Director Penelope Spheeris began filming The Decline of Western Civilization, a documentary about LA’s raucous punk community, in 1979. That film, released in 1981, spawned a trilogy connected by name, location, and music, but the songs that play in each film don’t exactly mesh. The first follow-up, 1988’s The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, focuses on the glam-metal scene that turned the Sunset Strip into a magnet for gaudy hairballs; the final chapter, 1998’s The Decline of Western Civilization III, lightly touches upon politically conscious hardcore bands, but mainly focuses on the lives of a gaggle of teenage crust punks as they panhandle and get wasted.
The lives of the teens Spheeris films in the third Decline are unremittingly bleak. One dies in a squat fire during the course of the film. Another, who goes by the name Squid, was stabbed to death after Spheeris wrapped up filming, but before the movie was completed (his suspect also appears in Decline). And yet for some reason the lives of these gutter punks feel less sad than some of the hair-metal devotees in The Metal Years. When Spheeris asks many of the big-haired wannabe musicians where they’ll be in five years all of them declare that they’ll be on top of the rock heap—and they say it with the conviction of someone who knows it’ll be impossible to fail at that goal. If such a shallow lifestyle is the only thing those folks strived for, then I’d hate to see where they wound up.
