To casual fans, Wayne Coyne is the greying Pied Piper clad in giant foam gloves who fronts The Flaming Lips, and the adults in animal suits who dance with them. The suggestion that he might make a festive film about space explorers wrestling with their sanity aboard a space station on Christmas Eve, featuring a bloodied foetus and a ‘vaginal-headed marching band from hell’, might alarm these fans. It really shouldn’t. Coyne has always been fixated on mortality – it’s just that The Lips have spent their career making happy in the face of impending doom.
‘What choice do we have?’ asks Coyne, who appears in his film as a friendly alien. ‘When I see “Christmas on Mars”, I think: Well, that’s all of our lives. I don’t trust that the air is going to be here tomorrow. Little by little we discover just how helpless we are in a world we thought we belonged in. It feels desperate, but it’s true. If we’re waiting for something to come and save
us, it’s just not going to happen. In the end, we believe in things we think are going to work for us. That’s the Christmas I think belongs in the world – when we grab a dumb tree, put lights on it, put it in the house and call it a Christmas tree. It represents our battle against darkness.’
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‘Christmas on Mars’, released on DVD last month, but which Coyne will introduce personally at the Barbican on Friday, explores this same theme. It’s a homemade ‘Eraserhead’, evoking nativity in space in which Coyne’s real-life earth wife gives birth to a GM baby, causing no end of anxiety among the astronauts who’ve gone loopy thanks to the weak oxygen. It’s only the thought of Christmas and the baby’s safe birth that gives them hope.
That’s the gist of it. Though Coyne would much rather you made up your own mind. ‘I’ll admit I’m making it for imaginative people, to trip their minds going down their own little tunnel of what they think it means.’ Helpfully, Coyne adds that many of those who enjoyed ‘Christmas on Mars’ in the US might have been on mushrooms. The seeds for his film, soundtracked by The Lips’s eeriest music, were planted in Coyne by his older brothers and their friends – a gang
called The Fearless Freaks who lived life in the early ’70s as if they
were starring in Richard Linklater’s ‘Dazed and Confused’. They told
Coyne of astronauts stuck on the moon after the Apollo mission.
‘For a long time I thought it was true,’ says Coyne about the
moon-marooned men. ‘After you think about something for a couple of
years, depending on what time it is in your life, it gets embedded in
your way of thinking about the world and about your insecurities.’
‘Christmas on Mars’ isn’t an essential watch for non-Lipsters, but it
is an intriguing window on Coyne’s mind, although he can’t say why,
exactly, he indulged himself. Only that, ‘in America you get these
insane artist guys who build castles in their backyard out of bottle
caps – well, that’s me. Most dumb art is based on that idea. I don’t know why I’m doing it, but it’s better to be a little insane and unpredictable.’ The 80-minute film took Coyne – and his bandmates Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins, plus family and friends – seven long years to complete, during which Drozd quit heroin, something you can see in his increasingly healthy complexion as the movie unfolds.
For the production, Coyne built a spaceship in his garden (‘People say, “Man, that’s a cool space station, where d’ya go for that?” Dude! That’s just my backyard!’). He found the perfect ‘space tunnel’ in a field just outside Oklahoma City (‘the guy selling it said, “Dude! I’ve been telling people that for years!” ’), turned vacuum cleaners, oven doors and old toys into props, and cleared an old cement factory free of pigeon poo so he could use it as a location. The results may not be to everyone’s taste. For Coyne, making ‘Christmas on Mars’ was a psychotherapeutic endeavour following the death of his parents. But does this mean he should inflict the results on us? ‘Well, you know, I can step back from it all and say, “Yeah, but there are psychedelic vaginal things flying around, what’s not to like?” ’
Ah, yes. The vaginas. Lots of them. At the start, a spaceship flies into what Coyne calls a ‘cosmic genital area’ and, of course, there are the ranks of vagina-faced musicians who trample a foetus. It might be a story about birth, but Wayne, why are there so many? ‘I have no defence. The main cause of their hallucinating is the weak oxygen and this combination of psychological disturbances. Something’s not right in their brains. At the same time, the hallucinations build around their anxiety about this baby being born outside of the womb and it sends them down these roads to colourful despair.’ ‘We already knew we had a few by accident but as we started editing it, we started thinking: Let’s try throwing one in every ten minutes. Let’s get this psychedelic, vaginal, disturbing, awesome thing in enough so it’s not just a one-dimensional vaginal trip. I have to say, I’m relieved that people get it, or want to understand it, or question it. Maybe it’s because I’m me. If I was Matthew Barney, I might say, “Fuck off, you can’t ask me that.” ’
Wayne Coyne introduces ‘Christmas on Mars’ at the Barbican on Dec 12, with screenings on Dec 13 and 14.
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