Nirvana had just appeared on the mainstream's radar when Chris Wilcha, a recent college grad with a degree in philosophy, was hired by the marketing department of the infamous mail-order record club Columbia House. During the two years he spent at Columbia House, Wilcha—who was hired because he was able to explain the appeal of grunge at the interview—was made part of the team assigned the task of producing that company's first-ever catalog of "alternative" music. Wilcha brought a small video camera to work every day; it didn't seem to bother anyone too much. Two hundred hours of tape later, he quit his job and starting editing his footage into the documentary The Target Shoots First, a playful and candid examination of what happens when the alt.rock ethos collides with business culture.
Smart, funny, and philosophical, in the past year or so The Target Shoots First has won Best Documentary awards at the South By Southwest, Slamdance, and New York Underground film festivals. The film—or tape, as its creator prefers—traces Wilcha's deepening involvement with the corporate entity. His initial indifference to workplace politics shatters as he's trapped between the suits on the 19th floor and the creatives on the 17th. Wilcha helps infuse the alt.rock catalog he edits with some authentic subversive energy—it criticizes some of the titles it's supposedly trying to sell, for example—but his pride in the quality of his work is troubled. In one scene, toward the end of a meeting which has obviously stretched on for far too long, as one upper management type tonelessly concludes that "the designation 'Heavy Metal' will be changed to 'Metal,'" Wilcha swings the camera down to his notepad, on which he's written "KILL ME." In general, though, the documentary's tone is less strident than this, and more personal than it is sociological.
Having been an anti-corporate zine publisher myself [Munroe publishes Holiday in the Sun: A Zine About Surviving Exposure to the Mainstream; and he used to publish the zine Celtic Pamplemousse‹ed.], it was something of a system shock when my first novel, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, was published by HarperCollins. This experience made me want to talk to Wilcha about his sense of what it means to be both an artist critical of monolithic entertainment companies and someone working with, or within, such a company. I wound up speaking Wilcha him twice. To my surprise, the first time I called him he was working at Columbia House again.
HERMENAUT: How did you end up back at Columbia House?
WILCHA: I refer to it as my "ironic day job." In a way it feels like a step backwards, but I needed the stability to start promoting my tape. I found myself in the position where I would have to work twice as hard to hustle, or I could take a position which would pay me a decent amount of money and which wouldn't require much focus or commitment. I suppose at this point I could translate my experience marketing my tape into a job in the film industry, but I don't want to go to Sundance as a representative from some movie company. I'd rather make a living in a field that has nothing to do with film, and shoot things on the fly. I realize that purist types won't buy any of this, but they'll probably consider The Target Shoots First compromised from the get-go: a real rebel wouldn't ever have taken the job. I, however, am not particularly interested in the willfully downwardly mobile thing.
What we expect from a "rebel" narrative is that, in the end, the protagonist will extricate himself from a compromising situation and become a fiercly independant iconoclast. Although The Target Shoots First satisfies that expectation, the ending was too neat, somehow‹it didn't exactly jibe with the complex tone of the rest of the documentary.
When I was younger, I'd have these reductive conversations about the so-called corporate world. But I've discovered it's not so black-and-white. I knew, even as I quit Columbia House, that I was going to find myself in that sort of environment again, so I wanted the documentary to reflect an ambiguity that is really familiar. I tried to end on an ambiguous note, not a Michael Moore-style beatdown. For me, the real question is, how do you navigate stretches of being independent in between being involved with corporate relationships?
The first thing everyone wants to know when they see The Target Shoots First is "How did he get away with it?" Did carrying around a video camera actually help you at Columbia House, by cementing your alt.expert status? And how did making the film help you get your current job? Doesn't that make you kind of a corporate jester?
It's overly sophisticated to imagine that anyone here at Columbia House is so self-aware that they'd consider my tape some great postmodern promotional video. They don't; they take it pretty literally. As for hiring someone precisely because they'll be rebellious against everything you stand for, Columbia House hasn't caught up to that paradigm yet. A couple of friends of mine work at an Internet start-up, though, and when I visited them recently they were like, "We're wacky! We're alternative! We're blowing off steam, throwing a Nerf ball around!" And that didn't ring true for me, either. I think my superiors here just accepted the fact that I was taping everything because they'd seen Reality Bites and assumed that this is just what people my age do.
One of the most exciting things for me about your documentary is that you used a video camera. Coming from a zine background, it seems to me that video is to film as photocopying is to printing.
There isn't any other way I could have done it: the content is a function of the technology. The intimacy and trust that I built on is a direct result of being able to shoot unobtrusively. When you're using film it's so fucking disruptive, it's so time-consuming to compose a shot, and I was on the job—I wasn't being paid by PBS to document office culture. I'd hold the camera by my waist, because it's really intimidating to have a camera pointed in your face.
