Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D. are faintly abashed opportunists. No, wait, they’re urban collectors and public servants. Nah, they’re Midwesterners who dabbled in city living, and got a taste of being cool. Wrong again, bucko: They’re artists. Accidental artists, but artists nonetheless.
As the subjects and narrators of Aussie filmmaker Matthew Bate’s feature-length documentary Shut Up, Little Man!: An Audio Misadventure, Mitch and Eddie Lee have ample opportunity to play all those roles, wittingly or not. And so do we, when the film is humming properly.
See, the entire “Shut Up, Little Man!” saga is a case study in eavesdropping, voyeurism, cheap amusement at other people’s expense, poverty-row exploitation and appropriation. The question is whether the protagonists, and we viewers shamelessly and endlessly clamoring to be entertained, take any responsibility for our participation.
Fresh out of college in the late ’80s, Eddie and Mitch moved to San Francisco and found a cheap apartment in the lower Haight. Next door lived a pair of middle-aged alcoholics who drank and argued at all hours of the night. In self-defense, as it were, the young guys strapped a microphone to a pole and held it outside their neighbors’ window, recording hundreds of hours of ludicrous, obscenity-laced banter. (Peter was gay and Ray was homophobic, adding another bizarre dimension to their hate-love cacophony.)
Mitch and Eddie gave cassettes to friends, who passed them around to an ever-widening circle that included Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, graphic artist Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) and L.A. playwright Gregg Gibbs. Each was inspired to interpret the twisted dynamic between Ray and Peter in his own medium. In short order, “Shut Up, Little Man!” (named after one of Peter’s favorite putdowns) had become an underground phenomenon.
