the agony and the ecstasy

This is the first of several reviews by Watch Minneapolis of Sound Unseen films.  The Agony And The Ecstasy of Phil Spector screens this Thursday at the Southern Theater at 7:30.  Thanks to contributing writer Russell Anway for this review.

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The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector

Phil Spector is one of the greatest musical talents of the 20^th century.  But if you know his name it is as likely that you know him as the lunatic with the permed afro who was found guilty of  murder as it is you know him by his music.  The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, a documentary showing Thursday October 7^th at The Southern Theater as a part of this week’s Sound Unseen Film Festival, is comprised of courtroom footage from Spector’s murder trial and interviews with him from the same time.  He is a strange man, but not uncharming.  He is fascinating like a car accident.  As you hear his songs and his musings on them it is impossible not to get caught up in their massive sound and catchy hooks, and equally challenging not to be unnerved by their perverse biographical parallels within Spector’s personal history.

Early in his career Spector was known as “The Tycoon of Teen,” a name he received for his rock and pop song’s popularity amongst the youth of their day.  His earliest hit was “To Know Him is To Love Him.”  It seems like a simple song of unrequited teen love, but as always with Spector there is a dark alter explanation.  The song, Spector tells us, is about his father, who we will later learn committed suicide when he was very young.  This basic dichotomy between apparently simple themes of happiness and young love, and their bizarre or deranged counterparts within Spector’s biography, supply the bulk of the documentary’s intrigue.

During the film many of Spector’s songs are played in their entirety.  They are used in the background, as songs are generally played on movie soundtracks, but they are also presented to us as the subject itself.  When the songs play, critical notes about their content and instrumentation are written on the bottom of the screen.  At first they slip by largely unnoticed, and are at times slightly annoying.  But as more of them roll through, and the juxtaposition of the music with courtroom images becomes more obvious, and more ironic, the gag becomes clear.  It’s hard not to chuckle at the combination of a court room photo array of handguns and munitions taken by the prosecution as “Going To The Chapel” plays behind it.  And there is a disturbing “Top 40” charm to a courtroom parade of women describing the ways they were physically and emotionally abused by Spector when they are paired with the infections “Be My Baby,” until slowly the scene fades to a discussion of The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”

The film is never about the trial directly, it is a music doc first and foremost.  But the music is never left to exist completely apart from the man.  There is a discussion of Spector’s song “Da Doo Ron Ron.”  He tells of how the song was a reaction to Duke Ellington’s “If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” an infectious, silly, poppy hit.  He tells us, “The real title was ‘When He Walked Me Home,’ but the hook was so dirty […] it was almost like committing incest.”  He says that at the time he was so brazen that he named the song after the background singers’ part just to see what he could get away with.  As he says this the director shows him sitting in the courtroom, flanked by lawyers, laughing.  Spector was eventually found guilty, but the film does not present him as a murderer.  Instead it phrases Spector’s story as something all too common:  A powerful man seeing what he can get away with.

This documentary’s title is an allusion to Michelangelo, but the documentarians are not alone in their comparison.  Spector is fond of comparing himself to the greatest artists of his millennium, saying that he came to a blank canvas and created the song “Be My Baby” just as DaVinci came to a blank canvas to create “The Last Supper.”  He thinks little of the musicians he worked with, excluding a small handful, viewing them as paints and brushes to his painter, remarking that any of his artists could have been replaced by any of his other artists.  He brushes aside the many high praises he has received throughout his career by way of their prolonged discussion.  While watching this documentary you may be repulsed by his personality or actions, but you can only be entertained by his music and wonder if he doesn’t deserve the place in history he feels he deserves.

-Russell Anway

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Trailer for The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector from VIXPIX Films on Vimeo.