Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television

by Chuck Klosterman

  I’m not sure why The Omega Code made more at the box office than Left Behind; it’s kind of like trying to deduce why Armageddon grossed more than Deep Impact. But the most plausible explanation is that Left Behind tried a marketing gamble that failed: It was released on video before it was released in theaters. At the end of the VHS version of Left Behind, there is a “special message” from Kirk Cameron. Kirk appears to be standing in the Amazon rain forest while explaining why the movie went to Blockbuster before it went to theaters. “You are part of a very select group,” Cameron tells us, “and that group makes up less than one percent of the country… [but] what about the other 99 percent of the country?” The scheme by Left Behind’s production company (an organization that calls itself Cloud 10) was to have every core reader of Left Behind see the film in their living room in the winter of 1999 and then instruct each person to demand it be played theatrically in every city in America when it was officially released on February 2, 2000. “We need you to literally tell everyone you know,” Kirk stressed in his video message.

  I was working as the film critic for the Akron Beacon Journal in early 2000, and—all during January—I kept getting phone calls from strangers, telling me I needed to write a story about some upcoming movie that I had never heard of; I’ve now come to realize that these were Left Behind people. I can’t recall if the film ever opened in Akron or not. Regardless, there is a part of me that would like to see this as an example of how Left Behind is different from other kinds of entertainment. Its audience truly felt it had a social and spiritual import that far exceeded everything else that opened that same weekend (such as Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Head Over Heels). And I’m sure that some of the people who called me that January truly did believe that a Kirk Cameron flick could save the world, and that it was their vocation to make sure all the sinners in suburban Ohio became aware of its existence.

  However, I can’t ignore my sinking suspicion that the makers of this movie merely assumed their best hope for commercial success was to manipulate the very people who never needed a movie or a book to learn how to love Jesus. They took people who wanted to rescue my soul and turned them into publicists. Which makes me think the people at Cloud 10 are probably a few tiers below Stalin, too.

  There are eleven books in the Left Behind series, and many have excellent subtitles like The Destroyer Is Unleashed and The Beast Takes Possession, both of which may have been Ronnie James Dio records. I am not going to read any more of them, mostly because I know how they’re going to end. I mean, doesn’t everybody? I went back and read the Book of Revelations, which doesn’t make much sense except for the conclusion—that’s where it implicitly states that Jesus is “coming soon.” Of course, Jesus operates within the idiom of infinity, so “soon” might be 30 billion years. Sometimes I find myself wishing that the world would end in my lifetime, since that would be oddly flattering; we’d all be part of humanity’s apex. That’s about as great an accomplishment as I can hope for, since I just don’t see how I will possibly get into heaven, Rapture or otherwise.

  When I was a little boy, I used to be very thankful that I was born Catholic. At the time, my Catholicism seemed like an outrageous bit of good fortune, since I considered every other religion to be fake (I considered Lutherans and Methodists akin to USFL franchises). Over time, my opinions on such things have evolved. But quite suddenly, I once again find myself thankful for Catholicism, or at least thankful for its more dogmatic principles. I’m hoping all those nuns were right: I’m angling for purgatory, and I’m angling hard.

  CALL ME “LIZARD KING.” NO … REALLY. I INSIST.

  When I was leaving Val Kilmer’s ranch house, he gave me a present. He found a two-page poem he had written about a melancholy farmer, and he ripped it out of the book it was in (in 1988, Val apparently published a book of free-verse poetry called My Edens After Burns). He taped the two pages of poetry onto a piece of cardboard and autographed it, which I did not ask him to do. “This is my gift to you,” he said. I still possess this gift. Whenever I stumble across those two pages, I reread Val Kilmer’s poem. Its theme is somewhat murky. In fact, I can’t even tell if the writing is decent or terrible; I’ve asked four other people to analyze its merits, and the jury remain polarized. But this is what I will always wonder: Why did Val Kilmer give me this poem? Why didn’t he just give me the entire book? Was Kilmer trying to tell me something?

  The man did not lack confidence.

