For film lovers, the prospect of getting to see a lost film is irresistible. That’s doubly true for a lost cult film (though perhaps a film becomes cult simply by virtue of being lost). Director Paul Bartel’s final feature film, 1993’s Shelf Life, has never seen wide release. It was thought to be lost for decades. However, a recent discovery of the last remaining print and a subsequent restoration effort have enabled independent exhibitors to offer small screenings since 2019, with the film making its UK premiere just last month at Matchbox Cine, 28 years after its initial release.
It was worth the wait.
Shelf Life is no longer lost, but it’s still a cult film, and it feels hauntingly prescient in 2021. Based on the play of the same name by O-Lan Jones, Andrea Stein, and Jim Turner, the film examines a day in the life of the St. Cloud siblings: Tina (Jones), Pam (Stein), and Scotty (Turner). On November 22, 1963, their dangerously paranoid father (Turner) and oblivious, inebriated mother (Stein) drag the children down to their fallout shelter to wait out “the Martians or the Communists or whoever the hell” assassinated President Kennedy. Thirty years later, the (somewhat) adult St. Clouds still live in the underground bunker amongst the detritus of their lives…including the skeletons of their parents. The film follows the daily routine of Tina, Pam, and Scotty as they play-act their traumas and make sense of their minuscule world based on what little information they have.
Perhaps the most fascinating and rewarding aspect of the film is the way the script plays with language. The St. Cloud children have essentially raised themselves, piecing together their sad, warped lives after the deaths of their parents early on in their time in the fallout shelter. Based on fragments of childhood memories, the St. Clouds have taken concepts they never fully understood and distorted them over time into near-religious rituals, reflecting a horrifying vision of America that they don’t truly comprehend. Take, for instance, the way they say grace before breakfast:
Now I lay me down to eat and pledge allegiance to the flag.
For one nation is invisible, the body of our Lord…
Safe and sound inside. Plaaaaay ball! Amen.
They chant this hodge-podge of prayers, oaths, and cheers while holding rifles and performing military drills. It’s a troubling combination of religion, jingoism, and military fervor that the viewer soon learns is in keeping with Mr. St. Cloud’s twisted worldview.
The characters are a bizarre, affecting, and occasionally repugnant mixture of innocence and vulgarity. Their day is filled with strange musical interludes and arguments over which elaborately scripted game to play — “Ballerinas,” “Medical Update,” “Monsters Who Cheat,” or “Law Enforcement,” to name but a few — but it has a regimented schedule of “breakfast-time,” “the culture hour,” “schooltime,” and “suppertime.” Watching the characters go through their ritualistic day is like catching all the stages of human development in amber simultaneously. The St. Clouds are no longer children or adolescents, but they’re certainly not fully formed adults; rather, they are a grotesque and pitiable mixture of the three. They throw tantrums and play disturbing games; they engage in what can only be described as an incestuous dry hump orgy; and they have existential crises while studying nuclear chain reactions and debating whether singing cowboys exist.
Though the claustrophobic tedium of their Beckettesque lives feels painfully familiar to those of us who have been essentially locked in our own fallout shelters for the past year and a half due to the ongoing pandemic, the St. Clouds’ desperate attempts to deal with their isolation aren’t the most pressing examples of Shelf Life’s relevance to a modern audience. Rather, it is Mr. St. Cloud’s delusional political screeds that remind viewers too much of the current wave of conspiracy theories in American culture.
Some of Mr. St. Cloud’s thoughts filter through in Tina, Pam, and Scotty’s dialogue. When Scotty pretends to be “Mighty Car,” an automotive superhero in one of their many games, he asks, “Who comes to save the day when the evil politicians eat the little babies?” The sentiment is startlingly similar to the beliefs of a current conspiracy theory group and a clear reference to blood libel, an anti-Semitic remark that is just the first instance of Mr. St. Cloud’s horrific bigotry. Scotty obviously doesn’t understand the implications of what he’s saying; having been raised in a literal bubble by racist parents, he only echoes what he heard growing up. Though most people can’t claim innocence on the basis of not knowing any better due to growing up alone in a fallout shelter, it is a terrible reminder of the ways that bigots beget bigots.
The most chilling moment in the film comes at the halfway point, when the girls exclaim, “Dad’s home!” Tina puts on a children’s record extolling the virtues of the family patriarch, and Scotty puts on his father’s old clothes — complete with eyeglasses and pipe, to round out the portrait of stolid Cold War fatherhood — to try to add some stability to their family unit. Rather than adding familial comfort, however, his monologue reveals a great deal about the terrifying way the St. Cloud children were raised before they were forced into their underground prison. Scotty-as-Dad rants about Cubans trying to take his business away from him, mentions people from Idaho with “some new ideas” coming over to the house for a meeting, and alludes to taking the children to a Klan rally. Again, the kids don’t comprehend what’s being said. They’re simply following a ritualized pattern they’ve developed over the years to cope with their isolation and grief. The actual Mr. St. Cloud told the kids they were going to a carnival — adding that their “aunt and uncle” had plenty of beds but no sheets, so they would have to bring their own — and the kids continue to believe the lie well into their 30s because their only experience is that which their parents handed down to them. With no window into the outside world save for a television that only plays static and split-second clips of cereal commercials and aerobics programs, they don’t know any other way to live.
Shelf Life is still a Paul Bartel comedy, though, with all the bawdy, subversive satire that entails. So, in addition to these bleak glimpses into the St. Clouds’ hateful upbringing, the film is filled with camp flourishes and elements of farce. The siblings’ loyalties are constantly shifting: two of them will scuttle off into a corner to gossip about the third, calling to mind an ironic court comedy in their royal kingdom of filth. The costumes and props are hilariously, depressingly decrepit. The characters clearly outgrew their shabby clothes a decade or two ago, and the garbage heap chic of their most prized possessions reflects both their dwindling resources and the magpie tendencies of children. Bartel makes the most of the limited location — it’s obvious that this production began as a small stage play — with kinetic camerawork, lighting, and music cues. For example, during “Pamela St. Cloud’s Salute to America,” a wild medley including a jazz interlude during which Jones pretends to be a cat and performs Oscar-worthy meows, Bartel evokes Busby Berkeley with a tilted overhead shot of the characters performing a synchronized dance routine.
The combination of diegetic and non-diegetic music and lighting is an inspired touch that draws the viewer into the St. Clouds’ surreal fantasy world. The characters often change the music on their record player to match the game they’re playing — or to fit the mood better, as when Tina has a breakdown over her parents’ deaths and Pam and Scotty ask if she wants sad lighting and sad music. More often, though, the sounds and lighting are only in their heads. When they pretend to be repeatedly blown up by landmines, explosions fill the soundtrack; when Tina and Scotty pretend to be amorous schoolmates strolling along a river, watery light flickers across their faces while a languid harmonica tune plays. After Tina’s breakdown, they hold a memorial ritual and reveal the bed where their parents’ skeletons still lie, then transition immediately into a raucous dance break complete with rock music and a wildly spinning camera. Like the stunted, traumatized children that they are, they jump from emotion to emotion and memory to memory at breakneck speed, lacking the ability to make sense of any of it through anything other than increasingly troubling playtime.
Much like its main characters, Shelf Life spent nearly 30 years — an entire generation — hidden away from the world. Even more relevant now than it was when it was first released, the film offers a morbidly comic vision of the effects of paranoia, bigotry, and isolation. This once-lost film is rightfully finding a new audience, emerging from its bunker to spread the story of the bizarre and tragically humorous St. Clouds.
