HELLO DANKNESS -- Post-Ironic Video Collage With Lots to Show and Little to Say

Review by Daniel Lima

The pop culture landscape of today can be frustratingly recursive and self-referential, constantly in conversation with itself with no grander ambition than being recursive and self-referential. To the credit of Soda Jerk, the art collective behind the experimental Hello Dankness, they at least are attempting to weaponize that trend. The film repurposes the images and sounds that have become so familiar to directly comment on the state of America through the Trump years. It’s an technically impressive undertaking, but one that reveals the limitations of its conceit almost immediately.
 
The film is a video collage, taking footage from hundreds of films and TV shows and editing them together to tell the story of a typical American suburb. We follow this suburb from the early days of 2016, through the election and presidency of Donald Trump, all the way to Inauguration Day 2021. Shots are cut to make it seem like Tom Hanks from The ‘Burbs lives in the same neighborhood as Ice Cube from Next Friday and Wayne from Wayne’s World. Extensive rotoscoping work inserts characters from one work into another; characters put up signs and get tattoos announcing their support of one candidate over another. Apocalyptic scenes from This is the End are set on Election Night 2016 to depict the liberal sense of the world ending, and the Ninja Turtles sit in the sewers explaining Pizzagate to each other. On top of all that, there’s a bunch of musical numbers, too.
 
The amount of work it takes to mash all these elements together into something even vaguely coherent in astounding. Collecting and culling all this material, finding what is complementary and what makes the perfect juxtaposition, and all to satirize a section of American history ripe for this kind of post-ironic ribbing. If nothing else, Soda Jerk should be applauded for their effort.
 
Outside of that, what does Hello Dankness have to say? Unfortunately, not much.

As interesting as the form of its commentary is, it can’t make up for the fact that it has little to say about the Trump years that have not been repeated ad nauseum. Liberals lacked foresight, they offered little tangible resistance to threat of right-wing populism, and Trump was unprepared for the calamity of 2020. One would hope that having these ideas explored through pop culture icons would offer at least some novelty, but there’s only so much you can do with images that already exist. The same power they hold through being entrenched in popular consciousness paradoxically restricts how much you can distort them before they are robbed of that power.
 
This leads to an obvious issue with the project that can’t be avoided: it requires some amount of knowledge of the works being repurposed for it to have any effect. By the filmmakers’ own admission, much of the source material has a certain baggage, a cultural shorthand that is meant to make their remixing here feel charged and pointed. Without that familiarity, many of these recontextualized images lack the emotional attachment that would make them impactful, if they’re even recognized as recontextualized images in the first place. Perhaps there’s something to be said about these touchstones being so thoroughly removed from their original purpose that they could be taken entirely at face value, but it’s not enough to sustain even the scant seventy-minute runtime.
 
Not every moment is attempting to engage in metacommentary about its own use; some are just funny gags. These are undoubtedly the strongest parts of the movie, with the condensing of the entire first three years of Trump’s presidency being condensed into a Garfield meme being perhaps the funniest moment. The film opens with the infamous Kylie Jenner Pepsi ad, shown unedited in its entirety. That the ad is more surreal, incisive, and revealing than anything that follows does call into question whether this effort ever could have offered something that hasn’t already been said.
 
Even so, the sheer scale Hello Dankness, the amount of painstaking work to bring this vision to life, makes it impossible to be written off entirely. It offers little insight on the Trump years, and how much one gets out of it might have a ceiling based on how many references are recognized. In an era where preexisting properties are constantly regurgitated to the point they lose any meaning, however, at least this film attempts to do so with a purpose. 

Hello Dankness hits theaters September 8.

Rating: 3/5