FULL BLEED: SUBURBIA AND OTHER WASTELANDS
- 18 hours ago
- 6 min read
The Kickstarter campaign for My Gifts Are Hungry is still rolling. We’re at 150% funded but there’s stretch goals to think about. Oh yeah, and how this is the time that people actually buy and connect with the books because after this, it’s onto Amazon and benign neglect by the algorithm.
Over the next little while, I’ll be talking about some influences and inspirations for Hazeland and in particular, My Gifts Are Hungry. I always say that books come from a place I can’t reach, only through the writing can it be touched. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t big chunks of inspiration. Suburbia, a 1983 film by Penelope Spheeris (who also directed the Decline of Western Civilization series about punk and metal in LA, and would later go on to direct Wayne’s World and the Sandlot and a bunch of other films) was a big part of what would eventually become My Gifts Are Hungry.
In short, Suburbia is a movie about kids lost in the malaise of the eighties. Economic, cultural, social, what have you. All kinds of malaise. Cultural historians may talk about Reagan immediately turning things around in America, bringing everyone brighter futures and blah blah blah. Fact is, for a lot of people, that recovery never happened. Los Angeles was a place that was particularly hard hit, losing vast payrolls of factory and other blue collar jobs over the seventies and lingering into the eighties. This movie is really about the children of that constant draining.
Suburbia is centered around a found (or maybe more accurately forced by circumstance) family of punk rock kids in one of the enervated neighborhoods of Los Angeles, never really named (though it looks like it was shot out at the then-end of the Valley). Coming from abusive or absent or otherwise perilous homes, these kids all live in a rotting and abandoned neighborhood, a no man’s land of roving dogs and decay that is occasionally used as a shooting gallery by the unemployed blue collar displaced former kings of the world. That’s the only thing the kids are good for in these guys’ eyes. But a little more on them later.
We follow one runaway from his alcoholic mother’s home to the streets of Hollywood to a punk show (where he gets roofied and blacks out, whoops). Luckily he’s saved by Jack, the relatively empathetic and benevolent more or less leader of the lost kids who all go by the group identity of The Rejected. Things aren’t necessarily easy or calm in the house, with plenty of tensions between various group members, I suppose like any family. They live on nothing, stealing food from garage refrigerators, go to punk shows, play with disused and abandoned toys, watch a lot of TV. They also remake themselves: crazy haircuts, clothes, etc. Gotta play the part.
They also pick fights with what seems like the entire world. Squares, cops, convenience store clerks, jocks who go to punk shows, suburban families. It’s not enough that they’re The Rejected, but they gotta remind the world that they’re on the outside. Now, to be fair, the square dudes go way out of their way to make trouble for the kids. The kids don’t do themselves any favors, though. Maybe it’s a sucker’s game. Why be normal? We’re all abandoned and only have other freaks who’ll give us any kind of respect. All this in the shadow of the bombs that are gonna one day fall, just you watch.
It's not all perpetual war for them. They play around, some of them fuck through the pain. There’s a great bit where they steal sod from a front yard, cart it off to a mall after-hours and lay it all down in front of a wall of televisions at Radio Shack and watch grim warnings of the nuclear Armageddon that seems their likely birthright. Party at ground zero, man. They read each other bedtime stories and play cards. They drink beer around the fire and train the wild dogs to be a little more like themselves, only partially feral.
Society hates them. So do the jocks. The cops are arguably a benign presence (only due to a family connection to Jack). Some of them hate themselves, turning their abuse inward to suicide. This only creates more tension for them and the outside world as they deliver their surrogate sister’s body to her birth family and crash the funeral, which goes about as well as you could expect. That’s the last straw. The cops issue a midnight deadline for The Rejected to hit the road and don’t look back this time. The kids reluctantly agree.
The suburban rednecks don’t want to wait. It’s not enough to threaten the kids (which they have done twice now, once personally and in a humiliating fashion). They want to exterminate them like the wild dogs in that rotting purgatory. The rednecks show up, guns in hand, but the kids aren’t scared off and manage to turn the tables, driving them back to their El Camino in a panic. A panic that ends up with them running down the youngest member of The Rejected in a gruesome spectacle. The cops show up to probably arrest everyone. Nobody learns anything.
Thing is, the whole heart of this film is these kids trying to make some kind of sense out of where they’ve ended up. Or maybe they realize there isn’t any sense to be made and that all this is to be endured or made fun of, at least until society decides it’s had enough. The kids aren’t weekend punks. They don’t wash the makeup off and go back to school or jobs. This is it. “You think this is a fuckin’ costume? This is a way of life!” Granted, that’s from Return of the Living Dead, a couple years to follow, but the attitude is the same.
There’s a fair bit of poking and dissecting how the kids got to where they are. Some of it is grim. Some of it is wince-inducing from 2026. There’s cycles of abuse that don’t really get stopped. The suburban rednecks are abandoned too, in a way, having been laid off from factory jobs that used to be plentiful and could keep the bill collectors away. Yes, there’s more constructive ways to deal with that than to hunt down and harass punks, but everyone needs someone to feel superior to. Particularly when you feel like nothing ‘cause you can’t provide for your own family.
Sadly, still a thing.
Couple other things about the film. Punk rock isn’t shown as an idyllic sort of accepting place. Yes, the kids at the house take care of each other, but the shows are a different thing entirely. They’re mean. They’re rough. Women get victimized. Security guards get knifed. It doesn’t feel like a good time even in an obliteration of self kind of way (which is also a hallmark of Spheeris’ work on Decline of Western Civilization, where the shows got portrayed as meatgrinders, should you jump into the pit, even if you belong.) Living in the house is hardscrabble, stealing and begging. But if it’s the only way you get to be who you believe yourself to be then that’s a price worth paying.
I suppose it’s not really a spoiler to say that there’s a house full of lost kids in My Gifts Are Hungry. But it’s not the same kind of house that The Rejected live in. There’s a sense of identity, but not as durable or permanent (given that Rejected kids brand themselves with the initials TR to prove devotion to the group.) So in this, Suburbia and My Gifts Are Hungry are kinda similar, but ultimately very very different. For one thing, The Rejected don’t live in a haunted house.
Suburbia’s also a bleaker work. The landscapes are crumbling or stultified. The characters within it, similarly so, stuck on their own pain or outsider status. And yes, there’s always someone to remind them of that, so perhaps that’s to be understood and maybe even empathized with. My Gifts Are Hungry isn’t documentarian (though Suburbia really isn’t), but much more dreamlike and glossy and weird. Suburbia’s weird distance comes from the kids ability to look at the world of the squares and see how crazy and empty it is.
Only love is real.
That much makes it into my work. Some of the texture does as well. There’s some overlap, but beyond initial inspiration of “houseful of outsiders,” that overlap ends. Well, there’s the matter of time and place. But again, I err on the side of fantastic.
Still, I don’t think I wrote anything quite as charming or arresting as the punks watching TV in the mall, sitting on stolen suburban lawns. There’s other good stuff, though. I promise.
If you want to see more stills from the film, I have a thread on Bluesky (you’ll need to be logged in to see).
Go here:
And for the Kickstarter campaign for My Gifts Are Hungry, go here:
More later.
