Stills from the film (photos courtesy of Flux)

Stalking through the tundra, musk-ox battling around them, the White Stripes in Under Great White Northern Lights are sweaty, tearful, smiling specters.  They appear randomly on buses or bowling alleys or pool halls or boats, cloaked in the grain of 16mm film stock.  Flux’s Cinema Tuesdays gave our city a sneak peek at the film, a deep and curious document of the band’s snaking tour of Canada, alternating between on-stage guitar assassinations, sly conversations in cabins and cars, and offbeat explorations of the bleak landscape and its congenial citizens.  The recipe works, giving you many different threads to cling to, and implicitly contextualizing everything that happens in Jack and Meg’s ramshackle tumbling through the wilderness.

Small moments.  During one performance, Jack culls loud growling noises from his keyboard and shouts at Meg to play faster, as if he’s captaining a ship.  Later, in an interview, he insists that he never talks over Meg, talking over her in the process.  Back stage, he teases her for the quietness of her voice, reappropriating Randy Newman, “Quiet people got no reason to live.”  Another performance, an understanding of their mostly telepathic, onstage communication begins to arise, as Jack gives the knife-across-the-throat/kill-it gesture and she complies before he gets his hand back to his guitar.  Their relationship is cute and strange and antagonistic and gives the film a solid emotional ground that most concert documentaries don’t even attempt to achieve.  There are no big revelations here, but there are moments that help to illuminate the central drama of the White Stripes and feeds the massive, cephalapod narrative that encircles them.

Live entertainment

Writing about Jack and Meg is potentially dangerous.  It’s too easy to start throwing around joyless theories and obligatory catch-phrases.  The minute anyone starts questioning the brother/sister thing or attempts to ponder what level of contrivance is behind the whole persona, they lose the game: exposed as the ideological enemy, a blind fool who has failed to comprehend the deep wondrous complexity in truth and, ultimately, the universe.  This is all unspoken, of course.  And Jack and Meg seem to (or don’t, at all, maybe) encourage all the conjecture and analysis.  There seems to be delight in revealing the joylessness in modern conversation about celebrity.

Emmett Malloy

The film plays with all the tropes.  Emmett Malloy, the director, seems to have a supernatural understanding about what makes the band so intriguing and why they were the sole survivors of the bloody neo-garage wars of the early ’00s.  He films most performances in the obligatory red, white and black to complement all the sloppiness and frantic barbarism, of course.  But at the same time, the stage violence is interspersed with Jack softly waxing about the freedom that emerges from difficult and sweat-filled work.  Malloy understands that the White Stripes’ dirtiness and cacophony often obscures their unexpected politeness and tenderness, and the most intriguing moments arise when they are placed outside the bubble of stardom.  When they visit a community center of ancient Inuit elders to talk about ravens and sing Blind Willie McTell, Jack seems absolutely delighted when they teach him how to write his name in their language.  The elders then pull out a squeaky accordion and commence square-dancing, slightly confused about who these people are, but playing along nonetheless.

Live entertained

As the film and tour draws to a close, Jack is sitting at a piano and playing a mournful song.  Meg sits by his side, slowly drawing nearer until she’s almost touching his face, and tears begin to fall.  Her ache and sadness are enigmatic, but still painful.  What are the underlying emotions here?  And, are they real?  Does it matter?  It seems to feel too perfect to not be staged.  But, then, there’s that trap again.

—Gerard Olson