How an Extra within a film can Overtake the DVD Extras/Supplementary Features

The bonus features on a DVD give us the "making of" the film but cleansed of all the figures that intrigue me most in a movie. These featurettes show the Ferrells, the Spielbergs, the Cruise and the Cruz, but never those microscopic actors who give amoebic life to the background of every film.

Only in Todd Phillips' Hated : GG Allin and the Murder Junkies do the extras of the film overlap with the dvd extras. In another post I have mentioned how a former neighbor of mine, Michael, appears in the film slouched on the sidewalk and drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. Michael inaugurates the film's decadence. He does more than the star, GG Allin, to give the flavor and smell of an Allin concert.

To my surprise, Michael reappears in the bonus features. The extra footage documents the sudden self-destruction of an Allin performance at a small club in New York. We see Allin half-singing as he slowly goes beyond half-nakedness and finally gettting out of his clothes, throwing the instruments around, punching spectators and bandmembers alike, and getting tossed from the club by an irate owner. As the police arrive, Allin and his crew walk surreptitiously away from the fracas. Michael appears with a boom box on his shoulder, suddenly at Allin's side and on an even level with the star of the movie. Forcibly ejected from his performance space, Allin encounters the extra to his own movie. Michael is persistent and won't stop following Allin. When Allin and his bandmates get into a cab, Michael gets in with them. And each time this happens the cab driver says "no...too many people." As the embodiment of Allin's crazed fandom, Michael is literally the multiple figure (the extra who represents more than just one person) who makes it seem like there are too many people inside the cab. As long as Michael walks beside Allin, Allin has to walk. As the featurette continues, we realize that Allin has slowly gathered a literal following, causing one person on screen to remark, "GG, you're like the Pied Piper." But Michael, the extra, is technically the only figure who brings the music, via that cassette tape boom box that would unfailingly announce his arrival at the apartment building. It's he, not the star, Allin, who leads the rats.