"I'm an
irony dealer. Irony is what I deal in from the moment I wake up until the
moment I go to sleep. I am weary of it, though. To me, irony is snobbery in a
way. There's no irony in Bangladesh. What so-bad-it's-good if you're hungry?"
—John Waters
The above
quote was taken from an interview
I did with John Waters eight years ago, and I think it's worth reflecting on as
we head into Camp Month, which is loaded with the sorts of cinematic
experiences that wouldn't play in Bangladesh. As readers of this site are
keenly aware, we're irony dealers around here, too: Features like My Year Of
Flops, Commentary Tracks Of The Damned, I Watched This On Purpose, Films That
Time Forgot, and Ephemereview are all, to a large extent, about gleaning some
sort of value from the teeming, stinky landfill of pop cultural trash. It's
heroic work, really, to eke some redeeming entertainment out of, say, Snaps:
The Ultimate Yo Mama Battle
or the not one but two delusional commentary tracks on The Hottie And The Nottie DVD.
Yet as much
fun as we have picking through all this endless flotsam for a living, I'm sure
I'm not alone in feeling a trace of Waters' ambivalence about it sometimes.
Enjoying something for being so-bad-it's-good takes a certain amount of
arrogance, a sense that you're somehow above the work, able to chuckle
knowingly over its failings. And as Waters suggests, there's a rank whiff of
privilege to being an ironist, too, since you have to be pretty well-entrenched
in pop culture to do it and having that much idle time for snark probably means
you're not out on the streets, begging for change. More likely, your cloistered,
middle-class upbringing has left you with an encyclopedic knowledge of Saved
By The Bell and the
need to find some productive outlet for it.
Still,
there's another, more charitable way of looking at the ironic instinct. If
you're engaged with pop culture to any degree, you know that the likes of Snaps:
The Ultimate Yo Mama Battle and The Hottie And The Nottie are more the rule than the exception, and so you have to
find clever ways of grappling with it. Irony is a defense against banality and
pain; when Kevin Federline releases a rap album, we have to laugh to keep from
crying. In his book Artists In The Audience, Greg Taylor talks about today's "vanguard"
cultists and camp aficionados who find themselves pushed to the margins by
commercial films, and who naturally push back with their own creativity. That's
how a transcendently goofy piece of horror marginalia like Death Bed: The
Bed That Eats gets
processed into a Patton Oswalt routine or how German über-hack Uwe Boll
nurtures a kind of anti-fanbase.
Camp life has its limits, though. One of the problems is
that it can cripple your perception to such an extent that anything worthwhile has to pass through
those ugly, plaque-filled layers of sarcasm and cynicism first. Worse yet,
sometimes the films you might label so-bad-it's-good are actually in on the
joke. And then there are cases that are so ambiguous that you have trouble
figuring out whether they're so-bad-it's-good or so-good-it's-good, or whether
it really matters in the end. Sussing out these distinctions is part of what
motivated me to devote a month to modern camp, because I think what makes us
laugh at—or with—these movies tells us something about who we are
as moviegoers and the sometimes curious ways our pleasure is derived.
If you're
one to lump John McNaughton's sleazy South Florida noir Wild Things into the so-bad-it's-good category,
I'm afraid to say the joke is on you. Pitched somewhere between an
old-fashioned, twisty crime melodrama and a straight-to-video erotic thriller,
the film could not have existed before the current age of irony. Granted, it
probably functions just fine for viewers looking for a little T&A; to go
along with their double-crosses, but McNaughton (Henry: Portrait Of A Serial
Killer) and
screenwriter Stephen Peters are operating on another level, too. The whole
movie is in quotation marks: It knows the genre inside and out—if you can
look past the gratuity, the mechanics of the plotting are impeccable—but
everything that's implicit in a classic noir has become shamelessly explicit
here. So instead of Barbara Stanwyck descending a staircase wearing an anklet,
there's the doe-eyed Denise Richards sopping wet in translucent white, making
her intentions very, very clear.
"Fuck off"
are the first words uttered in the script, and it sets the tone for a movie
that makes a running joke out of the ugliness and greed of human nature. It's a
film without heroes: Those who aren't already nakedly vicious and self-serving from
the start are revealed later to be more duplicitous and evil than originally
assumed. You have to go six names down the cast list to find someone with a
conscience, and even she's not immune to temptation. As the opening shots of
the Everglades none-too-delicately suggest, these characters occupy a moral
swampland, with alligators snapping at their heels. But where another movie
might have tsk–tsk-ed prudishly, McNaughton and Peters
turn their corruption into gleefully sordid sport, letting fly with wet
t-shirts, lipstick lesbians, a threesome, a catfight, and rampant double
entendres. Wild Things is a movie that's sophisticated in its classlessness.
The opening
scene piles a bunch of high school seniors into an auditorium for a guest lecture
from a pair of vice detectives, played by Kevin Bacon and Daphne Rubin-Vega.
