This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

This Is Spinal Tap arrives from 1984, a mockumentary following a fictional English heavy metal band across an American tour that steadily disintegrates. Rob Reiner directs with a straight face, and the cast improvises nearly every line. The satire targets the pretensions of rock stardom and the credulous form of the concert documentary itself. It is a comedy of manners about men in spandex arguing over amplifier settings. Nothing in its construction reaches for the cultural concerns that would come to dominate later decades. The band is white, male, and consumed by its own mythology, and the film finds this funny without ever suggesting it ought to be otherwise.

Consider Jeanine, David's girlfriend, who joins the tour and promptly destabilizes the group. The film treats her as an intruder, a purveyor of astrology and yoga who sidelines the guitarist she does not date. We are invited to share the band's irritation. A contemporary production would likely reframe her as a wronged woman asserting herself against a boys' club. This film does no such thing. It lets her be an obstacle and moves on. The record label's refusal to release an album with sexist cover art is played as corporate timidity, not moral awakening. The joke lands on commerce, not on patriarchy.

The result is a document of a specific comic sensibility, one that predates the vocabulary we now apply to such matters. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no accounting for who is missing from the frame. Just a drum kit, a Stonehenge prop eighteen inches tall, and a band that cannot find the stage. We grade it accordingly.