In the introduction to “Teenage Wasteland,” the former Village Voice writer Donna Gaines’s study of 1980s suburban youth, she poses a few simple questions that initiated her project: “I wanted to understand how alienated kids survived, as well as how they were defeated,” she writes. “How did they maintain their humanity against what I now felt were impossible odds? I wondered. What keeps young people together when the world they are told to trust no longer seems to work? What motivates them to be decent human beings when nobody seems to respect them or take them seriously?”These questions are also at the core of “The Decline of Western Civilization” trilogy, released for the first time on DVD and Blu-Ray on June 30. (The first part of the trilogy also recently screened as part of BAMcinemaFest, and the second part will screen as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s “Indie 80’s” series in August.) Directed by Penelope Spheeris, each of the three films, made between 1981 and 1998 with long gaps in between, documents the way teenagers cope with alienation through the formation of communities, typically built around music and (anti)fashion, a struggle to restructure their identity with the motto, as Orange Juice’s Edwyn Collins once sang, to “rip it up and start again.”“The Decline of Western Civilization,” the first part of the trilogy, focuses on the nascent hardcore-punk scene emerging in Los Angeles in the beginning of the 1980s. Rejection is the shared ethos — of family values, of professionalism, of the ideas of success and excess ushered in by the Reagan-era. Through interviews and live performances by bands such as Black Flag, X, and the Germs, along with spikey-haired kids on the fringes of the scene, the film creates a portrait of youth in revolt. By letting the kids speak for themselves, by talking with them instead of at them, they are given space to explain their attraction to punk music — with its physical and sonic aggression — and, more significantly, the intellectual appeal of dismissal. This is not to say that the “Decline” series is uncritical of its subjects. In the second installment, “The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years,” Spheeris takes her camera back to the streets of Los Angeles less than decade later to document the burgeoning heavy metal scene centered on the Sunset Strip. These kids, while still consumed by a similar urge of rejection, have fully embraced the economic ideal of the decade. In the first film, the subjects champion their outsiderness; in the second, the hair-sprayed and spandexed metal-heads are concerned with nothing but money (and girls, but only as a form of transaction). They want to be famous, to be a part of the popular culture. They want to sell their rebelliousness to stadiums of screaming fans.Again, Spheeris lets them speak for themselves. But this time, the world they’ve created seems remarkably naïve. There is no true rejection of popular culture, no embrace of a community that’s been created out of necessity. What they’ve built for themselves is unstable. This is rock ’n’ roll as commodity, and most of the people involved don’t even seem to realize it. When Spheeris, at one point, innocently asks a few of the subjects what they would do if they don’t become rock stars, all of them refuse to admit that success isn’t on its way. Watching the film now, and realizing that only a handful of the people interviewed ever went on to achieve even a modicum of success, makes the whole thing sadder.Almost a decade later, after a string of Hollywood films — “Wayne’s World,” the remake of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the Chris Farley vehicle “Black Sheep” — Spheeris went back to the series, this time focusing on late-’90s gutter punks in Los Angeles, a cyclical return to the first film. These are kids who are surviving outside the standards of traditional living, squatting in abandoned buildings and living under bridges. Their view of the world is harsh, their hope for a future nonexistent.What would be fascinating now would be for Spheeris to return to the series. What does punk rock look like today? Is there a viable subculture that is based on rejection of the status quo? I don’t know the answer but I’m sure that Spheeris and her camera would be able to provide a very clear portrait.
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