  CRAZY THINGS SEEM NORMAL, NORMAL THINGS SEEM CRAZY

  (JULY 2005)

  “I just like looking at them,” Val Kilmer tells me as we stare at his bison. “I liked looking at them when I was a kid, and I like looking at them now.” The two buffalo are behind a fence, twenty-five feet away. A 1,500-pound bull stares back at us, bored and tired; he stomps his right hoof, turns 180 degrees, and defecates in our general direction. “Obviously, we are not seeing these particular buffalo at their most noble of moments,” Kilmer adds, “but I still like looking at them. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m part Cherokee. There was such a relationship between the buffalo and the American Indian—the Indians would eat them, live inside their pelts, use every part of the body. There was almost no separation between the people and the animal.”

  Val Kilmer tells me he used to own a dozen buffalo, but now he’s down to two. Val says he named one of these remaining two ungulates James Brown, because it likes to spin around in circles and looks like the kind of beast who might beat up his wife. I have been talking to Kilmer for approximately three minutes; it’s 5:20 P.M. on April Fool’s Day. Twenty-four hours ago, I was preparing to fly to Los Angeles to interview Kilmer on the Sunset Strip; this was because Val was supposedly leaving for Switzerland (for four months) on April 3. Late last night, these plans changed entirely: suddenly, Val was not going to be in L.A. Instead, I was instructed to fly to New Mexico, where someone would pick me up at the Albuquerque airport and drive me to his 6,000-acre ranch. However, when I arrived in Albuquerque this afternoon, I received a voicemail on my cell phone; I was now told to rent a car and drive to the ranch myself. Curiously, his ranch is not outside Albuquerque (which I assumed would be the case, particularly since Val himself suggested I fly into the Albuquerque airport). His ranch is actually outside of Santa Fe, which is seventy-three miles away. He’s also no longer going to Switzerland; now he’s going to London.

  The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is mildly Zen: there are public road signs that say “Gusty Winds May Exist.” This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice. When I arrive in New Mexico’s capital city, I discover that Kilmer’s ranch is still another thirty minutes away, and the directions on how to arrive there are a little confusing; it takes at least forty-five minutes before I find the gate to his estate. The gate is closed. There is no one around for miles, the sky is huge, and my cell phone no longer works; this, I suppose, is where the buffalo roam (and where roaming rates apply). I locate an intercom phone outside the green steel gate, but most of the numbers don’t work. When an anonymous male voice finally responds to my desperate pleas for service, he is terse. “Who are you meeting?” the voice mechanically barks. “What is this regarding?” I tell him I am a reporter, and that I am there to find Val Kilmer, and that Mr. Kilmer knows I am coming. There is a pause, and then he says something I don’t really understand: “Someone will meet you at the bridge!” The gate swings open automatically, and I drive through its opening. I expect the main residence to be near the entrance, but it is not; I drive at least two miles on a gravel road. Eventually, I cross a wooden bridge and park the vehicle. I see a man driving toward me on a camouflaged ATV four-wheeler. The man looks like a cross between Jeff Bridges and Thomas Haden Church, which means that this is the man I am looking for. He parks next to my rental car; I roll down the window. He is smiling, and his teeth are huge. I find myself staring at them.

  “Welcome to the West,” the teeth say. “I’m Val Kilmer. Would you like to see the buffalo?”
<
br />   “I’ve never been that comfortable talking about myself, or about acting,” the forty-five-year-old Kilmer says. It’s 7:00

  P.M. We are now sitting in his lodge, which is more rustic than I anticipated. We are surrounded by unfinished wood and books about trout fishing, and an African kudu head hangs from the wall. There seem to be a lot of hoofed animals on this ranch, and many of them are dead. Kilmer’s friendly ranch hand (a fortyish woman named Pam Sawyer) has just given me a plateful of Mexican food I never really wanted, so Val is eating it for me. He is explaining why he almost never gives interviews and why he doesn’t like talking about himself, presumably because I am interviewing him and he is about to talk about himself for the next four hours. “For quite a while, I thought that it didn’t really matter if I defended myself [to journalists], so a lot of things kind of snowballed when I didn’t rebuke them. And I mainly didn’t do a lot of interviews because they’re hard, and I was sort of super-concerned. When you’re young, you’re always concerned about how you’re being seen and how you’re being criticized.”

