Essay: In Acid Veritas
Title: In Acid Veritas: Foreshadowing and Thematic Development in Hard Core Logo’s Acid Trip
Spoilers: For the ending of Hard Core Logo, which you should definitely see first
Many thanks to
purridot, who puts up with a lot and
ignazwisdom whose fault this indirectly is
Most of Hard Core Logo has an extreme cinéma-vérité style in keeping with its documentary sensibility. Though it occasionally indulges in surrealism or more polished effects and devices, for the majority of the film the viewer is continually reminded that there is a guy behind the camera. The audience is deeply aware of the narrator’s limitations, where the scenes are either interviews or have the artificial feeling of characters hyperaware of the cameras they can’t quite help but play to. The notable exception to this documentary format is the scene at Bucky’s farm where the boys drop acid.
What is the audience supposed to make of the change in style? One possibility it that it’s Bruce McDonald-the-character’s own acid trip. For most the movie, the perspective is a pretty neutral third-person. The audience sits on the sidelines, watching as spectators. But for this radically different style, the viewer could be seeing as though they are the character, seeing and hallucinating from that characters POV. Bruce would be the most natural choice in this case-he isn’t seen in any of the shots, though he should be present. However, if that’s true, then the scene tells more about Bruce than it does about Billy or Joe, and for that reason I reject it. At its heart, the movie is an exploration of Joe and Billy and their relationship-it would be clumsy film-making to have so important a scene center around a tertiary character.
The scene is not the representation of a specific character’s experience, but it is also not supposed to be literal footage from the impartial perspective of a camera lens. Instead, through wild camera pans, oversaturated color and bird’s-eye shots, it makes the viewer a participant within the scene. The extreme shots would require equipment that the film crew within the movie doesn’t have-and even if they did they would hardly be in any condition to use it. The scene functions not as a literal presentation of what happened but as device in which the themes of the movie can be furthered at a metaphorical level.
With such a chaotic, non-linear scene, it is difficult to find an effective approach for unpacking it. As Joe is the protagonist inasmuch as HCL has one, the shots of him may be the best place to start. The most striking of the clips of Joe is also the hardest to catch. It’s a four frame clip from the end of the movie (seen again at 1:26:27) as Joe lifts the gun and sets it to his temple. Despite being subliminally quick, it’s clearly there at 59:40, sandwiched between a shot of Billy and another of Joe sitting by himself. Like most of the movie, it’s as intriguing as it is baffling. It’s the ultimate in foreshadowing, but also banks on its audience missing it entirely. It’s the only shot within the scene that comes from outside the trip sequence itself. Why is it there? Is it an insertion of McDonald-the-character or McDonald-the-director? Does the distinction matter?
The clip begs another pressing question: at just what point did Joe start considering suicide? A popular opinion in fandom is that Joe’s suicide was largely impulsive with little or no premeditation.
lyra_sena states it persuasively here in her discussion of Joe’s motivations for killing himself. However, the inclusion of that fatal final clip would belie this interpretation, as do other shots later discussed. It stands as an inexorable prophesy, a glimpse of the future that cannot be avoided or changed. Joe’s suicide which first seemed abrupt, now seems inevitable.
Other shots of Joe throughout the scene, though more obvious and less explicit, are just as dark. The first is at 59:38 (the acid trip scene starts at 59:25 and lasts a whole 2:05 minutes), Joe is in shadow, alone, secluded from the activity around the bonfire. What could he be thinking about? Oh yes, Billy-whom the camera immediately cut to. Coming back to Joe, he holds his face in one hand, looking pensive, morose, but that may just be the heavy eye-liner. There’s a brief shot of someone shaking out fabric (John’s coat?). This time when the camera comes back to Joe, it’s with a bird’s eye view above him as he reaches toward the camera in entreaty. It shifts back to a continuation of the previous shot of Joe in shadow, but now the camera pulls back far enough to see that he holds a handgun, idly playing with it. His expression is dark and turned inward.