Have the marketing skills you've acquired at Columbia House helped you attract interest in your film? What I found with HarperCollins was that that they didn't market my book effectively—they were more focused on selling the rights to foreign markets. When you have the kind of overhead they have, going for the big score makes more sense than trying to sell an extra thousand books. But since I've decided to publish my second book independently, I've been promoting the book here in Canada—selling a thousand more books means an extra $5,000 in my pocket. I don't think I would have been thinking this way before my experience with a big corporation.
The whole experience I've had this past year, self-promoting my tape, has absolutely built on the lessons I've learned as a professional marketer: targeting the right people, getting promotional materials out with some kind of understanding for schedules, asking "What would I like to see?" The fun thing has been going out to film festivals, almost on the indie rock model‹although festivals don't have a lot of money. So you end up flying yourself there, and having a really good show where a lot of people show up, but then you find yourself in the hole. I'd like to put on one of my own shows actually, 'cause I'm coming home with these huge credit-card bills!
I'm starting to see corporations less as evil marketing machines and more as elephantine structures that take up most of the cultural space. But does the fact that they own a large amount of market share, even though this relegates a lot of worthy artists to the margins, mean we ought to actively fight against the big entertainment companies?
I don't think it's a party you're not invited to. They just do business differently; there's just another range of topics they're interested in. People I know have decided that the stuff they make doesn't fit into that matrix. If you're going to make a serialized six hour film that's an ambient meditation on a topic, then you're not going to do it with a major studio. I think that if you brought it into a studio, then it would change to suit the needs of the corporate model. When I made my tape, I thought people's relation to corporations was really complex‹and since I've been interacting with them in connection to my cultural product, this tape, I feel it even more. I talked to HBO recently, and they appear to run their documentary division almost like a not-for-profit with money. HBO offers a better deal than PBS, who'da thunk it?
But when for-profit companies offer the same good terms as the non-profits, they're doing it to compete. Once they've driven out the non-profits, then they can change their terms.
But so many non-profits suck. They have non-profit-itis‹total apathy‹and don't utilize even the most basic practices of marketing. I don't mean marketing in the crass sense of trying to hype something worthless, I'm talking about a well-cultivated mailing list of people who'd want to see certain projects, for example.
Given the fact that the alt.rock catalog you produced for Columbia House didn't end up being profitable for them, and given the fact that big entertainment companies aren't really good at niche marketing, do those of us who are interested in independent film and music and book publishing really have to worry about being co-opted?
The real indies are never going to be the Columbia House Selection of the Month. It was an impossibility from the start. So that's not the point of my documentary. I discovered that organizing around an impossible project was a redemptive moment for me. Because my co-workers and I were able to abandon the hierarchy, the glacial bureaucracy, work—even work which demanded that we help colonize our own cultural niche—suddenly became fun.
So it's impossible to colonize the sphere of zines and indie rock? Doesn't that make the tension of your documentary kind of false? If Columbia House can't actually target us, why shoot first?
A company like Columbia House can't actually sell the kind of music I like to its customers. But one thing it can do, and this applies to every medium, is to take what they need from the subculture and reduce it to a style. This is what co-optation really means: rendering something that's un-stealable meaningless, by using a facsimile of it in an advertisement, for example. If an independent film director has his shooting style copied by an ad agency, it's worse than theft.
But it's not only a question of advertisers stealing from artists. Artists influence each other all the time. As soon as one of them chooses to enter the corporate world he's selling something that isn't completely his. A musical style, for instance, isn't created in isolation‹it's a community effort, but the market only rewards the person who brought it to market and commodified it. I don't think it can be a take-it-or-leave-it kind of situation with corporations. Their very existence has an impact on independent artists. In fact, I'm not so sure that there's any such thing as being "outside the corporate system" any more. I'm starting to think that the most powerful thing about the (false) idea of a subculture is that it allows us to build different models of living our lives, models which we then have to try to apply to the dominant culture.
Yeah, I guess that's the big question. Do you look for a way to walk a tightrope within a system you don't respect, or do you seek to resist or escape that system? In a weird way, thanks to all the corporate mergers lately, this is a great time to be independent. No-one is targeting us right now; it's all about the Backstreet Boys. I think it's a moment ripe with possibility.
The Target Shoots First (d. Chris Wilcha, 1999)/available from Insound.com
The Target Shoots First will be broadcast on
Cinemax on February 20th, 2001 at 8pm.
Since this interview was conducted, Chris Wilcha has left Columbia House again.—ed.
