Depressing documentary about the legendary Raymond and Peter audio tapes, which themselves are a documentary. They’re a documentary of two fiftysomething San Francisco bachelor nobodies who lived together for years in a cheap apartment back in the 1980s and who had a relationship seemingly based on pure hate. Every day, these two screamed at each other in alcoholic fury. Their insults were rapid fire, and often funny and bizarre. Anytime you start to feel bad for these lonely headcases, one of them pops out with a priceless line that keeps you listening. (My own favorite moment might be Raymond’s “I am not going to die; I will tell you if I’m dead“.) The tapes are brutal, hilarious, constantly quotable, and all too real.
The only reason why we know about these two jerks at all is because the walls of their apartment were as thin as dollar store condoms and their neighbors heard everything. Two of those neighbors—young punks Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D.—thought it was a good idea to record the nightly brawls. They then passed dubbed cassettes on to their friends, and those friends passed them on to their friends, and so on until an underground sensation was born. A CD came out. There were also stickers, T-shirts and comics. There was a stage play inspired by the tapes, as well as three separate unproduced film treatments.
Raymond and Peter themselves had no idea about any of this. Both men would die not long after without anyone knowing much about them, either. (Like a lot of old drunks, these guys don’t have much in the way of traceable families.)
This film attempts to tie everything together. It documents the document, but this time with a mix of fabricated and archived visuals. It offers little about the back stories of Raymond and Peter themselves, so this ends up most valuable as a picture of the greed, the conflict, and the ego trips that occur when a couple of young hipsters accidentally fall into underground notoriety.
I watched this film and hated Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D. I didn’t hate them for taping Raymond and Peter and I didn’t hate them for spreading the tapes around (I’m cool with all of that).
I hated them for hitching their wagon to it. I hated them for zealously taking ownership of the tapes like they created the content. I hated them for questioning their own motives in this whole affair while also going along with them like sharks following blood. I hated them for acting like fuckin’ Alan Lomax just because their neighbors in 1987 were a couple of weirdo loudmouths.
About halfway into the movie, every time one of them showed up on screen, I wanted to yell “Shut up, little man!” myself.