WHAT WE ARE LISTENING TO: MONSTER CHILDREN NYC #12
Hello, my name is Naz Kawakami. I’m the new Editor in Chief of Monster Children based in New York City. Did you know that for a number of years, I was a radio DJ? You probably did because I never shut the fuck up about it. My show was called Night Drive, every Thursday from midnight to 3AM. Those were good times. A lot of sex, drugs, and partying were done in that little Honolulu radio studio. None of it done by me, but it’s still cool to think about.
Anyway, since taking this Editor job, I spend most of my day the way I spent my days as a DJ: listening to music. Some good, some bad. Some old, some new. Every Friday, I compile the week’s worth of music into a playlist. Songs we’ve been enjoying, songs we’ve just (re)discovered, and songs that offer a preview into what features we have coming out soon. Not the newest, not the rarest, just good music. The mood of the week over at the MC New York City office for you to judge and enjoy.
This week, I have been listening to the impeccable soundtrack of a movie that I enjoy very much. It’s called Cressida. It takes place in Honolulu (some Hawaiian shit was bound to pop up eventually, deal with it) in 1985, which is an interesting time in Hawaii’s cultural history because it is just after the closure of the Hawaiian cultural renaissance, about seven years into punk rock being a thing, about that long since disco stopped being a thing, and is when Hawaii’s organized crime began to fade into submission. This time and place along with the diverse taste of the characters yields the extraordinary opportunity for the soundtrack to mash together dance, punk, yacht rock, and Hawaiian music, featuring everything from Richard Hell to Kalapana to Steely Dan, each song and genre essentially defining a theme within the narrative.
Instead of telling you about my life and why I’m listening to what I’m listening to and why you should too, I’m going to give you the entire plot of the movie, in the hopes that you might better understand the context for my adoration of such a disjointed mix of music, to instill in you some slight sentimentality, and to give you a story to read while you listen.
Here you go:
Cressida centers on an impoverished Native Hawaiian family - an emotionally and physically abusive drug dealing father, Cippy, a passive mother, Gwen, an older brother, Kekai (17) and a younger brother, Samuel (13) - in the rural neighborhood of Waimanalo. Samuel is an outcast who gets his pants pulled down at school a lot. He has a crush on this girl, Linda, who is on the flag twirling squad at school and Samuel gets it in his head that he will be able to impress her if he wins the dance competition at the winter ball.
One day some kids walk in on Samuel making first attempts at dancing out behind the school building and they beat him up and tie him to a tree. He is untied by the Mahu groundskeeper, Mary, who drives him home. While on the drive, Samuel explains his dancing plan, and, sympathetic to a desperate loser, offers to take him somewhere he can learn to be a good dancer. That night, Samuel sneaks out and meets Mary who takes him into town to a gay bar and nightclub that is filled to the brim with people of various ages and backgrounds in shiny shoes and velvet jackets who are completely unwilling to let disco die. They dance, and Samuel, despite having grown up in Hawaii in the 80s, is able to slowly overcome his ingrained homophobia, and under the protection of Mary, begins to learn moves from patrons.
Meanwhile, Kekai also has a crush on Allison, the haole girl with a military father who just transferred to their school, wears a leather jacket and black jeans despite the heat, and whose bouncing golden hair and forest green eyes makes Kekai feel like he might vomit or melt or disintegrate at each glance. Allison has a the anarchist symbol on her backpack and Kekai asks if that ‘A’s for ‘Allison’ and she says, ‘no, it’s A for punk’ and Kekai says, ‘but that starts with a ‘P’’. Kekai goes to Allison’s house to work on a Hawaiian history presentation and Allison plays him records like Blank Generation, Loaded, and The Clash. She talks about the songs she loves and what they mean, and he pretends that his record collection isn’t full of Todd Rundgren, yacht rock, and Hawaiian classics. Through his eyes, extreme close ups capture the details of her chipped fingernails rubbing album covers, and her hair curling at the ends. Kekai is falling in love and as ‘Police and Thieves’ fades out, it is replaced by ‘Make It With You’ by Bread because Kekai is a dork at heart coming into first contact with coolness and the courage to rebel.