  I have not come to New Mexico to criticize Val Kilmer. However, he seems almost disturbingly certain of that fact, which is partially why he invited me here. Several months ago, I wrote a column where I made a passing reference about Kilmer being “Advanced.”1 What this means is that I find Kilmer’s persona compelling, and that I think he makes choices other actors would never consider, and that he is probably my favorite working actor. This is all true. However, Kilmer took this column to mean that I am his biggest fan on the planet, and that he can trust me entirely, and that I am among his closest friends. From the moment we look at his buffalo, he is completely relaxed and cooperative; he immediately introduces me to his children, Mercedes (age thirteen) and Jack (age ten). They live with their British mother (Kilmer’s ex-wife Joanne Whalley, his costar from Willow) in Los Angeles, but they apparently spend a great chunk of time on this ranch; they love it here, despite the fact that it doesn’t have a decent television. Along with the bison, the farmstead includes horses, a dog, two cats, and (as of this afternoon) five baby chickens, one of which will be eaten by a cat before the night is over. The Kilmer clan is animal crazy; the house smells like a veterinarian’s office. Jack is predominantly consumed with the chicks in the kitchen and the trampoline in the backyard. Mercedes is an artist and a John Lennon fan; she seems a little too smart to be thirteen. When I ask her what her favorite Val Kilmer movie is, she says, “Oh, probably Batman Forever, but only because it seems like it was secretly made by Andrew Lloyd Webber.”

  For the first forty-five minutes I am there, the five of us—Kilmer, his two kids, Pam the ranch hand, and myself—occupy the main room of the ranch house and try to make casual conversation, which is kind of like making conversation with friendly strangers in a wooden airport. Mercedes has a lot of questions about why Kilmer is “Advanced,” and Val mentions how much he enjoys repeating the word Advanced over and over and over again. He tells me about an Afterschool Special he made in 1983 called One Too Many, where he played a teenage alcoholic alongside Mare Winningham (his first teenage girlfriend) and Michelle Pfeiffer (a woman he would later write poetry for). I mention that he seems to play a lot of roles where he’s a drug-addled drunk, and he agrees that this is true. In fact, before I got here, I unconsciously assumed Val would be a drug-addled drunk during this interview, since every story I’ve ever heard about Kilmer implies that he’s completely crazy; he supposedly burned a cameraman with a cigarette on the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau. There are a few directors (most notably Joel Schumacher) who continue to paint him as the most egocentric, unreasonable human in Hollywood. As far as I can tell, this cannot possibly be accurate. If I had to describe Kilmer’s personality in one word (and if I couldn’t use the word Advanced), I would have to employ the least incendiary of all potential modifiers: Val Kilmer is nice. The worst thing I could say about him is that he’s kind of a name-dropper; beyond that, he seems like an affable fellow with a good sense of humor, and he is totally not fucked up.

  But he is weird.

  He’s weird in ways that are expected, and he’s weird in ways that are not. I anticipated that he might seem a little odd when we talked about the art of acting, mostly because (a) Kilmer is a Method actor, and (b) all Method actors are insane. However, I did not realize how much insanity this process truly required. That started to become clear when I asked him about The Doors and Wonderland, two movies where Kilmer portrays self-destructive drug addicts with an acute degree of realism; there is a scene late in Wonderland where he wordlessly (and desperately) waits for someone to offer him cocaine in a manner that seems painfully authentic. I ask if he ever went through a drug phase for real. He says no. He says he’s never freebased cocaine in his life; he was simply interested in “exploring acting,” but that he understands the mind-set of addiction. The conversation evolves into a meditation on the emotional toll that acting takes on the artist. To get a more specific example, I ask him about the “toll” that he felt while making the 1993 Western Tombstone. He begins telling me about things that tangibly happened to Doc Holliday. I say, “No, no, you must have misunderstood me—I want to know about the toll it took on you.” He says, “I know, I’m talking about those feelings.” And this is the conversation that follows:

  CK: You mean you think you literally had the same experience as Doc Holliday?

