Punk Slash! Musicals: Tracking Slip-Synch on Film (review)

Punk, like its amorphous p brethren pornography and postmodernism, is notoriously tricky to define. Is it an aesthetic? A set of values? Both? Does true punk exist only outside of mainstream corporate channels? Is punk a political protest against conformity and commercialism or an apolitical celebration of the trashy and extreme? Is it always angry? Does it always come with a mohawk? These questions become more knotty in relation to punk cinema, a film movement that has been paradoxically equated with such fast-paced films as Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000), with its MTV-style editing, dark content, and confrontational imagery (i.e., films that correspond to the more shocking, in-your-face characteristics of punk), as well as with such slow-paced films as the stripped-down, cerebrally arty, and moody The Foreigner (Poe, 1978) (films that, like punk, actively work against mainstream co-optation through their embrace of the imperfect and the aesthetically noncommercial).

David Laderman, in Punk Slash! Musicals (hereafter Punk), wisely bypasses this conundrum of punk cinematic definition by concentrating on films with punk characters and content while moving beyond a discussion of what makes these films punk, instead focusing on a particular element that they have in common. This particular element, most evident in the films' musical numbers, is what Laderman cleverly terms "slip-synch," a riff on the now commonplace, and patently artificial, performance technique of lip-synch. Slip-synch refers to performance moments in which the vocals, instrumentation, and visuals temporarily disalign, laying bare the constructedness of the performance and the film in which it is situated. As Laderman explains, "the singer-performer slips out of sync, alienated from yet caught up in the performance spectacle" (3). Within punk cinema, these instances of asynchronous rupture, which Laderman describes as simultaneously resistant and conformist, are emblematic of the difficulties of "maintaining authenticity in the context of a deeply mediated performance mode" (9). Moreover, slip-synch is representative of wider tensions within punk, tensions between independence and co-optation, subversion and conformity, affect and professionalization, and, most salient within Laderman's study as well as punk culture writ large, tensions between authenticity and inauthenticity. Laderman remarks upon this latter tension with his rather cumbersome use of the term "in/authenticity," which appears throughout.

As Laderman reveals in the last chapter of Punk, the instance of slip-synch that inspired him to write Punk Slash! Musicals is the memorable fantasy" sequence from Sid and Nancy (Cox, 1986) in which Gary Oldman, playing Sid Vicious, performs a jagged, snarling version of "My Way" in front of a television studio audience. Midway through his performance Oldman abruptly stops singing, pulls out a gun, and proceeds to shoot several of the audience members, while his voice illogically continues on the soundtrack. For Laderman, this moment both challenges the bloat of televisual spectacle and operates in its service: "On the one hand, Sid enacts excessive punk rebellion, appearing to break out of the contrived performance. On the other hand, such spontaneous rage becomes 'spontaneous rage,' a contrived effect of the performance spectacle" (146).

Laderman's analysis of this scene is one of the most clear and convincing in the book and successfully aids in elucidating the slip-synch concept. In fact, as it is such an instructive example and as it motivated Laderman to write Punk, one wonders why he waits to the end to discuss it. Laderman does analyze his cinematic examples, which span 1978 to 1986, in chronological order. Thus, it makes logical sense to close the book with Sid and Nancy, especially since it represents punk cinema's "swan-song climax" (139). At the same time, a minor breach in temporal logic would seem only apropos in a book about such an "out of whack" concept as slip-synch.

Before delving into detailed analyses of the films, Laderman provides the context for punk cinema's emergence in a comprehensive and well-researched opening chapter that grounds his ideas within and...