Pretty Vacant & The Beautiful Refusal To Behave
Author’s Note
I first encountered Jim Mendiola’s Pretty Vacant (1996) on PBS in the late 90s, and I was captivated immediately. Up to that point, most Chicano/Latinx representation I encountered felt rigid, dogmatic, locked into narratives of injury and inevitability — tragic figures with no real agency over their lives. Molly blew that apart. Her defiant joy, her intelligence, her punk sensibility, and her late-night DIY world felt like home. It mirrored the spaces I moved through: zines, music obsessions, identity as experiment rather than burden, Kinko’s at strange hours.
It arrived at a time when I was just beginning to think of film as art — and more importantly, as something I might actually do. There’s that famous line attributed to Brian Eno about The Velvet Underground: “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band.” That idea — that art doesn’t need mass validation to matter, that it only needs to reach the right person at the right moment — feels true of Mendiola and Pretty Vacant for me. I didn’t start a band — but I did something just as reckless. I became a filmmaker.
After that first viewing, I spent years trying to find the film again and could never track it down. Access, availability, time — it just slipped back into the ether. Right before the New Year, I searched almost on a whim, and there it was on Jim’s Vimeo page, freely available. I watched it for the first time in nearly thirty years, and it opened up completely: more personal, more emotional, more political, more defiant — and far more revealing about where I come from and how I think about culture, music, film, and art.
Or maybe it wasn’t a whim at all. Making films, or simply being creative, has only gotten harder over the years. Lack of funds, aging, full-time work, raising kids, trying to hold on inside a dying Los Angeles working class — all of it pushes creativity to the margins. But the itch never left. That stubborn urge to make something, to refuse silence, to find form even when there are no resources, kept tugging at me. I kept writing. I kept making what I could, however I could — using old footage, working around limitations, forcing myself to stay in motion. The lessons I absorbed from Pretty Vacant were still there, still quietly shaping how I thought about independence, refusal, and possibility.
Maybe that’s why the film and I found each other again now. Maybe I was already drifting back toward the ethos it came from, that I came from — past algorithms, past “content,” past the pressure to be endlessly visible. Back toward that rough, beautiful idea that you make work because you have to, because it matters to you, because it keeps you alive. It felt like a message from a younger version of myself, leaning in gently but firmly: You’re not finished yet.
So I started writing, not to explain the film, but to stay in conversation with it — and that conversation became this essay.
Francisco Romero
Los Angeles, California
✖︎ ✖︎ ✖︎
Pretty Vacant & The Beautiful Refusal To Behave
Chicano Punk, Rasquache Cinema, Xerox Dreams, & The Stubborn Joy Of Making Something Anyway
Pretty Vacant, with its Chicano punk spirit, rasquache aesthetics, and Xerox-era DIY intelligence, once thrived inside a fragile independent ecosystem — one that has since been lost, transformed, and corporatized into something far more controlled. Back when that ecosystem was still breathing, I stumbled onto the film almost by accident. I first saw the film on some late, lonely night on KCET — or maybe it was already PBS SoCal by then. I didn’t have much of a social life at the time, so a lot of nights were spent letting whatever that station programmed wash over me. Back then KCET felt adventurous, almost conspiratorial, like a portal broadcasting things you weren’t supposed to stumble across for free.
I found Maya Deren there, Stan Brakhage, Monte Hellman, and a handful of films whose titles I completely missed, leaving me with nothing but fragments and sensations. Half-remembered dreams. Images that lingered in my head for years, haunting me quietly, until one day in film school — sitting in class watching Meshes Of The Afternoon — I suddenly recognized it: that film, from that strange lonely night, finally had a name.
I was lucky to catch Pretty Vacant from the beginning. I had never seen anything like it, and honestly, I haven’t seen anything quite like it since. Maybe the closest thing is Richard Linklater’s Slacker — another Texas-born artifact from that restless early-’90s cinematic weather pattern. In my mind, the two films feel like bookends: different sensibilities, same cultural oxygen.
