Controversy Surrounds 'Bodycrash,' A Mini-Doc on Melbourne Clubbing Culture

This article was originally published in THUMP Australia.

After watching Bodycrash and observing the flurry of controversy it generated I had expected to simply eviscerate the film. Lube up the scathing criticism I wrote, gently insert it inside myself and feel better than something for once in my life. Even if that pleasure was enjoyed at the expense of a well-intentioned half-hour documentary about Melbourne's clubbing culture. After talking to its director Adrian Ortega and his chief antagonist I realised if I did there'd be some observations left unobserved.

There is, still, plenty to criticise. The primary point of dispute is evident before you hit play—a stern, overcapitalised subtitle reading "A Look Into Melbourne's Unique Club Scene." As if either Melbourne has only one unique club scene (it doesn't) or the film speaks for all of them (again, doesn't). Instead, it's about the 'Melbourne sound' or 'Melbourne bounce'—a new subgenre in the unabashed, big-room tradition of gabba, happy hardcore and three letters that are very much in the public consciousness right now. The movie begins with sombre intertitles, a warning to photosensitive epileptics arrives several strobes too late and voiceover begins. Voiceover possessing all the gravitas of a Hollywood film trailer and all the prosody of a packet of powdered French onion soup. To quote: "Some argue that the scene has never changed. And that club life reflects past traits and beliefs. Others think it's become something more."

What follows is an incoherent mess of a film. One that can't decide if it's an embedded investigation into a genre currently generating a little steam or a cool uncle, hey-kids-don't-do-it PSA about recreational drug use. If Bodycrash wants to be the former it interviews far too few people and gives far too little context; relying, instead, on sweeping proclamations about the questionable undergroundness and arguable influence of the music. If it wants to be the latter, there's far too many jiggling titties for an anti-drug message to land.

Ortega defends this on the grounds of impartiality. "I wasn't trying to make a statement, because I tried to make the film non-biased. I wasn't trying to make anyone think anything. Basically, I just tried to make the film and leave it open to your interpretation". How disingenuous that statement is I'll leave up to your interpretation.

He seems like an ambitious guy, and one thing you can't say about the film is that it looks amateurish. Crisply edited, replete with Melbourne skyline time lapses and —evidently— mixed down in surround sound. The inspiration for the film was generated while working as a videographer in the King Street clubs the film documents. Noticing "the change in the scene. How it's gotten to where it is today." He made it because "there were things to be said about that scene that needed to be said aloud." The no-doy 'insight' into the importance social media has in the scene, handwringing discussion of underage patrons and moralising about GHB use disguised as concern for its users are attempts to give dimension to what is otherwise a pretty damn capable video clip.

An aside: the discussion of GHB's ties to the Melbourne sound scene by a paramedic and drug expert may smack of patronising disapproval, but it's not necessarily completely alarmist. A study by the alcohol and drug centre Turning Point indicates GHB-related ambulance attendances in metropolitan Melbourne rose 42% between 2011/12 and 2012/13—a statistic not used in the film.

It's those jiggling titties (male patrons in the film are almost exclusively depicted as intoxicated buffoons) that really display Ortega's naïveté. When I asked whether the documentary's lingering shots of female dancers were just straight-up prurience he retreated, again, to a documentarian's defence. That it was "just the footage I had." As to whether using the footage so extensively was exploitative he says "I filmed at lot of venues where — I'm not talking about women as a whole species, we're talking about certain girls—a lot of the footage of the girls doing provocative stuff doesn't really scream respect to me, you know what I mean?" Which is a problematic attitude at best and slut shaming at worst.

So an ambitious young filmmaker made a slick documentary about dance music more informed by network-television current affairs shows than, say, Pump Up the Volume, put it on Vimeo, made a Facebook page, registered it on IMDB and waited for the views to roll in (they did, over 20,000 of them in five days). Which might deserve to be simply ignored rather than awarded such a lavish spanking. Probably would, if it weren't for Kristian Hatton.

Hatton is the outspoken director and writer for Haarp Media. A blog so deeply rooted in the Melbourne's underground electronic music scene we'll never pull it out. He (and many others) took deep, deep umbrage at Bodycrash. Writing a jeremiad about the film on his blog and taking to the comment sections of articles covering it on Inthemix. Claiming the film is "not truly representative of the majority of Melbourne's electronic music culture," taking it to task for the obscurity (and scarcity) of the interviewees and making some pretty emphatic assessments of the music. That it's "held in derision by the more intelligent majority of the scene." Although he's terminally blunt, that characteristic just seems a symptom of his love for all the nerds making beeps and boops in bedrooms across Melbourne. Something you can also see in his tendency to speak for that community in the first person, as in when he told me that the documentary's portrayal of the Melbourne sound "is not what we're down with at all. That sort of lifestyle is just not sustainable. In that it's not a lifestyle. It's bogans going out and getting pissed and making idiots of themselves to really crap, bogan music."

Again, so what. Internet beef is the cheapest, most plentiful cut at the online butcher.

To me, what's interesting about this skirmish is that it—despite Hatton's protestations—doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with the artistic merits of the Melbourne sound. Nor the merits of the 'juicy wiggle,' a dance to which its become associated. Something close to having your arms marionetted by a maniac with a motor disorder while your lower half acts like a character in an 8-bit platformer whose running animation only has two frames. If you want to try at home.

Criticising people for the things they enjoy is the first rule in the book titled How to be an Asshole. You can deride the music of producers like Will Sparks or Joel Fletcher, you can think it's the dumbest thing you ever did hear. That's permitted, that's having taste. It's when you start tarring everybody with a prejudicial brush simply for enjoying something that discernment transforms into classist nonsense. People on King Street are just trying to have a fun night out. You don't get to feel superior to them because you don't like the music they're listening to, the dance they're doing or the drugs they're taking. Remember that, in restrospect, all the yahoos flooding the field at Comiskey Park on Disco Demolition Night seem like racist homophobes.

I think Hatton and others are so aggrieved about Bodycrash partly because of it represents clubbing as something to be gawked at rather than participated in. Something, furthermore, that largely ignores the artists who are facilitating the spectacle. There will always be a split between enjoying music and being a part of the community it generates—you don't necessarily have to have an straight-edge X tattooed on your hand to enjoy Minor Threat—but what might be a gap elsewhere is a thin, black-lit blue line in dance music. It is, after all, music explicitly engineered to generate heaving masses of flesh in nightclubs—themselves highly specific, atypical environments. If a Schubert fan disagrees with a Schumann fan about the current state of the New York Philharmonic, the most they're going to do is say something disapproving about their bow tie. Maybe snap their suspenders. When the battleground is a lifestyle made up of weekends spent sweating on people the stakes are higher. The cultural and aesthetic elements less able to be teased apart. Furthermore, as EDM rises—as spectacle, populism and creeping corporate interest become more of what we talk about when we talk about dance music—these sort of arguments are only going to get louder and less civil.

Ultimately, all Adrian Ortega did was make a not-very-good film. If you want to portray anything remotely subcultural one must come from a position of absolute authority or consuming passion. Not rank opportunism. As he said to me—"I'm not a fan of this music scene. Not for bad reasons, just the music itself, the style of the music, I'm not into that music. It's not to my taste." In the end, his reasons for not liking the music may not be bad. But his reasons for making the documentary certainly were. So let's all go watch Paris is Burning or something.

Watch Bodycrash here.

Kane Daniel's Twitter feed was described as "a work of transcendent majesty" by either the New York Times or his grandma. He can't remember.