Touch Me I’m Sick
The phony magazine cover glimpsed in the early moments of Her Smell may not have the same heady metatextual allure as that of so many journals invented out of whole cloth and newsprint for narrative purposes, like the must-read issues of Dorgon and Kill Weekly on the newsstands in Blade Runner (1982) or the original Spy magazine that employed Mike Connor in The Philadelphia Story (1940). But the sight of the three members of the film’s fictional band Something She getting giddy and goofy as they show off their first SPIN cover—complete with the none-more-1994 cover lines “Beck: This Loser’s Not Weeping” and “London’s Rave Scene: Welcome to the Jungle”—does serve a few purposes besides inducing a nostalgic pang in former subscribers. Along with the stage sequence of the band performing a cover of The Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet” that immediately follows, it’s a fleeting glimpse of more joyful times for a trio of women—singer-guitarist Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), bassist Marielle (Agyness Deyn), and drummer Ali (Gayle Rankin)—who will spend much of the next two-plus hours in a downward spiral of anger, frustration, and self-destruction.
It’s also the first sign of the verisimilitude that distinguishes but doesn’t hamstring Alex Ross Perry’s vividly rendered voyage through the seamy upper echelons of ’90s alt-rock, a milieu that’s only just beginning to attract the scrutiny long devoted to the iconic heroes, flameouts, and (2015) and (2015), then it’s high time for a Temple of the Dog biopic. Surely Eddie Vedder’s sterling set at the Bang Bang Bar in (2017) would suggest as much.
