Exploring O’Dessa’s Roots in Old School VHS Video Store Glory

“In another time, in another place… the world has been poisoned.” So opines the introductory wall of text in O’Dessa. Marketed ahead of its release as writer-director Geremy Jasper’s new rock opera fantasia starring Sadie Sink and Kelvin Harrison Jr., from the outside the film looks of its current moment with the stars of Stranger Things and Waves marqueeing a streaming release. But inside its own head, there burns a fever dream that is something much more hallucinatory… and retro.

Just take that opening insert text and the visions of post-apocalyptic ruins which accompany it. The message is superimposed on an old school ‘80s television set and what appears to be a ream of faded VHS tape; the dystopian bent of the image on the TV, with its matte painting aesthetics, might have appeared in any video store curio from 30 or 40 years ago, or perhaps in an NES game about the power of love and music. It’s a wild audiovisual time warp, and to hear director Jasper tell it, that is kind of the point.

“Those are seminal film experiences for me, going to the ShopRite or going to Blockbuster and renting these kind of ‘80s pan-and-scan VHSs,” Jasper muses now. “That was my entire childhood, and so many times the VHS covers were more engaging than the film itself.”

Something of a connoisseur of cult VHS covers, Jasper admits to collecting the most lurid and fantastical “paintings” in his free time—covers like 1990: The Bronx Warriors, a 1982 Road Warrior knockoff where a hero wields a battle mace from the top of a speeding chopper bike. Recalls Jasper, “He’s screaming, and you’re thinking, ‘This is going to be the most insane thing I’ve ever seen!’ And then it’s a great movie, it’s a classic, but it’s not that.”

Still, that image and countless others like it have lived rent-free in Jasper’s head for decades, all the way through his debut film and festival darling, Patti Cake$. That image has waited for O’Dessa, a film about a six-string guitar-slinger, or “rambler,” who stares down an authoritarian regime in an urban wasteland, and who changes her life and those around her through the power of epic, glorious song. And now, 20 years since first dreaming of O’Dessa, she is living flesh and blood.

“There’s gonna be this young woman wandering this dystopian surreal wasteland and she’s gonna have to go into the underworld,” Jasper says of the original kernel of an idea in the mid-2000s that begat this film. At the time, he originally thought it might be a musical for the stage, an avant-garde theater piece that adapted the Orpheus myth through a gender-bending prism of science fiction, fantasy, and modern folklore myth.

Obviously the idea never quite took hold on the stage—perhaps not least of all because at the time, and still to this day, Jasper has had nothing to do with theater—but after his first film was a success and folks immediately asked what was next, the memory of his rambling troubadour and a handful of VHS covers came roaring back into the mind’s eye.

“I’m interested in those big mythic stories, those fairytales, those mono-myths, from everything from Star Wars and Mad Max to the Man with No Name,” Jasper considers. “There’s countless versions of them. I think they take you out of our reality, they put you in a strange world.” They also put him in touch with a younger self too.

Bringing Comfort to the Disturbed

Not surprisingly for the director of Patti Cake$ and O’Dessa, music is a crucial part of Geremy Jasper’s life. After all, the filmmaker wrote all of the songs in O’Dessa, including several for the voices of Sink and Harrison after they were cast. And a line uttered in both lyric and dialogue verse several times in the film is that a song should “disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed,” which as much or more as old school VHS dystopian flicks is the youthful zeal that carries the film.

“When I feel like connecting to my younger self, I’m always listening to albums that had that magic power over me when I was 14, 15 years old,” Jasper says. “There’s just something that always brings me back to it. Maybe it’s just that sense of the world feeling like it’s opening up a bit, the feeling you have when you’re that age and finding an album or a song that breaks your mind open.”

The filmmaker likens his need to return to that release to a heroin-addict trying to recreate their first high. In which case, O’Dessa is the biggest hit yet. Here is a film where a young person, Sink’s eponymous O’Dessa, through song and heartache influences the world around her with a sound that blurs the borders between folk, punk, and anthem rock. Even O’Dessa’s father onscreen, who is briefly seen in a flashback, looks suspiciously like a singer who did all of the above.

“Everybody’s father is Johnny Cash,” Jasper muses. “He’s sort of like the father of American roots music in some weird way. He’s everyone’s daddy, Johnny.” And in O’Dessa, the Man in Black, along with other mythic touchstones like Dylan and Lennon, loom above all like the hippest choir of angels ever. “Those are godlike figures in my imagination,” Jasper adds. “They’re my myths, those musical American artists all take up a lot of space in my imagination.”

They also represent perhaps the greatest part of the fantasy of O’Dessa: that a musician traveling from town to town can have a profound impact by playing her songs intimately, personably. Live. Increasingly, that unto itself looks like a fantasy in the age of Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, and the litany of other ways music has become homogenized and mass-communicated.

“It breaks my heart that there’s less and less connection between artists and audience, and audience and artists, and we’re getting further away in our own little safe bubbles,” Jasper says. “You can still find good stuff in some dark corners, but I do feel like there’s a bit of the spark that’s missing… the little dirt under the fingernails like we used to have.”