But it’s the next exchange with Joe that is particularly noteworthy. First we see Bucky, either hung up or hanging on the scarecrow frame (a cross, for all intents and purposes). He’s wearing the same jacket the scarecrow had previously been sporting (seen clearly in the establishing shot of Bucky’s farm, 55:01). Straw is tucked in his lapels and sleeves; he looks up and asks, “Joe?” The camera cuts to Joe, who’s holding a gun-not the gun, though. This one’s larger, possibly a shotgun or some such (I know absolutely nothing about guns). He raises it and fires. The camera cuts back to the cross, only instead of Bucky, now it’s Joe strung up as a scarecrow with the jacket and straw. He takes the shot to the chest; with huge spray of blood, he collapses.
This scene isn’t real, that is, Joe isn’t actually shot. This clip has to either be a manipulation by film!Bruce to further the narrative of his documentary or an attempt on actual!Bruce’s part to convey the unreality an acid-addled mind and further the narrative of his film. I find the latter more likely; for further discussion see the comments below.
Though tempting, it’s perhaps too facile to assume it’s a clear-cut representation of Joe’s self-destructive tendencies toward himself and his willingness to sacrifice Bucky. Still the violence of Joe facing off against himself is hard to ignore, as is the fact that in most of the shots of Joe during the scene he is holding, firing or being shot by a gun.
Having considered Joe’s place within the trip, Billy next deserves examination. He ties with Bucky for most screen-time during the scene with roughly 32% of the shots focusing on him. Joe, in comparison, is the focus of only about 19%.** It’s appropriate that Bucky and Billy are the focus of the scene as they are also the two most important people to Joe. Though Bucky gets as much time before the camera, the majority of it is as he stands by the fire, dancing (or convulsing, it’s hard to tell sometimes), partially veiled from the viewer by flames. He presides over the revelry as a Master of Ceremonies or high priest. He’s a part of the action, but also above it, orchestrating instead of participating. It seems reflective of Bucky’s relationship to Joe, as an inspiration and distant figure of worship. He stands in sharp contrast to Billy, on whom the camera lingers obsessively with intimate close-ups. There are extended shots of Billy’s face as he toys with his cigarette, licking the upright (erect?) knife provocatively (at 1:00:12 for inquiring minds). Without the onus of furthering film!Bruce’s documentary agenda, the camera follows Billy with the same intensity that Joe does. That the footage includes such overtly sexual imagery would indicate another dimension to Joe’s affection and need for Billy.
Though more upsetting to the squeamish and animal rights activists, the goat sacrifice is less interesting. Here more than the other images, Bruce-the-director is drawing from traditional bacchanal frenzy motifs. The goat’s death becomes a sparagmos (ritual tearing apart of an animal or person) as its blood is drunk and used to anoint Bucky and Joe (though not the others from what is seen). The fate of the goat is both visually dramatic and underscores themes of chaos and violence, but reveals less about the characters themselves. Joe is again set apart from the others as the only one who doesn’t participate in the slaughter but is the first to be anointed with blood.
Ambiguous and open to a variety of different interpretations, the acid trip scene stands out from the rest of Hard Core Logo by breaking with the film’s mundane aesthetic style. Freed from the restrictive documentary format, the acid trip is able to underscore the film’s dark themes of entropy, desperation, and destruction in a visceral, highly visual way, giving insight into the character of Joe Dick that the movie would have otherwise lacked.
**These are extremely rough figures-I rounded up to the nearest second.
The Acid-Trip Scene Breakdown for the Anally-Retentive:
59:25 Bucky dancing in front of the bonfire
59:33 Billy slouching on the fence, smoking by the knife.
59:38 High angle shot of Billy in jacket
59:38 Joe in shadow
59:40 Low angle shot of Billy’s face
59:40 A split second (seriously, only four frames) of Joe at the end of the movie (1:26:27), putting the gun to his head
59:41 A close-up of heavily eye-lined Joe
59:42 The shadow of someone swinging a cloth (a blanket? an article of clothing?)
