Picture yourself on the street you've seen in dozens of Hollywood films. Neat, colourful wooden houses; large front lawns; American flags; a cul-de-sac. We're in an every-neighbourhood in an anywhere-city in America in early 2016. Signs supporting Sanders, Clinton and Trump sit on neatly manicured (and not so manicured) lawns.
But there's something strange in the neighbourhood — starting with the neighbours, which include Tom Hanks from The 'Burbs (1989) and Mike Myers from Wayne's World (1992). Annette Bening's Carolyn from American Beauty (1999) lives next door to Ice Cube in Next Friday (2000). The teenagers of PEN15 (2019-21) are down the street.
Multiple versions of Seth Rogen blur into one character; Jesse Eisenberg is inventing Facebook (The Social Network, 2010), delivering pizzas (30 Minutes or Less, 2010) and killing zombies (Zombieland, 2009).
This is the world of Hello Dankness, the new film from Australian artists Soda Jerk (siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro), making its premiere this week at Samstag Museum of Art as part of Adelaide Film Festival and alongside earlier works by the duo, in an exhibition titled Open Sauce.
A sequel of sorts to 2018's Terror Nullius (best known — unfortunately — for the controversy surrounding its premiere), Hello Dankness sets up camp in 2016 and 2020, jumping between the anni horribiles as it charts two political elections, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, internet memes, hundreds of cinema references — and the lives in this constructed neighbourhood.
Cinema is spliced with news footage; memes and factual radio sit alongside the 1992 poem I Want a President.
Dominique describes Hello Dankness as "easily the hardest, most ambitious project we've ever done".
Capturing the strangeness of the time
Watching Hello Dankness, there is a whiplash to the remembering; to remaking those connections your brain had forgotten. The conspiracy theories that marked time through 2020: Bill Gates's killer vaccines; online marketplace Wayfair trafficking children; blood-harvesting adrenochrome. The fact that audio of Trump saying "grab 'em by the pussy" aired on the same day as the leak of the hacked emails from Clinton's campaign.
Soda Jerk are known for their complex remixing of films, folding together hundreds of visual references from cinema history to create new narratives with a biting political edge. Terror Nullius took on the idea of white Australia and 50 years of Australian cinema history; the focus of Hello Dankness is narrower – and the project is so much sharper for it.
Commissioned by Samstag and the Adelaide Film Festival in 2018, Hello Dankness was made in close proximity to the events it documented — and occasionally right on top of them.
"We were trying to document the time as it was unfurling — but of course the ground kept shifting beneath us," Dominique remarks.
The pair were interested in how, in 2016, "reality had sort of become very, very, very strange," says Dan.
"And we feel like 2016 is kind of a threshold where, beyond that, reality kind of collapses into spectacle."
Making it the story of one neighbourhood, and the impact of those years on that one community, "was a way to kind of create a fable which would tell the story of that collapsing to unreality," says Dan.
In recent years, the pair say, our collective notion of "truth" has been eroded, through the "accumulation of the internet".
"[The internet] has led to this kind of moment where we're no longer sharing the same consensus reality as each other and that's having an impact on the fabric of society and how we relate to each other," Dan reflects.
When the film was commissioned, the pair thought they would be making "a heroic story of the internet," says Dan.
"And then, surprise!" adds Dominique. "We began to feel less heroic and less optimistic about the future of the internet.
"Like most people, we kind of consider ourselves to 'live' in the internet now. We were interested in how it seemed that reality had sort of collapsed into these conspiracies and contagions. Where there once was fact, now there's just sort of like a, I don't know, a s*** show of hyperbole," she says.
Dan describes Soda Jerk's work, generally, as "interested in myths".
"I think myths are a form of cultural stories that we tell ourselves that have embedded power structures. And I think that conspiracies are the kinds of political myths of today, you know — [for example] that Hillary Clinton's involved in the satanic baby-eating cult or that people are communicating in pizza."
There was a definite darkness to the satire and political commentary of Terror Nullius; Hello Dankness feels much more acerbic — and never more so when it turns its focus to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, mixing together footage of the real protests with cinema protests (and the dancing cops of Step Up Revolution) – to the soundtrack of Springtime for Hitler from Mel Brooks's 1967 satire The Producers.
"It's a really complex thing obviously, in so many ways, to choose that soundtrack to speak about the fall of democracy," says Dominique.
But, she says, it was a choice born out of the political commentary of the time.
Dan adds: "In a sense, when we're dealing with the myths of that time, [the relationship between Trump and Weimar Germany] was one of the frameworks that was in the mainstream."
