Hello Dankness is a film for our age of insanity, a work whose every fiber is attuned to the manipulation, division, distrust, disinformation and demented deliriousness of the last seven years of American life. A non-fiction collage culled exclusively from pre-existing movies, television and online material, it revisits our recent past through the filter of our favorite pop-cultural artifacts, in the process caustically mocking the left, the right, and everything else in sight. It’s a stinging political, social, and media critique made from digitally altered bits and pieces of entertainment favorites, at once hilarious, enraged, and as zonked out of its mind as many viewers will prefer to be while watching it.
Written, edited, and directed by Soda Jerk, an Australian sibling duo who relocated to Brooklyn in 2012 (and whose prior Terror Nullius was disowned by its commissioning body), Hello Dankness (Sept. 8, in theaters) is like the canniest YouTube video ever assembled, replete with all sorts of footage that suggests a copyright-infringement lawsuit (or 10) is on the horizon. It tells our national story through characters, scenarios, and songs that moviegoers and internet inhabitants will instantly recognize, albeit reconfigured to serve a new narrative—and, with it, a pointedly fresh purpose. In doing so, it provides a commentary on not only the nightmarishness of our current reality, but also on the nature of images: what they overtly and subtly say; how they can be re-engineered; and the fact that they’re defined by the context in which they’re presented and consumed.
If this makes Hello Dankness sound like a drag, rest assured that it’s a gonzo slice of cut-and-splice cine-madness. Its first act is to simply replay the infamous Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad in which the model joins a BLM-style protest alongside other multicultural hipsters and achieves rah-rah citizen-cop peace via a soft drink offering—a crass attempt to co-opt grassroots movements in order to further one woman’s celebrity and a corporation’s bottom line. That Soda Jerk don’t modify this reviled long-form spot is its own joke, and sets the tone for the ensuing snapshot of a country on the brink of a nervous breakdown, torn between Republicans and Democrats, idealism and avarice, compassion and a cruelty—comprised of racism, sexism, commercialism, and fascism—that seemingly knows no bounds.
Its tale begins in early 2016, with Tom Hanks’ The ’Burbs protagonist singing along to Fred Rogers’ “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” (decades before the actor would star as the famed children’s entertainer), a Bernie 2016 sign on his front lawn. Residing on his block are not just those in his movie but also Annette Bening’s Carolyn Burnham from American Beauty (who’s a Hillary Clinton stan) and Mike Myers’ Wayne and Dana Carvey’s Garth from Wayne’s World, who we’ll later learn—courtesy of text as well as the sight of Wayne cradling a Caesar-like bust of Trump—are alt-right teens. Films from different eras and genres freely collide in this mix-and-match universe, as do elements from our own, so that the creepy hillbilly who moves near Hanks’ The ’Burbs schlub is now terrifying because of the Trump confederate flag and “Hillary Clinton for Prison” poster decorating his residence.
Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle’s girls from PEN15 and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) also live nearby, and things only get loopier from there. As Morgan Freeman’s War of the Worlds narration cautions against evil aliens patiently drawing up plans against us (“They observed, and studied”), Soda Jerk cut to Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook in The Social Network. Wayne and Garth no longer sing along and bang their heads to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” but, instead, to “My Dick is Out for Harambe (La Bamba Cover),” an ode to the incessantly memed gorilla whose picture adorns Garth’s car dashboard. Trump’s election win incites the apocalyptic bedlam of This Is the End—a canny jab at Hollywood’s (and blue state residents’) view of this seismic event. Meanwhile, 2017-2020 is summed up by the 2013 online video Garfielf in which the orange cat (i.e., Trump) misbehaves with reckless abandon and his owner John (i.e., Democrats) impotently yells at him but does nothing to curb his offenses.
Boasting clips from more than 300 separate sources (including Napoleon Dynamite, Boys Don’t Cry, Arrested Development, Serial Mom, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Mean Girls, She-Devil, The Hangover, RoboCop 2 and The X-Files), some of it set to Barbra Streisand’s “Memories” and Les Misérables’ “One Day More,” Hello Dankness merges and warps in order to ridicule conservative extremism and intolerance, liberal wishy-washiness and fecklessness, and movies, TV shows and viral whatsits that directly speak to, and subtly reflect, our national psychosis.
Moreover, by rearranging these snippets into an original patchwork-quilt whole, Soda Jerk underscores that meaning and truth are defined by the framework in which facts are placed—a notion amusingly suggested by an all-too-apt Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequence in which one hero in a half-shell explains to another the origins of Pizzagate (“I knew I didn’t want to know about this”).
To dramatize 2020’s George Floyd protests, Hello Dankness provides visions of big-screen social unrest and Trump marching to St. John’s Church set to The Producers’ “Springtime for Hitler.” When Biden finally puts an end to “The Bad Orange Man’s” reign of terror, Daddy Warbucks (Albert Finney) sets aside his Hillary Clinton locket and dances with Annie (Aileen Quinn) to “Tomorrow,” the neo-liberal order apparently restored, much to the chagrin of Hanks’ Bernie Bro (who’s now from Sleepless in Seattle). Zombies rage and kids party and those who perished from COVID are quickly, callously forgotten, as Soda Jerk spares no one, laying waste to the entire socio-political spectrum. As one form of chaos gives way to another, Jesse Eisenberg’s Zombieland protagonist guns down the undead as the real Mark Zuckerberg talks about his dream of connecting the world, and the juxtaposition hits so hard that it nearly makes one choke on their own laughter.
Hello Dankness builds wildly and tears down gleefully, its amalgamation of clips as imposing as is its scorn for what we’ve done, allowed, and become. It’s a hilarious look at yesterday via the kaleidoscopic prism of our shared pop-culture history, although its humor carries with it a pungent whiff of despondency, here articulated by a Weiner-Dog clip that paints America as “a big fat elephant drowning in a sea of despair.”
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