exploding-drummer routine is delightful; so is the miniature Stonehenge prop and the cultural misunderstanding that causes it. The fifth-wheel girlfriend-manager (June Chadwick) is notable only for inspiring the superior imitation in the hip-hop mockumentary Fear of a Black Hat, which was culturally authentic.
Overall, the subject matter largely imitates the 1978 Beatles parody The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, and the meta-documentary jokes merely echo Albert Brooks’s Real Life (1979). The rest is lame — an “alternate facts” travesty of British progressive rock bands that’s the opposite of what the Brits call “muso” for informed adepts. It lumps Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin into the same barrel; the lack of differentiation appeals to haters, not fans. The film’s popularity attests the peculiar desperation of fans longing to be noticed even if being ridiculed.
Reiner’s antipathy toward a showbiz form different from his own reveals pettiness and a tendency toward exploitation. (This Is Spinal Tap was readily hyped by film and music hacks who even released a Spinal Tap sequel album, Break Like the Wind, that Rolling Stone reviewed positively as if it were legitimate rock music.) Reiner’s mockumentary format did grave damage to both film and journalism, creating distrust and normalizing disinformation. It’s in keeping with other evidence we have of his cantankerous, disputatious personality. Reiner eventually dialed his insulting public discourse up to 11, but the offense starts with This Is Spinal Tap. It is on the wrong side of culture and history.