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Soda Jerk Hello Dankness (2022)

Mirroring our every trip to the multiplex, Hello Dankness (2022) begins with a commercial. Before any credit or title pageindeed, before any commentary, manipulation, or outside editthe artist duo known as Soda Jerk present the entirety of PepsiCo, Inc.s deeply batshit 2017 commercial wherein Kendall Jenner solves racism and police brutality with a can of soda. The inclusion makes us giggle in self-defense at the vulturous media-scape we live inone capable of producing such infamous relicswhile simultaneously setting precedent for the plastic, mashed-up Frankensteins monster of a film to follow: nothing is off the editing table. The inclusion of the ad catalogs and recommits to cultural memory the footage itself, as the ad was (obviously) hastily pulled by the corporation as the (obvious) criticisms rolled in. It was called a trivialization of radical intentions and just another tone-deaf act by a corporation to cloak profit-mongering in the garb of art-making and activism. Which is to say: it was an advertisement.

The Pepsi adwherein an army of bougie makers and entrepreneurs lead a protest against something, only to end up confronted by a wall of cops whose defenses are charmed and breached as soon as Jenner offers a can of Pepsialso demands the spectator of Hello Dankness to reason whether the movie has begun or not. Where in the cinematic apparatus are we when the pre-spectacle space and the cinematic one mush together so goopily? Its perhaps not off-base to suggest that most viewers of a film made by artists who are, as their press bio notes, interested in the politics of images, might be media-literate (read: online) enough to recognize the advertisement and chuckle in recognition before it reaches its daffy climax. The inclusion is a perfect throat-clearing in the films quest to unpack, atomize, and re-package cultural thrulines and inadvertently chaoticize the preliminary thesis and ensuing existence of Hello Dankness: all moving images freight art and commerce equally, or can. Why construct a collaged mash-up that plunders recent American popular culture to retell American history when the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad already exists as the perfect intersection of the crisis of image-making in the twenty-first century? What filmic critique exists past the bombed-out dread and looney resignation such a manipulation of image inspires? Because, Hello Dankness suggests that, simply by continuing past its opening ad-quote, we can waste an image just as good as art and commerce can. Hello Dankness, then, is not a question or investigation into whether acts of commerce and art bleed into each other (as always they obviously do), but a sensory experience of what that bleeding feels like in our collective, plastic body.

Recognition itself is under scrutiny in Hello Dankness, nominally a collage that re-edits hundreds of pre-existing films, songs, memes, news feeds, and foley from the recent past. It culminates into a credits sequence that feels more like a chapbooks acknowledgements page than sample clearance. The films movements are recognizable to anybody reared on or responding to a Rickroll, its narrative familiar to any whove walked around and watched America after the 2016 election. In a certain way, Hello Dankness is a history of America. Its first post-Pepsi sequence establishes both its language and story, as footage of Tom Hanks in The Burbs (1989), Annette Bening in American Beauty (1999), Mike Myers and Dana Carvey in Waynes World (1992), Ice Cube in Are We Done Yet? (2007) and a soon-to-be revealed cast of thousands share a neighborhoodand cinematic spacein 2016 America. Eyelines and match-cuts are swapped out and spliced in just as often as manipulated digital images are introduced into pre-existing frames. Hanks in The Burbs can look across his lawn at Benings Carolyn Burnham from American Beauty, their suspicious glances removed from their original contexts and remixed in reaction to a Bernie 2016 lawn sign for Hanks and an Im With Her Hillary placard for Bening. Though such a thing may only be theoretical, Soda Jerk suggests, on a purely visual level, Hello Dankness is a miracle of editing. In both image placement (of course Wayne and Garth move their hockey net out of the street to accommodate Carolyn Burnhams SUV) and image re-reading (of course the Waynes World doofuses would be chirpy alt-right teens, exhibiting trolly behavior by their own tuned-outedness, and of course American Beautys icy and beleaguered real estate girlboss would be the totemic Nasty Woman tote toter), the film feels both recognizable and alien. Its an ache in the mouth, a chewed-up something that impacts every utterance that passes through it. As the ensuing new text, Hello Dankness reads flawlessly despite being an act of flaw: an interrupted image (color correction and careful transcodingadvised by Anthology Film Archives own John Klacsmannacting in concert to nudge disparate images together). Less than a pre- or post-modern great soup of being, Hello Dankness is a digital quotation as ephemeral quotidian, a deadly lark that pranks looking as much as it pranks what gets looked at when were not looking: Because a vision softly creeping / Left its seeds while I was sleeping.

Narratively, Hello Dankness re-contains history in a certain way. In its plundered language, it plays out the ongoing farce of American electoral politics and charts the rise and decline of Bernies and Hillarys and Donalds and Joes amid conspiracy theory backlash, pandemic consciousness, and reactionary meme-making. One of its most compelling visual decodings occurs, again, in its credit sequence: by organizing its list of samples Ordered by president, the film presents the fallacy of assuming that history (of images and bodies) unfolds a certain way. Its a deliberate prank on the American social studies textbook, itself a collation of images curated a certain way to curate a certain narrative and an echo of Godards insistence: in order to see one image, you need two. Is the film ultimately an act of radical politics? Its too dubious of the culpability of the image to insist that it is. The film never gestures in irony. It ends with a breath of levity more sympathetic to the removal and recontextualization of human lives rather than digital images of them.

By forgoing memey irony for looney-tune heartinessas well as in its obvious affection for and attention to The BurbsHello Dankness is a fitting re-visitation of Joe Dantes own mash-up monster, The Movie Orgy (1968). Dante, a genre hound and film history font who made affably anti-capitalist films for several major American studios throughout the eighties and nineties, holds as much affection for the moving image as he does contempt for the market forces that corrode it. The best of his films areto invoke a word often misapplied to any hack with a studio contract and half a consciencesubversive dreamscapes, precisely because they hold postmodern despair accountable to material plasticity. What if we moved this way? What if we existed after a Pepsi commercial?

When one shot moves to another, there is, however momentarily, blackness. Certain decodings of film grammar suggest that this space between edits is where time and space continues to pass. As the camera position changes, moving either towards or away from the subject or finding a new one entirely, the spectator doesnt panic, recognizing the half-history, half-memory project of cinema itself. Theres an internal logic to each filmic universe that subconsciously teaches the spectator what these (very) momentary blackouts are: blinks in a unified vision. We dont panic in the iota interims blackness between shots, we fill in the gaps. Soda Jerk echoes and contains elders like Dante and Godard while simultaneously razing the rank and reductive idolization that stagnates both politics and image-making. In their digital slipstream, they suggest that the blink-void between different images isnt just inherent to a specific cultural object, but culture more broadly. The blink-space between shots in one movie is the same as the darkness between another. By not only allowing but chasing slippage, Hello Dankness insists that every image belongs to every other one and that cinema is the process by which, holding tightly to each other, we find the hollowing-out of commerce and the potentialities of art. And in between we fill in the gaps.

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Soda Jerk's Hello Dankness The Brooklyn Rail - Brooklyn Rail