Joe's Apartment
This week we’re presenting Joe’s Apartment (1996) on Thursday, May 29th at 8pm.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the film at 8:10!
What if Man is the Roach of the Universe?
…Now for something a little different from the From Below: a gross-out multiplex comedy featuring a chorus of singing, shit-talking, lascivious cockroaches! While the programming down in the microcinema doesn’t usually venture too far into what could be described as “11 PM in your cousin’s basement with a 2 liter bottle of fluorescent soda on summer break from 7th grade” cinema, there’s many a reason to give Joe’s Apartment, directed by John Payson (adapting his own short film) and starring Jerry O’Connell alongside, it must be repeated, hundreds of talking cockroaches, another look.
Credit where credit is due, I was introduced (or reintroduced, if I had previously deeply sublimated the film into a pubescent subconscious) through Screen Slate’s program from last October at the Anthology Film Archives, KILL YR LANDLORDS. Even in an eclectic series spanning from New Hollywood classics like Hal Ashby’s The Landlord to grindhouse revenge films to international auteurist films by Buñuel and Nikos Papatakis, Joe’s Apartment caught my eye. What was a lowest-common-denominator comedy starring an overgrown Stand By Me kid doing here? Turns out, this broad comedy has a bit of bite to its foul-mouthed humor. (Side note: it being the 90s and all, there are some words used in the film that we’ve moved away from using as freely.) (Second side note: Screen Slate programmed Joe’s Apartment with the short documentary Roaches’ Lullaby, and while we won’t completely jack their steez by showing it as well, it’s worth a little From Below pre-gaming, so I’ve linked it here).
In Joe’s Apartment, O’Connell is the titular Joe, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and fresh off the bus from the midwest in a New York that hasn’t completely been Giuliani-sanitized yet. Serendipitous circumstances allow him to pose as the son of a recently deceased leasee of a rent-controlled apartment, but that apartment is quickly revealed to be the home of the aforementioned horndog cockroaches. As anyone who has rented a room knows, though, cheap rates mean you’ll put up with a lot, including rather worrisome roommates. Joe quickly comes into conflict with Senator Dougherty, a corner-cutting congressman hoping to raze the apartment in order to build Manhattan’s first high rise prison, at the same time he starts falling for Lily, an ecowarrior hoping to repopulate New York with gardens (who happens to be the slimy senator’s daughter). Many hijinks and insectoid showtunes ensue.
Joe’s Apartment is also, in a way, a continuation of the inquiry instigated by this past week’s programming of ECSTATIC TELEVISION. The videos and television programs of ECSTATIC TELEVISION came from an era in which avant-garde artists looked to TV as a space of potential for new forms of decentralized and participatory media, and that era dried up as Reagan eradicated funding for the arts, deeply hindering the public access cable station’s programming capabilities. Alongside that development, the rise of cable television empires began to gather steam, often forming around specific audience groups and deeply influenced by their particular aesthetic proclivities. Foremost among those networks is, of course, MTV, the preeminent provider of Gen X music videos and ephemera. By the 90s, MTV was branching out to the much-complained-about non-music video content, including animated shows such as Beavis and Butthead and Daria, crafting a holistic cultural toolkit for conjuring a certain generation’s whole vibe. It was perhaps inevitable that a cable network like this would inevitably make an incursion back into feature filmmaking production, and Joe’s Apartment would be MTV Films’ first release. As such, we can look at Joe’s Apartment as an effort to translate that specific vibe from the rambling world of television into the, perhaps, higher-stakes world of the cineplex, where it was a commercial and critical bomb. MTV would find box office success with later films, but Joe’s Apartment is worth reappraisal as an effective blend of baudy humor, old-fashioned showbiz, and disaffected anti-authoritarian praxis, of sorts.
From under one roof,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark, and our thousands of tiny roommates