Jonathan Demme's Career Began and Ended Strongly with Caged Heat and Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids

When Jonathan Demme died he was remembered warmly and universally as one of our greatest filmmakers, as well as a prince of a human being. Demme made movies that people loved, like Stop Making Sense, Melvin and Howard, The Silence of the Lambs, Something Wild, Married to the Mob and Rachel Getting Married, and movies that have endured, but as a filmmaker he could be a little tough to pin down because he didn’t make that many movies, and the films that he did make flitted from genre to genre. Demme didn’t stick to one type of film like Alfred Hitchcock, nor was he an intensely autobiographical filmmaker whose movies provided an X-ray into his soul.

What distinguished Demme as a filmmaker more than anything, perhaps, was an enduring fascination with human nature as well special insight into the psyches and worlds of women. Demme’s movies were justly revered for their complex and nuanced female characters, from Jodie Foster’s iconically tough-yet-vulnerable FBI agent in The Silence of the Lambs to Michelle Pfeiffer’s feisty mob widow in Married to the Mob to Anne Hathaway’s prickly, brazenly unsympathetic Rachel Getting Married anti-hero.

Demme was a classy filmmaker but like so many of his peers, he learned his craft in Roger Corman’s gleeful, giddy, subversive trash factory and made his proper directorial debut with the seminal 1974 women-in-prison movie Caged Heat. Corman afforded his filmmakers a lot of creative freedom in exchange for working fast and cheap and to the maestro’s specifications.

Few filmmakers took better, or more, advantage of the creative freedom Corman afforded than Demme. Working as writer as well as director, a rarity in a career where Demme worked closely with accomplished screenwriters, Demme made a women-in-prison movie distinguished more by social commentary, ambitious tracking shots and conceptual ambition than sexy naked women in same-sex scuffles.

All Demme had to do with Caged Heat, commercially speaking, was deliver the requisite number of homoerotic shower scenes, catfights and sexual assaults and an aggressively undemanding audience that really wanted nothing more than something to masturbate to, or watch while drunk at a drive-in, would be satisfied.

Demme’s film contains the required nudity and sexual violence, but it functions as a Trojan Horse. Demme managed to smuggle an angry and indignant, even feminist movie about the violent, systematic oppression of vulnerable women inside what only looks like a sleazy, salacious T&A exploitation cheapie from the outside.

Caged Heat follows the bleak lives and feverish escape plans of a group of young, overwhelmingly sexy female inmates, including Jacqueline Wilson (Russ Meyer super-vixen Erica Gavin), a new inmate who falls in with a cadre of fiercely feminist “bad girls” who chafe under the Draconian rule and unrelenting sadism of Supt. McQueen, who Corman veteran Barbara Steele (also of Dark Shadows) plays as a quietly unhinged dictator ruling the prison from her wheelchair.

McQueen and her sinister accomplice Dr. Randolph (Warren Miller), a pipe-smoking doctor who specializes in sexual assaults, lobotomies and hastily performing lobotomies to cover up his many sexual assaults, ensure that these poor women’s lives are filled with the trials of Job but you can only push soul sisters and renegade white girls so far before they push back.

Fed-up with sexual assault and daily abuse, the girls bust out of prison, but break back in to save one of their comrades from the prison’s abuse. That description makes Caged Heat seem far more coherent and plot-based than it actually is. Because, truthfully, Caged Heat has very little use for plot. It’s more content to simply explore its grubby, sordid but evocatively drawn milieu. Like a lot of low-budget films shot cheap, fast and on the fly, Caged Heat  contains a fair amount of post-dubbing but its sound mix is intriguingly muddy and experimental, veering continuously into the overlapping dialogue that would come to define the sound design of Robert Altman’s masterpieces from the same era.

What kind of a women-in-prison movie would a future Academy Award-winning titan of cinema like Demme direct? A very strange, but also a very ambitious and distinctive movie. At times, Demme seems to be aiming for documentary realism, for a journalistic, docudrama feel. At other times, he’s making a lunatic arthouse movie filled with gothic stylization, fantasy sequences, weird visual experimentation and liberal doses of flat-out horror. An experimental, intentionally unsettling score from the Velvet Underground’s John Cale only adds to the free-floating air of nightmare intensity.

It’s achingly evident even at the beginning that Demme was a profoundly talented and ambitious director. Who else would take a seemingly sleazy, mercenary assignment like making a low-budget, nudity and violence-filled women-in-prison movie and make a movie that seemingly owes an equal amount to Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Of course One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest didn’t hit theaters until a year after Caged Heat’s release, but in 1974, it had logged more than a decade as a popular novel and Broadway play, and Caged Heat at times feels like a distaff version of Cuckoo’s Nest, albeit with a whole lot more female nudity, and a lot more catfights. Demme transformed a sleazy wet dream of a leering male fantasy into a waking nightmare.

With Caged Heat, Demme was hired to make a sleazy, salacious women-in-prison movie. Instead, he made a harrowing women-in-an-abusive-society movie. That made all the difference.

