Volume that does not exist
Marty DiBergi arrives with a notepad and the straight face of a man who believes he is filming a real band. Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, released in 1984, follows a British heavy metal group through an American tour that shrinks as it goes. Christopher Guest’s Nigel Tufnel, Michael McKean’s David St. Hubbins and Harry Shearer’s Derek Smalls improvise most of what they say, which is why the stupidity has the texture of memory. Nobody is winking hard enough to break the lens. The joke depends on the camera pretending to respect them.
The gags have become folklore, which is a strange fate for a film about folklore. An amplifier whose numbers go to eleven. A Stonehenge prop delivered in inches instead of feet. An album cover, Smell the Glove, argued down to black on black. A procession of drummers who do not survive the job. Big Bottom and Hell Hole are ridiculous and, if you have stood near a certain kind of stage, not ridiculous enough. The songs were written to be bad in a precise way: three chords, a myth, a crotch, a drone. Metal’s grandeur and its paperwork are the same animal. The film just lets you see both in one dressing room.
What keeps it from being a sketch is the affection. Guest, McKean and Shearer know the way a guitarist touches a neck when he is nervous, the way a singer explains a lyric that does not have an explanation, the way a manager promises a hall that has already cancelled. Reiner’s DiBergi is the audience’s stand-in and also the disease: the documentary that flatters a band into believing its own press. When the gigs get smaller, the belief does not. That is the sad note under the laugh, and the reason musicians still quote the film as if it had toured with them.
This Is Spinal Tap is one of the funniest, most intelligent, most original films of the year.
(Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 1985)
Ebert, when the picture found its wider audience, called it one of the funniest films of the year and meant the intelligence as much as the punchlines. Later mockumentaries borrowed the form and often missed the ear. Spinal Tap works because the music is almost good. If the riffs were only a parody, the tour would be a cartoon. Because they nearly convince, the empty rooms are humiliating. Hard rock’s cult of volume, leather and destiny is examined by people who could have joined it. They chose, instead, to turn the monitors around.
The band, of course, escaped the movie and became a real touring outfit, which is the final joke and a kind of proof. A fiction precise enough gets hired by the world it mocked. This Is Spinal Tap remains the music film that taught audiences to hear the pause before a guitarist says something he thinks is profound. The pause is the portrait. Eleven is only the number painted on the dial.
