Review - The Flaming Lips: Christmas On Mars

Originally published in Soundcheck Magazine (1/26/09)

What are we to make of The Flaming Lips’ seven-plus-years-in-the-making maternity experiment in space, Christmas On Mars? It seems both too goofy to analyze critically and too philosophical to cast away as psychedelic nonsense. When put that way, I suppose it fits perfectly in The Flaming Lips’ universe.

Christmas On Mars is a (probably intentionally) low-budget, interstellar musing about humanity and, particularly, motherhood. The setting, a suspiciously terrestrial-looking space station on Mars, is stocked mostly with hallucinating male workers, dark, scary corridors and lots of gloom-and-doom atmosphere. Pink Floyd might have sang about the dark side of the moon, but according to The Flaming Lips, Mars is all dark, which is a bit surprising coming from the majestic, hopeful sound of the band’s lush musical repertoire.

Make no mistake, though. Christmas On Mars is not a musical, nor is it even a music-oriented film, regardless of the soundtrack created by the band. The music is far from the twisted pop melodies that fans are used to; it’s a proper film soundtrack, which means it is led solely by pacing and mood. This makes it both void of most of the splendor fans have come to expect from the band and, ultimately, irrelevant in their sonic catalog.

Band leader Wayne Coyne directs the film while he and the rest of the Lips either star or cameo in the movie, which may be the most direct and unadulterated exploration of Oedipal complexes and in-utero fantasies to come along in film in a long, long time. Most of the major players’ aforementioned hallucinations generalize around fetuses and vaginal imagery, which later is explained adequately in one of the film’s more interesting scenes. It all revolves around the colony’s lone female inhabitant, who has very little interaction with the men but whom the crew seems to look at as some kind of supernatural miracle worker.

The film sets up for a Christmas pageant of sorts that never actually happens. But there are elements of Christmas miracles that come into play, particularly when a rather ordinary-looking alien (played by Coyne) shows up. The film is too straight-laced to become a stoner classic and yet still is weird-for-the-sake-of-weird enough to suggest that Coyne and the gang felt compelled to meet some sort of universal expectation of them.

Christmas On Mars is one of those inexplicable passion projects that some artists become possessed by, and so it never can be appreciated by an audience as much as the creator appreciates making it. You definitely won’t see it trailing It’s A Wonderful Life on Thanksgiving weekend TV, and you probably won’t even see it in a college dorm room sandwiched between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Trainspotting. It’s an interesting little film, but that’s about it. Its ambition certainly meets The Flaming Lips’ standards, but the end result falls a bit short.

– Andy Pareti