Christmas On Mars

Pop music is hero worship. And, as such, a forum is required for both the worship of the heroes and for the heroes to perform their feats. Think of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Think of both Woodstocks, every summer at The Gorge, CBGB in New York, Bruce Springsteen at Giants Stadium and the Beach Boys touring the casino circuit. Until last summer, the forums in which The Flaming Lips was worshiped were limited to music venues and the occasional Zaireeka listening party. After Christmas On Mars, The Flaming Lips can be worshiped on the big screen.

A near capacity audience attended the second of two showings last Saturday at the Northwest Film Forum. A guy working the ticket counter said the first night was also well attended.

The plot, considering the Lips reputation for orangutan live productions, is mercifully simple. The setting is a colony of humans on Mars. It is Christmas Eve and Stephen Drozd’s personal Santa Claus has just committed suicide by running out of the airlock. The rest of the film follows Drozd’s possible psychosis and his relationship with a mute alien, played by Wayne Coyne. Throughout is a constant theme that humans are not meant to live in space.

The movie begins with ambient music and blinking colors fading into space. Color is used sparingly and purposefully in this mostly black-and-white movie. It is usually accompanied with an intense crescendo in the score as if The Flaming Lips are trying to push their music into your eyes.

The first human on screen is a woman, played by Lips frontman Wayne Coyne’s wife, crawling out of a vagina. A motif of humongous female genitalia is established straightaway as it should be in every movie. Major Hollywood filmmakers, take note.

Drozd, the man behind most of the Lips actual music, is the star of the film. The first words spoken are his narration about his fellow martian colonizers: “They look like two moths hovering around that light.” What is that light? Is it Obama’s promise for hope and change? Is it the American Dream? Are we all just a bunch of moths?

There are several existential non sequiturs delivered by the various family members, Lips roadies and other carny folk starring in the movie. “Maybe,” one character philosophizes, “we’re all just living in the belly of some giant machine. And the machine is dying little by little.” Wow.

A hilariously appropriate Fred Armisen plays a supervisor of sorts in the colony. Drozd asks him why a worker is staring silently at nothing and Armisen answers that, “He’s staring at something that’s not even really there.” Wow.

Home-made props covered in spray paint abound in Christmas On Mars. A storage device that appears to hold nothing but color is a barely modified oven. Headsets are obviously constructed by taping pieces of cheap plastic headphones to equally ancient computer microphones.

Christmas On Mars is funny. I half expected to see an updated version of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees bumbling around in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Those demented few waiting for such an update will be sorely disappointed. At one point, Adam “Hebrew Hammer” Goldberg, playing the station’s psychiatrist, shares a dream with Drozd: “There was a vaginal-headed marching band from Hell and the baby is in their path, of course.” Viewers are then treated to a depiction of what such a march would look like. Wow.

This movie should be an inspiration to successful bands on major labels everywhere to make a low-budget film in their backyard. There is a coherent story, style and humor tying the whole movie together. Self-indulgence is no where to be found. Clocking in at just 82 minutes, Christmas On Mars is disciplined and, except for a short ten minute drag before the final climax of the movie, there is little fluff. Coyne, surprisingly, does not say a single word during the entire run of the film. Ok, so he did write and direct the thing. Still, as anyone who has ever seen the Lips in concert knows, Coyne is notorious for talking on and on, using hand puppets, to elucidate his world view. His abstention from speech in his own movie is commendable.

Christmas On Mars is available on DVD. I highly recommend seeing this movie even if you are not a fan of The Flaming Lips. It stands on its own.