The Talkies
Bowman, James
"The Talkies" The entirely predictable success this summer of the third of Mike Myers' Austin Powers films, Austin Powers in Goldmember, is a confirmation, if any were needed, that in the popular culture...
...And why...
...What do parents and teachers and cops know...
...Thus the old-fashioned horror flick or creature feature of the 1950s started turning comic in the 1970s but was still going strong in its new form, with Scream and its knock-offs, in the 1990s...
...THE TA The entirely predictable success this summer of the third of Mike Myers' Austin Powers films, Austin Powers in Goldmember, is a confirmation, if any were needed, that in the popular culture everything aspires to the condition of self-parody...
...Stop thinking Prague police and think Play Station," he explains: "Blows*** up...
...We always work alone...
...At one level, the parody level, this seems to put him in the tradition of American heroism since the Second World War...
...It was a world where people, though free to drink martinis and smoke cigarettes and have sexual inter-course, also made sacrifices for each other...
...Do we want to drop another mouse in the snake pit," says Gibbons to his skeptical colleagues back at the Agency, "or do we want to send our own snake and let him crawl in...
...The CIA is just the engine by which another stateless, identity-less Mr...
...Meyers' parody-Bond is able to go back to the well, again and again, suggests that he may have an equally long career...
...Of course, we see him fighting other tough-guys with the usual array of "martial arts" techniques, but director Doug Liman is even more than most directors of action flicks these days driven to rely on quick cuts to lessen the implausibility of his routinely defeating them...
...The man then dies, saying "Look at this: Look at what they make you give...
...But of course Xander isn't really the bottom of the barrel...
...He learned from the original Bond that the parody is better than the real (cinematic) thing—assuming that one could even imagine what the real thing would look like anymore...
...Nor are the people's servants back at Langley any more plausible...
...Incredibly, in spite of becoming a legend for largely illegal activities, he has no arrest record...
...Yet even such ostensibly adult fare as The Bourne Identity proves to be quite as juvenile...
...But sometimes the self-parody mutates into a new genre of its own...
...But though Marie may be persuaded, we are not...
...There is a brief attempt to defuse this criticism in the film where Damon's character tells Marie (Franka Potente), the ditzy but attractive hard-luck gal he picks up to help him on the run, that "I can't remember anything that happene 1 before two weeks ago...
...I work alone," he says...
...So why not just run off with her...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63...
...In other words: Tell me this is a joke...
...After the cliche of the amnesiac who is trying to find out who he is, we have the cliche of the hero who likes being nobody...
...There were no more westerns after Blazing Saddles, apart from a few grim, deconstructive anti-westerns like Silverado or Unforgiven...
...The rest of the world just isn't up to his high standards...
...And it was a far more healthful fantasy than we have had since the spy-thriller became all parody...
...It may have been a fantasy, but it had a serious side...
...That means that he must go dumpster-diving for "the best and brightest of the bottom of the barrel"—to wit, Mr...
...In fact, it has no political point...
...How could he have forgotten that...
...He's just misunderstood, like your average teenager whose parents, and the cops, don't want him to have any fun...
...We can hide...
...I guess he never expected that...
...That Mr...
...Though also a fantasy, he was a fantasy not just of individual cool and swagger, but of a good society where loyalty and community were finally more important than he was...
...You might think of X as the James Bond of the anarchists...
...Light out forthe territory like Huck Finn...
...could just walk in off the street and outperform all the highly trained agents of his country'ssecurity services...
...Diesel's character, called Xander Cage, that all he has to work with are "ex-military" types, and that the bad guys "can smell the training on our agents a mile away...
...I don't care...
...He is, in short, a remarkably frank projection of teenage wish-fulfillment, an embodiment of the essential immaturity of the idea that someone (someone like me...
...A Man Alone...
...The only thing that looks authentic about him is the attack of conscience that makes him turn against his employers...
...Everything I find out, I want to forget...
...And then, when she sees he's not laughing, "You mean like amnesia...
...Take, for example, the film that succeeded Austin Powers as box office champ, XXX (pronounced "Triple-X"), directed by Rob Cohen and starring the improbably named Vin Diesel...
...Merely to cover his bureaucratic posterior for having commissioned a botched assassination...
...Thus where Bond would outrace an avalanche on skis, X does it on a snow-board...
...Is there any chance you can do that...
...Discipline, practice, sobriety, hard work, training—all of this counts for nothing...
...Naturally he is shot and killed by the bad guys, and his body is carried off by the gyrating crowd as if he had gone diving in the mosh-pit...
...Sometimes the self-parody is a genre-killer...
...Lucky you," she says, thinking it a joke...
...We have this money," he explains...
...Like X himself, they just want to "blow s*** up...
...The Bond franchise itself was of course tongue-in-cheek almost from the start...
...The old-fashioned, James Bond-inspired spy thriller seems to fall into the latter category...
...But at another level, it shows us the extent to which the whole rationale of the spy thriller has been taken away...