The body of the film explores and exposes these brothers, their relationships, Cippy selling drugs to the kids that bully Samuel, the petty crimes the boys commit without thought, Samuel practicing his dance moves hidden away from his hyper-masculine father, and Gwen chainsmoking in the kitchen most of the day unable to face what could have been. At a point, Cippy becomes the villain, condemning Allison for being haole and a military brat, going as far as to call her, ‘some whore’. While driving by the gay club in order to yell horrible slurs at whoever might be outside (which is an activity/event that fuckers would make plans to do on the weekends in Honolulu in the 70s and 80s), one of Cippy’s clients sees Samuel there, and Cippy beats him with a belt as soon as he arrives home that night, screaming, ‘I not going have one fucking homo for my son!’
The film culminates on the night of the dance. The boys head to the gymnasium, Kekai with Allison (still in the same outfit and he in a blazer and shorts), and Samuel alone but confident. After they depart, we remain at the home and though it isn’t shown on screen, domestic violence between Gwen and Cippy can be heard. It is clear that Cippy is intoxicated, and throughout the movie, his alcohol use is a point of tension between him and the rest of the family, Kekai appearing with a black eye following a scene where he comments on the smell of Cippy’s breath.
The DJ, (a fat Hawaiian man with face tattoos who also happens to be the brothers’ uncle and who chainsmokes despite it being an event for children) puts on ‘(For You) I’d Chase A Rainbow’, a classic of beloved Hawaiian group, Kalapana. The entirety of the song plays as we cut between the simultaneous experiences of the characters. Kekai and Allison slow dance. Samuel searches the crowd for Linda, eventually finding her in the arms of the boy who tied him to a tree, swaying to Mackey Feary’s gentle-but-mournful singing. Samuel takes a place high up in the bleachers, alone in the dark looking over the dancefloor. Kekai and Allison kiss for the first time. Samuel sees Linda kiss the boy and begins a small embarrassed cry the way 13 year olds do. As the saxophone solo kicks in, we cut to Gwen, at home, smoking cigarettes in a tattered kitchen. She, too, has tears in her eyes. She is thin and beautiful and worth more than what she has. As the song ends, Samuel storms out of the gym. Kekai and Allison see this and follow him all the way home.
At home, they encourage Samuel to put on the sequin shirt and flared jeans that he had borrowed for the occasion and return to the dance for the competition. This is the first time we see Kekai not be an absolute piece of shit to Samuel, and although Kekai has failed to stick up for his brother in the past, he sees the damage being done and - having become empowered by Allison’s diverse, scary, haole musical taste and culture of rebellion - has gained the competency and courage to begin protecting Sam. They decide that the competition and months of work aren’t for Linda, but for Sam. As they leave, they see their mom and know what has happened. They invite her to come see Sam dance, but she declines, unable to or perhaps unequipped to escape her situation in even the smallest, most momentary of ways. They leave without her.
Kekai, Allison, and Sam arrive back at the dance. The camera tracks their footsteps from a low angle in a long following shot scored by ‘Lowdown’ by Boz Scaggs. We see Mary and her boyfriend outside smoking weed, who flick the roach into the school bushes and follow them in. Sam bursts through the doors of the gymnasium, his support behind him. Mary’s boyfriend whispers in the DJs ear, who begins the competition. The dance floor clears. Samuel takes the center as other boys sneer and jeer at him before dying out and giving way to silence. Sam’s shirt reflects beams of light and as he waits for his moment to begin, he shines.
A strong bassline begins, each bar accented by two fast strums of a guitar, then another layer of guitar chords adds melody, until finally, in full, ‘One of These Nights’ by The Eagles kicks in echoing throughout the stunned gym as Samuel bursts into motion.
Samuel is stunning.
His moves deliberate, impressive, passionate, confident, and beautiful. He soars, and the girls in the crowd begin to clap along, cheering his more impressive maneuvers. Gwen is seen glancing in through the gymnasium window, contrasted by a shot of Cippy smoking cigarettes in the tattered kitchen. Kekai and Allison hold each other and look on at the talent before them. The song cuts out, Samuel’s routine ends. A close up of his exhausted, sweating face. A smile cracks. Cut to black. Credits roll.
It is an outstanding film not only because of the soundtrack, but because of its examination of the effects of systemic poverty, violent homophobia as a result of colonization, the commercialization of culture, and the issues of systemic domestic abuse, drug abuse, crime, undereducation, and lack of resources in Hawaii and across all ‘formerly’ colonized pacific communities. Additionally, it is a love story, painfully and unsparingly funny, and narrates an extremely overlooked yet vital transitional period in musical culture as dance music, punk, and the Eagles, disperse, fight, and collide.
Questions, comments, concerns, complaints, movie recs, hit me, here.
