The new documentary Winnebago Man [2009] is the culmination of 20 years of a cult video being passed around from friend to friend, videocassette to videocassette. In the days before YouTube when cult video aged in the underground for years, morphed into tenth-generation copies of distorted VHS images, and slowly took on mythic proportions (like the classic Heavy Metal Parking Lot [1986]), a man named Jack Rebney became a cult video icon. The inadvertently released outtakes from his 1989 industrial video for new Winnebago owners were a string of expletive-laden tirades that were hilarious coming from a man you could easily imagine as your grandfather; his bald, raw, yet strangely articulate cursing was all the more funny given that it was couched in the stilted aesthetic of a professionally composed, cardboard-choreographed industrial video. Unbeknownst to him, Jack Rebney became a celebrated, venerated symbol of the frustrated, inner id of young people everywhere. In a restrictive world of manners and self-editing, Jack Rebney became an emotional-release valve.
During the course of those 20 years, Jack Rebney’s outtakes made its way to portals for underground film including the hilarious and brilliant collection of kitschy found film and video known as the Found Footage Festival . The Found Footage Festival, curated by Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, recently released its third volume and loves Jack Rebney so much that it brought back Rebney for a second time in volume three (the first time was in volume one). In fact, Pickett and Prueher are featured in Winnebago Man expressing a genuine adoration of a man whose whereabouts were unknown for most of the last 20 years. Rebney’s subsequent appearance at a Found Footage Festival show on the West Coast as seen in this documentary was a surreal yet profound experience for Pickett and Prueher not unlike seeing a favorite celebrity for the first time in person except that their celebrity is not the superficial human vacuum ever present in today’s shallow pop culture.
But it wasn’t Pickett and Prueher that found Rebney. Despite their efforts over the years, it was actually a guy named Ben Steinbauer, the director of Winnebago Man, who not only revered Rebney but was obsessed with him. By chance, Steinbauer found Rebney through a classified ad buried deep down in the middle of the vast Internet wasteland. His subsequent attempt to physically locate Rebney was jarringly easy. In the middle of the Pacific Northwest, Steinbauer found an isolated man who seemed to have disconnected from society and was slowly on his way to a mental landscape of anger-fueled political rants that bordered on becoming conspiracy theories. As witnessed in the film, Steinbauer was initially let down by the anticlimactic first meeting with Rebney. Instead of an explosion of anger, Steinbauer was met with a calm, passive man—the antithesis of the man in the images that Steinbauer and countless others watched, laughed at, and academically studied over the years. Steinbauer muses that perhaps he had been fooled all these years by the myth of Rebney’s epic fury.
What soon transpires afterwards is the volcanic eruption that Steinbauer expected, but the film then unexpectedly catapults into a sweet, grandfatherly relationship between the young director and a grumpy yet endlessly endearing old man. It is in this that the film’s real surprise comes from; it’s not the fact that we find out that Rebney is actually that angry, it’s the fact that he is that loveable…and intelligent, and articulate, and surprisingly refreshing in his frankness all things political and philosophical. Rebney is the antidote to shallow sound bites from politicians and pretentious perspectives of the New Age subculture. Rebney is old school. He is the rough, thick-skinned model of traditional man that was so prevalent back in the previous generations before children were coddled. In fact, he reminds one of the network news anchor Howard Beale from Network [1976] with his outraged “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” mantra, the similarities becoming apparent after the film’s surprising revelations regarding Rebney’s actual origins pre-industrial Winnebago video. And perhaps it is in this (rather than the amusing expletive-laden tirades or even the heart-warming relationship that develops between Rebney and Steinbauer) that Winnebago Man’s and Rebney’s enveloping magnetism comes from: our recent generations of coddled children and latch-key kids secretly want a swift kick in the ass from a strong parental figure. Sure, hipsters will revere Rebney for his “authenticity,” but for the rest of us, we may actually be gravitating towards a sense of presence and authority that has been afraid to raise its proverbial head in an increasingly soft, child-centric culture full of increasingly self-centered brats.
Perhaps the love that the younger generation shows to Rebney in Winnebago Man is a sign of a cultural shift back to traditional roots in which men were men and younger people knew their place and respected their elders; P.T. Anderson certainly was interested in this type of antiquated male figure in Magnolia [1999] in the form of Jimmy Gator and Earl Partridge, and the television series Mad Men has certainly revisited and reexamined that type as well in numerous characters not to mention its lead character Don Draper. If only the cultural pendulum didn’t swing back all the other way would there perhaps be a benefit to us all—the days of alcoholic parents and physical-abuse-as-parenting is something that no one needs. During a screening of Winnebago Man at the American Film Institute’s annual documentary film festival Silverdocs, young people were clamoring at Steinbauer’s idea of having Rebney do his own radio show titled The Rebney Report especially when Steinbauer actually called Rebney on his cell phone during the film’s post Q & A session. Whether the underlying psychological hold that Winnebago Man has be indicative of a migration back to strong parental figures, a need for a precision knife that can cut through the hard butter of modern bullshit, or just a need for perennial, old-fashioned cuss-laden entertainment, to echo Rebney himself, “Jack, could you do us a fucking courtesy and continue your fucking rants for the sake of us all?!”
Justin Baker