In my essay on Elmer Gantry, I said to beware of all enterprises taking place in tents. Now having seen 1966’s The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, I’m going to classify as tents inflatable plastic domes capable of holding 300 people.
The titular dome was purchased by Robert Gentry and Sharon Henesy, a duo whose relationship is never fully clarified. One thing we know for certain is they live in deeply rural Table Rock, Missouri. When we first see them, she’s on a tire swing and he’s playing a harmonica. Suddenly, she’s announces “It’s here”, whatever “it” might be. They go to the train depot and get an astonishingly huge crate lowered onto the back of a flat-bed truck. The visual of them driving this up to its destination is surreal, and it had me wondering what kind of havoc a crosswind of any significance might have on that crate.
Surreal would be the word to describe this distinctive independent production, which is an odd intersection of filmmaking clearly inspired by the New Wave effort, with music of the type of garage bubblegum pop-rock that was popular at the time, all brought together with a bit of The Dead Zone.
You see, Henesy is a psychic, and she receives visions of things past, present and future when touching an object. When she sits down on top of the giant crate, she suddenly hears music and she seems to summons a car carrying three musicians who stop in front of the truck, jump out with their instruments and start playing. Henesy climbs down from the truck and touches each on the chest and says their name in what felt less like a psychic ability and more like she spontaneously created these men and is bestowing names upon them.
The band is led by Marco St. John, bearing the unlikely moniker of “Bobo”. He is a master manipulator, which is easier to imagine of somebody with a name like Machiavelli. There’s a reason nobody has ever heard of a Boboian scheme. Yet, it is he who first realizes the potential to exploit Henesy’s ability to earn some serious coin.
Another band member is Skip Hinnant on bass. He just happens to be a dead-ringer for a young Mike Mills, who served in the same capacity in R.E.M. Hinnant went on to have a strange career, voicing Fritz the Cat in both feature films before becoming a regular on The Electric Company. Lastly, on drums, we have an impossibly young Sam Waterston, nearly three decades from being everybody’s favorite district attorney on Law & Order.
Together, everybody gets the dome inflated and it is quite the spectacle, roughly like the top half of a hot air balloon. The bottom is flared out and presumably filled with some sort of ballast, giving the structure the odd appearance of a giant hard hat when viewed from above. There are three giant neon stars hanging from the ceiling, and shots of these inevitably had me thinking of the cover of Big Star’s #1 Record every time.
There’s even a revolving door to handle what St. John thinks will be a huge turnout to see some group nobody knows play in a giant inflatable dome. When that fails to be a success, he convinces Henesy to be the main attraction, doing readings based on objects presented by those in the audience. The first volunteer is an older woman who is despondent upon learning one of the dogs she’s looking for won’t be back because it is dead.
In a later session, she keeps seeing a well and, eventually, the body of a woman hanging in it. The sheriff threatens to run them out of town, but St. John is convinced Henesy can prove her visions are real. With additional coaxing from him, she provides enough info for that body to be found and it was that of the woman looking for the missing dog.
Nobody seems to regard this as much of a tragedy. The mayor is clearly far more excited by the crowds who will inevitably flock to Henesy’s tent (er, “dome”) revivals (or whatever one chooses to call them). He even prioritizes that over finding a spelunker who is trapped in a cave-in, in what is an odd subplot that only seems to only run parallel, and independently, to the main storyline.
Really, there are too many tangents, some of which are more intriguing than others. Although it doesn’t advance the plot at all, I was intrigued by a brief diversion where another crate arrives and it appears to contain a princess costume for Henesy, a pony for her to ride, a magician’s outfit for Waterston and a bear costume for Hinnant. They go for a walk in the woods in these guises, only to be startled by an old bum (Arthur Hughes) in a tree.
We’ll see more of him later towards the end of the picture, as he lives in the junkyard where Gentry conceals Henesy after she has been exhausted by using her powers. I like this exchange between Hughes and Henesy: “People always throw out the best things.” “What else do you find interesting around here?” “Well, today I found you.” I like his logic about living in the dump: “If you can stand it, it’s the safest place.” Alas, he will prove to be wrong in that assumption. Another of the picture’s surreal moments has them walking through the dump while being trailed by a herd of pigs.
The photography is interesting, especially for a picture made on as low of a budget as this had to have. Director Juleen Compton especially seems to like silhouettes, which are used effectively for scenes such as the dome being inflated at night, or when the police arrive at the darkened dome and the only illumination is the diffused light from their headlights through one of the plastic walls.
I was intrigued this was helmed by a woman, a rarity in the 1960’s, even in independent cinema. Compton didn’t seem to work much after this, with 1987’s Buckeye and Blue being her last credit on IMDB. I bet she has led an interesting life, as she was once painted by Diego Rivera.
The cast is solid, especially Henesy. Her best moments are in the trance sequences when she has a vision. I find it interesting her life has been even more of a mystery than Compton’s, with her appearing in all of four films, and one of those was the similarly oddball independent production The Legend of Hillbilly John. Gentry is better than I expected from somebody whose work has been overwhelmingly in TV, with the vast majority of it being on soap operas. The only person miscast is St. John, who looks too old to be the leader of such a garage rock combo.
I can’t say The Plastic Dome of Normal Jean is a complete success, though only because I’m not sure as to its objectives. I found it intriguingly quirky, but to an extent that is almost to its detriment. It is one of the earliest American films clearly influenced by French New Wave, but it is at times so slavish a tribute as to sacrifice its own identity. Still, it captures that certain something undefinable other independent American films of the era seemed to channel. And isn’t it odd how so many films about psychics are, ironically, predicable? What most surprised me about this one is it was far from predictable, with me unable to foresee how it would end.
Dir: Juleen Compton
Starring Sharon Henesy, Robert Gentry, Marco St. John
Watched on Kanopy