Let me get something out of the way: Matt Zane is a feckless clout goblin.
Now, your first question might be: who the hell is Matt Zane? And honestly, fair.
Matt Zane is a music video director, video editor, “suspension artist,” and sometimes musician. He is probably best known for his directorial work with Static-X and Dope, largely because his own band, Society 1, never reached anywhere near the same level of visibility.
So why am I calling him a feckless clout goblin?
Zane’s latest grasp at relevance is an upcoming documentary about the lives of the late Wayne Static and his late wife, Tera Wray Static. In his own words, the film will capture the couple “as themselves, madly in love, obsessed with each other, in a wild world that they created.”
On the surface, that may sound harmless enough. Maybe even sweet. But look beneath it for more than five seconds, and the cracks are not only visible – they’re practically waving at you.
The contention at the center of Zane’s push to get this documentary made is that Wayne and Tera wanted him to do it. We will get back to that point later.
For many fans, that seems to be enough.
But at the end of the day, what the fandom wants does not matter if their families do not want the documentary released. Both Wayne and Tera’s families have repeatedly said they oppose the documentary, even going so far as to serve Zane with a cease and desist – which he promptly declared he would not be honouring.
“This won’t stop me,” said Zane. “I’m ready and willing to take this as far as it goes. If it ends up in court, so be it. This movie will be made and released if it’s the last thing that I do.” – Metal Injection
Which is certainly one way to respond to grieving families asking you to stop using their dead loved ones for content. Nothing says “respectful tribute” quite like telling the families of your dead friends that their objections are irrelevant and you’ll drag this thing into court if necessary.
While I’m at it, let’s really examine Zane’s claim that Wayne and Tera asked him to make this movie.
Could that conversation have happened? Sure. Absolutely. I’m not here to pretend it’s impossible.
But “they said I could” is not the end-all, be-all defense Zane seems to think it is. Consent is not a magical hall pass you get to wave around forever, especially when the people involved are dead and cannot clarify, retract, contextualize, or object to how their lives are being packaged now.
And given that Wayne and Tera were, by many accounts, deep in addiction during the later years of their lives, it is fair to ask whether they were in any position to fully understand what they were agreeing to – assuming they agreed to it at all. Would a fully sober Wayne and Tera have agreed to this? Maybe, maybe not. They aren’t exactly here to tell us, are they?
That context matters even more when you look at the timeline. Zane has described the footage as covering the period after Wayne left Static-X through as late as 2014. Wayne died of a drug overdose on November 1 of that same year. In other words, this documentary would not simply be chronicling Wayne and Tera “as themselves, madly in love.” It would be chronicling some of the worst, most unstable, most vulnerable years of their lives.
And even that could be valid if their story were being treated with compassion and care. But that does not appear to be what is happening. Zane seems to be making a candy-coated fantasy that frames Wayne and Tera’s story as some kind of Y2K Sid and Nancy myth: doomed, glamorous, chaotic, and romantic in a way that makes for good marketing but terrible truth.
And there is a very ugly difference between honouring someone’s life and making their collapse look cinematic.
A few people on my Facebook page have argued that this is not really all that different from the final documentary made about Ozzy Osbourne. And I understand the comparison on the surface. It hurts to see an icon in the final years of their life. That is not how most fans want to remember someone they loved or admired.
But there is a difference between documenting someone’s decline as part of an honest, compassionate portrait and packaging someone’s worst years as aesthetic content. Ozzy’s story, painful as it may have been to watch, was presented as part of his life, his family, his legacy, and the reality of what he was going through.
Wayne and Tera’s story, at least from what Zane has shown so far, seems to be treated less like a legacy and more like an opportunity: a way to attach himself to Static-X’s renewed visibility, sell a tragic love story, and frame two deeply vulnerable people as doomed rock-and-roll mythology.
Ozzy’s documentary was deeply sad. Zane’s project looks opportunistic. Those are not the same thing.
As I cannot possibly cover every reason this is a bad idea in one post, I’ll continue in Part 2 with the slew of accusations Matt Zane made on my Facebook page, including his claim that Edsel Dope and the surviving members of Static-X alienated Wayne and Tera’s families and turned them against his movie.
I’ll also address the common rallying cry from Zane’s fanboys: that the rebooted Static-X is somehow defacing Wayne’s memory.
Stay tuned.