59:46 Bird’s eye shot of Joe with up-stretched arms
59:49 Joe with the gun pointed first off camera, then turning it as he studies in meditatively (strung-outedly?)
59:56 Extreme close up of Billy’s face with cigarette and knife
1:00:02 Brief shot of Joe.
1:00:05 Billy playing guitar
1:00:07 Bucky strung up/hanging on the scarecrow stand/cross seen in the establishing shot of his farm (55:01). He is wearing the powder blue jacket with dark trim the scarecrow was wearing, straw is stuffed in sleeves and under lapels. He looks up. “Joe?”
1:00:09 Billy with guitar
1:00:10 Joe fires a gun--not The Gun, this one looks too big. I don’t know anything about guns, but maybe a shot gun.
1:00:10 Instead of Bucky, it’s Joe on the scarecrow stand, wearing that jacket with the straw. He’s shot in the chest, huge spray of blood. He collapses.
1:00:12 Wild, out-of-focus pan of what I think is Billy’s pants, plus the ground.
1:00:12 Close-up of Billy with knife, he licks it slowly, then sinks out of frame.
1:00:29 High angle shot of Billy, with Joe cut out of frame
1:00:31 More wild panning around back to Joe
1:00:31 Bucky with more fire dancing.
1:00:43 The hapless goat is led out by John and Billy.
1:00:48 Billy pins the goat down.
1:00:53 Medium shot of Billy, now hatless.
1:00:55 John kissing the goat’s face.
1:00:58 Pipe stalks over with the chainsaw.
1:00:03 Close-up of Pipe’s face with Bucky looking over his shoulder.
1:01:13 Naomi anointing Joe’s face with blood.
1:01:17 Shot of film in Danny’s lap.
1:01:20 Shot of Danny in tinsel wig.
1:01:22 Joe, Billy, Pipe and John in a tight circle, arms over each other’s shoulders.
1:01:30 Naomi anointing Bucky’s face with blood while he holds the poor goat’s severed head.
Spoilers: For the ending of Hard Core Logo, which you should definitely see first
Many thanks to
purridot, who puts up with a lot and
ignazwisdom whose fault this indirectly is
Most of Hard Core Logo has an extreme cinéma-vérité style in keeping with its documentary sensibility. Though it occasionally indulges in surrealism or more polished effects and devices, for the majority of the film the viewer is continually reminded that there is a guy behind the camera. The audience is deeply aware of the narrator’s limitations, where the scenes are either interviews or have the artificial feeling of characters hyperaware of the cameras they can’t quite help but play to. The notable exception to this documentary format is the scene at Bucky’s farm where the boys drop acid.
What is the audience supposed to make of the change in style? One possibility it that it’s Bruce McDonald-the-character’s own acid trip. For most the movie, the perspective is a pretty neutral third-person. The audience sits on the sidelines, watching as spectators. But for this radically different style, the viewer could be seeing as though they are the character, seeing and hallucinating from that characters POV. Bruce would be the most natural choice in this case-he isn’t seen in any of the shots, though he should be present. However, if that’s true, then the scene tells more about Bruce than it does about Billy or Joe, and for that reason I reject it. At its heart, the movie is an exploration of Joe and Billy and their relationship-it would be clumsy film-making to have so important a scene center around a tertiary character.
The scene is not the representation of a specific character’s experience, but it is also not supposed to be literal footage from the impartial perspective of a camera lens. Instead, through wild camera pans, oversaturated color and bird’s-eye shots, it makes the viewer a participant within the scene. The extreme shots would require equipment that the film crew within the movie doesn’t have-and even if they did they would hardly be in any condition to use it. The scene functions not as a literal presentation of what happened but as device in which the themes of the movie can be furthered at a metaphorical level.
