The Talkies/Friends of Bill

...Michael Douglas plays a man named Bill (oddly called D-FENS, after his vanity license plate, in the credits) who has lost his job, his wife, and his child, and, one day, proceeds to lose his self-control...

...Reach for your revolver and squeeze off a few rounds at foreigners or rich peopleor government bureaucrats or young punks or whatever minority you have decided to blame for causing all your problems...

...In fact, the only person in the film whose death we know is directly attributable to Bill is the Nazi...

...Only the left, of course, whose alternative American dream is the perennial fantasy of making the world safe for everybody—or everybody but individualists and entrepreneurs...

...This is what happens to good ideas in Hollywood: they have to be adapted to one of the standard scenarios, variations on which are continuallyreplayed, and these squeeze out such marginal concerns as originality or coherence...

...N o, it doesn't...

...That is what happens in the Movie of the Month, the Australian film Strictly Ballroom by Baz Luhrmann, which on one level is a straightforward Cinderella story that gets away with being so incredibly corny by making fun of the conventions of Cinderella stories (and of movies, and of ballroom dancing) on other levels...

...In a piece in the same "Arts and Leisure" section of the Sunday Times on February 21, Aljean Harmetz quotes Smith as saying that Bill, his hero, is "someone who bought the American dream, and it's blown up in his face...

...Paul Mercurio plays Scott, a dancer who has got it into his head that he can win the Pan-Pacific Ballroom Championship by doing his own steps...

...All the interesting stuff at the beginning is pretty much forgotten...

...That is why I rather liked Mad Dog and Glory—or at least the first half of it...

...Naturally, what they come up with is a saucer-shaped spaceship filled with big-headed, spindly-limbed, wrinkly-faced creatures that look like angry potatoes—or perhaps like E.T...

...It is "the last big Bush-era movie, custom-made for the rabidly conservative Rush Limbaugh crowd that sees social blight as proof that America is lost in a liberal wilderness...

...They are not idiots, as in heavy-handed parodies like Naked Gun or Hot Shots or Loaded Weapon, but likable kids whose happy ending we root for as much as we ever did for Cinderella's...

...She delivers the film's most memorable line: "Life is what happens to you while you're waiting for your ship to come in...

...There is cven a sneer at anti-Communism when Bill's old mother, a spaced out weirdo who collects tiny figurines, describes her son's job (which she has never realized he's lost) as "building important things to protect us from the Communists"—as if only a ditzy old broad like that could ever have believed we needed protection from the Communists...

...Phew...

...There is no language, no imagery with which to represent extraterrestrials but that of the alien movies that we've all seen many times before...

...he asks, referring to her spectacles, and when they come off she of course turns into a raving beauty and a fantastic dancer...

...It is this dangerous belief that the most basic of life's problems have political solutions which has led both to the Democratic hegemony and to a fascist fantasy like Falling Down...

...This is the film that promises an answer, based on actual experience, to the question of what extraterrestrials are really like...

...in a stocking mask...

...In fact, Bill is the perfect Clinton Democrat, which may be the reason for both his first name and the filmmakers' pretense that he doesn't have one...

...ascist or otherwise, fantasy as I F have observed before is very hard to get away from in Hollywood...

...Caught in a traffic jam in Los Angeles, he finally snaps, abandons his car, and announces that he is "going home" on foot—even though he no longer has a home to go to...

...Perhaps the only thing for a film to do about this problem is to bow toward truth by making fun of its own fictions in the thoroughgoing, post-modern way...

...Their triteness is exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness—which, paradoxically, makes them look touchingly fresh and believable once more...

...Can you dance without those...

...Alas, these very promising materials are not exploited to the full and the film soon becomes much more predictable: a love story between Mad Dog and Glory and the saga of how the former manages to overcome his timidity, challenge the bully, and win the fair maiden...

...The latter, by contrast, gives voice to more acceptable socialist views by calling, for example, for country clubs to be taken away from the rich and opened to picnicking families...

...Doesn't that demonstrate his bona fides...

...The Australian Dance Federation and its sinister head conspire with his own mother to prevent him from going ahead with his plan, his partner deserts him and he is left with plain, wallflowery Fran (Tara Morice), who sweeps the dance studio, as the only person who believes in him...

...What is fascinating is to see the same process at work in a dramatization from real life like Fire in the Sky...

...He is the embodiment of all that moaning and groaning about a middle-class Gotterdammerung that worked so much in Clinton's favor last year...

...Who ever thought that the American dream was about making the world safe for white men...

