Teenage Tupelo (1995)

 

Director: John Michael McCarthy

Screenplay: John Michael McCarthy

Cast: D'Lana Tunnell as D'Lana Fargo / Topsy Turvy; Hugh Brooks as Johnny Tu-Note; Wanda Wilson as Wanda Fargo; Kristen Hobbs as Franky; Dawn Ashcraft as Joey; Sophie Couch as Ruthy; Phillip Tubb as Pookie Fargo; Nancy Taylor as Mildred McCarthy; Edd Hurt as John McCarthy

An Abstract Candidate

 

We have a curious title here - produced by David F. Friedman, the exploitation producer behind many sixties softcore films and Herschell Gordon Lewis movies. Teenage Tupelo does however look like a mid-nineties independent production shot in Memphis, Tennessee, only rather than grunge and flannel, everyone has early sixties hair and our lead is D'Lana Fargo (D'Lana Tunnell), a pregnant teen seduced by a sleazy rockabilly musician Johnny Tu-Note (Hugh Brooks), and then tries to find herself. John Michael McCarthy is an obscure filmmaker, but having seen Superstarlet A.D. (2000), a post-apocalypse film released by Troma Entertainment, John Michael McCarthy is a really idiosyncratic artist. There will be unique voices from the 2000s and the 2010s I will stumble upon as I see more films, but from the eighties and the nineties alone, just from the North American (and Canadian) independent movement, I have tripped over unique figures who are not quite genre directors, cult in the truest terms. Someone like Trent Harris (Plan 10 from Outer Space (1994)) releases his work on his own website, and makes films into the 2010s, but someone like John Michael McCarthy feels more elusive to find to work of.

Teenage Tupelo is definitely a square peg in the round hole of distribution, coming to be during the VHS era of cinema in the mid-nineties, a square peg even for genre cinema as this, among others, is neither a film you can completely sell on a gimmick nor a film of then-current trends. You can, in mind to its producer Friedman, sell it on the erotic element as, slowly on after the initial set-up, there is a considerable bit of nudity based on the older era of sexploitation films, nudie-cutie toplessness and fettered in soft-softcore BDSM edge. Even that in itself is a throwback in mind to pornography existing at the time, despite being less readily accessible, making Teenage Tupelo a curious quirky drama in comparison of a pregnant teen, played by an adult, who looks likes a notorious star of sexploitation films from the same obscure Americana town. Crossing paths with a group of men hating women, some gay, who worship that actor/stripper she looks like called Topsy Turvy, D'Lana's story is less erotica for the sense of titillation, but a pastiche of the old era sexploitation film with its own curious melodrama being parodied. Her mother wishes to give away her baby when she has it, and life is in the doldrums in D'Lana's town of Tupelo anyway, one where the one figure she liked, the musician, is a slime ball who jilts her, even beats her up, and most people occupy themselves in conservative protests against sexploitation films being screened at their cinema.

Teenage Tupelo's aesthetic, realism shot in celluloid but fixated on the past, is a really curious one. This is a director replicating pop culture but completely forming it into his own vision. Shot in black-and-white, the starkness is contrasted by the fantasy sequences. Openly meant to be titillating, with the cast topless and in quasi S&M moments, these heated Sapphic fantasies (and a film of Topsy Turvy's where Castro in Cuba, represented by a woodland, accidentally gets edible panties than the nuke he wanted from signed delivery) have their heated coloured tone too which stand out. Less exploitation, these scenes look more like saturated old time celluloid of avant-garde cinema in mood which adds a curious effect.

As a result, even if Teenage Tupelo has a male gaze whit large, especially in those colour sequences and the matter-of-fact nature of the production it has a distinct aesthetic, contrasted by the costumes and tone, one which can have the hallucinogenic quality of a heterosexual Jack Smith film. It is, regardless of sexual orientation, a narrative equivalent of Flaming Creatures (1963), Jack Smith's simulacra of old cinema (there forties and thirties b-pictures) turned here into a film focusing on early to mid sixties exploitation movies, as interpreted in both cases by having to one's normal environments and what prop clothes could be accessed. Some of Teenage Tupelo is entirely John Michael McCarthy and reminds one this was made in the nineties, such as the homeless tattoo artist, living in a bus, who dresses like an occult monk and takes the art of apply spider tattoos that cover the entire back severely.

And one time, as D'Lana contemplates her future motherhood, John Michael McCarthy splices in monochrome footage of a real birth, drastically shifting the tone from the erotic male gaze to a gynaecological reality whilst evoking older sexual hygiene films, which David F. Friedman would have been aware of too, which contrasted the titillation of getting away with sexual content, under the pretence of education, with some films showing such footage. Teenage Tupelo as a result is an acquired taste which however also has these touches which keep you on your toes, a fascinating film you could only mark as a "cult" film as genre because it has a sense of personality, weird humour and moments which are deliberately strange. By this point, I am fully aware what interests me is usually an acquired taste, the reviews less a recommendation but a sketchpad of figuring out what a work covered feels like to experience. Here what stands out is that, trying to recreate a sixties subgenre, entirely connected to that era, in the grunge era of the nineties becomes a weird cocktail of a low-fi, sexploitation pastiche from John Michael McCarthy. Know the resurgence of interest in old pop culture from years before, including the revival in fifties and sixties cocktail and lounge music, the rockabilly and classic rock n roll created for the film in the soundtrack, alongside the sense of the director-writer's Mississippi upbringing evoking the likes of Elvis in his career really adds a nice spice to the material too.

It is certainly curious, divisive not even for the clear male gaze but that like sexploitation films, it has a plot yet like certain niches of cult movies, they are less about an escalation of plotting in a lot of cases but their mood. This is something I actually prefer, which was one of the huge issues later on in decades many neo-grindhouse films did not work for me in the late 2000s into the 2010s. Melodrama is apt here as, even if a comedy at heart, you have a young woman wanting to find herself. Conformity is square and horrifying, but she is not a gay woman nor a man hater either, finding in the end her solace in Topsy Turvy, her doppelganger played by D'Lana Tunnell too. It is ironic, for a film you could say is full of an irony in its tone, it has a sincerity for all its nudity and kink. That it is about a woman finding a power in cinema as, D'Lana finds her onscreen character (and Topsy Turvy herself, helping her in real life) empowering as people wanting to claim their sexualities and individuality even if you have to put together your belongings in a knapsack and wander the country. Here, between this and Superstar A.D., John Michael McCarthy certainly suits me as a unique director who has interesting characters, worlds and personality.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None