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Here’s a topic guaranteed to generate a few black eyes the next time your Monday Night Football party or film appreciation group suffers a power outage right in the middle of Panthers/Falcons or Discrete Charms of the Bourgeoisie and the resulting Coors- or merlot-fueled boredom turns ugly: if aliens landed on Earth and asked which movie would best exemplify our species, what would you recommend? Citizen Kane? The Graduate? Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Debbie Does Dallas?
My vote would go to this amazing little documentary shot for next to nothing on eight-millimeter video by first-time director S. R. Bindler at one of those p.r. spectacles where a car dealership gives away a vehicle to whoever can stand with one hand on the sheet metal the longest before succumbing to fatigue and falling unconscious.
This particular episode unfolded in Longview, Texas during the summer of 1995 at a Nissan dealership holding its fourth such contest. Twenty-four contestants were chosen by lottery, outfitted with complimentary promotional t-shirts and mandatory gloves to protect the paint from acid in their sweaty palms, and turned loose on a new pickup with only a few simple rules: at least one hand must remain on the truck at all times; no stooping or squatting, or leaning on the vehicle; a five-minute break every hour, with a 15-minute rest every six hours; and the top three finishers must submit to urinalysis to preclude a head full of speed.
I’m tellin’ ya, you’d think these folks had been handed M-16s, dropped on an island, and told the last one alive would get a billion dollars while the rest would have their surviving family members fed to piranhas. Mixing pre-contest interviews with simple stand-back-and-watch, Bindler introduces a mix of people so diverse you’d think they were procured from Central Casting for an Irwin Allen disaster pic. There’s a smart, perky college girl who’s convinced youth and a careful plan of smart nutrition, massage, and running shoes will net her a $15,000 windfall so she can get back to school and have her teeth fixed; a recent ex-Marine who once stayed up five days straight during a combat exercise; a jocular Pentacostalist mom with the Holy Ghost and a prayer group in her corner; an athletic young Latino exuding the kind of quiet, self-effacing confidence you’d hope for to pull your kids out of a burning building; the toothless trucker’s wife whose husband is fond of boasting the industrial strength air-conditioning unit on his house can lower the temperature at 12 degrees (and don’t ask him how he knows); the oldest contestant, a hell-for-Bubba chain-smoker who likes to talk about how he’s many times patiently sat motionless from dawn to dusk in a stand during deer season; a former high school track star gone to seed, with a penchant for Snickers bars; and the returning winner of the 1992 contest, a down-home philosopher who compares the adventure to Highlander -- “there can be only one in the end” -- stating beforehand he’s pretty sure he can do it again unless somebody like an ex-Marine shows up.
No joke, it would make a pretty entertaining evening to throw a party and have everybody place bets on who they think will outlast drowsiness, heat, gravity, and the merciless concrete slab. They bob and weave, make alliances, psych each other with music, laughter, and stares, break down, and hallucinate through days and nights without sleep, ultimately dropping off one by one like characters from an Agatha Christie mystery. I got tired just watching.
At times Bindler surrenders to inexperience, resorting to editing gimmickry. But for the most part, Hands On a Hardbody is low cost, guerrilla filmmaking at its finest. The technical quality may be no better than the 11 o’clock news, but that just means there’s less to get in the way of startlingly human, entertaining drama. A-
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