Feeling stuck in a rut, Chris Wilcha, a successful director of TV commercials, starts shooting a documentary about a record store in suburban New Jersey, Flipside Records, where he worked as a teenager, in the 1980s. From this slender premise, he develops a breezy but prodigious memory piece, encompassing his family background, his artistic obsessions, and his adventures in the movie business.
…True to his method of amiable indirection, Wilcha leaps from the store into a rabbit hole of memory (complete with its own Proustian culinary trigger, involving smoked meat). Wilcha’s deepest dive is into his own huge collection of stuff—30 years’ worth, he says, which fills the closets in his childhood bedroom, in the house where his parents, Pat and John Wilcha, still live. The cache is wildly eclectic, including dozens, maybe hundreds, of matchbooks from hotels and restaurants; obsolete electronics; a scrapbook; boxes full of magazines; concert programs; T-shirts, shoes, jackets; his teen-age driver’s license; a poster for a Nirvana show that he’d attended; tennis racquets and balls; an old baseball mitt; a decades-old airline “barf bag”.
In a sense, Flipside is a hoarder’s tale, in which objects, by summoning the past, generate intense emotions in the present. A powerful sense of incompletion looms over the movie, as Wilcha evokes the emotional and experiential surfeit of a lifetime, in all its tragicomic glory. As he unpacks the closet and displays his throwaway treasures, he explains, in a line of arrogant sublimity, why he has accumulated so much: “As far back as I can remember, I always had this feeling that the world was going to forget—and that I was somehow in charge of remembering. And that meant saving everything.”
With this stuff occupying space in the house where his parents live, Flipside morphs into a hilarious yet resonant family story. Though John and Pat want Chris to clean out his closet, John is just as much of an idiosyncratic pack rat as his son. He collects stamps and coins, magazines and autographed baseballs, long-obsolete AOL-installation disks. “His most enduring and obsessive collection is of hotel shampoos and soaps”, Chris adds, reflecting—with hilarious redundancy—that perhaps he has inherited his own hoarding tendencies from his father. These stories of stuff are the most wondrous parts of Flipside, yet also the ones that fall shortest of their ambition: Wilcha, in his rush to get his story out, never stops to expand on the importance of any one of these objects, never runs out a chain of associations that any of them inspire.
For that matter, Wilcha hits a similar wall of silence regarding music. The essence of memory is built into the very objects of which Flipside is made: records and tapes. Quite possibly more hours of music fill the store and its teeming basement annex than a person with a permanently spinning turntable could listen to in a lifetime. All these physical media preserve past performance for eternal recall. They make Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin live forever—and live forever alongside Belle Barth and Herman’s Hermits. They both safeguard historic artistry and magnify ephemera via nostalgia. Although there’s plenty of music in the film, neither Wilcha nor Dondiego—nor anyone else, for that matter—has very much to say about music itself. More time is spent on the rarity or the value of individual items, the peculiarities of album covers.