PRIMARY COLORS (PRIMARY CHOLERS)
Hollywood Re-Makes Reality!
Film review by Martin Higgins
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Fifty years ago, a U.S. President who cheated on his wife would make a soul-stirring speech and resign from politics. But that film was State of the Union, starring Spencer Tracy. It was fatuous, formulaic, and larded with '40s fructose by its director, Frank Capra.
Thirty-five years ago, a President who cheated on his country would seek the advice of a doctor before hiding in a mineshaft with "women selected for their sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating order!" The prescribing Doctor was named Strangelove, but the eponymously double-dipped, limp-noodle President, Merkin Muffley, was too impuissant to face the Oom-pah and jig like a Führer. |
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Smelling money in veiled Presidential biopics, Hollywood flibberjibbed a string of presidential cautionary tales and cinematic cannolis in the '60s: Sunrise at Campobello, The Best Man, Fail Safe, Seven Days in May and PT 109 (more a feature-length dream sequence than historical fact.)
Then, Watergate and the subsequent mind-numbing investigation blunted America's appetite for mythic leaders and Yankee Flap-Doodle Dandyism. Only All the President's Men remains to chronicle that period, and it was little more than a sex-symbol buddy caper. Butch and Sundance "holed up" at the Post!
From the ascension of Gerald R. Ford through the ousting of George W. Bush, Hollywood had nothing Presidential to market. What? The Slow President Grants a Pardon? The Peanut Hostages? Grandpa Takes a Nap? A Bush League of Their Own? No, no, no. No box office there.
Not 'til Bill.
Taking the pulse of the American People in this century has always meant getting a little popcorn butter and salt on your fingers. So, Clinton and Hollywood eyed each other as merchants of the same fabric, the same rich brocade of character that sells so well. As they say on Seventh Avenue, "It was a fit."
So, the Studios began to give us exactly what they have always sold best, a plausible, potent President in an implausible situation: Dave, The American President, Independence Day, and Air Force One.
And they were happy… for a while.
But in the background, all our forgotten Agent Orange exposure and Black Market Quaaludes finally kicked in, adding a wild-card element that changed it all. We craved an "edge."
Post-traumatic director Oliver Stone burst into a new hyper-reality mode with Nixon, an epic biography of one of our most controversial presidents. Nixon deftly "nixes" the Herculean task that the former President undertook during his last years to wipe the dung off his public image.
Ars gratia veritas!
In the movie (which honestly should have been titled The Big Dick), Nixon is a raving nutburger stuffed with hubris, garnished with monumental hidden rage, and served on a sesame bun of profound insecurity. (A quick apology to Dick's Drive-In patrons in and around Seattle. Dick's features the undisputed heart-clogging burger and had nothing to do with Our Nation's Nixonian heartburn.)
This was where Hollywood found its metier, as first posited by Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) in The Player;
"We don't need writers; the stories are right there in the newspapers. Pick a story, any story. Immigrants Protest Budget Cuts in Literacy Program? Human spirit overcoming economic adversity. Sounds like Horatio Alger in the Barrio. Put Jimmy Smits in it, and you've got a sexy Stand and Deliver."
For the most part, film and television are the only ways Americans can swallow the unknowable past and digest the lactose-intolerant present. Filmmakers who bend the facts, create character amalgams, and rewrite the fundamental laws of human interaction to reach a satisfying denouement, upsetting and polluting the American psyche. Like chocolate pollutes your body. Like coffee upsets your Theta rhythms. Like Lipton Onion Dip makes borborygmus.
So, Wag the Dog elicits a chain of uneasy chortles - fear-recognition snorts - while some supralimnal sage, barefoot and unwashed, staggers through our Collective Unconscious bawling, "What the Hell are you people laughing at?"
But with Wag, we're still in The Land of Nod, The Land of The Knowing Nod, where acknowledgment replaces alarm and a loving re-creation of reality is dosed with enough ironic distance to constitute Parody, the sleep-around sibling of Satire.
Primary Colors, however, takes a deep, deep Cops, America's Funniest Home Videos, and Faces of Death bong hit and gags back the cough until the tenuous boundaries of `90's reality roll around like a barrel of red-velvet balls, full past noise. (Sorry, I inhaled once and had the definitive Captain Beefheart experience.)
