Written/Directed/Photographed by Tobe Hooper
Edited by Robert Elkins and Tobe Hooper
Produced by Hooper, David L. Ford, and Raymond O’Leary
Music by Shiva’s Headband, Jim Schulman, and Spencer Perskin
Starring
Kim Henkel
Pamela Craig
Sharron Danzinger
Ron Barnhart
Allen Danziger
. . .
THE GOVERNMENT IS VIOLENT-NOT US!
-protest slogan on display in the film Eggshells (1969)
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Eggshells is a movie where I found myself fascinated by the overall conception of it, but I had a hard time zeroing in on the individual characters. I didn’t catch their names, but their conversations were often lively. Maybe it’s supposed to feel like some people you hung out with over a debauched, drugged-out summer. Not sure.
The film begins with a vivid documentary portrayal of an anti-war protest and then spins out into a wholly fictional narrative of broke-ass young people navigating lust, love, values, drugs, anxiety about the future, marriage, and the psychic influence of a phantom entity dwelling in the basement of their hippie-dippie party house. Eggshells is wonderfully eccentric and funny, but also a bit impenetrable. I didn’t mind it, though, because it took interesting risks while taking advantage of a range of filmmaking styles and techniques.
In the heart of the city of Austin, Texas vociferous, peaceful protestors march to bring American soldiers home from Vietnam. Cops are ready to suppress, brutalize, and kill with clubs, guns, and gas. But explicit violence is avoided-in fact, we see a protester shake hands with a uniformed police asset. Moreover, the peace marchers come brandishing an array of American flags, which are themselves often transcendentally framed from low angles against blazing sunlight. The heart and soul of America lies with We the People-not the White House, not Congress, not the Senate, not the Pentagon, not the Governor’s Mansion, not the state legislature, not the party bosses, not the Chamber of Commerce, not the Supreme Court, not Madison Avenue, not Hollywood, not Big Business, not the National Guard, not Your Local Sheriff, not the arms manufacturers-it’s us. By the way, this stirring display comes from filmmaker Tobe Hooper, the guy who would go on to bring us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I sort of expected Eggshells to start in a place of hopeful idealism, and then descend into a hell of mutilation-but, nope, that’s not what happens here.
A handful of fictional characters are woven into the documentary footage of civil disobedience. These characters pass through and around the protest event, but they’re somewhat detached from it, even if they are sympathetic to the cause. They seem to be on mundane errands in town. They make their way back to their two story party house, and that’s where we spend most of our time. Just kinda hanging out. Time passes painlessly enough in clouds of reefer smoke. There’s a party. People talk about politics. They get high. They get drunk. They fuck. They discuss feminism. They worry about money. They ruminate on the value conflicts with their parents. They modify the seams of a wedding dress. But there’s no actual dramatic fight between the characters. Everybody basically gets along.
One of these young people wanders into the basement where he falls under the influence of a strange force that presents him with a sword straight out of Legend of Zelda or maybe an Errol Flynn picture. The dude takes up the blade and has a delightfully edited duel with himself. So, I dunno, maybe the conflicts that matter are within hearts and minds; we’re all just dueling with our shadow self, maybe?
At one point, a couple is fucking, and their sex is perhaps turbocharged by the psychic emanations of the basement whatsit unleashing a goofy-but kinda awesome-psychedelic light show. Naked bodies in action unleash cosmic powers that make the Silver Surfer and Captain Marvel look like a couple of pikers.
Another character-a drunk wannabe novelist-takes off his clothes and sets a colorful shaggin’ wagon on fire . . . but I couldn’t tell you if this was drunko shit or the influence of the basement entity or just a pure fantasy riff. I think this confusion is actually the point, but your guess is as good as mine.
If you’re looking for a conventional narrative climax . . . well, you kinda get two. The first is a lovely outdoor wedding where the rabbi’s poetic words seem to evoke a religiously derived kind of psychedelic romanticism of merging souls forged by eternal love beyond human comprehension. Climax #2 involves people under the influence of the basement thing digging up an absurd contraption that, uh, teleports folks to a higher dimension . . . or something? Maybe the basement entity represented some accumulating psychic force representative of people’s collective wish to get beamed off of the violent planet Earth and off to Star Trek somewheres? You take a look, and decide for yourself.
Eggshells mixes fiction, documentary, stop motion animation, and psychedelia to evoke a tumultuous present tantalized by wild promises of a better future. Sure, you could say it’s all hippie dippie nonsense cycling through drug addled brains. But the oh-so-sober Christian warmongers jolly well fucked up the operation in Vietnam, didn’t they? And they had all the intelligence, all the money, all the military toys, all the popular support of the Hard Hats and the Silent Majority and John Wayne his own self. Maybe American existence, as a sum total of all its functions, is just the dialectical output of a war between competing regimes of illusions. At least the hippies and the peaceniks in Austin didn’t napalm any children. So credit where it’s due.
