So alone: the East Village post-punk scene and homelessness in Rachel Amodeo's What About Me

Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Village Voice called it a "broke-ass tragicomedy of desperation", and I guess that's about right. This is Rachel Amodeo's film What About Me (1993), a sort of lucked-out punk drama of homelessness, hopelessness and street scuzz based in New York's Lower East Side in the late 1980s-early 1990s. "That's the East Village of my youth and it looks like 100 years ago. Sheesh", says one person on YouTube (where the whole film is available), and it seems that New York cineastes now view this no-budget cultish film as a sort of precious snapshot of how this much-mythologised part of New York looked and felt back in the post-punk, pre-gentrification day. Add in biggish roles for punk stars Johnny Thunders and Richard Hell, as well as cameos for Dee Dee Ramone (as a semi-dandified wino who tells Vietnam veteran stories) and Jerry Nolan (as a gangster with a bootlace tie), and yeah, I guess it's a sort of instant cult-punk film. Oh, and it's also a touching, saddening film about loss, drift and death. The main character, Lisa, played by the director herself, experiences a numbing journey into post-rape trauma, street-level hustle (a very muted kind of hustle in her case), crack-taking (well, she tries it), and an all-round decline into a near-zombie state where her one fixed idea is to take the Staten Island ferry to see the Statue of Liberty which another character (her street friend Nick) says she herself resembles (which, in fact, she does). Yep, give me your tired, your poor etc. Anyway, having yesterday taken my own little journey through What About Me, here are a few thoughts on this excellent film:

*What About Me is suffused with motorcycle jacket-wearing post-punk chic, with the homeless Lisa drifting into situations - including bars or loft parties - where everyone looks like they're in a band. This could have been a pretty cheesy, Pretty In Pink-ification of an important music scene, but in the context of the film it more or less works. The early parts of the film establish Lisa as a natural goth type but not one from any specific scene. Instead, she's a sort of eternal child. She can't get up in the mornings, hoards a collection of toy dolls and is completely unworldly. Her encounters with the East Village scenesters is played to semi-comic effect, especially her adoption by a dopey, pouting, eye-rolling punk guy, Tom (Nick Zedd), who's supposed to be irresistible to women. Among other things, there's an excellent encounter between Tom and Nick (Lisa's street pal), with Nick's irrascible attitude represented by a "Fuck you" pin badge. Yeah, man, go fuck yourself, you fucking creep ...

Hey chicken-lips, I'm gonna wipe that smile right off ya face you little creep

*Speaking of fuck-you behaviour, the film is entertainingly stocked with ultra-direct New York rudeness, where a whole host of people routinely spout abuse and withering put-downs, none of which seem to really matter. 

*Johnny Thunders, playing Lisa's brother Vito, apparently affecting a British accent (or did I imagine this?), is pretty memorable with his cool, heroin-punk demeanour: studded leather jacket, a thin, mournful face heavily made-up with eyeliner and face-whitener. Vito's absence from Lisa's life - he's in New Orleans, possibly doing drug deals - is shown to be a major reason for Lisa's decline. The film is a sort of study of how familial breakdown can precipitate all sorts of crises, with the uncertain "community of the street" as likely to involve ruthless exploitation as random acts of kindness.

*Aside from Tom's self-absorbed semi-kindness toward Lisa, the other benevolent characters who - temporarily at least - provide her with a lifeline are the fellow homeless person Nick (brilliantly played by one-time Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson) and Richard Hell's Paul, one of the punk party crowd. Hell, who was already in his early 40s when the film was made, is almost an elder uncle figure to the Lisa, while I take it that Zedd's Tom - with his cute-boy sex appeal - is a sort of ironic tribute to the younger Hell, known (not least by himself) for his good looks and conquests with women. Heartbreakers, indeed. 

*Naturally enough, music is important in the film. Johnny Thunders' stuff pops up repeatedly - So Alone, You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, Joey Joey, Bird Song, In God's Name - while the Voidoids' Bob Quine and Marc Ribot scored some of the incidental music. We also hear the Only Ones' Another Girl Another Planet blasting out (and sounding especially good) when Lisa gets taken into a loft party, nothwithstanding her bedraggled state, which includes a bleeding wound from being hit by a motorbike in the street. Another song we hear is Aisha by Vacuum Bag (which has no online presence as far as I can discern), the band in which director Amodeo had herself played drums. 

Another girl another planet: Richard Hell's Paul gets his party act on

*A pair of hoodlum lesbian bikers who - rather contemptuously - half help, half abuse Lisa, are in one scene shown reading out extracts from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. With Lisa having already been raped by the landlord at her deceased aunt's place, the film's sexual politics seem to involve quite a bit of disgust with predatory male behaviour. In another scene, the homeless "bum" Nick sits by an outside fire with two other homeless men who argue about whether or not the world would be "a better place" without women. 

And ... er, well, that will do I reckon. These are just a few (over-obvious?) observations on Amodeo's extremely enjoyable film. The acting in What About Me is often "spacey" (Amodeo as Lisa, Nick Zedd as Tom) and/or mechanical, which to me comes across as deliberate and as stylistically similar to the blankness of Bresson or Kaurismäki rather than simply wooden acting. In a scene where he gets shot in the street, Jerry Nolan as the targeted gangster Joey wisecracks about needing to smoke "a lighter brand" as he expires in Lisa's arms. It's unrealistic in the way that violent episodes in Kaurismäki's films are unrealistic, and in this case it's topped off with Thunders' Joey Joey playing away throughout the scene. Is this crime genre parody? A fun homage? Or yet another seriously-intended emotional hit for the increasingly-traumatised Lisa? It seems to be all of these things. And this is one of the reasons What About Me is enjoyable, as it plays around with genre expectations and its own mean streets setting. In an early scene in the film, Lisa is shown spending a night in a flop-house hotel where the walls are adorned with huge paintings of the Statue of Liberty. Lisa stares at the walls seemingly aghast. As seedy hotels go, to me Lisa's room looks rather amazing but it's pretty clear that we're in a place of luckless irony. The huddled masses of America aren't exactly welcomed and cared for by their host country. As we see in the film, if they're without money they're quickly cast adrift and end up sleeping beneath bridges or in freezing doorways. And as the child of Italian immigrants to the USA herself, I can only assume Amodeo saw all this partly from an immigrant's standpoint. 

So alone: Lisa enjoying the USA's famed care and protection of its poor  

Meanwhile, given how the Bowery had for years encompassed New York's CBGBs punk scene as well as the infamous flops and missions of skid row, I guess What About Me is the almost inevitable filmic fusing of these two worlds. It could so easily have been an exercise in trivialising an important social issue, but instead I think it's a real success. A semi-comic, semi-serious fantasy about homelessness and post-punk partying in late-80s New York. For my own part, whenever I've visited New York it's been the Bowery I've tended to gravitate toward (not least because of nearby Chinatown), and although it's usual these days to bemoan gentrification in this part of New York (and all of Manhattan) I've still found this area to be a good mix of post-gentrification wealth and scuzzy, graffiti'd normality. But hey, perhaps I'm speaking very much as a privileged visitor to these streets (could be). One of the keynote songs in What About Me is Thunders' You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, which plays out toward the end of the film. I must admit I've never really liked Thunders' stuff, but in the context of the film the song works really well. And for all the nostalgia merchants wanting to bring back the glory days of the Voidoids, the Ramones and the whole CBGBs scene, it's a good reminder that there's no going back. You can't put your arms around a memory/Don't try, don't try ...