Ian pulled some truly punk rock ingenuity from those years of bunking down with crusties and sketchy West Coast kids for so many years. Or maybe that was upstate NY comin’ out of him in the clutch. Either way, he figured out how to inject a parched inkjet cartridge with a syringe full of screen-printing ink so he could coax out both of our invites for the Nike SB “Nothing But the Truth” video premiere. Even though I didn’t witness this feat of Yankee can-do spirit, his simple retelling of it was the most interesting event of the evening.
Amid love hotels and gauche clubs, most notably the ubiquitously dull “Club Asia,” the theater is a stark futurist slab of concrete façade, a venue inclined towards the reprint of Chomsky’s fabled “Manufacturing Consent”—the last film I saw there—than commercial skateboard hype. Apart from the extravagance of Nike’s promotions crew renting out a theater in Shibuya, there wasn’t as much flash and pop as I expected. Nothing like Shanghai’s premiere that included ramps, several of the SB team, and a bouquet of blandly and scantily attired girl-hires. Maybe the budget had already been blown on the video itself, and the remaining green would go further cashed out in RMB than yen and would get deeper into a dreamy “emerging market.” That’s casino capitalism doubled down: marketing and venture commerce meet faddish extreme sports that have bloody consequences for bad judgment.
The subdued crowd of style-fiends in expensive denim and fitted T’s with requisite 59 caps and unscratched boards clutched close, seemed nonplussed by the coolness of the space itself, and this indifference hung thick in the auditorium itself. Two kids sat quietly beside me, rocking a pair of expensively-swooshed windbreakers cut and patterned from an unmistakable 1980’s steroid-muscle beach aesthetic. They murmured “hot” or “amazing” or “scary” as key moments of physical jeopardy and triumph played themselves across the screen. Skaters rocked-and-rolled and gave proof of their street credentials with tricky flips done switch over (requisite) gaps, or big flips over handrails to waiting embankments. The filming depended on pre-lit environments and careful choreography while the edits were fast and clean. It left the skaters sanitized and ironically unremarkable in their consummate displays of rare skill. As Nike SB has labored to infuse their brand insurgency with legitimacy, their calculated image-crafting seems to have cost them the ability to let calculation and control remain as split-second miracles of the skaters themselves. Apart from a few sequences shot on scarred concrete highway barriers made barely rideable with crude transitions and Chet Childress’ scenes, the skating itself was reducible to a series of predictable set-pieces which belie the risks and intensity of finding spots and dialing them in. The Nike magic of soaring conventional athletes is a puppet that lives in the theater of mainstream sports but on the streets that magic struggles to conjure itself within the truth of skating’s failure and improvisation. Out there on the street objects disappear and suddenly reappear with totally new purposes under the fiery slash grinds of skaters. Even the most adroit skaters crash and bleed with far more frequency than they stick tricks in spotlighted glory. “Nothing but the Truth” occupies an increasingly crowded corner of the truth-universe, one stuffed with the wall-projection-trophies of manufactured truths about brand and sport synergies and the wacky personalities that make both come alive. What is finally on display is not magic, but a kind of taxidermy of risk. Effortlessly precise riders like Paul Rodriguez or hardcore skaters like Childress are made into coherent shills-in-motion to animate the imagination of a global brand.
With skating broken down into tightly framed depictions of triumphalism, edited free of the context of slams and false starts and bad timing, what remains is only a thin veneer of raw proficiency presented in series, like a checklist, or a sneaker collector’s catalog. In order to give “flavor” to the team, to make them more than flawless but rote street performers, the film introduces the conceit of movies-within-the-movie. The Belgian director duo, working under the nom de plume Lionel Goldstein, rehearse their low-tech narrative conventions again in which the normative portrayals of sport are undermined with clever exaggerations of mythical underdog stories told in a raw documentary-style.
