(UPDATE: Having rewatched the film, I’m just not seeing what ‘Baker is. The female characters are cyphers/placeholders, but so are most of the men. No “agency”? Who kills who at the end? Hmmm…)
I’m guessing Kinsella splurged on the “boom box” even though he already has everything (including imports) on vinyl.
See, a kind 5FF just told me that “The Baker” has a blog, which includes his recollections of the filming of that b/w Clash home movie Hell W10 (1983), long thought lost, where they all played gangsters.
(The Baker speculates on the Freudian/Jungian “art imitates life” aspect of the movie, with Joe casting Mick as the villain, etc. But what strikes me in that vein is that a) Joe cast himself as a cop, because duh, and b) more amusingly, Mick runs what amounts to “a prostitution business.”)
None of what follows shocks me.
But then, I’m not liberal feminist Warren “Mark Steyn wrote the words ‘gook’ and ‘wog’!!!” Kinsella.
To me, however, the movie holds much deeper meanings – and some very observable Freudian undertones, as everything that’s captured on camera is to Joe’s specific design. It’s noticeable that the female characters in Hell W10 have no real agency, or play any meaningful part in the narrative; they’re merely portrayed as throwaway characters, devoid of any intelligence or significance.
Whether this was Joe unwittingly imprinting his own male-centric state of mind onto the movie or not is unclear, but the entire piece plays like an episode of The Sweeney, with women consigned to serving as mere plot devices.
The racially charged comments in the movie’s captions are also entirely consistent with Joe’s ’70s street-vernacular style – he was constantly referencing “wops,” “nips,” and “Greeks” in his lyrics. This all provided a further glimpse, perhaps unintentionally, into Joe’s anachronistic worldview and confrontational nature.
