On the eve of punk rock’s unverifiable 30 year anniversary,
we’re being treated to the usual nostalgia reserved for such
milestones—namely, a slew of documentaries, each a blind man
contending that the elephant is a tree, a snake, or a spear.
Therein lies the problem with Punk’s Not Dead, a doc that
insists… well, you get the idea. Full of brief, strangled footage of
bands doing their thing and snippety interviews with everyone in
punk, its message is clear: Punk is still alive, and it’s huge, and
it’s being played by poor kids and losers everywhere, and it’s a
multifaceted marketing juggernaut being spoon fed to the masses like
some kind of high fructose corn syrup-laden pabulum. To illustrate this
point, more than two hours of Good Charlotte “interviews” and pandering
justifications drooled out by punk’s aged and nominal success stories
are paraded through the parlor. For an audience weaned on two-minute
songs, two hours is a lifetime.
In addition to the poor editing—there’s so much footage that’s
cut at such short lengths that the film seems to be a two-hour long
trailer for itself—other bad traits show up, too. The simpering
nostalgia (a punk taboo if there ever was one), a naïve assumption
that anyone viewing a punk documentary wouldn’t already be aware that
being a punk was once difficult (nay, life threatening), and the
inclusion of multiple justifications for punk’s recent commercial
obsequiousness, without offering a qualified assessment of the impact
of such “success.”
While the intensively archival Punk’s Not Dead was made as
producer/director Susan Dynner’s very qualified labor of love, and was
constructed under the proud DIY aesthetic embraced by punk itself,
Dynner’s film largely buckles under its own crushing volume and
confusion. Indeed, punk isn’t dead—but like a friendly
elephant that’s come back from a fresh burial at Stephen King’s Pet
Sematary, maybe it should be. This is, after all, hardly the same
animal you grew up with.