When you watch documentaries about 2020, says Dan, "there's a sense in which they can't capture the strangeness of the time that was experienced. And so in some ways by creating a bizarre suburban musical fable, maybe you can get closer to the experience of how weird it was".
Censorship and controversial narratives
Soda Jerk have been collaborating for 20 years, the fruits of which are showcased in the exhibition Open Sauce, which opened at Samstag Museum on Tuesday.
Included are key works Astro Black (2007-2010), exploring Afrofuturism; The Was (2016), created in collaboration with electronic band The Avalanches; and the feature-length films Terror Nullius (2018) and Hello Dankness.
The siblings came to remixing film and video in their early 20s in Sydney. It was a time, they remember, of audio sampling, warehouse parties and "squatting initiatives". In these spaces, says Dominique, was a "resistance to the privatisation of culture".
She draws a line between that culture and the duo's approach to cinema: "In the same way you'd squat a house you can squat a film and inhabit it in that way," she says.
You can see the antecedents to Hello Dankness in Soda Jerk's earlier films – the merging of news footage and politics against an incredible array of cinematic references – but with each film, the worlds they are constructing get increasingly complex; the politics becomes increasingly cynical.
At times in Terror Nullius, Soda Jerk's surrounding commentary would fade to the background, and the film would just give us the documents they were exploring, unvarnished and untouched. The Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) from Mad Max 2 might be the physical body giving voice to Mel Gibson's rants against his ex-wife, but the rants themselves are, as Dan describes, "just played straight. The scaffolding of the scene is there to allow the audience to listen".
It's a technique they use again in Hello Dankness: the cast of Napoleon Dynamite (2004) watch Trump's "pussy" claims ("This is pretty much the worst video ever made," says Napoleon); one of the guys from Slacker (1990) drives around the suburb spouting Alex Jones's screeds against vaccines and Clinton.
Hello Dankness gives us space to experience the weirdness of these cultural moments.
"We consider ourselves sort of like rogue documentarians," says Dominique. "We're interested in these films being documentaries – or docu-fictions, anyway."
As much as Soda Jerk are now very much making films about the internet, they are also coming head-to-head with a weird time for the internet. How do you document the voices – like Jones's – that are so much a part of online cultures, when those very same voices are being censored and removed from online spaces?
"It is really interesting to be interested in these things, from a research perspective, and then not to be able to find them; to have them actually scrubbed from the internet," says Dan.
"And that was true of quite a lot of the alt-right research that we were doing. The things that we would be studying or looking at were just getting removed.
"Which is …" they pause. "I'm not sure how I feel about that."
Why the level of uncertainty, I ask?
"I believe in deplatforming and censorship in some regard," Dan says. "[But] I do have questions about the extent to which censorship has been applied to the internet, and what the long-term ramifications of that are for political speech on both sides."
Soda Jerk infamously faced their own form of censorship in 2018. Terror Nullius had received the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, worth $100,000. The day before the work was due to premiere, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust withdrew promotional support and asked its name be removed from the film and all marketing material, calling the film "very controversial".
Four years on, the pair say they are still "concerned" about the precedent set by the trust in choosing to remove its name from the work. The "handshakes" between artists and institutional bodies, says Dominique, "are polite until the art is no longer willing to be, and then [those relationships] become really vexed".
Hello Dankness is certainly not a film that shies away from controversy: when the teenagers from PEN15 throw food at RoboCop, he responds by shooting at them; we're taken into Bill Gates's lair, where he inserts "Death Machine Maker, Home Version" into his computer ("This page has repeatedly shared misinformation," a pop-up reads).
This is 2016 and 2020 in all of their contradictory, controversial narratives.
Soda Jerk's work, says Dan, can feel like "these impossible puzzles we're piecing together. And we love it dearly, but it's very intense and can be frustrating".
Now the film is made, the pair feels it is time to step back: "We have a lot to say and then we spend years saying it in a work and then we send it into the world," says Dominique.
"I guess in an ideal scenario for us, you send that provocation into the world and then leave that as an open space for other people to speak and ideate," she says.
Dan adds: "I guess we're just really old-school, in that we just really would like the work to be the thing."
Hello Dankness is showing daily at 3.30pm as part of Soda Jerk: Open Sauce at Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide until December 16.
EDITOR'S NOTE October 21, 2022: This article has been amended to clarify that the Ian Potter Foundation did not withdraw financial support to the Terror Nullius project in 2018, but declined to participate in any marketing or publicity.
