You can see why: Jonze’s vision is loopy, canny and pure pop. For the Beastie Boys’ ““Sabotage’’ video, he duded up the hip-hoppers as cheeseball TV cops in a parody of ““The Streets of San Francisco.’’ He had J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. golf around Manhattan for ““Feel the Pain.’’ Why? Don’t expect Jonze to explain. A visual savant, he’s willfully inarticulate about his work, incapable of a straight answer. His concept for R.E.M.’s forthcoming ““Crush With Eyeliner’’: a Japanese band lip-syncs the entire song. ““I went to this coffee shop where all these teenagers were hangin’ out and it was just their own world,’’ Jonze explains in his spacey monowhine. ““I wanted to re-create a world like that.’’ Huh? Ask about his suburban East Coast upbringing and he quotes from a Burt Reynolds biography. Ask if he renamed himself after ’40s musical satirist Spike Jones, and he claims he was born ““Ralph Sigmond-Rupaul.’’ He’s funny, but you want to smack him.
A media prodigy, Jonze got into publishing at 15, a daredevil skateboarder and dirt-biker who wrote and took pictures for California youth mags like Free-stylin’ and Homeboy. In 1991 he cofounded a now defunct teen-boy quarterly called Dirt. After supplying skateboard footage for Sonic Youth’s ““100%,’’ he started making videos of his own, and hooked up with cutting-edge Satellite Films. ““He’s younger than most of us and his references are everything from “Star Wars’ to “Happy Days’,’’ says Danielle Cagaanan, Satellite’s head of music video. ““It’s interesting to see how seriously those things affected him.’’ He set the video for Weezer’s geeky ““Buddy Holly’’ song at Arnold’s diner from ““Happy Days,’’ seamlessly splicing in cameos by Ritchie and The Fonz. After two weeks, Weezer is in MTV’s ““Buzz Bin’’ – a ’90s band in a ’70s sitcom set in the ’50s. It’s nostalgia laced with generational irony. It’s also hilarious. Video director Tamra Davis, who gave Jonze his start, says, ““He doesn’t know a thing about filmmaking, but he knows how to use a camera. He didn’t even know who Fellini was.’’ Better he doesn’t find out.
