An excerpt from an essay in the Kill Yr Landlords Zine.
Researching [a film] series led me to correcting an inexplicable blind spot in my history as a cinephile: 1996’s Joe’s Apartment, written and directed by John Payson. The film is a generous expansion of a 1992 short (Joe’s Apt., also by Payson) that would feature between blocs of heavy-rotating music videos and episodes of Liquid Television, The Real World, and so on. At just three minutes, the short film is better suited to the constraints of the material. Crucially, the cockroaches in this version are stop-motion rather than CGI, which lends it a certain charm the feature version cannot sustain. Of this decision, animation director Chris Wedge told the film journalist Ian Failes that, “Unfortunately it stole some work from stop-motion animators in New York at the time, but we ended up doing more than 300 shots,” which now sounds sadly prophetic. I recalled commercials for the feature-length Joe’s from the brain-flattening tributary of broadcast television I mainlined every day after school, as Payson’s film was MTV’s much-vaunted first foray into theatrical feature cinema, released in July of 1996 just a few months ahead of Beavis and Butthead Do America.
Jerry O’Connell stars as the titular Joe, the protean New New Yorker: just graduated from college and fresh off the bus from Iowa, he’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of hope about his new life in the East Village, doing… well, what exactly? Does he even deserve to be here? While Joe makes a blandly sympathetic hero, he also represents a kind of parasitic strain in his own right in the eyes of the disenfranchised community of artists, punks, bohemians and low-level criminals who used to claim Lower Manhattan as their home without complication. (Many of the film’s funniest, and dumbest, jokes are delivered via Joe’s first friend in the city, a performance artist named “Walter Shit” (Jim Turner). Within the film’s first minutes Joe scores a crumbling, filthy walk-up apartment by pretending the deceased former tenant was his mother. It’s a bruising bit of rent-control satire, delivered with the kind of dudebro coarseness I alluded to earlier; thus, we are lowered into a depiction of New York City described understandably by Psychotronic Video magazine as “a bottomless pit of filth”.
Things get even better for Joe after he meets Lily (Meghan Ward), a blonde do-gooder helping build a neighborhood community garden. (Lily seems to hail from the same factory that produced the anti-real-estate-development NYU paleontologist Princess Daisy in the 1994 Super Mario Brothers.) Soon it’s revealed that Joe’s apartment is in a condemned building, slated to be demolished in favor of a new mega prison spearheaded by Lily’s father, Senator Dougherty (Robert Vaughn, bringing the patrician smarm he perfected with roles in Bullitt, Blake Edwards’ S.O.B. and the original Man From U.N.C.L.E. television series.) Joe, Lily, and the cockroaches band together to save the building, resulting in a tidal wave of abolitionist solidarity between the hippie gardeners and the cockroaches.
Joe’s Apartment runs just 82 minutes, an ideal length for a project designed to brainwash prepubescent Nickelodeon viewers into their natural next phase as pubescent MTV viewers. Yet even this was probably too much. Whether you find it lovably abrasive or just plain abrasive, the film represents an experiment that would not come to pass, not again in the 1990s nor (by any means) in whatever’s left of the studio system today. Speaking as someone who has long since made peace with the fact that living in New York City means killing a few cockroaches every now and again: it is deeply bizarre that the aforementioned executives really believed there was enough audience goodwill out there for 82 minutes of singing and dancing CGI cockroaches. There is no getting around this fact. (On his blog, the great Reginald Hudlin, director of House Party and Boomerang, wrote: “I love musicals, and I love animated movies. I was lucky enough to co-star in both. Problem was I played a roach in a movie about roaches, which meant no one, not even my mother or wife, have ever seen Joe’s Apartment.”)
In hindsight, the Clinton years look like a golden era for proudly asinine Hollywood products: among your Flintstoneses, Dumb and Dumbers, Bio-Domes, Encino Mans, The Stupidses and many more. Among these vainglorious artifacts, Payson’s film must represent some kind of apotheosis, a relic of a bygone world that testifies to the long leash granted upstart video artists and cartoonists in those days, its conceptual bravado matched by its sell-sell-sell cynicism. Watching it, traversing one needle drop to the next (Soul Coughing to Green Day to Moby), you can practically feel the Viacom suits signing checks in obsequiousness to what they think the kids want.
Joe's Apartment screens with a 16mm print of Claudia Weill & Eli Noyes's "Roaches' Lullaby" this evening, October 5, 7, and 10 at Anthology Film Archives as part of our series “Kill Yr Landlords.” Musicians and filmmakers Cassandra Jenkins and Stephanie Jenkins will introduce tonight's screening along with additional videos by Cassandra Jenkins.
Also tonight critic Nick Pinkerton will introduce Homebodies at 9:15pm.
The Kill Yr Landlords zine is available for pre-order.
