Underplayed (2020)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) It’s impossible to be against Underplayed’s intention, which is to highlight the underrepresentation of women in the current electronic music scene. I take it as granted that more diversity is better, I can affirm without a doubt that the EDM scene is heavily male-dominated, and the remarkable change in representation in film over the past few years is an eloquent demonstration of what happens when more diverse people get to create and broadcast art that reflects them. But why did director Stacey Lee’s Underplayed itself have to be so incredibly conventional? If you’re even slightly aware of issues regarding female underrepresentation in various fields, you can probably outline the topics that the documentary will approach in monotonous order. There’s the wage gap, there’s the LGBT angle, there’s the racial aspect, there’s the problem of tokenism, there’s the difficulty in linking work with family life… it all feels well worn, working from an established template and each interviewee making obvious points. I had hopes that the music would save the film—electronic music is one of my jams, so to speak—unfortunately, the highlights are few: much of the soundtrack is disappointing, similar and low-key. The film does much better once it focuses on its interviewees’ individual stories: Most of them are likable, have interesting journeys and telling examples. But when the film goes back to its blunt-force retelling of obvious points, it once again becomes the formulaic progressive screed that has the power to annoy even those who support its theory. The analytical component is barely anecdotal, and the historical context is incredibly selective—Wendy Carlos is justly mentioned as a pioneer of electronic music, but (unless I’m not remembering this correctly), there’s nothing about her influence as a transgender pioneer. And so on, and so forth — at times, it felt as if Underplayed was so incredibly self-convinced about the righteousness of its topic that it didn’t lay out the proper groundwork to be a film worth watching by those who agreed with it. (Let alone anyone who didn’t.)  By the end of it, I had a list of artists to listen to that was more interesting than the film itself.