Finding a Real Rambler and Her Tiny Dancer

For anyone who’s already watched O’Dessa, they know that dirt was found again by Sink who gives a raw, earnest performance of a young woman who travels from the wasteland to the big city, which proves equally wasted. Yet through it all comes a voice as clear as a Broadway bell—which is not entirely surprising given Sink’s Great White Way origins in the 2012 Annie revival. There’s also a folk sound that might do Papa Cash proud.

Says Jasper of his leading lady: “It was very difficult to find someone who was young enough that they didn’t feel worldly. A lot of the great actors, they’re later in their 20s, pushing 30, and to find someone like Sadie who who was 21 when we shot this, which is basically the age of O’Dessa, and who had a face like a silent movie star that lit up the screen—[I realized] she could carry someone who’s coming from a real innocent place only to become disillusioned by the world, to become active in the world, to fall in love in the world.” Plus, he knew she could carry a tune and legit play the guitar.

Indeed, many of the songs Sink sings on the soundtrack were written years in advance by Jasper, but the young actor had such an uncanny ear for mimicry she could match his sound while making them her own. This, for the record, is a bit different from her love interest in the film, a soulful and gender-bending headliner at a cabaret in the desolate Satylite City, Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s Euri Dervish.

“[Kelvin] had this sort of world-weary melancholy that he brought to the character and a certain sweetness that really just worked,” Jasper says. “[But for the music], I was singing the Euri songs on the demos, and I have a lot more of a ratty, screamy, garage rock-y voice, which is the exact opposite of Kelvin’s voice. So I would sing these things, and he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s cool. Okay, let me try.’ And he has an amazing R&B voice. So we had to completely reimagine the songs as we worked together. He was really game to figure out different ways to phrase things… they became less aggressive and more stacked and kind of weird. Like he could do more Frank Ocean style stuff.”

He also brought a look to the film that, like Sink’s O’Dessa, perhaps bends audience expectations. Consider that Sink is rocking a ‘50s styled pompadour throughout the film and eventually dons a white suit while romancing Euri, a character who is introduced doing a veritable dance of the seven veils in a nightclub.

“I’ve always been interested in musicians that blurred those lines, be it David Bowie or Annie Lennox or Grace Jones or Prince, or Little Richard,” Jasper smiles. “There’s a long list! So that was always just a part of the world of O’Dessa. Gender was a blurred experience.” It’s a world where O’Dessa is the gunslinger and Euri her Eurydice. A punk rock take on the Orpheus myth.

A Return to Mega-City Decadence

The influence of that old school sound bleeds throughout O’Dessa, right down to the green and purple color scheme of the film which washes over the Searchlight Pictures opening fanfare like a modern day Rocky Horror Picture Show salvo.

“I don’t really know,” Jasper initially laughs when asked where those colors come from. However, he elaborates that he “really got into these late ‘60s, early ‘70s album covers that used a lot of infrared photography. Like Captain Beefheart covers and Frank Zappa. So I loved the way the landscapes looked. They would flip the greens and make greens look purple and it just was really beautiful to me, and I wanted to create a sci-fi world that used that. So the excuse was nature has been perverted through pollution in the movie, and everything that’s green has gone purple and then everything that’s purple has gone green.”

That upside down color scheme belies a heightened look for the film that by intention is a throwback to the type of post-apocalyptic fantasias Jasper used to peruse while walking down a video store aisle. He cites Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil as a profound influence on O’Dessa, but so many of the noirs and sci-fi movies of the ‘80s were informed by sprawling metropolises of waste. Think Blade Runner (1982), Streets of Fire (1982), or Batman (1989).

“Another big influence on this one was Spaghetti Westerns,” the director adds, “because those cities just had like a main street, and you had a church on one side and you had a saloon and a bordello on the other. That’s pretty much it, and I always thought of this metropolis as being a little bit more concentrated, a little bit smaller, a little bit more ragtag. I always thought of it somewhere between the Brooklyn that I lived in for a couple of decades and [the Man with No Name] Westerns.”

Ramblin’ On Down the Road

When Jasper and I sit down to discuss the film, it’s on the eve of O’Dessa’s debut on Hulu. After years of toil and decades of dreaming, his troubadour is finally hitting the road. Yet the writer-director cannot help but muse what her life beyond the first few days of streaming might be. He even jokes about one day releasing “a VHS cut” of the film. 

“Like George Miller did the black and chrome version of Mad Max,” Jasper chuckles while referring to the black-and-white editions of Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa. “We will do the opposite for O’Dessa. We’ll do like a pan-and-scan, super shitty VHS version and be like this is how it should be seen!”

It’s an amusing image, but not too far from Jasper’s real hopes for the film. As he later confides, his ambition is that the movie has the figurative shelf life of those strange cinematic oddities that once fired up his imagination so many moons ago.

Says the director: “My dream for it, my prayer for it, is it’s that weird little movie that I used to try to discover—that a young person finds it and it turns them on to a different world and a different group of films and music, and inspires them to go and make something. It could be a week, it could be a year, it could be a decade, but as long as it lives on.”

As long as it keeps ramblin’.

O’Dessa is streaming now on Hulu.

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