This edition of Mick Raubenheimer’s Reel to Real returns to a pair of challenging, but always intriguing films released in 1999 by directors David Fincher and Milos Forman:
DAVID FINCHER’S FIGHT CLUB (1999): Fight Club was less an epiphany than a strategically devastating explosion – and perhaps the quintessential late 20th century American flick.
Its temporal residence hosted the apex of the decline of the male genome – metro-sexuality kicked in soon after – and the steadily exponential evolution not of the feminine, but of the artificial, sexless genome – the projected, godly hygiene (in ethics, physical grooming and intellect) of the synthetic.
Man had built himself into his own Hell. His sheer superiority to all things organic: Attacked by a tiger? Invent the gun; invent the bullet. Construct wide, poisoned cities to keep its brethren out, and sweetly talented – but fickle! – Jane in! Then it all eventually unveiled itself as mere cunningly distorted inferiority.
We invented medicine because we were weak; built cities so that we could hide in the open. We built TVs so we could fight and fuck and conquer vicariously (no sweat). We invented the crinkle-cut chip to complement the infinitely comfortable sofa to complement our sagging frames.
Director David Fincher’s chutzpah in the realms of the gritty and the tense found its vocation in Fight Club antagonist Tyler Durden’s schizoid, reflexive wet-dream; and found its medium in novelist Chuck Palahniuk’s muscularly ironic, crudely poetic prose; and in the Dust Brothers’ darkly digital funk – and special effects so effortlessly chic and hours-ahead-of-its-time that they were ravishing; and, finally, found the perfect vehicle to slip this modern myth of GQ decline and anarchic solution into unsuspecting synapses.
MILOS FOREMAN’S MAN ON THE MOON (1999): The late Andy Kaufman was a strange soul.
He never quite fit. He was a unique comedian who didn’t consider himself one (“I’m a song-and-dance man”); a Buddhist who gleefully invented inter-gender wrestling, tossing outraged women about in outraged, testosterone-heavy wrestling States; a family man who on more than one occasion tricked his own relatives into believing him to be terminally ill. He staged hoaxes so elaborate that one struggled to pinpoint where and how they were separated from the frame of the real. Some are still unresolved.
Where other stand-up comics measure their success in applause and guffaws, Kaufman preferred punchlines that estranged the very possibility of laughter, gauging his success in levels of outrage and bewilderment.
Man on the Moon, director Milos Forman’s ode to the oddly endearing Kaufman, never seeks to explain his intrinsic otherness, or his delight in rupturing that film of reality others cling to for safety. It follows him from his early days as a no-luck performer (“You’re firing me? You don’t even pay me”), through to his unexpected break and brief years as darling of the alternative comedy circuit via Saturday Night Live, through to his eventual fall from grace – with no one understanding the increasingly bizarre nature of his gestures.
Rubberface Jim Carrey is inspired in Man on the Moon‘s main role, capturing Andy Kaufman’s essential innocence, and the touch of melancholy that informed his work and life. Poignant stuff.
[First published in Muse magazine.]
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