It's all in there, folks! Every Clinton rumor that Rush Limbaugh has mongered into a lucrative career is on the screen in zesty color and twenty feet high! Illegitimate offspring, covert dirty tricks, bimbo-boinking, racks of ribs and a bucket of cluck, Lesbian sex/castration fantasy/suicide combo platter, obligatory Black and Jew chuckles, and just a few memorable moments that could be confused with outtakes from Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.
These scenes illustrate the beauty and wonder of listening to an illiterate tell a rambling story, manipulating simple poor folk, portraying an AIDS patient with impeccable political correctness (i.e., Ghandi-like: philosophical and saintly), and conducting a doomsday Labor rally in an abandoned factory that would make a Ross Perot convention look like a Mensa Singles Mixer.
It works! We want to forgive The Big Guy for his faults and failures. We feel compelled to admire his tenacity. He is better than the alternative - no movie at all!
And all this has been thoughtfully packaged and delivered, right on time, by "Tinseltown" to send a loud message to the Family Values whiners, Conservative Christian pundits, and Lumpenproletariat bellyachers who bemoan Clinton's moral profile.
"We know he's imperfect and human. We like that about him. You folks fell asleep in a 1961 Civics class and just now woke up! That's why all this looks so frightening! Don't worry; we've been following your selfish, cruel lives - your sad stories - for nearly a hundred years! If you are upset, just keep watching those tiresome, `30s, black & white movies if it makes you feel better."
Then, Watergate and the subsequent mind-numbing investigation blunted America's appetite for mythic leaders and Yankee Flap-Doodle Dandyism. Only All the President's Men remains to chronicle that period, and it was little more than a sex-symbol buddy caper. Butch and Sundance "holed up" at the Post!
From the ascension of Gerald R. Ford through the ousting of George W. Bush, Hollywood had nothing Presidential to market. What? The Slow President Grants a Pardon? The Peanut Hostages? Grandpa Takes a Nap? A Bush League of Their Own? No, no, no. No box office there.
Not 'til Bill.
Taking the pulse of the American People in this century has always meant getting a little popcorn butter and salt on your fingers. So, Clinton and Hollywood eyed each other as merchants of the same fabric, the same rich brocade of character that sells so well. As they say on Seventh Avenue, "It was a fit."
So, the Studios began to give us exactly what they have always sold best, a plausible, potent President in an implausible situation: Dave, The American President, Independence Day, and Air Force One.
And they were happy… for a while.
But in the background, all our forgotten Agent Orange exposure and Black Market Quaaludes finally kicked in, adding a wild-card element that changed it all. We craved an "edge."
Post-traumatic director Oliver Stone burst into a new hyper-reality mode with Nixon, an epic biography of one of our most controversial presidents. Nixon deftly "nixes" the Herculean task that the former President undertook during his last years to wipe the dung off his public image.
Ars gratia veritas!
In the movie (which honestly should have been titled The Big Dick), Nixon is a raving nutburger stuffed with hubris, garnished with monumental hidden rage, and served on a sesame bun of profound insecurity. (A quick apology to Dick's Drive-In patrons in and around Seattle. Dick's features the undisputed heart-clogging burger and had nothing to do with Our Nation's Nixonian heartburn.)
This was where Hollywood found its metier, as first posited by Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) in The Player;
"We don't need writers; the stories are right there in the newspapers. Pick a story, any story. Immigrants Protest Budget Cuts in Literacy Program? Human spirit overcoming economic adversity. Sounds like Horatio Alger in the Barrio. Put Jimmy Smits in it, and you've got a sexy Stand and Deliver."
For the most part, film and television are the only ways Americans can swallow the unknowable past and digest the lactose-intolerant present. Filmmakers who bend the facts, create character amalgams, and rewrite the fundamental laws of human interaction to reach a satisfying denouement, upsetting and polluting the American psyche. Like chocolate pollutes your body. Like coffee upsets your Theta rhythms. Like Lipton Onion Dip makes borborygmus.
So, Wag the Dog elicits a chain of uneasy chortles - fear-recognition snorts - while some supralimnal sage, barefoot and unwashed, staggers through our Collective Unconscious bawling, "What the Hell are you people laughing at?"