What struck me most about the film was La Molly’s playful insistence on bending Chicano identity into new shapes instead of repeating inherited ones. She wasn’t simply performing pride; she was remixing it. Expanding its vocabulary. Plugging punk obsession, art-school thinking, and Kinko’s-at-2-a.m. energy directly into it. That world felt deeply familiar to me. I lived inside that Xerox glow.
I worked at Kinko’s —— the kind of fluorescent grind designed to dull you down, to make you forget you ever wanted anything larger than a paycheck. I refused. I learned to smuggle meaning through the machinery. And beneath all that corporate beige, it became a frontline cultural battleground. Every night was a parade of zine-makers, artists, bands running off flyers, graffiti kids carving out futures with stencils, broke students turning a single dollar into an act of faith. If I could help, I did. Let’s just say I happily rerouted a healthy amount of corporate toner back into the cultural commons — A small redistribution of resources. A minor rebellion. A necessary one.
Watching Pretty Vacant, I recognized something true. The humor. The intelligence. The stubborn joy of making culture with whatever you can afford. The refusal to behave. The understanding that identity isn’t simply inherited; it’s argued, scraped together, assembled from sound, theory, friendship, photocopies, and care. The film didn’t just reflect a moment — it belonged to that moment, alive in it, arguing with it, laughing with it.
That feeling never really left.
I must have seen the film around 1998. It’s hard to pin down exactly, but if it came out in ’96, it isn’t hard to imagine it landing on PBS in ’97 or ’98. It was definitely before ’99, before I switched majors from journalism to film. By then I was pretty much done with journalism. I clashed constantly with my professors. They said my writing was too academic, too biased, too opinionated. I countered that all writing is biased, and that objectivity is a performance — a costume everyone pretends not to notice. They disagreed, of course.
Once, a professor asked the class: What is the purpose of a newspaper? Truth? Information? Public service?
I said, To sell newspapers. I wasn’t trying to be clever. I was stripping away the romance. And once I did, it was impossible to put it back. It wasn’t anger that pushed me away. It was suffocation. Too much framing. Too many rules about tone, balance, and restraint. Imagination treated like contamination.
I needed an elective around that time, so I chose History of World Cinema. The professor wasn’t great, but the films were — and unlike journalism, with its quiet racism humming beneath the lectures, film seduced me completely. Where journalism treated subjectivity and imagination as contaminants, cinema welcomed them like essential nutrients. I absorbed everything I could: Silent Cinema, Experimental Film, The French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Post-Franco Spanish Cinema, The American Avant-Garde, Cassavetes, Godard, Buñuel.
Pulp Fiction was the reigning fantasy then; everyone seemed intent on making their own Tarantino remix or some flashy kung-fu-inspired knockoff. I didn’t want that. I wanted something stranger, more personal, more handmade. I wanted the world that Pretty Vacant had opened inside me.
Its ethos had stayed lodged in my bones. The way Molly narrates why she makes what she makes, how, and for whom — that’s not just character; its methodology. The final joke about narrating everything because it’s cheaper isn’t just humor; it’s pedagogy. I didn’t realize it then, but Mendiola wasn’t just telling a story. He was teaching a way of surviving.
What’s also interesting about Mendiola is that he may have belonged to the last cohort for whom 16mm wasn’t an aesthetic choice — it was simply the only viable “cheap” way to make a film. He may have been part of the final generation of students who literally cut film, who physically handled the material, who learned to think about rhythm by feeling it between their fingers. Video existed, sure, but non-linear digital editing hadn’t yet democratized itself. When I was in film school between 1999 and 2001 as an undergrad, the ground was shifting but still unfinished. Shooting “digital” really meant shooting on video and hoping your school had access to an editing bay that didn’t crash every ten minutes. Final Cut Pro was a rumor becoming a possibility. The so-called digital revolution hadn’t yet delivered on its promise; the tools were there, but still half-formed, glitching forward, primitive compared to what exists now.
In that sense, Mendiola sits at an almost mythic threshold: the end of tactile filmmaking as necessity, and the beginning of digital filmmaking as promise. He worked inside scarcity and constraint as a lived condition — not as nostalgic posture, not as retro aesthetic, but as economic reality. That gives Pretty Vacant a physicality, a material stubbornness, a relationship to effort and cost that feels profoundly different from what came after. It wasn’t “cheap” in the contemporary sense of cheap. It was cheap like sacrifice. Cheap like devotion. Cheap like commitment hammered into celluloid.
