Review: Stop Making Sense

This is a concert film with a narrative, bursting at the seams with bits of invention and passion.

Stop Making Sense
Photo: Cinecom Pictures

From an early age, we’re trained from media osmosis to expect, and to celebrate, performers who lord their power, their status, and their entitlement over us. We celebrate, with a certain degree of self-loathing, these peoples’ transformations from regular Joes to the icons we’re raised by television, magazines, and movies to want to be.

Talking Heads, the quartet consisting of David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison, have a more centered, settled sensibility, one that somehow still doesn’t compromise the energy we expect and want from a good rip-roaring concert. In Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, the group put on a show that revels in a smaller, more personal, self-actualization: It’s about rock stars learning to dominate themselves as opposed to others, to fit into a wider-reaching society that they accept as baffling, uncomfortable, and joyous.

Stop Making Sense doesn’t feel self-conscious and “good for you,” though it is good for you. Bryne’s a parodist, a prankster, who happens to believe in everything he parodies, and he’s inviting you to the party, which begins with just him and a simulated boom box while performing “Psycho Killer,” and gradually grows to include the entire band, as well as another community of musicians of varying backgrounds, as they all work their way toward songs that have now become a taken-for-granted part of our shared pop-cultural tapestry. Byrne’s pop bliss, and his empathy, meshes with the theme of many of Demme’s other pictures: life as a fleeting, varied ride of odd little things, too texturally varied to invite self-pity. Bryne, especially in “The Big Suit,” is a potentially dwarfed white man who finds catharsis in everything.

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Stop Making Sense is a concert film with a narrative, bursting at the seams with bits of invention and passion: the Pablo Ferro titles, the dancing light, the “Big Suit,” Japanese Noh theater conventions, and so on. Bryne’s irresistible conceit is that you’re privy to the birth of his band, as well as their mutual transcendence as they grow and lose themselves in their camaraderie and obsessions. Byrne has a tall, loose-limbed, underfed build, with a poker-faced expression that could either be a smirk or a smile (or neither), and a high voice that invites irony: a presumed geek’s postmodern revenge against years of being seen as the “other.”

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Bryne, though, is too playful for that, as he’s moved beyond grudge and tedium and humiliation: He peddles a rock fantasy of acceptance and self-satisfaction, and he has the physical grace, even (or perhaps particularly) in that famous suit to take the fantasies beyond the maudlin. Stop Making Sense proves that Byrne embraces small artifacts—movies, music of all genres (jazz, funk, African tribal), casual objects—that can be our unexpected saviors.

As in Demme’s recent Rachel Getting Married, momentum is itself a character in Stop Making Sense. Bryne and the rest of the Heads build and build, about to explode and always exploding seemingly at once. Talking Heads give us a disarming sense of privacy unusual for the concert movie that’s accentuated by the decision to more or less exclude the actual audiences in attendance (this doc was filmed over three shows). There’s a vibe of a half dozen people dancing privately in their bedrooms on cue, finding their grooves, enthralled with a private power that the populace also happens to miraculously find appealing and transformative.

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Stop Making Sense taps into the desire that probably drives the creation of most art of most kinds: to create that thing that makes you relatable. There’s a number of images in Stop Making Sense, particularly one near the end of “Found a Job,” with Byrne, Weymouth, and Harrison dancing out of sync, that suggests a communal rite. Stop Making Sense, like other Demme films such as Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, can make you feel giddy in a way that you associate with movies you watched as a child. You feel the pleasure of people who know better engaging in a delirious foolishness, and you surrender, which is exactly what the title was telling you before you walked into the theater or pushed play.

Score: 
 Cast: David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison  Director: Jonathan Demme  Screenwriter: David Byrne  Distributor: Cinecom Pictures  Running Time: 88 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1984  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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