With such a chaotic, non-linear scene, it is difficult to find an effective approach for unpacking it. As Joe is the protagonist inasmuch as HCL has one, the shots of him may be the best place to start. The most striking of the clips of Joe is also the hardest to catch. It’s a four frame clip from the end of the movie (seen again at 1:26:27) as Joe lifts the gun and sets it to his temple. Despite being subliminally quick, it’s clearly there at 59:40, sandwiched between a shot of Billy and another of Joe sitting by himself. Like most of the movie, it’s as intriguing as it is baffling. It’s the ultimate in foreshadowing, but also banks on its audience missing it entirely. It’s the only shot within the scene that comes from outside the trip sequence itself. Why is it there? Is it an insertion of McDonald-the-character or McDonald-the-director? Does the distinction matter?
The clip begs another pressing question: at just what point did Joe start considering suicide? A popular opinion in fandom is that Joe’s suicide was largely impulsive with little or no premeditation.
lyra_sena states it persuasively here in her discussion of Joe’s motivations for killing himself. However, the inclusion of that fatal final clip would belie this interpretation, as do other shots later discussed. It stands as an inexorable prophesy, a glimpse of the future that cannot be avoided or changed. Joe’s suicide which first seemed abrupt, now seems inevitable.
Other shots of Joe throughout the scene, though more obvious and less explicit, are just as dark. The first is at 59:38 (the acid trip scene starts at 59:25 and lasts a whole 2:05 minutes), Joe is in shadow, alone, secluded from the activity around the bonfire. What could he be thinking about? Oh yes, Billy-whom the camera immediately cut to. Coming back to Joe, he holds his face in one hand, looking pensive, morose, but that may just be the heavy eye-liner. There’s a brief shot of someone shaking out fabric (John’s coat?). This time when the camera comes back to Joe, it’s with a bird’s eye view above him as he reaches toward the camera in entreaty. It shifts back to a continuation of the previous shot of Joe in shadow, but now the camera pulls back far enough to see that he holds a handgun, idly playing with it. His expression is dark and turned inward.
But it’s the next exchange with Joe that is particularly noteworthy. First we see Bucky, either hung up or hanging on the scarecrow frame (a cross, for all intents and purposes). He’s wearing the same jacket the scarecrow had previously been sporting (seen clearly in the establishing shot of Bucky’s farm, 55:01). Straw is tucked in his lapels and sleeves; he looks up and asks, “Joe?” The camera cuts to Joe, who’s holding a gun-not the gun, though. This one’s larger, possibly a shotgun or some such (I know absolutely nothing about guns). He raises it and fires. The camera cuts back to the cross, only instead of Bucky, now it’s Joe strung up as a scarecrow with the jacket and straw. He takes the shot to the chest; with huge spray of blood, he collapses.
This scene isn’t real, that is, Joe isn’t actually shot. This clip has to either be a manipulation by film!Bruce to further the narrative of his documentary or an attempt on actual!Bruce’s part to convey the unreality an acid-addled mind and further the narrative of his film. I find the latter more likely; for further discussion see the comments below.
Though tempting, it’s perhaps too facile to assume it’s a clear-cut representation of Joe’s self-destructive tendencies toward himself and his willingness to sacrifice Bucky. Still the violence of Joe facing off against himself is hard to ignore, as is the fact that in most of the shots of Joe during the scene he is holding, firing or being shot by a gun.
Having considered Joe’s place within the trip, Billy next deserves examination. He ties with Bucky for most screen-time during the scene with roughly 32% of the shots focusing on him. Joe, in comparison, is the focus of only about 19%.** It’s appropriate that Bucky and Billy are the focus of the scene as they are also the two most important people to Joe. Though Bucky gets as much time before the camera, the majority of it is as he stands by the fire, dancing (or convulsing, it’s hard to tell sometimes), partially veiled from the viewer by flames. He presides over the revelry as a Master of Ceremonies or high priest. He’s a part of the action, but also above it, orchestrating instead of participating. It seems reflective of Bucky’s relationship to Joe, as an inspiration and distant figure of worship. He stands in sharp contrast to Billy, on whom the camera lingers obsessively with intimate close-ups. There are extended shots of Billy’s face as he toys with his cigarette, licking the upright (erect?) knife provocatively (at 1:00:12 for inquiring minds). Without the onus of furthering film!Bruce’s documentary agenda, the camera follows Billy with the same intensity that Joe does. That the footage includes such overtly sexual imagery would indicate another dimension to Joe’s affection and need for Billy.
