Frog Dreaming: Decoder (1984)

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Dir. Muscha

Decoder avoids what happens to a lot of films based on the subcultures of their time, becoming badly dated, by taking the aesthetics so far it is completely in its own world. It is of the eighties and yet completely its own reality. The colours push out any sense of the real world. Blood reds. Blues. Greys. Sickening woodland greens. Scored with industrial music, this is a filmic manifesto for alternative culture, made in a collective independently with director Muscha. Amalgamating together beat culture, with a William S. Burroughs cameo, industrial music, punk aesthetic, anarchist politics and full out surrealism involving frogs. It still evokes a world of the Berlin Wall, European architecture and even the gothic together with computer technology and industry. It's what Claude Chabrol's Dr. M (1990) should have been, a multi-cultural melting pot of Europe, politics and dystopia, the past and the future melded together into one film.

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The movie is languid in its plotting. At first it's as if we'll follow a detective, Jaeger (artist and actor William "Bill" Rice), of a Big Brother law organisation, a weather beaten face of film noir still using computers and CCTV cameras, that can see everything, to his advantage. He is clearly tired of his existence, a ghost drifting along on the streets in his investigations. At a distance from his work colleagues as he says viewing clips of Metropolis (1927), the most famous German dystopia on film, is of use for his assignment. He wanders into the red light district as if for a case but becomes more curious about one of the women who works at a peep show, Christiane, played by Christiane Felscherinow. In a world where surgical footage of female circumcision and autopsy material is shown for a turn-on for patrons, evoking J.D. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), his interest in her is far more than mere sexuality but a strive for something out of place in the wreck of a society. But he is not the main character. Part of the way through we are introduced to him, a sound musician, and boyfriend to Christiane, called F.M. played by FM Einheit of the group Einstürzende Neubauten. He becomes intrigued with a fast-food burger food chain, believing that they use a special type of music to brainwash their patrons, working day and night on what he believes will be a noise that causes physical nauseousness. Spreading it to attack the food chain and every fast food restaurant possible, he hopes to cause a political upheaval, as Jaeger is assigned to track him down and finds that even he is more sympathetic to F.M. then his own employers.

Decoder is about mood. Intense, atmospheric music including compositions made by industrial artists who starred in the film. A world of human decay where arcade games blur with the sound of transport into a mass of violent noise. American war films play on the TVs, and even the people on F.M.'s side exist in a fiery underworld abyss led by Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Girstle as an anarchist keeper of knowledge. The only serenity for any character is for Christiane , literally in a world of frog dreaming, as the review's title suggests, at a point surrounded by the amphibians and books on frog anatomy, dreaming of a red desert wasteland monologue by a mix of the witches' chants from Macbeth and Burrough's work. It is ill advised to view the film as a vast narrative as that is clearly not what it wanted to do. It follows aspects of classic crime stories. The detective becoming enamoured with the subjects he is following and questioning his purpose. The attempt by an everyman to demolish a group that, in one scene in their absurd training of new employees just to work at a burger place, have no qualms in restricting "ugly" workers to the kitchens only and act with a belief that they are a titan of culinary skills, even if it means using noise weaponry when any of the customers get aggressive in their premises. (Although when one potential employee admits he'll be finally able to buy a specific brand of shoes with his wages, far from dismissing it as consumer gullibility, the film briefly steps back and admits that the people behind the counter are ordinary young adults like F.M., just happening to work for businessmen who view them as merely human resources). But the film drifts along as the world is turned upside down, real riot footage used to depict the city going up in flames. It's a grubby, beaten down reality distorted by the bright, bleeding colour saturation or dark shadows. It does feel like a feature length music video, but this is in Decoder's favour, as its visually depicted plot is driven by its musical content. The sounds of crashing metal. Synth. Only Soft Cell's Sleazy City, repeated every time the red light district is shown onscreen, doesn't quite work, but it's more of a personal taste issue for me, out of place against the more ominous, mostly instrumental compositions that even border on jazzy. What really sticks out with the film, as stated, is that it managed to be more faithful to older, even centuries older, influences like the gothic and noir while explicitly being new in its anti-authoritarian, industrial music driven world. It's not accidental that there's feelings of German Expressionism in the film because it itself has clips of Metropolis shown, fittingly squashed on a tiny CCTV screen next to surveillance footage, the metropolis here having pushed itself further into monitoring dissidents. Clearly Muscha and every contributor to this film wasn't aghast to the notion of referencing the past, still subversive and outside conventions, and in tipping their hats to the likes of Burroughs, seen in an electronics shop amongst cables and wires, the upmost respect and realisation that Decoder is as much a continuation of forefathers as well as its own work is alive in what's seen in the film, and is a great deal of the reason it works completely. While its future is of the eighties now, in the past, the mood and atmosphere, the ideas and how everything is depict, become a future in another reality, still potent even if the context of it feels more alien. Its newly gained alien nature replaces what is missing with the sense of intensity and rhythm of music that makes Decoder probably a greater film now it's been severed from its original time and place, allowed to be independent of its original purpose and able to become a subversive, abstract beat film completely in its own self-made context decades later.

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