Resurrector: The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years

Hidden halfway through The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years, Penelope Spheeris’s love-it-or-loathe-it documentary about ’80s glam metal, is a modest little scene that freed my teenage brain from decades of cultural indoctrination. I’m referring, of course, to the infamous Dude-in-the-Pool interview, featuring W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes, three bottles of Smirnoff, an inflatable pool recliner, and his mom.

In the scene, a handsome blond man is floating on his back in the pool of a Hollywood mansion, telling us he’s dreamed of being a rock star ever since he was a child. In spite of his grin, we know something is seriously wrong. Maybe the grin itself is the tip-off—that, or the look on the face of his mother, hunched and silent in a deck chair a few feet away. Immediately after telling Spheeris that he has “five, six, ten, twelve” gold records, Holmes pours the better part of a fifth of vodka down his throat and calls himself a “piece of crap” and a “full-blown alcoholic”—as if we need to be enlightened on that score. “I don’t dig the person I am,” he mumbles, almost apologetically, and for an instant we glimpse the polite and bashful boy he must have been. He offers his mother a drink, lets out a cackle of unadulterated suffering, and announces, with a toothy all-American smile: “I’m a happy camper.” Then he lets himself disappear into the pool.