***Director David Guggenheim in person! at the Young Friends of Film advance screening of IT MIGHT GET LOUD at the Walter Reade Theater on Thursday, July 30 at 7:30pm. Tickets on sale now!***
There’s a distinct dialectic at work in Davis Guggenheim’s mild-mannered rock doc, It Might Get Loud. In consideration of the triumvirate of Jimmy Page (guitarist for Led Zeppelin), The Edge (U2), and Jack White (The White Stripes), it’s all but impossible (at least for Young Hegelians) not to position Page as some sort of keystone thesis, The Edge as antithesis, and White as a present-day, post-historical synthesis. Page nicely fits the bill of rock ‘n’ roll progenitor, at the very least nominally, having, among other things, co-authored the 1971 Zeppelin staple “Rock and Roll.” Contra Page’s blistering finger virtuosity, we have The Edge’s militantly reductive technique, a method that favors open-stringed, ringing chords over aggressive solo noodling—albeit after said chords have passed through towering racks of effect processors. Jack White is a bit too young, and has come late to the “roots” variety of rock he emulates, so he must necessarily be categorized, at least for now, as postmodern anomaly. But his generation will always gleefully admit to the vampiric joys of pastiche. On the way to the film’s on-screen summit, he lets slip an ulterior motive: “stealing” the chops of his guitar elders. Given the same opportunity, who wouldn’t?
Guggenheim, best known as the guy who directed An Inconvenient Truth, has a viable idea, at least on paper: have three iconic musicians revisit the significant locations and formative stages of their careers (intercut liberally with potent archival footage), and then weave these respective strands with a meeting-of-the-minds sequence (shot on a cavernous soundstage) in which the Great Men chill, their favorite axes within easy reach. Or maybe that sounds like a recipe for contrived-camaraderie disaster?
White’s seize-the-riff strategy points to one of the film’s missed opportunities—although you can tell Guggenheim was more than willing (and waiting with multiple cameras) for it to happen: the moment when maestro pulls back the curtain and reveals a patented tip for achieving Guitar Godliness. Even if you don’t play the instrument in question, and regardless of what kind of doc you’re watching, it’s that sort of geek-pleasing, secret-tech detail that would really titillate. (Minor geek-style tip: pay close attention when Page demonstrates the opening riff of Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying”—you will learn that each guitarist wears his slide on a different finger.)
In any event, the best moments happen outside the controlled petri dish of the studio setting. White cavorts creatively around a derelict farm that can only belong to him; Page spins vinyl from his personal library, and has a mini air-guitar epiphany while listening to a Link Wray disc. Or, my favorite, The Edge divulges one of his preferred private pastimes: testing various distortion pedals at a remote seaside location. In all three cases the dominant cliché that emerges is popular artist as soul in isolation—Page alone in his manse with a turntable, The Edge with only the ocean as audience. (To further the existential melodrama, consider the fact that the U2 guitarist may be the only rocker on earth who doesn’t find Spinal Tap amusing: “I didn’t laugh. I wept. It was so close to the truth.”)
White, the man with time on his side, seems the most at ease (or maybe the least tragic) when seen in the solitude of his own private environs. That’s probably just the luck of the documentarian’s draw: if they reshot the film, perhaps the next time around he’d be caught looking like the loneliest man in show business. But for now, he’s the “synthetic” moment in the dialectical equation. Jimmy Page (the “abstraction”) and The Edge (its “negation”) have done the historical groundwork. White, who can only thrive the way he does by virtue of his carefully cultivated yet seemingly empathic communion with the music of the past, is in the more robust, or as Hegel would say, “concrete” position. Which seems an absolutely reasonable place for hard rock.
