Reel Rundown: Documentary tunes into creation (and demise) of new wave band Devo
In the 1994 film “Reality Bites,” the character Lelaina (Winona Ryder) asks her friend Troy (Ethan Hawke) to define the term “irony.” Without hesitation, Troy responds. “It’s when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning,” he says.
Few of us real-life humans could do the same. It’s not clear that even the actor Hawke could have done so without having memorized his lines.
Still, the concept behind that definition is easy enough to recognize when it applies to our real lives. And as the Netflix documentary “Devo” emphasizes, that’s something that the self-same-named band from Akron, Ohio, came to realize about itself.
It was way back in 1973 when a group of Kent State University students got together in their free time to debate nothing less than the meaning of humanity. And the one thing they agreed on was that humanity seemed to be regressing instead of progressing. In their collective mind humanity was, so to speak, de-evolving.
Since all of the students were engaged in creating art and/or music, it was only natural that they would pursue projects that soon involved forming a 5-piece band that – reflecting their adopted philosophy – eventually came to be known simply as Devo.
The band, alternately described as new wave or art punk, most famously comprised two pairs of brothers, Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh and Gerald and Bob Casale, along with drummer Alan Myers.
And together, they achieved their greatest success during the 1980s, particularly after the formation of MTV in 1981 when videos of hits such as “Whip It” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” started getting regular play.
The Netflix documentary, directed by Chris Smith, details all this, from the band’s initial lineup (which for a while included a third Mothersbaugh brother) to their first struggling attempts to perform and on through their snaring a record deal and eventually achieving global success.
Smith, whose directorial efforts include the offbeat 1999 hit “American Movie” and the 2023 musical documentary “Wham!” also captures the band’s demise, which as Gerald Casale explains, is something that tends to happen to most musical groups.
But Smith also shows the serious intent behind the band’s weird performances, marked by their wearing strange costumes and the herky-jerk mannerisms they adopted while playing that made them look like virtual androids.
And while interviewing band members, particularly Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, and using a lot of concert and other archival footage (some including the late David Bowie, who was a fan), Smith shows how their intentions tended to get overlooked by critics and fans.
The fact that they were never taken seriously is something that the surviving band members bemoan. As Casale said in a recent interview with author Bill Kopp, “I never really wanted to be a band, I wanted us to be … a gestalt of lifestyle and politics and social commentary.”
In other words, the members of Devo strove to be a force that reflected the times in which they lived and their fatalistic attitudes about where they saw everything heading.
Yet for most people, any real sense of seriousness ended up getting lost amid the catchy rhythms and clever visuals that their artistic sides were able to create. They wanted to send a message, yet they had to settle for mere commercial success.
Call that irony in action.