To point out the obvious, “Fats
Waller was Born in Passaic” could not have happened without Mr. Fletcher’s
invented story—one could say “appropriation”—of Fats’s birth in the building
that houses Be Kind Rewind. Neither
could it have happened had Mike, Jerry, Alma, and the rest of the neighborhood
not appropriated it in their own way. The making of the community film is a
coalescence of older generation and younger, the latter fitting Phil Cohen’s
description of a youth subculture: “subculture is…a compromise solution,
between two contradictory needs: the need to create and express autonomy and difference from parents…and
the need to maintain…the parental
identifications which support them.”
Mike, more than any other character, feels the need to maintain parental
identifications by preserving the story of Fats, as told to him by Mr.
Fletcher, from the outset of the film. After
all, he and Jerry make a graffiti mural of Fats underneath a nearby overpass
and take every opportunity to share the Fats story with customers of Be Kind
Rewind. Their difference with the older
generation is not so much a rejection of appropriations as it is an extension,
for they make an entire catalog of popular culture (not just the Fats story)
their own.
The subculture of “Sweding” in Be Kind Rewind does not technically seem
to be split along generational lines; by the film’s conclusion, the whole
neighborhood, young and old alike, has gotten involved in remaking popular
films their own way. Despite its
inclusivity, however, the generational implications of Sweding make it a youth
subculture before anything else. Aside
from what is shared with the parent culture, Clark et al. describes a second
element necessary in any analysis of a youth subculture, which “consists both
of the materials available to the group for the construction of subcultural
identities (dress, music, talk), and of their contexts (activities, exploits,
place, caffs, dance halls, day-trips, evenings-out, football games, etc.).”
The VHS
tapes--the materials available to Mike, Jerry, and Alma--are
“generationally very specific.” One
might associate the relic-like nature of VHS more with Mr. Fletcher than with any
of the younger generation, but Mr. Fletcher’s reluctance to transition to a
newer format has more to do with ignorance and lack of money than with any
inherent connectedness to the physical tapes.
The younger characters would have been children during VHS’s prominence
and consequently have a very different relationship with the format and its
outlet, the independently owned video rental store. Unlike Mr. Fletcher, they grew up with
increased accessibility to movies, being able to re-watch certain titles over
and over, thus developing a collective consciousness of popular culture.
To say the
VHS tapes from Be Kind Rewind are the characters’ materials is insufficient,
for what are the tapes if not films? It
is also insufficient to say the films alone work as material for these
characters; the technology used to watch these films and the way in which they
are accessed—their contexts—are vitally important elements to understanding
their appropriation by the people of Passaic.
Technological implications are apparent even in the title of Be Kind Rewind—a certain amount of
effort is required in the maintenance of VHS that is not necessary in the
on-demand, digital age. Be Kind Rewind refers, of course, to the stickers found on VHS rentals
during their prime. One not only needed
to rewind the tape before returning it but also to keep it out of the
heat. The clunkiness of the cassette
tape made it less space-efficient than what was to come later and was probably
the main reason that rental stores did not (or possibly could not) carry extra
copies (Mr. Fletcher, conversely, observes the multiple-copies idea for the first time when taking notes at a West Coast Video). Consequently, customers looking
to rent a video at an establishment like Be Kind Rewind might enter without
expectations of finding a specific title lest they suffer the same
disappointment as the customer wanting Rush
Hour 2. Under this mindset, one
could walk away with just about any title, which seems to be the case with the
average Be Kind Rewind customer. While
the dearth of new, available titles might discourage someone looking for a new
release blockbuster, it does encourage eclecticism by default—Be Kind Rewind’s
small but varied library offers the possibility of walking away with either Citizen Kane or The Garbage Pail Kids…
 |
| Be Kind Rewind's eclectic Sweding: Boyz in the Hood, Driving Miss Daisy, and Ghostbusters |
…which
explains the diversity of the films chosen to be Sweded by the neighborhood. During a Sweding montage, lists of their
choices scroll down the screen, revealing such disparate titles as Last Tango in Paris, Mortal Kombat,
Frequency, Seven, Happy Campers, Body Shots, Lost in Space, and Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Less an attempt at well roundedness than an
illustration of “circumstances and restricted opportunities,” the people of
Passaic know these films because they have seen them time after time, having
little choice in what they could rent from Mr. Fletcher’s store, more public
institution than actual business. The
copy of Ghostbusters Miss Falewicz
wanted to rent was the presumably same copy seen by Mike, Jerry, and everyone
else in the neighborhood over the years.
That it circulated so widely in such a small geographical space makes
it—the physical tape and its contents—property of the neighborhood, regardless
of the FBI Warning.
The neighborhood does not realize their
ownership of the movies until they begin to Swede them. Jerry’s inadvertent erasing of the tapes
allows them to more easily “adopt and adapt material objects—goods and possessions—and
reorganize them into distinctive ‘styles’ which express the collectivity of
their being-as-a-group.” The destruction
of their Sweded creations at the hands of Mr. Rooney and Ms. Lawson only proves
to galvanize the group, which, feeling empowered after having created new and
improved films, is intent on telling their own story in their own way. Accuracy might have mattered earlier, but
not anymore. Miss Falewicz's statement prior to the
filming of “Fats Waller was Born in Passaic,” indicates the way in which the
older generation’s and the younger generation’s style of negotiating, in
particular their style of storytelling, has converged into a powerful
community-building tool: “Our past belongs to us; we can change it if we want.”
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