WITH BOB ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE

On VOD today:

J. R. "Bob" Dobbs & the Church of the Subgenius--Yet another in the pandemic-era boom of offbeat documentaries has struck a nostalgic autobiographical chord with me: Sandy K. Boone's behind-the-scenes look at the "parody religion" (or is it?) founded by Fort Worth, Texas weirdo Ivan Stang and his friend "Philo Drummond" in the late '70s. In the mid-'80s, my best friend gave me, one Christmas, The Book of the SubGenius, published by McGraw-Hill no less, a compendium of the Church's exhaustingly dense prophecies, teachings and aphorisms ("You'll pay to know what you really think") mingled with hilarious yet unsettling apocalyptic artwork, much of it clip art collage.

The book, my friend said, was too strange for him, but he thought I'd like it. He was right. I had never heard of the Church, but there was something deeply compelling about its scripture; it was like the Tibetan Book of the Dead crossed with a Chick tract, re-edited by Firesign Theater. And it was hard not to reflect, while reading it, that it contained a high degree of self-deprecating good sense. It's still on my bookshelf.

The impossible-to-summarize theology goes something like this: Social misfits and oddballs are really members of a class of person called a SubGenius, distinct from and superior to the "pinks, glorps and mediocretins" that perpetuate conformist society. The state which SubGenii properly seek is "Slack," an undefinable form of well-being. The Church venerates a figure known as J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, a stereotypically clean-cut midcentury-style clip art white dude with blazing eyes and a pipe clenched in his grinning teeth. The central prophecy was that eventually (well, in 1998) aliens would come to Earth and liberate the faithful.

Now affable old longhairs who look like veteran Deadheads, Stang and "Philo" rather sheepishly tell Boone's camera how their in-joke pamphlets gradually caught on across the country, spawning "Devivals" and radio hours and selling out live shows; other talking heads include Penn Jillette, Mark Mothersbaugh and Richard Linklater. It's to Boone's credit that she doesn't shirk the potentially dark side of the Church's supercilious, misanthropic outlook, or how closely it's flirted, at times, with being a real creepy cult over the years. But overall, this portrait suggests a positive, even comforting religious experience: The meaning of life and the universe, interpreted by a like-minded community.

DAZED ANEW

Opening this weekend:

Everybody Wants Some!!—Writer-director Richard Linklater calls this a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 classic Dazed and Confused, and certainly the format is the same. It’s an ensemble period comedy with a soundtrack full of pop hits and a large young ensemble cast of relative unknowns, depicting the tribal rituals around getting high and getting laid.

But while Dazed and Confused was about high school and the ‘70s, Everybody Wants Some!! is about college and the ‘80s. That is to say, it’s about the beginning of college and the beginning of the ‘80s. The central figure is Jake (Blake Jenner) an incoming freshman arriving at “Southeast Texas University” a few days before classes start in 1980.

Jake’s a pitching prospect for the school’s powerhouse baseball team, so he moves into one of the dumpy houses in which his teammates live, drink, party, swap bravado and chase girls. Some of his new housemates are wound-up, obnoxious jerks, and some of them are wound-up, obnoxious nice guys, and you see Jake slip easily into differing levels of friendship with or toleration of them.

It’s striking that both here and in Dazed and Confused, Linklater has unsentimentally focused on the jocks, the sheiks, the alpha dogs, swaggering, confident and, at least by the standards of their age, sexually successful. And in both, he’s managed to make them likable, even touchingly vulnerable at times.

Because of the narrower environment, there isn’t as much variety to the dramatis personae in Everybody Wants Some!! as there was in Dazed. But Linklater does gives us a romantic interest for Jake in the form of a cute theatre student (Zoey Deutch), which allows him to take the guys out of their comfort zone to an artsy theatre party.

When I first saw Dazed and Confused back in ’93, I thought that there wasn’t a scene or a performance that wasn’t funny and completely convincing. But I remember also thinking that the pace was a little unvaried; there wasn’t much rising tension. In the many, many times I’ve seen that film since, I’ve come to see this as a strength, not a weakness—it’s central to how Linklater generates the sense of a window on the past.

Everybody Wants Some!! has this quality as well. I was in 8^th Grade in 1976, and I started college in 1980. Both of these films evoked sense memories in me of considerable intensity, and—considering that I “wanted some” as much as everybody else, and was far more frustrated than these guys—surprising affection.