Flipside

I had so many clever things to say about Gen X after watching Flipside, but in the ultimate ironic twist, my old-ass brain couldn’t hold onto them for long enough to make it to the page. I’m telling you, it was super-insightful. It was all about the long-dead concept of selling out and how if we live lives outside of our true selves and our true passions we are somehow disappointing the universe. And inviting judgement from everyone and anyone we ever met. Money be damned. It was a truly deep meditation on my life and generation. I swear.

But as it stands, this is my typical bullshit movie review where I say some stuff that doesn’t really tie together and end on a note that seems like a comma. I was a film production major and a cinema studies minor in college. I thought I would do some version of this for a living. But as a Gen Xer I was realistic about my limitations and my unwillingness to be uncomfortable and starving. Though I’ve been both at varying times in my early career. Not truly starving of course, but pretty damned hungry. I wasn’t lucky like Chris Wilcha, landing a marketing job at a stupid music marketing company that for some reason let him film everything. No, I drove literal dummies around LA and then production trucks around NYC and generally lived hand-to-mouth. Though, like Chris, I was lucky to have a safety net and was never in real danger of being homeless. But I wanted it to feel that way. Like the struggle was real.

This documentary, Wilcha’s second after 1999’s The Target Shoots First, is about a labor of love. A broken-down record store in NJ owned by a man who is part collector / part hoarder, but loves records and music more than he loves making money from said things. A record store where Wilcha used to work and built his love of music. A record store that serves as both a symbol of a bygone era and a cautionary tale. Which I’m not quite sure is what Wilcha was going for. Because this is a tale about Wilcha himself and his struggle to make a living by following his heart. By following his passion and actively not selling out. The gold standard of Gen X. Because nobody can truly be successful by this generation’s measure by working against their true nature. By going for stability and money instead of altruism and integrity. A truly fucking stupid thing to think, but that’s just who we are. And, look, we don’t have to take it to the Gen Z extreme and “get that money,” but what was wrong with Wilcha’s life of directing high-end TV commercials for brands? He provided for his family. He could afford to fail and fail and fail in his endeavors to create more documentaries with little to no worry. Only disappointing his subjects and himself, but able to maintain a comfortable life because he had “sold out.”

The thing is, you can’t save what doesn’t want to be saved. Because somewhere in his heart Wilcha thought by creating this documentary that it would inspire people back to a record shop that is an antiquity. An owner in Dan Dondiego who seems more interested in entombing himself in stacks of moldy 45s than he does making a single sale. And while Wilcha doesn’t say as much — though his ten-year hiatus after starting the doc speaks volumes — his heart just wasn’t in it. And he can say it was just another failed attempt or false start in his multiple failed attempts and false starts, but a piece of him had to see in Dan what his future could have been. And it scared him. Or made him sad. Or disproved his thesis: that a life of the purest form of artistic integrity and following one’s heart leads to happiness and fulfillment. But what he found was the exact opposite. A crank. A guy who hadn’t progressed. Hadn’t moved forward. Wasn’t happy. Wasn’t fulfilled. Was just stuck and slowly sinking, buried under the weight of his own stubbornness to stay the course and not be one of those sell-outs with the Websites and the cell phones and inventory record keeping. A man seemingly working against his own success. So, the excuse of Wilcha’s life intervened. And he vanished on the man. Until he came back because… Well, I’m not sure why he came back.

The interesting part is his relationship with Judd Apatow. A man who enticed him out to LA to begin with. The very successful man who introduced him to success. The skeleton key to his selling out. Not directly, but he was the gateway drug. As contrasted by another successful man that enters Wilcha’s life, David Milch. But a man with a very different story. One that does, in incredibly small way, actually make its way into my own. David and his wife, Rita, both of whom appear in the film, where my neighbors growing up in LA from about eleven on. They lived in a much bigger, nicer house across the street, but my parents were friendly with them and they were nice people. We went to a brunch for mother’s day the summer before I took off for college with them and a couple other friends and neighbors. My mom, ever the ballbuster, looked at David and asked him if he had any advice for me as I ventured forth into the world (to study TV production). He looked at me and said, “Don’t ever get caught with black tar heroin in Mexico.” Great advice, and the perfectly sad encapsulation of life advice from a man whose life was to quickly unravel and his career and health slide into a pretty sorry state. Eventually their house was sold and torn down. And then my folks moved, and their house was also leveled. Milch, once one of the most revered television writers in the industry, had very public struggles, and by the time this film was released was in an assisted living facility in the throws of Alzheimer’s. But, you know what, Milch will forever be seen as an uncompromising artist. A man who lived the hard life that he wrote about. Who drugged and gambled, but was always true to his craft. And what did this get him? A sad room and an impressive IMDB. Though Wilcha does pull a rabbit out of a hat with this one, leaving us with honestly the most affecting part of the documentary that illuminates Milch’s love of art and artists where Wilcha himself becomes both the patsy and the student of Milch’s teachings. It’s very sweet.

Like a lot of documentaries, the narrative doesn’t really go anywhere. Though there are some anecdotes and little moments that speak to me. Wilcha is clearly a thoughful guy. One who is self-reflective and self-flagellating. But there is something inherently sad about this thing. A man who is by all measures successful, making a film about a place he once loved that he hopes will somehow be a rebuke to his success. Only to find it is, in fact, not cool to be the guy he thought he wanted to be. The guy a whole generation thought they wanted to be. Shit, I heard the tiny indie band Beulah apologize profusely at one of their shows back in 2001 that they let Target use their song “Silver Lining” in a commercial. Beulah! A band whose members probably couldn’t even afford to shop at Target. Yet they clearly felt enough extreme guilt to beg forgiveness of the Bowery Ballroom audience as if they’d killed our grandmothers. It’s a weird thing this sense of purity that can be so self-defeating. Such a limiting factor for a generation of people who live by a code that rewards our souls with fidelity, but buries us in our own rigidity of spirit.