“Say, are you girls doing anything after you beat the shit out of me?”
On October 9th, 1962, teenage drop out D’Lana (D’Lana Tunnell) ditches her boyfriend and joins a gang of lesbians called the “Mad, Mad Man Haters”. They murder D’Lana’s boyfriend and take her to see Topsy Turvy’s (also Tunnell) latest man-hating “nudie cutie” film only to discover that the two women look identical.
Writer and director John Michael McCarthy’s Teenage Tupelo (1995) is a DIY extravaganza of trash, retro aesthetics, militant feminism, music videos, and Southern hospitality. McCarthy, like John Waters, wears his influences on his sleeve. These range from Doris Wishman and Russ Meyer to Jean-Luc Godard. McCarthy’s singular vision is a broadcast from a post-punk wasteland as if he had adapted a Cramps record into a movie.
The 16mm black and white photography is grainy and gives the film the look of a Richard Kern short. Out of this milieu McCarthy paints a portrait of life in the sixties as imagined by MTV. The fanciful color segments of the movie juxtapose the “realism” of black and white with sexual fantasies that look like music videos or are simply movies projected onto a silver screen.
Teenage Tupelo is “full throttle sexploitation” as women lay about topless or “beat the shit” out of sleaze ball musicians. The female body is a sexual vessel for vengeance and McCarthy’s gaze renders it as titillating as possible. It’s here that the influence of Wishman and Meyer is most pronounced. There’s a surreal other worldliness to the proceedings that is unique to the independent exploitation features of the sixties.
In this post-modernist stew of garish visuals and punk personalities McCarthy finds some cinematic poetry. Borrowing from Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), McCarthy completes D’Lana’s arc as she sits in a darkened theater watching Topsy Turvy’s latest opus. D’Lana sees herself, contradictions and all, up on the screen. She is moved to enlist Topsy to help her break free of her mother and her stifling situation to hit the road and make a life for herself. It’s a poignant moment that loses none of its impact amid McCarthy’s trashy excess.
Teenage Tupelo is a film that deserves its place among other great DIY features of the nineties like Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymore (1996). These grassroots efforts, despite their limitations, possess a unique urgency and emotional power that many of the more polished films of that era lacked. These are passion projects made of blood, sweat and tears. These are transmissions from unheralded corners of the American sub-culture begging to be discovered.