Mendiola made his film in an ecosystem that was already disappearing. He made it just in time to show that this kind of work could still exist — and just too late for it to survive in the emerging industry economy. It was the moment before festivals stopped being places where films were found and became places where films were positioned.
I didn’t know that. None of us did, really. So when I graduated from CalArts in 2004, I walked out believing I was stepping into the same landscape that had shaped Pretty Vacant, the same scrappy, possibility-drenched ecosystem where weirdness could still find oxygen and films could be discovered rather than positioned. I thought I was joining a lineage. I thought I was entering a conversation already in progress. No one told me the terrain had shifted. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they didn’t want to know. Or maybe the collapse of an ecosystem never announces itself — you just realize one day the air feels thinner, and you’ve already been breathing less for a long time.
What I encountered instead was a world reorganized around market logic and managed discovery. Festivals felt less like places where unexpected voices might be found and more like platforms calibrated for branding and narrative alignment. Gatekeeping disguised itself as mentorship. “Support” often meant compatibility with an emerging economy rather than compatibility with an artistic impulse. I had expected the door to be cracked open, even slightly. Instead, I found sleek walls with inspirational slogans printed on them.
And then social media arrived and completed the takeover.
Where independent film once lived, there emerged another kind of “independence” — brand independence, content independence, economically dependent independence. The amateur spirit didn’t disappear; it was captured, monetized, reskinned, and fed back to us under subscription models and platform economies. The ethos that once said make something because you have to slowly shifted toward make something because it might perform. Corporations didn’t crush amateur culture. They domesticated it.
Suddenly the creative commons was full of “creators” churning out endless variations of the same content, optimized for visibility rather than discovery, engineered for engagement rather than resonance. That old spirit of Xerox-anarchy got replaced with templated spontaneity. The messy joy of making culture turned into “content strategy.” Even rebellion got branded. Even refusal got merch.
Attention spans didn’t just shrink — they were trained to fragment. The slow burn, the strange drift, the unresolved thought spiral, the risky gesture that doesn’t explain itself… all those spaces grew smaller. Algorithms learned to reward sameness. Platforms learned to monetize exhaustion. Everyone became their own marketing department. And somewhere in that storm, the ecosystem Pretty Vacant belonged to — that fragile world where being odd and specific and culturally unpolished was allowed to matter — felt even further away.
But here is the part that keeps me from falling fully into cynicism: Pretty Vacant still exists. Not just as a film, but as an ethic. A stubborn whisper from another moment. A reminder that art once came from need, not opportunity. A reminder that refusal can be joyful. That humor and intelligence can coexist with cultural rage. That small work can matter. That rasquache invention can still say no to polish. That identity can be argued, invented, revised, and laughed through rather than packaged.
If the present is defined by corporate platforms pretending to host creativity while quietly disciplining it, then maybe Pretty Vacant persists as a quiet counter-spell. Not nostalgia. Not mourning. A reminder. A template. A dare. A hand tapping you on the shoulder saying: yes, the ecosystem vanished, yes, the economy swallowed the language of independence, yes, the world slapped you hard — but the impulse didn’t die. It just waits for someone stubborn enough, foolish enough, loving enough to refuse again.
Somewhere out there, Pretty Vacant still hums like a stubborn little transmitter radio, whispering: We did this once.
We can do it again.
Annotated Thoughts
Notes On Pretty Vacant: The Punk Intellectual Who Refuses to Behave
Pretty Vacant has the sensibility of a hyper-literate slacker who’s read too many theory books, listened to too many records, and still refuses to “grow up” in the way the world demands. Molly is not a tragic figure or stereotype; she’s a thinking punk, a cultural critic, well-read in literature, philosophy, and theory, who understands power while refusing to bow to it. She occupies that peculiar early-90s cultural terrain where people were:
formally educated
culturally sharp
politically alert
financially precarious
defiantly uninterested in being respectable
This wasn’t a generation lacking ambition. It was a generation deeply suspicious of the ambitions being offered. Molly embodies that tension beautifully. She’s not lost. She’s not adrift. She’s deliberate. She knows the language of institutions and chooses not to speak it. Her rebellion isn’t only aesthetic; it’s intellectual. She thinks critically, jokes critically, narrates critically. She treats culture as something to argue with, remix, and steal back rather than something to obey.
