In the pilot episode of the mighty My So-Called Life, a band plays at a house party. Their music could be described as “Red Hot Chili Peppers meets Stone Temple Pilots,” which is also a description of my worst nightmare. The band’s guitarist had a J.R. “Bob” Dobbs sticker on his guitar. Dobbs is the mythical mascot of the Church of the Subgenius—a parody religion founded in the 1970s by Ivan Stang aka Douglass Smith, the experimental filmmaker behind Let’s Visit the World of the Future.
If you have a tinfoil hat, now is the time to put it on.
It’s the future! And in the future, the world is ruled by the Bozos—unisexual clowns armed with baseball bats, machetes, and life-threatening pies. The Bozos artificially breed robatts (i.e. humans) with Binsky’s Nuclear Beer, a hallucinogenic drug that’s administered through oversized, cartoon-like syringes. Meanwhile, God is a talk show host who interviews Satan. Claymation demons attack robatts. Stop-motion Barbies have an orgy before being dismembered by Bozo dolls. If this is the future, I can’t wait to get there.
Let’s Visit the World of the Future could be a recruitment tool for the Joker’s gang. Or a movie that Alex is forced to watch as part of his rehabilitation in A Clockwork Orange. Or even an opening act for a “Weird Al” Yankovic concert in 1985. But it’s none of those things. Instead, Let’s Visit is a 40-minute landmine of avant-garde angst from stoned hippies who recognized that clowns are inherently horrifying. And it’s kind of amazing. Set up like an instructional classroom film, complete with the tape-warbled narration of a character named Mr. Camera, this movie is a transgressive attack on consumerism, capitalism, and, you know, THE MAN. But like the film’s questionable hot takes on race and sexual politics, the messaging doesn’t fully land in the 21st century. What does land is the crazed presentation, which transforms some drunken clownin’ around into surrealist art.
Like Devo’s early music videos and Tommy Turner and David Wojnarowicz’s Where Evil Dwells, Let’s Visit is a lightning rod of outsider energy that dissolves the barriers of rational thought. It stops you in your tracks and demands that you pay attention, because motion is constant. Every frame is delivered via scratchy 16mm photography or hand cut paper collages. The soundtrack is a hiss-filled mix of piano twinkling and deranged circus music. There’s real-life hidden camera footage of clowns skulking around a mall with weapons. The mood jumps from hilarious to chilling without warning. It makes sense that this project would eventually lead to the formation of the Church of the Subgenius—one of the greatest pranks in history—and the essential found footage mixtape Arise! The Subgenius Video; it’s impossible to keep this much creative electricity from blowing up the world’s circuits.
The movie ends with this onscreen message:
“Sponsored by God to promote the future.”
