Those who know of the Punk queen and “No Wave” music pioneer will be delighted that the 2019 festival circuit doc has found a streaming distributor. Those who have no idea who Lydia Lunch is are in for a shock. Get ready to have your face melted off by her brutal honesty and larger-than-life persona.
New York City in the late 70s was a fertile era for intersecting music scenes: Punk, New Wave, No Wave, Noise and other sub-genres. Right in the middle of it all was one Lydia Lunch (born Lydia Anne Koch, June 2, 1959), still a teenager who left her unhappy childhood home of Rochester, NY, of all places.
Lunch quickly established herself as an omnipresent artist who was a busy hub, if not the actual center of the universe on the Lower East Side. Fortunately, in those days before cell phones and social media, Scott B and Beth B were documenting the scene on film. I say “fortunately” because Beth B has directed this latest documentary and her film would not have been possible without the deep archives of her own creation decades ago.
Although having said that, Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over, relies just as heavily on current interviews with the over-sixty rebel. Lunch is both pissed off and good-natured. She is both hardcore and, we learn from a colleague who gets choked up talking about it, an empath who shares her heart. Now a veteran of spoken word and self-help presentations, she knows how to put up a provocative soundbite, often with a disarming chuckle.
Indeed, she unabashedly recounts using sex to get what she wanted from men, when she wanted it–and only if she wanted it.
How was her sexual chi forged? It seems it was from the seed of years of sexual abuse at the hands of her own father. This was news to me, though others will be aware. Lunch is unflinching in her telling of what she went through, although it shouldn’t be said that the topic is the main theme of the film, it isn’t. But as we the viewers sit in the therapist’s chair, listening to her revelations, one can’t help but apply a bit of psychoanalysis to her story.
The film followed Lunch and her band on tour, and Beth B takes us back and forth from performance footage to interviews with her contemporaries/admirers. Thurston Moore and L7’s Donita Sparks are particularly insightful in their thoughts on the artist.
At only an hour and 15 minutes, The War is Never Over might feel slight to some, but it is billed as the “first career-spanning documentary” about Lunch, and it’s hard to see where something could’ve been left out.
I doubt if I’d ever buy an album of hers or her seminal bands, but I will watch virtually any music doc, and this one, much like its subject, never lost its mojo.
Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over plays IFC Center NYC, June 30 – July 6, 2021
Lydia Lunch & Beth B in person
It can also be streamed via Kino Lorber’s https://kinomarquee.com/ virtual cinemas starting June 30th.
