2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of music released by The Residents. This San Francisco-based group has remained resolutely faceless and anonymous over the decades, while producing some of the most unusual, twisted, startling, and flat-out funny music ever created in the USA – some of the most beautiful music too. Among the most notable recordings are their surrealistic debut album Meet The Residents; The Third Reich ‘N Roll, a blistering dissection of 1960s rock; Eskimo, their landmark reinvention of a vanishing culture; Mark of the Mole, a frightening parable of conflict between slave and owner classes; The Tunes of Two Cities, extending the Mole saga into a sampling of both peoples’ music; and the haunting God in Three Persons, which dives into American religiosity and hucksterism.
The group has observed their golden anniversary with the release of a feature film entitled Triple Trouble, written and directed by Homer Flynn and The Residents, which was screened this year as part of the acclaimed Mill Valley Film Festival’s exciting line-up. Triple Trouble marks a return to The Residents’ roots, insofar as the film incorporates footage from their never-completed black-&-white video, the now legendary Vileness Fats. Scenes and images from that bizarre 1970s project arise within the paranoid narrative of Triple Trouble, in which a San Francisco plumber stumbles upon the spread of an unknown fungus that is invading not just the pipes of sinks but the bodies of people as well. Employing a sharp black & white that permits certain colorations to pop out, this imaginative and unnerving film noir also incorporates footage from another uncompleted Residents film: the criminal tale Double Trouble, an aborted work whose color sequences serve as the memories of Triple’s plumber protagonist Randall “Junior” Rose. His late father was a musician who was in a band called The Residents that made an unfinished film called Vileness Fats… Yes, the snake eats its own tail, in a circular construction that echoes The Residents’ fondness for elliptical, tongue-twisting speech and lyrics, derived from their embrace of the Theory of Obscurity, as heard in the film’s concluding clip from Vileness Fats.
Further expanding the phantasmagoria of Triple Trouble are psychedelic dream sequences created by master video artist John Sanborn. And in keeping with The Residents’ appetite for cultural appropriation, the film also includes glimpses from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead – offered as disturbing counterpoints to the nightmare atmosphere of Triple Trouble, where the past never dies and the future never arrives. Actor Dustin York brings passion and conviction to the role of Randy Jr., a former priest who now kneels to unclog sinks, even as he continues to grieve the loss of his gun-toting, football-loving mother (seen in flashbacks and played by Sims voice actor and language-inventor Gerri Lawlor, whose 2019 death marked an end to Double Trouble’s production). As he keeps discovering clues of a pervasive, possibly extra-terrestrial fungus, Randy’s own life steadily unravels, despite the affection of his Wiccan girlfriend Suzi (Isabelle Ellingson) and the friendly assistance of an AI-enhanced, flying and talking drone (voiced by Isabelle Barbier).
If all this sounds profoundly weird – as well as weirdly profound – that’s because it is. The Residents wouldn’t have it any other way. Don’t miss it!
Check The Residents website – https://www.residents.com/ – for screenings near you, and learn more on the official Triple Trouble website, https://www.3xtrouble.com/
