Rik Little and The Church of Shooting Yourself
The year is 1993. A man is standing in his apartment with a video camera. He points the camera at his TV, which is showing a staticky recording of a home shopping network. The man then holds a broken mirror in front of the camera and speaks to whoever may be watching.
"I have a confession to make. I've been shooting myself. I've been popping the cassette into my VCR recorder to see what I do in my daily life, right and wrong, and recently, I've been putting it on public access. But now that is threatened by a major corporation and a bunch of lawyers. They want to get rid of public access, to put on… home shopping? I don't wanna buy anything! I don't wanna buy anything!"
This is the opening of the sixth episode of The Church of Shooting Yourself, a show that aired on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network from 1993 to 2007. The show was created by Rik Little. Not much is known about him outside of what we see on the show. He was a filmmaker who had made at least a handful of films since his college days in the 1970s, one of which I've covered earlier.
When he reached his 40s, he began this exercise of taking his camera with him all over New York City and shooting himself as he speaks his mind on what is happening around him. Often he would air his grievances with the city government, the NYPD, and Mayor Giuliani.
Rik seems to have pioneered the style of vlogging, complete with montages and a classic rock soundtrack. This was over 12 years before YouTube was founded and everyone started shooting themselves.
Over the course of 15 years, Rik made at least 100 episodes of The Church of Shooting Yourself. Out of these 100+ installments, only around 15 are available online, to my knowledge.
The show is like a box of chocolates. Each episode offers a different side to Rik’s filmmaking style. It’s sometimes documentary, sometimes narrative, often abstract, and full of surprises. I’ve singled out two of his episodes, each one an example of his different ways of presenting his world.
Rik, the Documentarian
"I remember when Tompkins Square Park was open 24 fucking hours a day… and those were the good days."
In 1996, a man named Michael Carter said those words aloud in the park, in the presence of a couple of police officers. Those officers then followed Carter across the street, seized him, and beat him with nightsticks before throwing him in their car and hauling him off to jail.
Carter's story is told through a series of interviews, in which Rik speaks with eyewitnesses, community members, and Carter himself. Rik also narrates, as he does in every episode. They all give their own side of the story, and their own diagnosis of the situation.
They allege that the real estate developers that helped bankroll Mayor Giuliani's campaign are now influencing the city's administration, ordering a higher police presence around the park to drive away the homeless people camped there, and to quash free speech, even demolishing the park bandshell where concerts and demonstrations were held.
Rik documents scenes of ten or so officers gathered together on a street corner, stopping people from making demonstrations. At one point, during Rik's interview with Michael Carter, they fear that they are being followed around by the cops and move to another location. In the final segment of the episode, a cop barges in on one of Rik's interviews to ask what's going on.
"I just wanna put my finger on the pulse of the community."
This is all rather intriguing, however, this falls into the same trap as does most of documentary cinema. Rik, the auteur, is in control of the final cut, and has the final say on what he gets to include and not include in his piece.
We hear quite a bit of compelling testimony, but Rik is the one editing it all together into a neat half-hour package, in which his views on the police and the city administration are continuously confirmed and echoed, and testimony from the other side of the argument is almost never considered. Even the cop in the final segment expresses a similar doubt over a question Rik's interviewee posed to him, the way it was "packaged and presented" to him.
This is not to say I believe all of these people are lying. In fact, I tend to believe they're telling the truth here. However, I like to hold a healthy amount of skepticism over the way information is being manipulated and presented to me. As you'll realize when watching more and more of the show, Rik isn't exactly the most reliable narrator.
Rik, the Storyteller
We jump ahead to the following year, 1997. In this episode, Rik crafts a story where he is stalked by an evil clown and seeks out more security, including police, to protect him. The clown seems to symbolize the fear of criminals that the government instills in the populus to justify a police state. As the episode goes on, Rik begins to suspect that the clown was Mayor Rudy all along.
That’s what I can surmise of the plot, because the episode is all over the place. At one point, he travels to "Mexico", which is just a dingy nightclub down the street where a Mexican rock band is performing. Then he starts chugging bottles of mouthwash. Then we see montages of clips from shows, movies, and commercials he taped off TV, mixed in with soundbites of Giuliani that are repeated over and over, and text popping up on screen, with the same words and phrases stacked one on top of the other, like if Jack Torrance got hold of a VCR.
This is Rik's expression of his frustration and paranoia over the rising police state in New York, or at least that's how he perceives it. The chaotic way it's all shot and edited starts to make you concerned over Rik's state of mind. You would hope that he is having a bit of spirited fun spitting in the face of power, but you worry that perhaps he may be suffering from delusions or some form of psychosis, especially when you see him having public outbursts, yelling, "It's not a police state!"
He seems to have friends participating in these episodes, and in later installments, we see him married and playing with his young daughter, so he must have had some support system to keep him grounded, but I could never tell. All I can do is speculate about the guy.
Whatever the case may be, I can say Rik Little has found a way to translate his vision directly to the screen, free from the filter of a team of executives, a focus group, or a set of community guidelines. He has crafted his own unique brand of cinema, mixing documentary with disorienting audiovisual collages and a strange form of sketch comedy, all while pioneering a style of filmmaking that wouldn't gain prominence for years to come.
Rik ended the show in 2007, and little is known of his whereabouts since. Perhaps he got tired of it all and wanted to spend more time with his family. He does have a YouTube channel where he has uploaded a handful of his old episodes. There's more episodes of his to be found elsewhere on YouTube and sites like the Internet Archive, so this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Rik was last spotted waiting in line for a Town Hall event for President Trump in Scranton, PA on March 5, 2020. I wonder what he thinks of the President's relationship with his former arch nemesis.
To learn about my current “1994 in Film” project, click here.