Here Goldstein presents the skaters documenting themselves as eccentric iconoclasts. This attempt at a kind of ironic nonchalance befits a moment when major brands are found casually yet determinedly slumming in the erstwhile ghettoes of art and sport. With seeming ease corporate money can now successfully make allies of old-school innovators as Nike SB recently did with Lance Mountain and transgress those old color lines between jock and the outsiders. Goldstein’s technique is perfectly suited to portray this Nike-funded filmic distillation of pure body practice—skateboarding—coming from that wellspring of authenticity, “the streets.” The resulting concoction is a tepid depiction of truth’s ironic mutability—nothing is true here and that indeterminacy makes Nike and its team as legitimately bound up in the intense conflicts over meaning and representation under capitalism as anyone else.
As if to underscore this surreal drama of brand-enhancement and street credibility, the film is scattered with little skits of the skaters being interviewed by lumpy old men in suits posing as Hollywood B-rank producers seated at cheap fake-wood desks. They want to help the skaters tell their “stories”—whatever improvised piece of theater the team riders can concoct using moldy warehouses full of props and the help of a make-up department and a procurer of silicone augmented models. Cut with bits of 16mm film, shot on a near-abandoned movie lot in the desert, these scenes are eerie and aimlessly experimental in their “truth”-telling. They attempt to restore to the skating a kind of insane intelligence that is so absent in the clean footage that comprises the bulk of the film. This device isn’t simply a weak plot vehicle to carry the repetitive money-shots of (skating) flesh in action. They are totally disconnected from the skating geographically, thematically, and stylistically while loosely serving as introductions for various riders.
The film is most compelling and weirdly unnerving around these scenes flashing us with the film’s post-modern best: the self-conscious pretend acting of the skaters playing themselves in their fantasies—the ridiculously self-scripted vignettes—within the larger fantasy of being filmed for Nike’s self-promotional and legitimizing video. For us watching, the layered fantasies seemed to present too much incoherence to respond to, and the audience was quiet, occupied with popcorn and the beer—tangible realness made better by being free. A trite slam section ended the film, repetitive outtakes belittled as a freakish distraction to the long credits.
Conscious of watching this quintessentially Californian rebel-sport enacted on a screen in Tokyo, I was struck by how tightly circumscribed around Americans the movie remained. The film hardly presented Nike SB as a global team despite it having sponsored riders around the world. This is in sharp contrast to Nike’s broader significance transnationally, from its production sites littered along the poorer and non-unionized edges of the world’s economy to shoe lines such as Nike’s famed “Glocality” series created by diverse designers representing their particular nationalities. More specifically, while Nike SB has employed Japanese designers such as Takashi and Yuji Sato, therefore extending the creative/cultural linkages across the globe and proving that stylistic metabolism across space and nationality is rewarding and necessary, there was no similar acknowledgment of the vitality of skateboarding’s imagination beyond America. A strikingly narrow range of riders skated over far-flung terrain, super-flattened into a nameless mélange of global, (mis)appropriated architecture. The emphasis on Nike SB’s team cadre certainly links its brand to a few recognizable skaters who are geographically positioned to benefit from skateboarding’s media and industry epicenter and its simultaneous authenticating, originary location--California. Across the Pacific Rim, on the streets of Tokyo, however, this rehearsal of skateboarding’s “true” sites and riders hardly affected the skaters I ride with regularly. Out in the western sprawl along the Chuo train line, skaters generally were unimpressed with Nike SB’s efforts to situate itself as part of their world and the film too was unremarkable to them. Particularly because it made no effort to link its narrative or riders to those who share the wider cultural and physical spaces that skateboarding thrives within.
As the movie finished there was finally weak, uncertain applause and the audience dispersed into the lurid unreality of Shibuya’s pleasure zones. It seemed like we had become part of intertwining fictions, caught up as spectators and participants in fantasy all at once. Despite this, skating’s spontaneous energy couldn't be completely contained by the film and Ian and I longed to go lay out some long slappy grinds and recreate some truth for ourselves.
