Green Room Is A Violent, Nihilistic Love Letter To Punk Rock's Origins
The culture war comes offline and into the real world.
“Is art inherently political?” It’s a question that, despite the intensity of the internet discourse cycle, has existed in some form or fashion for years, across every medium and throughout some of the most tumultuous periods in human society. Nowadays, it’s a question that incites heated debate online considering the way our contemporary culture war has consumed every nugget of the entertainment space, from Star Wars' first Black lead to conversations about diversity in gaming. Movies, literature, comic books, video games, everything has become a battleground for a perpetual ownership war between the political left and right, with some folks watching from the sidelines clinging to the idea that great art shouldn’t be politicized.
Artists themselves have had to wrestle with this question for years, with strong opinions across the board on both sides. For every artist who feels compelled to share their beliefs with the world there are just as many who choose to stay silent, out of fear of retaliation or alienating potential audiences. Although it might be more hyper-visible, today’s culture war isn’t all that dissimilar from an earlier one, one that was fought over the soul of one of our greatest musical genres — and 2015’s head-banging, pulse-pounding Green Room literalizes that struggle in a brutal way.
Lots of movies fashion themselves as being “about” music, but few have captured the texture of a particular genre as well as Jeremy Saulnier’s third outing, a gritty thriller about a hapless punk band who end up in a fight for their lives with Nazi skinheads when they stumble onto a murder after a concert. Before things escalate into a nightmare, we spend a crucial opening living alongside the Ain’t Rights, our lovable band of starving artists: watching them siphon gas when they’re too broke to pay, perform at a sleepy small-town diner filled with disinterested patrons to make six bucks each, and posture what it means to be truly hardcore in an interview destined to be listened to by exactly 10 people. But it’s all made worthwhile when they get on-stage, because Saulnier does such an incredible job bringing the thrashing, flailing energy of a punk show to life — one of the most sublime moments in the film is when the band plays at the venue that will soon become their arena, as the music drops out and we see the crowd move as one against a wall of noise.
All of that set-up is necessary for what undoubtedly becomes one of the most nerve-shredding movies of the 2010s. Jeremy Saulnier is a contemporary master of tension, and Green Room threatens to burst at the seams with it, courtesy of a painterly grasp on visual storytelling. When the Ain’t Rights are trapped backstage with no way out, it’s not simply enough for Saulnier to show us the Nazi gangsters waiting for blood on the other side of the door — he traps us in the room with them as they panic and plan, only to reveal the danger when one of our would-be victims peers underneath the door to see a small army of black boots and red laces.
Patrick Stewart’s ruthless neo-Nazi figurehead is certainly not as friendly as Professor Xavier or Captain Picard.
The violence in Green Room is quick, gruesome, and decidedly anti-cinematic — there’s no slasher movie-style catharsis to seeing the aftermath of an arm getting hacked with a machete, or an attack dog tearing out someone’s trachea. It’s a desperate, frantic struggle, not unlike something out of a punishing survival horror game. Although it’s fictional, the film can’t help but feel like a life-or-death literalization of the battle between anti-fascist and fascist punks in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
In the 1970s, the popularity of racist, reactionary sentiments in the U.K. (such as the extreme xenophobia of politicians like Enoch Powell and the white nationalist political party National Front) led to the rise of several neo-Nazi punk bands, a trend which immigrated to the United States in the ‘80s and led to an intercontinental schism within the genre, with skinhead punks engaging in violence, frequently of a racist flavor. An antifascist movement inevitably sprouted up in response, and principled reactions such as the Rock Against Racism movement in London and the Dead Kennedy’s perpetually timely Nazi Punks F*ck Off firmly drew the line in the sand, representing punk music as a space for anyone and everyone except those who would proudly wear a swastika.
Once it comes, the violence in Green Room is to-the-point and simply unforgettable.
The iconic Dead Kennedy’s song plays a crucial role in the film — it’s the first song the Ain’t Rights play during their set once they discover their venue is a skinhead hangout, a rash decision thought up by the band’s timid bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin). It’s one of the late actor’s best performances, with him embodying the character as sheepish, unsure of himself, and initially quite helpless. But underneath his nervous demeanor is a streak of impulsiveness and true anarchy, the same traits that drive the band to give the middle finger to a gang of Nazis on their own turf, and the same traits that become central to the group’s survival.
Early on, Saulnier takes care to present the extreme efficiency and organization of the skinhead operation. In a particularly attentive sequence, we see them go through the motions of a cover-up: paying off two “true believers” to take the fall for an orchestrated, nonlethal stabbing (sleight-of-hand designed to keep the cops from discovering the real murder), all the while constructing a false narrative to make their planned murders of the band look like self-defense. There’s clearly a hierarchical structure at play, a well-oiled fascist machine designed to swallow our heroes whole — which is precisely why, to survive, they need to embody the chaos of their music and throw a pipe bomb into their opponent’s machinations.
Anton Yelchin’s turn as Pat is one of the late actor’s finest roles and also the beating heart of the film.
The forces of authoritarianism are a neat, tidy, well-kept system, designed to oppress and censor. They don’t want art to be messy, or opinionated, or vocal about resisting prejudice; they want you to stay silent and digestible. But the truth is that art is a reflection of the life-or-death politics that surround us at all times, and the stakes of the “culture war” are bigger than a message in the newest Disney movie. Sometimes, despite the consequences, you have to get on stage and draw a line in the sand, even if it means standing alone in a room full of people who want to do you harm — because in the words of the Dead Kennedy’s, “punk is thinking for yourself.”