...The movie even has time to incorporate an anti-smoking message, just like teacher...
...When everything is parody, why bother with anything else...
...Diesel naturally saves the world with derring-do that is virtually indistinguishable from the Bond variety, apart from its tip of the do-rag to the kiddie culture in which stupidity is a virtue ("I like anything fast enough to do something stupid in," says X...
...Duh...
...Yet whatever process of moral reasoning may have led Mr...
...The point seems to be deliberately to mock the unreality of the agent as an urbane, well-dressed representative of the official culture...
...I don't want to know who I am anymore," he tells Marie...
...I could do that stuff, being the kind of "street-smart" character that I am...
...We also can't help noticing that the U.S...
...Oh-ohit's no joke...
...So how does it happen that his Xploits here are all undertaken on the side of the police and the CIA...
...Not to mention that the whole amnesia plot is just too, too daytime TV...
...This is the only time the word "amnesia" is mentioned, for understandable reasons...
...In some ways it looks like a straggler from the herd of movies of the 1970s and 1980s—The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, The Amateur—in which the U.S...
...Right at the beginning we see a traditional, Bond-style agent in a dinner jacket, comically trying to look inconK spicuous at a rock concert...
...All this has had an inevitable effect on other spy-thrillers, which have now become almost impossible to make with a straight face...
...Why he commissioned the assassination in the first place is anybody's guess...
...When Conklin greets him by saying "I thought we were on the same side," Bourne comes out with it: "I'm tired of this...
...X is created, and a temporary obstacle in the path of his progress to a glorious, anarchic autonomy that is every bit the fantasy that XXX is...
...Triple X, a skateboarding, snowboarding, car-stealing "extreme sports" practitioner whose videotaped exploits have made him a hero to slackers the world over...
...Like you...
...What are the odds...
...In other words, the movie is just going through the motions of the spy thriller...
...Yes," says the sufferer solemnly...
...At one point, in fact, when he has shot the frighteningly competent assassin called The Professor (Clive Owen) who has come to kill him, he asks the dying man how many are with him...
...James Bond worked alone, too, but his absolute, reliable patriotism was part of what made him so glamorous...
...Even the fascination with gadgets is the same, though slightly altered...
...One can't quite imagine, for example, a relative grown-up like James Bond waxing enthusiastic, as X does, about every little boy's dream: a pair of binoculars with "penetrator mode" capable of seeing through women's clothes...
...Even if his enemies were increasingly ridiculous, it was they who were the isolated and stateless ones and he who, if only subliminally, stood for civilization and stuffy but good-natured bureaucrats in Whitehall who came to work every day from smart suburban villas...
...At one point he and the anarchist leader, a former Russian soldier called Yorgi (Marton Csokas), agree in song that you're not really free if you cannot urinate on the floor of a deli (in the words of a punk-rock ditty that both of them have by heart...
...Yet they keep turning them out even today, and a new one is due this fall...
...At any rate, it provides the setup for Gib-bons, Samuel L. Jackson's CIA agent, to say to Mr...
...Like every-one from Gary Cooper to Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis, he is an antisocial hero...
...government has thought-fully prepared him for his career as an amnesiac by implanting a hip-chip on which is recorded information as to which Swiss bank has his safe deposit box full of money and passports...
...We see a lot of the devastating impact of his blows, but little of the strength and athleticism behind them, which we are meant, I guess, to take on faith...
...The style-only anarchism of XXX itself is clearly pretty tame stuff...
...Golly, a man whose business is killing people getting shot himself...
...In fact, a case could be made (and some film-studies type has probably made it) that the Bond movies of the 1960s rep-resent the first green shoots of the post-modernism that wasn't to blossom in Hollywood for another quarter century...
...Yorgi tells X that "you of all people should understand" a revolutionary movement dedicated to the abolition of all governmental restraints...
...Political sophistication is hardly a prime requisite of By Jaynes Bowman Postmod Squad James Bowman is American editor of The Times Literary Supplement and The American Spectator's movie critic...
...Chris Cooper plays the heavy, Conklin, with lines like, "I want Bourne in a body-bag by sundown...
...This guy is supposed to be a professional assassin...
...government in general and the CIA in particular were depicted as a nest of malevolent conspiracy, but it lacks even such exiguous political plausibility as those films had...
...When he finds himself reluctantly assisting the Czech constabulary to prevent a chemical/biological attack by a remark-ably well-organized gang of anarchists, he scolds the cops for pussyfooting...
...As "Jason Bourne" (not his real name), the new action hero, Matt Damon, is almost comically implausible...
...The first time we see him up and about after being found floating in the Mediterranean with two bullets in his back, he is pitching a fit and venting his girlish rage at not being able to remember anything...
...62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 movies made for 15-yearolds...
...X—whose very name suggests an alienation from parental ties and therefore adult society—to throw in his lot with the other side is a matter of no interest to the film-makers...
...I'm on my own side now...
Vol. 35 • September 2002 • No. 5
