Review: Shut Up, Little Man!: An Audio Misadventure

     A while ago, I reviewed a movie called Winnebago Man, a documentary looking for the star of a video that went viral before the internet, and then spread even further after the internet became what it is today. Similarly, Shut Up, Little Man!: An Audio Misadventure also tells the tale of a pre-internet viral sensation, this time in the form of audio tapes. The documentary covers a surprisingly wide range of topics from a seemingly banal occurrence: two men, roommates, verbally jousting.

     The story begins in 1987 with a couple of punks, Eddie and Mitch, from the midwest moving to San Francisco. They sign the lease for a rundown apartment in the Lower Haight district, and are warned that sometimes their neighbors can get a little loud. Sure enough, one night their next door neighbors start drunkenly yelling at each other. The fight was between Peter, a proud homosexual, and Raymond, a virulent homophobe. The fighting between these two keep Eddie and Mitch up at night, they try confronting the two of them, only to be threatened with their lives. Naturally, this makes Eddie and Mitch somewhat afraid of their neighbors, and out of this fear the two punks from Wisconsin start recording their neighbors in case they need to give evidence to the police. This is when things take a turn. You see, the things Raymond and Peter yelled at each other were hilarious. Eddie and Mitch started inviting people over to listen to their drunken neighbors, and eventually started making copies of the tapes to sell to people. People made copies of their copies and Peter and Raymond slowly became a viral phenomena. Comic artists began making comic books about the odd couple, one playwright wrote a successful play about Peter and Raymond, the band Devo released a song with excerpts from the tapes, and at one point there were three groups of people trying to make a movie based on these tapes. The film discusses the rise of the found footage movement, mixtape culture, and the fine line between art and exploitation.

     The end goal of the filmmaker's journey is an interview with Peter and Raymond's other roommate, Tony, the only living person that can be heard on the infamous tapes. After Raymond's death, Tony went to prison for assaulting Peter and he now lives alone in a small studio apartment in San Francisco. Mitch tries to bribe his way into Tony's apartment with a six-pack of beer and $100. At first, Tony is reluctant to be interviewed for the film, but eventually talks to Mitch about the relationship between Peter and Raymond. There was a lot of speculation about why two people, so diametrically opposed would willingly live together. Many people thought that Raymond was a self-loathing homosexual and was in a romantic relationship with Peter. Tony lays these rumors to rest and says that the two of them were friends and only fought each other when they got drunk.

     But most damningly, Shut Up Little Man! fails to convey what was so hypnotic about the original tapes, and Bate's decision to re-enact the transcripts with actors seems weirdly contrary to the spirit of the thing. (A nine-minute segment from an episode of the radio show This American Life far better evinces the potency of the Peter and Raymond tapes – the at-arms'-length hilarity of their epic swearing and the unfathomable sadness of these broken men, both of whom died from alcoholism-related disease.) Let it be said that all viral sensations are not created equal. Bate's facile and dispiriting documentary never makes a case for why this particular slice of audio verité required resurrecting from the graveyard of pop culture arcana.

Rating: 4/10 - Immoral