Head (1968)– The Monkees’ Movie that Revels in Revolt

The symmetry was irresistible. In 1997, I took my ten-year old daughter to see Spice World, the eagerly awaited big screen debut of the manufactured pop phenom Spice Girls, just like my mother had taken me to see Head 29 years earlier.

Talk about flashbacks. It wasn’t the fact it was a parent and child trip to see my kid’s favourite band in their first movie, nor was it that my daughter was just as cranked as I back in ‘68. No, it was that Spice World, like Head, was an act of merciless deconstruction, a movie that at once ridiculed the very process of fabricating a band like Spice Girls, but a well-aimed spit in the eye of the very fans that make the band’s success possible.

It wasn’t what either of us were expecting in our respective ten-year-old bubbles, and it stung at the same time it made an indelible impression. By the time I saw Head some years later, I came prepared. By that point the Monkees were long gone, I was hip to marketing and open to gestures of self-destructive cynicism, and I got Head. It came not to promote the Monkees but to bury them. And it pretty much did.

But history intervened, and Head, being ushered into the world by the same producers – Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson – who would deliver such key countercultural experiences as Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show and Five Easy Pieces. Hell, if you look carefully enough you’ll spot Jack Nicholson – who made no impression on me as a ten year-old – and Dennis Hopper among the throng of people crowded into a room shouting at each other. In other words, if you have any appreciation for the revolution that would sweep Hollywood in the late sixties and early seventies, a period where movies habitually cast a jaundiced if not outraged view of America coming apart – among other images that roll by during the course of the movie’s carefully calculated chaos is the indelible sequence of a South Vietnamese police officer shooting a suspected Viet Cong soldier through the head on a Saigon street. If that didn’t alert me – or, god knows, my mother – that Head was no Hard Day’s Night, that clinched it. Almost as much as the sequence of the boys configured as Victor Mature’s dandruff or, my personal favourite, of drummer Micky Dolenz – my personal fave Monkee – blowing up a Coke machine in the desert.

In keeping with the deconstructive temper of the times, Head was a ruthless dig at image-building, a struggle that was playing out on another front as The Monkees themselves were fighting over control of the writing, performing and ownership of their own music. It was a question of authenticity, and as far as the movie was concerned authenticity could only be reached by blowing every else up in the air. The playing field was being levelled to let the crowds in the bleachers rush the game, and it was Head that had first scorched that earth.

Revolt and dissent were in the air – it was season of the Democratic convention in Chicago, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the election of the polarizing Richard Nixon – running on a frightening law-and-order ticket – and Head was hardly alone. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was a head-trip of an entirely different – cosmic and hallucinogen-inspired – order. Head even had a spiritual cousin in one of the year’s biggest hits, and a movie that would blow my pre-pubescent mind, Planet of the Apes.

But it took the movie almost two full generations to be appreciated as the kindred spirit of Godard, Warhol, McLuhan, Laugh-In and the Marx Brothers that it is. Today you can’t even think about what happened to Hollywood in the late sixties without including Head.

Enter this Head with an open mind. Marvel at the fact that it was even made, that a studio paid for it, or that the primary audience for a Monkees movie was kids like me: kids who had the records, the pinups, the fan club membership and a wall full of Monkees paraphernalia. Just imagine the same kind of movie ever being made today.

My mother, needless to say, was both confused and mortified. Weirdly, it was her reaction that suggested to me there was something going on beneath all this chaos. Something perhaps even more important than The Monkees themselves. If my mom was frightened by Head, it had to be doing something right. As for my daughter, she had already absorbed the message that Head sent long before Spice World was ever released: there is no authenticity in pop, only the perpetual, and essentially rejuvenating, quest to find it.

Find the next playtimes for Head on Hollywood Suite