  Kilmer: Oh, sure. It’s not like I believed that I actually shot somebody, but I absolutely know what it feels like to pull the trigger and take someone’s life.

  CK: So you’re saying you understand how it feels to shoot someone as much as a person who has actually committed a murder?

  Kilmer: I understand it more. It’s an actor’s job. A guy who’s lived through the horror of Vietnam has not spent his life preparing his mind for it. Most of these guys were borderline criminal or poor, and that’s why they got sent to Vietnam. It was all the poor, wretched kids who got beat up by their dads, guys that didn’t get on the football team, guys who couldn’t finagle a scholarship. They didn’t have the emotional equipment to handle that experience. But this is what an actor trains to do. So—standing onstage—I can more effectively represent that kid in Vietnam than a guy who was there.

  CK: I don’t question that you can more effectively represent that experience, but that’s not the same thing. If you were talking to someone who’s in prison for murder, and the guy said, “Man, it really fucks you up to kill another person,” do you think you could reasonably say, “I completely know what you’re talking about”?

  Kilmer: Oh yeah. I’d know what he’s talking about.

  CK: You were in Top Gun. Does this mean you completely understand how it feels to be a fighter pilot?

  Kilmer: I understand it more. I don’t have a fighter pilot’s pride. Pilots actually go way past actors’ pride, which is pretty high. Way past rock ’n’ roll pride, which is even higher. They’re in their own class.

  CK: Let’s say someone made a movie about you—Val Kilmer—and they cast Jude Law2 in the lead role. By your logic, wouldn’t this mean that Jude Law—if he did a successful job—would therefore understand what it means to be Val Kilmer more than you do?

  Kilmer: No, because I’m an actor. Those other people that are in those other circumstances don’t have the self-knowledge.

  CK: Well, what if it was a movie about your young life? What if it was a movie about your teen years?

  Kilmer: In that case, I guess I’d have to say yes. No matter what the circumstances are, it’s all relative. I think Gandhi had a sense of mission about himself that was spiritual. He found himself in political circumstances, but he became a great man. Most of that story in the film Gandhi is about the politics; it’s about the man leading his nation to freedom. But I know that Sir Ben Kingsley understood the story of Gandhi to be that personal journey of love. It would be impossible to portray Gandhi as he did—which was perfectly—without having the same experience he put into his bod
y. You can’t act that.

  CK: Okay, so let’s assume you had been given the lead role in The Passion of the Christ. Would you understand the feeling of being crucified as much as someone who had been literally crucified as the Messiah?

  Kilmer: Well, I just played Moses [in a theatrical version of The Ten Commandments]. Of course.

  CK: So you understand the experience of being Moses? You understand how it feels to be Moses? Maybe I’m just taking your words too literally.

  Kilmer: No, I don’t think so. That’s what acting is.

  I keep asking Kilmer if he is joking, and he swears he is not. However, claiming that he’s not joking might be part of the joke. A few weeks after visiting the ranch, I paraphrased the preceding conversation to Academy Award–winning conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone, the man who directed Kilmer in 1991’s The Doors and 2004’s Alexander. He did not find our exchange surprising.

  “This has always been the issue with Val,” Stone said via cell phone as his son drove him around Los Angeles. “He speaks in a way that is propelled from deep inside, and he doesn’t always realize how the things he says will sound to other people. But there is a carryover effect from acting. You can never really separate yourself from what you do, and Val is ultrasensitive to that process.”

  Stone says Kilmer has substantially matured over the years, noting that the death of Kilmer’s father in 1993 had an immediate impact on his emotional flexibility. “We didn’t have the greatest relationship when we made The Doors,” he says. “I always thought he was a technically brilliant actor, but he was difficult. He can be moody. But when we did Alexander, Val was an absolute pleasure to work with. I think part of his problems with The Doors was that he just got sick of wearing leather pants every day.”