Head, The Monkees and the Search of Authenticity
Micky Dolenz falls from the Gerald Desmond Bridge, Head (1968).
Ana Roberts, September 24th, 2024
In 1968, Micky Dolenz jumped off the Gerald Desmond Bridge. Some eighty minutes later, he did it again, this time joined by the rest of The Monkees—Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and Michael Nesmith. Head, the 1968 film penned by Jack Nicholson and starring The Monkees, was the vehicle for this bridge jump—a filmic suicide that served equally as a career one. Not that there was much life left in The Monkees by 1968; the final episode of their show had aired in March, and their latest album, The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees, had failed to top the charts in America and didn’t even break the top ten in the UK—their first to miss both marks.
The Vietnam War, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, riots in Chicago, and Soviet pressures across Eastern Europe all contributed to a waning optimism, within which there was hardly a place for the naïve antics of the Prefab Four. Yet Head is far from naïve. It is a psychedelic experiment—intentionally mind-numbing and academically stimulating—serving as a fourth-wall-breaking political critique of everything from the American collegiate sports system to dandruff commercials, with war, media, and reality thrown in for good measure. The film flopped spectacularly. It made just $16,000 from its $750,000 budget and was derided by Monkees fans, hippies, academics, and critics alike. It was too conceptual for the core fan base, mostly teen girls, and too Monkees for anyone else the film was aiming for.
Yet Head has prevailed. In the years following its release, it built a cult following and achieved a niche but significant level of critical success, regarded as a cornerstone object of the era that encompasses the themes, politics, and feelings of the late '60s. It was entered into the Criterion Collection in 2010 and hailed by Criterion critic Chuck Stephens as “arguably the most authentically psychedelic film made in 1960s Hollywood.” Stephens is right—Head is a staggeringly authentic film in so many ways. Much of the joy of watching it lies in seeing The Monkees, unable to play anything but their teeny-bopper TV show selves, juxtaposed with legitimate, psychedelic social criticism. It is within this brilliant contradiction that the question arises: How did the era’s least authentic band create its most authentic film? And why was it so readily rejected and ignored as a false work, with no authentic merits, by the contemporary counterculture—among whom authenticity was a primary obsession?
“They were inside the wrong thing and outside the right one. This strange combination, teamed with the genuine rebelliousness and otherness of Jack Nicholson, uniquely positioned them to make the most astute criticism of their time.”
There are simple answers to these questions if we want them. Nesmith’s affinity for Nicholson and the hippie scene, paired with a studio believing that combining a cultural zeitgeist with a teen phenomenon would be financially viable, accounts for the creation of the film. Sgt. Pepper’s had been released to critical and commercial success the year before, proving that boy bands could be both psychedelic and successful. This explains much of the film’s genesis. As for the rejection of Head by the counterculture, it feels wholly logical—the only quality the counterculture valued more than authenticity was “cool,” and The Monkees, for all their possible genius, were achingly uncool. Yet these answers do not hit at the crux of the issue: that of authenticity.
Authenticity was not a problem solely for The Monkees; it was a primary concern for almost every post-war artist who tried to shape a public image that wasn’t always in line with their true selves. Regardless of where they started, most were to some extent manufactured by a team around them. The Monkees are discussed in terms of authenticity not because they were the first or only inauthentic band of the era—arguably, they were neither—but because they were among the rare few who acknowledged their own inauthenticity. Later, with Head, they acknowledged their own attempt toward authenticity.
Frank Zappa and Davy Jones in Head (1968).
At its heart, Head is a film about freedom, and the failed attempt to achieve it in a world that wants not just The Monkees, but all public figures, to be a shiny, televised version of themselves, sanitized even in their rebellion. After the opening suicide, each of the four band members kisses the same groupie and is told that they are indistinguishable from one another. They race through various genres and films, moving in unrelated vignettes as if they were aliens dropped randomly across a film studio lot. They fight in the trenches of war, ride horseback across the great American West, and solve a murder mystery in ominous, decadent housing. In each scenario, they try to prove that they are four real, individual people in a real band that makes real music that real people listen to. Yet, at every turn, they find that this pursuit is meaningless—everything they are doing is sanctioned, fated, directed, and written by the producers of the film they are trying to escape. They break the fourth wall repeatedly, intentionally flubbing lines, acknowledging actors, and referencing the flimsy walls of the set they are on—only to find that this, too, is in the script that Jack Nicholson, appearing as himself and playing his actual role as producer, wrote for them. From start to finish, it is a wild ride—a kind of Ouroboros that eats itself in its meta-reflective analysis. It digs through philosophical ideas again and again, only to find that it has dug so deep it returns on the other side, no closer to the surface than when it began—with a synthetic boy band playing their hits to an audience who don’t truly know them, and would rather keep it that way.
The film was released at the tail end of the capital-S "Sixties," before the killing at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont turned the whole decade into a bad trip. Despite the turmoil in the world, there was still a tie-dyed, tune-in, drop-out, mind-expanding, world-changing hopefulness that believed art, youth, truth, and rebellion could really change the world. The Monkees, for most of their career, had been a distillation of this attitude—neatly packaged by executives to be sold for syndication on TV channels across the world and played relentlessly on every wavelength. They were able to operate as both insiders and outsiders, feeling less shame about their participation in the system that everyone else was pretending not to be part of. They were inside the wrong thing and outside the right one. This strange combination, teamed with the genuine rebelliousness and otherness of Jack Nicholson, uniquely positioned them to make the most astute criticism of their time. That this critique is seen to come from the most unlikely place is, perhaps, incorrect—they were the only ones who could do it so explicitly.
Head is bombastic and exaggerated, but it cuts through to something that everyone else was too scared to be honest about. The Beatles danced around the ideas on Glass Onion, Dylan nodded to them with Ballad of a Thin Man, and even Elvis, in his countless motion pictures, tried to comment on them. But all cared too much about their artistry to acknowledge that they were participating in a system they claimed to be outside of. It took The Monkees, the least cool of all, to truly speak truth to power, and they paid the price for it. In the closing minutes of the film, as the final Monkee falls to his watery death, the director wheels their soaked bodies away in a large aquarium, the band struggling as they awake, and stores it neatly on a studio lot—to be used again whenever deemed fit.
Ana Roberts is a writer, musician and culture critic.
