Anti-fascist cinema: Freaky Tales (2024)
Oakland once again provides the setting for a surreal, anarchic vision
HOW TO DEAL WITH NAZIS
Punch Nazis
See no. 1
— maxim quoted on social media
Since moving to Reno I’ve been impressed by the tone of the r/Reno subreddit. The forum depicts the city as decisively non-affluent and, if not precisely working class, it’s even more not the voice of the managerial class (I guess that’s LinkedIn) or the Karen class (Nextdoor) or Facebook. Members— the forum seems very male — often post about the challenges they face. They seem underemployed, and frequently confess to being lonely. There’s no expectation that everyone’s gone to college, and the forum clearly lacks the enthusiasm for ironic discourse you would find elsewhere. When I posted extensive comments on a restaurant, I got shot down (“This isn’t Yelp!”). I’ve learned to temper some of the default (and unexamined) assumptions that I started out with.
“Freaky Tales” is a film showing the joys and dangers of life at a certain similar level. Because it’s a movie, there’s more criminality and more Tarantinine dirtbaggery. Because of this tone, and because the film contains multiple episodes with overlapping characters, it is reminiscent of “Pulp Fiction”— but minus most of the male preening, strutting, and homophobia.
Set in 1987, the movie’s four episodes are these: 1. Habitues of a Berkeley Flats punk club, 924 Gilman, face off against a large gang of Nazi skinheads (this part, at least, is based on a true incident). 2. Two friends who work at an ice cream shop enter a rap battle against recording star Too $hort. 3. A debt collector for a criminal attempts to quit, but a figure from the past has already come for revenge. 4. A local basketball star’s family is killed in a home invasion, and he wreaks revenge upon the robbers.
The stories are all set in Oakland in the same time period: spring 1987. That’s accurate for two of the episodes based on real events: the conflict between punks and skinheads at 924 Gilman, and the record-setting performance of Golden State Warriors guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd in Game 4 of the NBA semifinals. The link to real events, however much they are exaggerated and valorized in the movie, builds authenticity.
The fact that a basketball player’s nickname was “Sleepy” leads to the following line from the film. It’s spoken by the main bad guy, an Oakland police detective referred to in the credits simply as “The Guy” (Ben Mendelsohn). He is secretly the director of the neo-Nazis who got their asses kicked in episode 1, the same criminals who pillage the Golden State Warriors’ homes during the aforementioned playoff game. But by this moment in the movie, they’ve all gotten their asses kicked yet again, this time by Sleepy (Jay Ellis). The Guy looks around at the carnage, scowls at Sleepy and growls, “Tell me something. Did you do this all by yourself or do you have Dopey and Sneezy hiding in a closet somewhere? Huh?” That’s funny, but nobody laughed, because it’s the episode’s climax.
But also because The Guy is white, and alongside his basic cruelty, one of his main weapons is that sneering sarcasm. It strikes me now that he’s the only character who employs sarcasm; everyone else, even the Nazi skinheads, are straightforward and even sincere. Is that a sign that the young filmmakers, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, are representing their generation’s exhaustion with Gen X and early millennial cynicism?
Aside from the sheer enjoyment of watching vengeance visited on the strong by the supposedly weak, “Freaky Tales” has great performances from Pedro Pascal as a mob debt collector and new father, Ji-young Yoo as a punk out of 924 Gilman who wreaks havoc among the Nazis, DeMario Symba Driver as Too $hort, and especially Jay Ellis, whose role as Sleepy Floyd demands a range from a goofy new-age pitch man for a meditation business to a fierce avenger. Too $hort himself serves as the movie’s narrator.
But the most important character is the city of Oakland itself. Like “Sorry to Bother You,” the brilliant and even more surreal feature by Boots Riley, “Freaky Tales” shows Oakland as a land of strivers and schemers, full of creativity, tenacity, and courage. One of the things I admired about “Sorry to Bother You” is its refusal to reassure viewers that Oakland is but a satellite of San Francisco. Unlike most movies that show San Francisco across the bay from Oakland and Berkeley as if the smaller cities need it to feel important, Riley’s film doesn’t devote a single frame to the City by the Bay. In “Freaky Tales,” Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck show their city is just as solitary and independent, so I was surprised by the movie’s last moments that show Sleepy Floyd flying over the Bay Bridge on a motorcycle. This is the only false note in a movie as fun as it is violent, because almost all the victims are fucking Nazis. What can we learn from this essentially anti-fascist film? Punch Nazis.