The Pundit

You’re Gonna Miss Me

By Jess Friedmann ⋅ August 7, 2006 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Roky Erickson probably should’ve died young. He’d be remembered as he was then: a snake-hipped, baby-faced rocker howling and shrieking on stage. After You’re Gonna Miss Me, it’s impossible to think of him as anything but middle-aged, jowly, filthy, with fingernails overgrown and hair matted into one giant dreadlock. In the grips of schizophrenia and psychosis. As he is now.

While Roky’s journey from 13th Floor Elevators rock idol to recluse is the ostensible focus of the film, You’re Gonna Miss Me is not standard music doco fare. Closer to Capturing the Friedmans than ‘Behind the Music’, the film revolves around three dysfunctional Erickson family members’Roky, Sumner and Evelyn. Evelyn sees the film as a chance to tell her side of the story, and to prove for the record that she’s a good mother. Sumner, the youngest of five brothers, wants legal guardianship of Roky to ensure he gets medical help. Roky, oblivious, turns every radio and TV in the house up as loud as possible and goes to sleep.

As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that psychosis is only one way of retreating from the world. Evelyn lives in her own delusions, believing yoga can cure Roky’s schizophrenia. She even scrawls her life story in child-like crayon on cardboard sheets in her living room. It’s because of Evelyn that Roky goes unmedicated for so long’she uses ‘Frasier’s’ Crane brothers and their lack of spiritual life to justify her distrust of psychiatry.

Evelyn’s manipulations feed family tensions until a final intervention. Built up resentments come to the fore. Compiled from fly-on-the-wall footage, interviews, home movies and archival shots, You’re Gonna Miss Me is, more than anything, a portrait of decay. And watching Roky deteriorate, it becomes clear that sometimes, there really is something to leaving a good-looking corpse.