But with Wag, we're still in The Land of Nod, The Land of The Knowing Nod, where acknowledgment replaces alarm and a loving re-creation of reality is dosed with enough ironic distance to constitute Parody, the sleep-around sibling of Satire.
Primary Colors, however, takes a deep, deep Cops, America's Funniest Home Videos, and Faces of Death bong hit and gags back the cough until the tenuous boundaries of `90's reality roll around like a barrel of red-velvet balls, full past noise. (Sorry, I inhaled once and had the definitive Captain Beefheart experience.)
It's all in there, folks! Every Clinton rumor that Rush Limbaugh has mongered into a lucrative career is on the screen in zesty color and twenty feet high! Illegitimate offspring, covert dirty tricks, bimbo-boinking, racks of ribs and a bucket of cluck, Lesbian sex/castration fantasy/suicide combo platter, obligatory Black and Jew chuckles, and just a few memorable moments that could be confused with outtakes from Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.
These scenes illustrate the beauty and wonder of listening to an illiterate tell a rambling story, manipulating simple poor folk, portraying an AIDS patient with impeccable political correctness (i.e., Ghandi-like: philosophical and saintly), and conducting a doomsday Labor rally in an abandoned factory that would make a Ross Perot convention look like a Mensa Singles Mixer.
It works! We want to forgive The Big Guy for his faults and failures. We feel compelled to admire his tenacity. He is better than the alternative - no movie at all!
And all this has been thoughtfully packaged and delivered, right on time, by "Tinseltown" to send a loud message to the Family Values whiners, Conservative Christian pundits, and Lumpenproletariat bellyachers who bemoan Clinton's moral profile.
"We know he's imperfect and human. We like that about him. You folks fell asleep in a 1961 Civics class and just now woke up! That's why all this looks so frightening! Don't worry; we've been following your selfish, cruel lives - your sad stories - for nearly a hundred years! If you are upset, just keep watching those tiresome, `30s, black & white movies if it makes you feel better."
And, to add the coup de grace eye-poke to this psychological sucker punch, the forty-sixth-anniversary re-release of Grease hits the theaters this week. Travolta as the Alpha-male, Doo-wop Lothario that every woman wanted to tongue-kiss, one year after he was the Blow-dried Casanova of Saturday Night Fever that every woman wanted to rub with hot oil, a millennium before he was the Lanky Poke in Urban Cowboy that every gayboy wanted to hog-tie and gamahuche, eons before he was the Haughty Hitman in Pulp Fiction that pierced the Gen-X 'ers in their most delicate gear.
Travolta is the ultimate Clinton clone. They're both chunky, frosted, hoarse, and beset by lusty, lubricious babes and babe-wannabes with "certain needs." It's not his fault; it's in his genes and his jeans. The "dead-dick" conservatives hate him because their wives all dream of being a high-idle Olivia Newton-John in a chopped and channeled '32 Ford Coupe, clinging to the Biller after a socko Sock Hop.
So, the viewing public will gladly blur the distinction s beteen a White leisure suit with White water suit, Debra Winger and Gennifer Flowers, Fuelie Rod Roadster, and the Presidential Limo, Blow Out, Blow This, and Blow Up.
Someone go fetch Umberto Eco! Tell him that we've done a hyper-reality backflip and, although we have landed on our heads, everything still looks the same.
Copyright 2024
Martin Higgins
all rights reserved
Travolta is the ultimate Clinton clone. They're both chunky, frosted, hoarse, and beset by lusty, lubricious babes and babe-wannabes with "certain needs." It's not his fault; it's in his genes and his jeans. The "dead-dick" conservatives hate him because their wives all dream of being a high-idle Olivia Newton-John in a chopped and channeled '32 Ford Coupe, clinging to the Biller after a socko Sock Hop.
So, the viewing public will gladly blur the distinction s beteen a White leisure suit with White water suit, Debra Winger and Gennifer Flowers, Fuelie Rod Roadster, and the Presidential Limo, Blow Out, Blow This, and Blow Up.
Someone go fetch Umberto Eco! Tell him that we've done a hyper-reality backflip and, although we have landed on our heads, everything still looks the same.
Copyright 2024
Martin Higgins
all rights reserved