Though more upsetting to the squeamish and animal rights activists, the goat sacrifice is less interesting. Here more than the other images, Bruce-the-director is drawing from traditional bacchanal frenzy motifs. The goat’s death becomes a sparagmos (ritual tearing apart of an animal or person) as its blood is drunk and used to anoint Bucky and Joe (though not the others from what is seen). The fate of the goat is both visually dramatic and underscores themes of chaos and violence, but reveals less about the characters themselves. Joe is again set apart from the others as the only one who doesn’t participate in the slaughter but is the first to be anointed with blood.
Ambiguous and open to a variety of different interpretations, the acid trip scene stands out from the rest of Hard Core Logo by breaking with the film’s mundane aesthetic style. Freed from the restrictive documentary format, the acid trip is able to underscore the film’s dark themes of entropy, desperation, and destruction in a visceral, highly visual way, giving insight into the character of Joe Dick that the movie would have otherwise lacked.
**These are extremely rough figures-I rounded up to the nearest second.
The Acid-Trip Scene Breakdown for the Anally-Retentive:
59:25 Bucky dancing in front of the bonfire
59:33 Billy slouching on the fence, smoking by the knife.
59:38 High angle shot of Billy in jacket
59:38 Joe in shadow
59:40 Low angle shot of Billy’s face
59:40 A split second (seriously, only four frames) of Joe at the end of the movie (1:26:27), putting the gun to his head
59:41 A close-up of heavily eye-lined Joe
59:42 The shadow of someone swinging a cloth (a blanket? an article of clothing?)
59:46 Bird’s eye shot of Joe with up-stretched arms
59:49 Joe with the gun pointed first off camera, then turning it as he studies in meditatively (strung-outedly?)
59:56 Extreme close up of Billy’s face with cigarette and knife
1:00:02 Brief shot of Joe.
1:00:05 Billy playing guitar
1:00:07 Bucky strung up/hanging on the scarecrow stand/cross seen in the establishing shot of his farm (55:01). He is wearing the powder blue jacket with dark trim the scarecrow was wearing, straw is stuffed in sleeves and under lapels. He looks up. “Joe?”
1:00:09 Billy with guitar
1:00:10 Joe fires a gun--not The Gun, this one looks too big. I don’t know anything about guns, but maybe a shot gun.
1:00:10 Instead of Bucky, it’s Joe on the scarecrow stand, wearing that jacket with the straw. He’s shot in the chest, huge spray of blood. He collapses.
1:00:12 Wild, out-of-focus pan of what I think is Billy’s pants, plus the ground.
1:00:12 Close-up of Billy with knife, he licks it slowly, then sinks out of frame.
1:00:29 High angle shot of Billy, with Joe cut out of frame
1:00:31 More wild panning around back to Joe
1:00:31 Bucky with more fire dancing.
1:00:43 The hapless goat is led out by John and Billy.
1:00:48 Billy pins the goat down.
1:00:53 Medium shot of Billy, now hatless.
1:00:55 John kissing the goat’s face.
1:00:58 Pipe stalks over with the chainsaw.
1:00:03 Close-up of Pipe’s face with Bucky looking over his shoulder.
1:01:13 Naomi anointing Joe’s face with blood.
1:01:17 Shot of film in Danny’s lap.
1:01:20 Shot of Danny in tinsel wig.
1:01:22 Joe, Billy, Pipe and John in a tight circle, arms over each other’s shoulders.
1:01:30 Naomi anointing Bucky’s face with blood while he holds the poor goat’s severed head.