Demme would go on to make many wonderful movies about women but he also directed a popular favorite for greatest concert film of all time with the 1984 Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense. He followed it up with performance movies/documentaries about Robyn Hitchcock and Neil Young and ended an auspicious career with an artist you wouldn’t necessarily expect Demme to make a movie about: boy band graduate and massive mainstream mega-star Justin Timberlake.

Young is about the same age as Demme and Hitchcock and David Byrne are a little younger but pop superman and all-around renaissance man Justin Timberlake is young enough to be Demme’s son and is a pure pop artist (in the best possible way) whereas Demme previously gravitated towards quirky, idiosyncratic cult rockers.

Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids documents the final shows in Las Vegas’ massive MGM Grand in Timberlake's years-long 20/20 Experience World Tour as he performs in front of tens of thousands of adoring fans alongside his massive Tennessee Kids band -- in a tuxedo, paying tribute to Las Vegas’ past.

Timberlake owns the stage like he was born on it, which is only just a slight exaggeration. Like his hero Michael Jackson, Timberlake has been riveting crowds worldwide essentially since he was a child. He grew up onstage. He’s been a massive cultural figure for so long that it’s crazy to think even at this advanced stage in his career, where he’s pretty much accomplished everything a pop star can accomplish, Timberlake was still only 36 years old.

Timberlake is cocky the way only a true soul singer can be cocky. Much of the enjoyment of this almost obscenely enjoyable movie comes from the palpable pleasure Timberlake takes in his work. Justin Timberlake is a man who understandably enjoys being Justin Timberlake. In the pre-show pep talk/prayer, Timberlake gives his band and dancers the time-honored talk about how they’re performing for each other, and that’s certainly true, but they’re also taking obvious pleasure in their performance as well.

Name a more iconic duo.

Because Timberlake is such an unabashed creature of show-business the crowd-participation bits that sprinkle the film feel less like disingenuous exercises in show-business phoniness than an inveterate live entertainer speaking his native language, which just happens to bear a distinct resemblance to show-business phoniness.

The film’s opening credit sequence list a “laser designer” and Demme attacked this massive spectacle with over a dozen cameras littered throughout the MGM Grand. This is far from “Justin Timberlake Unplugged” but the spectacle never overwhelms the music. These are songs that seemingly demand to be played on a massive stage for a huge audience. Decades into a career that is shaping up to be one of the all-time greats, Timberlake has made The Neptunes and Timbaland’s trippy funk something approaching arena rock.

Demme’s concert film highlights the depth of Timberlake’s catalog while continually paying homage to the history of American soul music. There is a whole lot of Michael Jackson in Timberlake’s sound and stagecraft, particularly when he whips out a crowd-pleasing falsetto, but there’s a lot of Prince as well. So it’s entirely fitting that the movie is dedicated to Prince and a testament to Timberlake’s talent and soul that that dedication feels earned.

Timberlake intriguingly chooses “Human Nature” as his Jackson cover, gravitating to Jackson at his Yacht Rock-smoothest. Elsewhere he transforms BelBivDevoe’s trashy yet irresistible “Poison” into a showcase for his hard-working back-up singers, who, along with the rest of his band, constitute the unsung heroes of the show and the film. They make Justin Timberlake look good, but he’s gonna be pretty damn debonair regardless of the circumstances.

Timberlake has proven himself extraordinarily savvy in how he’s conducted his career. He’s particularly savvy in his choice of collaborators. Seemingly everybody worked with Timbaland and the Neptunes in the nineties and aughts, but with the possible exception of Jay-Z, nobody got better work out of them. Similarly, damn near every music superstar who did Saturday Night Live collaborated with Lonely Island, for a skit or a song or a video or a single, but Timberlake has such incredible chemistry with the trio that he’s damn near the group’s fourth member. Timberlake’s good taste in clothes, women and collaborators extends to getting the dude who made Stop Making Sense to make his concert movie. You know what? That, shockingly, turned out to be yet another of his trademark sound decisions.

To say that Demme’s work in Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids is understated to the point of being invisible is no criticism. Demme trusts his material and his star enough to know that he doesn’t need to try to whip up a sense of excitement over Timberlake or his show. All he needs to do is keep the camera on the Timberlake kid and trust in his ability to put on a good show, for an eternal audience of moviegoers, as well as the rapt concertgoers in attendance.

Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids is on some level a valentine to collaboration. In that respect, it’s fitting that Demme would go out on it, because he was, by all accounts, a peerless collaborator, generous and creative . On another level the movie is a tribute to professionalism.

Timberlake is professional almost to a fault. The great ones make it look easy and though Timberlake, along with his band and dancers and crew and crowd works up a righteous sweat, the ear-to-ear grin on his face conveys the infectious joy behind the slick devotion to his craft. The dominant emotion of Justin Timberlake + the Tennessean Kids is radiant, infectious joy.

At its best and most transcendent, Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids, like Stop Making Sense, is about the profound emotional connection that exists between both a performer and their audience, and between musicians and each other. It’s about the joy of collaboration, the joy of performance and the joy of just being alive. That, as much as anything, marks it as a work of Demme, whose films explored some very dark places, but whose love for people and their quirks, craziness and idiosyncrasies informed everything he did.

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