I used to work with a psychiatrist who once told me that children don't "get" abstract humor until they're 12 or so. That's why kids don't think Letterman is funny. I first saw this movie when I was about ten, and it really fucked me up.Winslow Leach just wants the world to hear his music, and what happens to him? His Faust cantata is stolen, he's beaten up and framed for drug possession, his teeth are pulled and replaced with metal dentures, and he's sent to prison. As if that isn't enough, he breaks out of prison and gets his head stuck in a record press trying to sabotage the plant!
Ha ha ha ha! Get it?
Everything about this movie disturbed me: the menacing Juicy Fruits, the casting couch vocal tryouts, the satanic contracts, Beef's onstage electrocution, the (attempted) televised assasination. And the end of the movie was particularly hard to stomach. Mortally wounded, Winslow crawls toward Phoenix, arm outstretched, while Paradise audience members crawl beside him, mockingly cheering him on ...
Okay, that's some heavy shit for a kid. But I saw the movie again as an adult and it's become one of my favorites. Weird, hunh? The Swan Archives is an excellent website with tons of ephemera for POTP obsessives.
Check it out here.
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