Raves, the Celluloid Rage

Jon Reiss had never been to a rave when he started work on “Better Living Through Circuitry,” his documentary on the underground youth phenomenon that opens later this month.

A director of music videos for groups such as Nine Inch Nails, Reiss knew nothing about techno music or the all-night dance happenings called raves. But his friend Brian McNelis, general manager of Cleopatra Records, wanted to make a rave movie, and Reiss agreed to accompany him to a music conference in Miami.

To check out the scene, they visited a dance club one night, video camera in hand, and Reiss was not impressed. “It was a really bad deejay in a bad club,” he recalls. “I looked at Brian and said, ‘This is it?’ ”

But on the second night, when they left the conference-sponsored events to attend a real rave featuring the group Rabbit in the Moon, Reiss was hooked. “It was just amazing,” he says. “I hadn’t had an experience like that at a musical event in years.”

McNelis concurs: “We used no drugs, no alcohol--we were working. But at the same time you just felt like you were going to explode from the euphoria.”

The documentary that Reiss, producers McNelis and Stuart Swezy spent the next two years making became their way of exploring why the music and atmosphere had affected them so. Filled with footage from raves across the country and interviews with ravers, deejays and organizers, “Better Living Through Circuitry” is a music-drenched primer on a youth craze that probably can no longer be considered underground, given the attention it’s starting to get from the mainstream.

Three rave movies currently are in or on the way to theaters. “Human Traffic,” a hip comedic love story from England about one high-octane weekend in the lives of young ravers, opened Friday. “Circuitry” opens May 26, three weeks before the June 16 opening of “Groove,” a dance-, drug- and sex-driven story in which nearly all of the action takes place during an illegal Los Angeles rave.

The music and attitude on display in these movies has been showing up in mainstream films and advertising for a while--last year’s “Go,” is one noteworthy example. But raves aren’t just the setting for the current trio of films--the joyous and often illegal happenings, which often take place in the countryside or in abandoned warehouses, are front and center.

Besides exuberance and, of course, the music, all three movies seem to share a conviction on the part of their makers that they are introducing an important and mostly misunderstood youth culture to the public at large.

Though aging beatniks, hippies and punk rockers might beg to differ, Justin Kerrigan, the 25-year-old writer-director of “Human Traffic,” calls it “the most significant youth culture in history.” He bases the claim not only on its size and longevity--it’s been around more than 10 years and shows no sign of decline--but also on the force of society’s reaction against it.

In order to control raves, which sometimes attracted more than 100,000 people to the countrysides of England, communities in the country forced them into clubs by making it “illegal for more than 10 people to dance to a repetitive beat in an outside space,” he says.

Drugs as a Key to the Experience

It seems like only yesterday that movies were squeamish about portraying drug use--scenes of pot smoking drew scornful comment from blow-in-the-wind reviewers who shortly before had seen nothing wrong with it. This was during Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, when bucking the trend toward on-screen sobriety seemed almost unpatriotic.

But if the collected works of Quentin Tarantino, Ice Cube’s “Friday” movies, “American Beauty” and any number of other films don’t provide enough evidence that times have changed, the arrival of these rave movies certainly will. The taking of drugs--ecstasy is the chemical of choice--seems an essential part of the rave experience. Even the names of some of some of the biggest groups intentionally refer to drugs: Crystal Method, for example.

With their talk of peace, love and understanding, and talk of mind expansion through use of drugs, the ravers seem to resemble the youth culture of the ‘60s, but, as McNelis notes, “They have the comfort of 20-plus years of history to know what that scene was about and to see some of the failings of it.”

The kids who flock to raves have no political agenda, he says. They aren’t trying to push anything on anyone. “It’s an underground culture,” he says. “If you want to go there, you’ve got to find it.”

“Groove” begins with a cross-section of Southern California twentysomethings receiving notification, via e-mail, of where to go to receive directions to the rave. As the characters, who hail from all walks of life, make plans to attend, the organizers set to work preparing the abandoned warehouse for the all-night party.

Gradually, the characters’ dreams and fears start to come into focus. Through all of the dancing and flirting and drug use--amid an overdose, a betrayal and a police raid--a central story starts to emerge. As in “Human Traffic,” the yearning that drives that story is an old-fashioned desire for love.

Despite appearances--and ravers can lavish as much attention on exotic appearances as anybody--these characters are no different from other movie characters or the kid next door.

“Human Traffic’s” Kerrigan, and the ravers Reiss interviewed for “Circuitry,” all stress the inclusiveness and harmony of the scene. The strong suggestion in all three films is that raves, and the community that flocks to them, provide something that’s missing for people who feel alienated in their everyday lives.

Kerrigan says his old friends from the rave scene have gone on to quite normal lives. “It’s not like they become junkies and live in the streets or turn to crime,” he says. “All my friends have gone on to become doctors, lawyers, bankers. . . . I even know one policeman, if you can believe it.”

‘Not Worshiping the False Gods of Rock’

Reiss, 35, is old enough to have caught the tail end of the punk movement, and he sees parallels between the punk and rave scenes. Both cultures foster a sense of community, he says, and both have an anti-corporate, do-it-yourself ethos. Just as any kid with a guitar and an attitude could form a punk rock band, any group with turntables and access--even illegal access--to a large enough, remote space could throw a rave. And people can make their own records without benefit of record companies.

“It’s not star-driven,” says McNelis. “They’re not worshiping the false gods of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Some of the filmmakers talk about the lifestyle they’re presenting--which some of them have lived--with missionary zeal. Kerrigan was so intent on authenticity for “Human Traffic,” which he says he made while living “on the dole,” that he only used actors who had been a part of the culture. And he doesn’t shy away from portraying the paranoia that people feel when they come down off of a high.

“I was basically writing from personal experience,” he says during an interview at the Los Angeles offices of Miramax, which is distributing the movie. “I was Jip,” he says, referring to the central character in “Human Traffic,” a young man who holds a dead-end job selling blue jeans.

For him, and for his characters, raving was just a way to blow off steam, to escape from everyday frustrations. As one raver says in “Circuitry,” “It’s like one-night oblivion.”

Kerrigan approaches the material with the same sort of manic energy shown by the movie’s hopped-up revelers. “Human Traffic” is filled with fantasy sequences and sardonic humor, and it switches at will between film stock and documentary footage of riots, raves and street parties. It has the free-form verve of “Trainspotting” (1996), only without the harrowing parts.

The film takes a jab at a society that passes judgment on ravers without knowing what the lifestyle is all about. When a clueless documentary filmmaker interviews ravers about their use of drugs, two girls pretend they’re on heroin.

“ ‘Trainspotting’ made us want to do it,” one of them tells the shocked interviewer.

“And, sometimes, if we see ‘New Jack City’ before hitting the clubs, we use crack too,” the other chimes in.

Kerrigan started writing the script in 1996, and for three years he found it next to impossible to raise the money to make the movie. “Nobody would touch it,” he says. People advised him to leave out the drugs and simply turn it into a love story. Either that, or make it a cautionary tale by including a drug-related death.

“If I had done that, if I’d put in a big climax with a shooting or a drug overdose or something, it wouldn’t have been authentic,” he says.

The rave scene no longer threatens people in London, he says. He was braced for a strong negative reaction when he movie came out there, but it never happened. The movie was a big hit, and now other rave movies are being made, he says.

But why are three hitting the U.S. at the same time?

“Maybe it’s the zeitgeist,” says Reiss. “I hope it’s different from having two asteroid movies. I’d like to think we’ve tripped onto something.”