The following is a long-form movie review by Neonn Felicity. Usually my words are in this font/color & quoted official descriptions are in lavender, but I wrote 1300 words about this amazing film & wasn’t sure where to post them, & it would take up too much space to put them all here in that format. So here they are, at least for now! 😛
Vudu ($3) ~ Amazon Prime ($3) ~ YouTube ($4)
If you would like to see an authentic portrait of the rave experience, including the dialectic between the event producers and the rave police, watch a movie called Groove. Somehow, writer-director Greg Harrison was able to capture extremely nuanced aspects of the whole thing that every raver has witnessed and felt and laughed at again and again over the course of going to underground raves. It was by far the most accurate depiction of the way people act on ecstasy at raves that I have ever seen in my life. It shows the way people converse in the midst of the party in profoundly honest and healing ways that deepen and accelerate the development of relationships between siblings, long-time friends, lovers new and old, and people who only just met for a brief but important moment.
The characters all felt eerily familiar to me, as if I had met them in real life at real raves, to such an extent that I feel like they must be somewhat universal archetypes across time and space. Groove was produced a decade before I started raving, but so much of it reminded me of those early days when I first fell in love with this culture and converted to the neopagan rave religion and adopted the name Neonn.
They depict brilliantly the phenomenon of “renegade” raves in abandoned warehouses whose locations remain undisclosed until the night of the party, when there is a phone number that reveals an address to a “map point” on the outgoing voicemail message, and there is somebody at the map point giving directions to the party to ravers for $2. That’s the price.
Later on, the main dude who threw the party is asked, “Why do you do this to yourself? Don’t even get paid, risk getting arrested, for what?” And he says, “You don’t know?” “No.” “The nod.” “The nod?” “Yeah. It happens to me at least once every party. Somebody comes up to me, says, ‘Thank you for making this happen; I needed this; this really meant something to me,’ and then they nod. And I nod back.” “That’s it?” “That’s it.”
Groove depicts the DJs, the drug dealers, the tech people, the decor people, the event promoters and organizers, and the individual ravers in participatory attendance all as creating this immensely valuable ecstatic container purely for the love of it. They are putting on these wonderful epic parties because they actually love it so deeply that they are willing to do it not only for almost no pay, but at a material cost of the risk of fines, asset seizures, and jail.
This labor of profound love refutes the obsolete speculation about human nature that asserts that culture needs a monetary incentive to be produced, cultivated, maintained, and innovated on. Authentic rave culture does not operate primarily by the profit motive, and yet it is Evolving more rapidly than the consumer culture which is primarily motivated by profit.
If you need proof, just look at the memetic recycling going on in the endless remakes and spin-offs and derivative knock-offs Hollywood is constantly producing, and the nauseatingly vapid consumeristic bling bling pop music playing on repeat on every radio station across the country, most of which are owned by a few gigantic oligopolistic corporations who bought them all up after Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulating—among other things—the cap on how many terrestrial radio stations a single corporate entity could own. Our anarchic neopagan culture is more emotionally and humanistically sophisticated, more imaginatively creative, and more genuinely innovative and future-oriented than that which money can possibly ever hope to incentivize. This film depicts that quite well.
I think that’s why Roger Ebert hated it so much. I haven’t read much of his work, but I know he was one of the most famous cinematic tastemakers in the country who got his start at the Chicago Sun Times in 1967, when the Establishment—the Leviathan—was in full-blown panic mode about the rise of the psychedelic counterculture, so I assume he made a name for himself hippie-punching all the way back at the beginning of his career. In that respect, I shouldn’t have been surprised at how offended he was by the portrayal of people having positive life-affirming experiences on drugs at a rave. That’s part of what was so special about that film!
Usually the writers and the studios are coerced by the ratings agencies and their corporate shareholders into never ever portraying “drug use without negative consequences” (except alcohol, because that’s, uh, different because, uh, it’s legal). There’s a lot of fascist propaganda machinery working behind the scenes to ensure that just about any time anybody does an illegal drug in a movie or on TV, something terrible happens to them. That’s incredibly dishonest, and it creates an extremely distorted and inaccurate public perception of what illegal drugs—in general and specific ones in particular—and people who do them responsibly and recreationally are actually like in real life, and what the actual risk-to-reward ratio is in doing them.
On the one hand, it undermines the credibility of people who sincerely care about preventing people from naïvely harming themselves in pursuit of a high, because by insisting that all depictions of drug use in the mainstream media be exaggerated scare stories where the moral of the story is basically, “Just say ‘no’ to drugs, kids,” nobody who ever does an illegal drug will ever listen to another word they say about the issue.
On the other hand, such systematically distorted depictions of drug use in our culture does infantilize the public about it such that most people are utterly trapped in a false understanding of—not to mention an impoverished appreciation for—the realms of conscious experience accessible to human beings given our extraordinary brains and our historical legacy of using them to invent shamanic mysticism and biochemistry and neuropsychopharmacology.
Groove showed me that psychedelic drug use—and all the quirky behavior it instigates in ravers, before, during, and after the party, from every different perspective within the intimate temporary ecstatic community—can in fact be depicted honestly, accurately, and authentically in film. It can be done. I always knew most of those other movies about psychedelics in general or raving in particular were slanderous, but Groove made me appreciate just how slanderous they were. Roger Ebert only got tricked into thinking this film was an inaccurate portrait of psychedelic culture because all he had was legitimately inaccurate portraits of it to compare it to. He drank the prohibitionist Kool-Aide, so apparently, he couldn’t recognize the truth in the art when he saw it.
In all the hundreds of raves I’ve been to, spanning over a decade now, with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people at each event, I’ve shared dancefloor space with cumulatively millions of people at this point. Of all those millions of people I’ve raved with, I’ve only ever heard of somebody dying at an event I was at twice. In both instances, it was Prohibition that killed them. One died from an overdose of an obscure research chemical that was sold to her under the pretense that it was LSD. That would not happen if these drugs were available from legitimate sources and thereby properly accurately labelled.
The other died from a lack of proper drug safety education; she overheated on the dancefloor on MDMA after dancing for ten hours straight without taking a break to hydrate and cool off for a minute. If her high school curriculum had taught her to remember to take breaks from dancing and to drink lots of water if she is going to be taking ecstasy, she would be alive right now. It was not the drug that killed her; it was the misguided paternalistic impulse that decided it was better to keep her ignorant of proper safety precautions.
The cynic in me wants to say that prohibitionists keep those teenagers ignorant and those drugs unlabeled and unregulated on purpose so that some ravers will accidentally hurt or kill themselves at a rave, because it helps to validate their hysterical slanderous anti-drug propaganda when there is in fact a real horror story anecdote they can point to and exploit the public’s bias toward anecdotes over statistics, the vast majority of which say that on the whole, drugs are actually good! Most illegal drug use—especially of psychedelics—is perfectly appropriate and healthy, and provides people with intellectual curiosity, emotional catharsis, bodily pleasure, or even mystical transcendence. It’s good to finally see a movie that portrays that underrepresented aspect of my spiritual community. Fuck Roger Ebert.