...Moreover, she comes from a whole family of Spanish dancers who can teach Scott how to do his new steps in the fashion of the paso doble...

...All the clichés of the genre are trotted out, but instead of being knocked over the head as in a traditional satire they are respectfully and lovingly treated, dressed up, and introduced into the tempest-ina-teapot world of professional ballroom dancing...

...The answer it gives is that they must be pretty much like a cross between Alien and E.T...

...You know what I mean...

...Later on, a third "artist" comes along: Uma Thurman as Glory, a would-be actress who is working for Murray as a barmaid and prostitute...

...Such a truly wacky statement shows that not only can she not have listened to Rush Limbaugh, she cannot even have listened to the movie—or its screenwriter, Ebbe Roe Smith, as quoted in her own newspaper a couple of weeks before...

...What's more, it is fascist fantasy...

...Unspoken indeed...

...He's not a Nazi because he says he's not...

...Bill is having the ultimate in bad days and, having been pushed beyond endurance, bops each of these insults to his emotional tranquility right on the nose, taking a baseball bat to the price-gouging Korean shopkeeper, for example, or shooting up a Whammyburger restaurant where he finds himself three minutes too late for breakfast...

...That Schumacher is aware of the political implications of his film is shown by the fact that he introduces into it a Nazi sympathizer (Frederic Forrest), with whom Bill has the following dialogue: NAZI (having shown Bill an empty container of Zyklon B from the death camps): We're just alike, you and I. BILL (in disgust): We arenot the same...

...That leftward bias is equally plain in the movie: the evil Nazi is associated with anti-gay, anti-feminist, and anti-environmentalist views, just in case anti-Semitism by itself is not enough to distinguish him from Bill...

...The movie people are perhaps at their best when they recognize the fact and poke a bit of gentle fun at themselves for it...

...Those middle-class blues getting you down...

...That's all right then...

...A s usual, truth—or "truth"—limps haltingly along behind fiction and looks far less true than even fantasy...

...It is typical of the film's self-contradiction, its pacifistic, leftist fascism, that it should attempt to milk our sympathy for Bill as a victim of cutbacks in the defense industry at the same time that it suggests there need have been no defense industry in the first place...

...But a lot of people must have wanted to believe it does...

...It is a very funny picture, but it never allows itself to become merely knowing and arch toward its characters or their story...

...He's a guy who believed the unspoken promise of America that if you worked hard and were white and a man, you were safe...

...It's okay to love this stuff, the hip post-modernist tells us, so long as you also laugh at it...

...So for the "true" story as much as for the fantasy you have to call up Industrial Light and Magic and tell them to design some generic space tourists...

...Talk about relevance...

...Maybe it's not much of a compromise with the movies' sinister tendency towards fantasy, but it is the best we are likely to get...

...Our enjoyment of the young couple's happiness after many vicissitudes is sanitized and made safe for us by all the self-mockery we have sat through up to this point...

...The film deliberately distances us from him in the end, but it is clear that he stands for that same "forgotten middle class" whose frustrations, as it was widely supposed in the election campaign, would undoubtedly lead to some secular apocalypse unless a savior like Bill Clinton came along to minister to them...

...And Caryn James wants to blame George Bush and Rush Limbaugh...

...And then along came Falling Down by Joel Schumacher, a self-conscious attempt to present us with Everyman amidst the frustrations of our highly complex, highly frustrating post-industrial society...

...How else would we know they were aliens...

...But although such stuff may give us a cheap cathartic high, in the end it is just more fantasy...

...We're artists...

...But, when you think about it, what can a film do with a supposedly true story of a man kidnapped by aliens...

...I am an American and you are a sick a--hole...

...I got this feeling," says Murray to DeNiro, trying to make friends, "me and you, we both want to be somewhere else...

...CI...

...Thereafter he meets representatives of various of the dark forces that haunt our nightmares about modern urban living, and a lot of the petty annoyances—overpriced soft-drinks, foreign shopkeepers, snotty waitresses, bad food, etc.—that on our increasingly frequent bad days seem to push us beyond endurance...

...It was a brilliant idea to cast Bill Murray as a ruthless hoodlum in therapy, a sort of yuppie Don whose fantasy is to be a stand-up comic, and Robert De Niro as a rather timid and mild-mannered policeman (hence his ironic nickname, "Mad Dog") whose fantasy is to be a photographic artist...

...Caryn James, the New York Times critic, to her credit sees Bill as the fascist he is, but then jumps to a conclusion exactly 180 degrees wrong: "Hollywood may have voted for Bill Clinton, but 'Falling Down' masterfully exploits conservative sentiments," she opines...