That’s part of the film’s electricity. Pretty Vacant doesn’t just depict punk attitude — it thinks through punk attitude. It treats ideas seriously and then gleefully punctures them with humor. It lets irony and sincerity sit side by side without canceling each other out. It understands identity as something constructed, but instead of turning that into a lecture, it performs the construction in real time: messy, funny, contradictory, alive.
Molly isn’t simply making a zine. She’s writing herself into history. She’s claiming interpretive power. She’s refusing the idea that Chicana identity has to be solemn, tragic, or “responsible” in approved ways. She insists on being smart and ridiculous, analytical and chaotic, deeply rooted and flagrantly playful — all at once. That is its own politics. That is its own refusal. That is its own freedom.
Intelligence doesn’t always lead to stability — sometimes it leads to better jokes, sharper anger, and a deeper sense of play.
The narration’s nonlinear, associative rhythm places us directly inside Molly’s mind. We’re not simply watching her life; we’re participating in the way she thinks. Ideas don’t arrive neatly. They arrive as they do in real life — layered, contradictory, funny and serious at once, drifting between critique and affection without warning. Humor sits next to analysis. Cultural critique leans against insecurity. Irony lives beside sincerity without suffocating it.
This structure matters politically as well as aesthetically. It’s DIY narration as authorship. Molly doesn’t simply appear in the film; she claims the film. She explains herself because she wants to, not because she owes anyone clarity. She frames her own story rather than allowing the camera — or the culture — to do it for her. The film doesn’t discipline her voice; it lets her sprawl, riff, contradict herself, and laugh. That refusal to submit to cinematic obedience — to tidy character arcs, to “professionalized” storytelling, to narrative respectability — is part of what makes Pretty Vacant feel so alive.
a zine editorial
a rant delivered into a tape recorder
a diary entry with swagger
late-night monologue energy
Visually and formally, the film feels handmade in the best sense. It echoes Xerox contrast, photocopied band flyers, and the rough iconography of punk graphics. The grain is part of the meaning. The lack of gloss is a worldview.
There’s a palpable rasquache energy —
not “low quality,” but resourceful, sly, stylish in constraint.
The film wears its constraints like safety pins.
Instead of hiding budget limitations, it uses them as attitude.
This isn’t the polished indie cinema of Sundance respectability; this is the cinema of:
apartments with posters taped to walls
Kinko’s at 2 a.m.
stolen staplers and tape
soundtracks as personal philosophy
The film belongs to that early-90s moment when being smart and disengaged was its own kind of rebellion. Not apathy — refusal. Refusal of capitalism’s success narrative. Refusal of assimilation. Refusal to behave culturally or aesthetically.
It’s in conversation with:
Riot Grrrl
Chicana/o alternative cultural production
post-grunge working-class art life
the rise of ironic intelligence
the lived uncertainty of second-generation identity
Pretty Vacant sits inside all of these currents at once. It shares Riot Grrrl’s furious tenderness and do-it-yourself infrastructure-building; Chicana/o cultural invention without permission; the exhausted ambition of post-grunge working-class survival; a sharp ironic intelligence that saw the absurdity of everything and refused to let it destroy joy; and the complicated inheritance of second-generation identity — tangled, delayed, mistranslated, still deeply loved.
And instead of drowning in angst, Pretty Vacant is funny. It’s wry. It’s affectionate. It has the comic clarity of someone who knows how absurd everything is, yet believes deeply in making something anyway. The way Molly narrates why she makes what she makes, how, and for whom — that’s not just character; it’s methodology. The final joke about voiceover being “cheaper” isn’t only a gag; it’s pedagogy. I didn’t realize it then, but Mendiola wasn’t just telling a story. He was teaching a way to live.