Almost Famous - More Notes

If the film is, as I've argued, about William (and in some ways Russell and rock n roll) becoming an adult, then the role models that William has are important. I'm going to offer a basic analysis of the options facing young William, which will give me a way of working through the film's conceptual shortcoming or shortcuttings as it turns out.

1. Lester Bangs - the vocational role model for rock journalism; uncool but doing something you really love; built upon a sort of personal integrity
2. His mother - overprotective, superego in full effect; a respectable adult with a traditional job but definitely without glamour
3. Stillwater (primarily Russell Hammond) - the spiritual model for an arrested childhood into adulthood; coolness; community; money; sex

The three models all have their shortcomings, and coincidentally, they match up to the three parts of the psyche: the ego, the superego, and the id.

Lester wants to help, but he bemoans the future of his vocation. He's not really being an effective salesman for the rock journalism profession when he tells William that he got in just at the point that real rocknroll was dying. He in many ways is the adult version of William, a chance for the 15 year old to see himself in ten years: chubby, excited, and available to talk on the phone to a 15 year old kid on weekends. Lester is William's EGO made objective, a chance to see himself, hear himself embodied in the older body of another.

William's mom means well. She's intelligent, but she's a superego run rampant. Her idea of protection borders on suffocation.

Stillwater is all id, the sex, the emotional backstabbing, the dirty secrets. The real sort of dirty secret about Stillwater is that EVERYONE knows how they really are EXCEPT Stillwater themselves. That is, the only one really surprised about the stories they generate for William and Rolling Stone are the bandmembers. I mean Russell shows up at some house and dives off a building. He claims not to remember saying, "I'm a Golden God" but everyone else in the band can't be too surprised given their take on him. Bebe (Jason Lee) is maybe the worst of all. He's clearly not on drugs when he starts spouting his buffoonish nonsense about "chicks" and "changing the world." He just can't stand that his real version of himself is that baldly banal. It's no big surprise that each of the characters reveal secrets to the "enemy" William about themselves. All they do is live to transgress! Their schtick is that they do what they're not supposed to do! In this way, they are completely uninteresting.

Lester gives William the option of being blissfully detached. He maintains his principles, but he never gets to participate socially in a meaningful way with anyone but other versions of himself.

His mother gives him security, the chance to have education and a house. She is "real" in Russell Hammond's terminology. But she's also the antithesis of rock n roll, the thing that William loves most. The sacrifice is a crucial one. The offer? Have security but give up the one thing you love.

Stillwater offers decadence, a chance to embrace the excesses of American life. It is a world fundamentally without responsibility where one's job consists of being as flamboyantly transgressive as possible. "I'm on drugs!" But they are conflicted backstabbers who ultimately only care about themselves and view others as one more source of personal pleasure.

Penny Lane, the one main character I've failed to mention thus far, is a cautionary tale. She takes Stillwater seriously and gets burned.

The film ends with the ego and id getting together under the superego's close watch. Russell ends up with William at his mom's house rather than with Penny. That is, the film decides that to give us "everything" (which is Russell Brand's final answer to the oft ask question "What do you love most about music?"). But the result is a little too pat. The final cover of the Rolling Stone in which William's story finally reaches the masses tells us that "Stillwater Runs Deep." But do they? In fact, they are stereotypically perverse, a bunch of buffoons whose own surprise at the original story is not what they said as much as the way in which they fulfilled every rock god cliche.

My final beef with the Sports Guy is that the film isn't that original. It tells us the story we already knew. Does that make it any less difficult? No, but it's not some bastion of originality. The film is its titles, a carefully computerized font that recreates handwriting, a simulacrum of reality that only manages to display the cliche in an intensely effective way.

What's fascinating is that they seem unable to recognize how hackneyed they are, how they are fulfilling a pre-written script to a 'T.' If this mid-level band struggling with success is already