Roxploitation

We called them roxploitation movies. Not Elvis,

Elvis was a genre to himself, though sharing

some motifs. I’m talking movies that had

Rock in the title, in which by a mistake explained

in an early scene, some hot act like Little Richard

gets booked to some society soiree where they’re

expecting Lester Lanin

    (you don’t remember

Lester? Think Lawrence Welk for 20-somethings,

even teens—yes!—who reached our teens sans

anthems of our own, listening to music only when

our parents did—yes! I did say “our,” I do include

myself, the first album I ever bought was Carousel,

then Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong. I was 40+ records

into my first, carefully indexed box of 45s before ever

I heard Ray Charles, and never was the same again.)

 

But I was talking roxploitation movies, the shock

on dowagers’ faces when first they glimpse

the musicians, the casual verbal misconnect

when the Margaret Dumont character is nonplussed

by teen slang that had already left the building

a year before this movie hit the theaters

always as the front end of a double bill—

with some Kirk Douglas movie maybe;

I got my first kiss after Man Without a Star.

 

In roxploitation movies, when Little Richard began

assaulting the piano, the cameras would play first

over aghast faces of august revelers in their ball gowns

and their tuxes, then to their feet—till suddenly

one of those patent-leather-sporting toes would start

to tap, and back then to the faces, where one at a time

the shock is transmogrifying into pleasure—

like the face of the man in last week’s feature

who opened the door of the darkened room, hit

the light switch, and sixty-seven close friends yelled

“surprise!” Why does that never happen to me?

 

And before Little Richard’s halfway through

his first number, our socialites—because

this is what socialites do best—begin to dance,

clumsily at first, but soon with brio, as though

the music itself were all the instruction anyone

required, as though dowagers in ball gowns

and men in tuxes were born knowing all the moves,

they just don’t always know they know them.

 

And seeing this, the girl and boy are overjoyed—

always, there’s a girl and boy, and plot demands

that they have something noble, something

worthy, riding on this event, the mortgage

on mom’s house, a little brother’s operation—this

couple we’ve watched meet so cute that we’re

aware that they’re the pair that we’re supposed to

care about to make the happy ending happy—

 

don’t get me wrong, I do not say these films

were formulaic, just there seemed to be

an unwritten rule that every such film had

to have a scene like this, and pretty early on.

 

I wonder could a film be made today

the other way around: take, say, a roomful of

young people, not—of course—in fancy dress,

in the basement or the back room of a club,

and maybe there for something other than music,

dancing; let’s say they’re there for—oh, let’s make it

poetry. But a kind of poetry that’s their own anthems,

all angst and anger, what’s wrong with

a society that has no place for me;

wrong with the lover who dumped me?

Was that outrageous or what?

 

And let’s suppose that into this room walks—

just for the sake of argument, stay with me here--

walks this old man, and sort of shambles

to the mike, and he having been, up to this moment ,

invisible to them, the kids all look at him and wonder,

“Where did he come from?” and, “Does he even

know where he is?” And it’s as if  

someone had just held up the sign,

“And now for something completely different;”

ignoring or not knowing the unwritten rules

he talks of things they’ve thought, but never thought

to talk about, things they knew, but didn’t know

they knew.

 

And, no, the young faces in that room

would never be aghast, exactly, but as

the cameras played over them, the polite

blankness, mere tolerance in those faces

might change, first to casual curiosity, then

gradually to something else, something more

engaged, and though we cannot see whether

toes are tapping and we presume not, still,

there is, yes, there is some movement

here and there as heads begin to nod

and maybe, at the end, applause is real,

from the heart.

 

And having asked myself whether such a

exploitation film could be made, and answered,

for a dozen reasons, No, I think to myself,