They're there to discuss sex ("yay!") crimes ("boo!"), but the kids are so hung
up on the "sex" part that they don't care about anything that follows. ("What
is a sex crime?" Bacon asks. "Not getting any!" goes the response.) Any talk of
date rape and sexual harassment falls on deaf ears: Everyone in this school and
the snooty Blue Bay milieu has sex on the brain, but sex crimes are only of
interest if they can be leveraged for personal gain. And that's where socialite
Kelly Van Ryan (Richards) comes in. (Inserting the word "Van" before any last
name is excellent shorthand for movie super-wealth. Just ask my cousin,
Econoline Van Tobias.)
"So where's
your hose, Mr. Lombardo?" Okay, so it's not quite, "You know how to whistle,
don't you?," but then, Wild Things isn't going for class. Mr. Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is the
handsome school guidance counselor that all the female students seem to eye,
including Kelly, who isn't the type of girl that's used to taking "no" for an
answer. Presumably spurned by Lombardo, Kelly accuses the teacher of raping
her; when the detectives on the case (Bacon and Rubin-Vega) express doubts
about Kelly's shaky performance, along comes another teenager, this one a
trailer-trash girl played by Neve Campbell, telling a similar tale of
Lombardo's sexploits. His life in the balance, Lombardo hires the city's
oiliest personal injury lawyer, played by a scene-stealing Bill Murray, to
represent him in what is clearly the trial of the century. Here's just a taste
of the hilarious farce that ensues:
So much of
what's good about Wild Things is encapsulated in that clip: Bill Murray in a neck brace,
Theresa Russell (as Kelly's gardener-schtupping mom) snorting in outrage,
Robert Wagner stepping up to the prosecutor's table, Richards hurling a water
glass across the room, and just the general movie-movie artificiality of the
whole proceeding. Courtroom scenes are generally so phony on film that it's
always a good idea to make them as ludicrous as possible, and have every word
of argument and testimony be inadmissible in a real-world court of law. (See
also: Duck Soup.)
Now if you hadn't picked up on the fevered, high-camp tone of Wild Things at this point, then there's really
no hope for you. McNaughton, Peters, and most of the cast (especially Murray
and Russell) are clearly having a ball amping up the melodrama to absurd
proportions. I like to think of Wild Things as an adaptation of a novel Carl
Hiaasen would be too embarrassed to write—colorfully silly and cartoonish
in the Hiaasen mode yet more willing to go blue in the late-night cable sense.
And now to
my favorite line in the film:
That line
again: Russell, in full Joan Crawford voice, screaming, "My daughter does not get raped in Blue Bay!" The thing I
love about that line is that it's three words too long. She's willing to
concede that her daughter could feasibly get raped somewhere else, under
different socioeconomic circumstances, but not in Blue Bay, where the Van Ryan
family holds sway. For an imperious blueblood like Russell's character, it's an
affront to her sense of entitlement, only slightly more severe than backed-up
valet service or the caller who dares to interrupt her while she's riding the
help. Social standing is a big issue in Wild Things, and it dictates everyone's
actions: Mr. Lombardo, who has long tried to graduate from teacher's pay by
hooking up with Blue Bay socialites; Campbell's sneering loner, who lives
behind a local bait shop; and the Van Ryans, who simply do not get raped in Blue Bay, literally or
figuratively.
Oh, and did
I mention there are boobs in this movie? And Kevin Bacon's wang? And a
threesome and a catfight and two hot young starlets of tomorrow going at it?
(Or what seemed like hot young stars of tomorrow, anyway. Based on the clips
I've seen of Denise Richards Colon It's Complicated on E!'s The Soup, she's not holding up so well.)
It's grotesque the degree to which Wild Things satisfies every male juvenile
fantasy it can dream up, and it's little wonder that the film became a runaway
favorite on the video market, inspiring a sequel with none of the principals
involved. The film's most notorious scene, a slapfight-turned-makeout-session
between Richards and Campbell in a pool, is like something out of softcore
pornography or the sketches on a middle-schooler's textbook cover.
After that
scene, Wild Things
runs out of audacious setpieces and settles into being a more ordinary
thriller, albeit one with a breathtaking pile-up of double-crosses and
triple-reverse-fakeout twists. (The closing credits sequence is pretty
brilliant, though: A series of deleted scenes that plug up several gaps in the
story.) The impression the film leaves—and one that another Camp Month
titles, Showgirls,
shares—is a deeply cynical view of mankind, marked by greed for more than
just money, but for power, revenge, and an all-consuming, unquenchable desire
for satisfaction that will never really come. "It's over," says Lombardo. "We
won." Famous last words.
Coming
Up:
Camp
Month continues…
Next
week: Road House
July 17: Manos: The Hands Of Fate vs. Troll 2
July 24: Showgirls
July 31
(back to business): Sexy Beast