by Nathan Rabin
I even came to love that Mailer’s he-men and she-sluts use words like “screw,” “bang,” “broad,” and “dame” without a hint of irony. Tough Guys traffics in the lively patois of the scuzzy barroom. It’s locker-room banter with a literary bent and caveman swagger. Here are some particularly juicy snippets of hard-boiled banter, Norman Mailer–style:
Certain dames ought to wear a T-shirt that says “Hang around, I’ll make a cocksucker out of you.”
My blood itself was turning mean.
You Yankees got tongues like tallywackers!
Mr. Regency and I make out five times a night. That’s why I call him Mr. Five.
Your knife. Is in. My dog.
And this exchange, between Tim and Hauser’s police chief, Alvin Luther Regency:
Alvin: Life gives a man two balls. Use ’em. It’s a rare day I don’t bang two women. As a matter of fact, I don’t sleep too well unless I get that second hump in. Both sides of my nature are obliged to express themselves.
Tim: Tell me, what are your two sides?
Alvin: The enforcer and the maniac.
Tim: Who do we have the honor of addressing?
Alvin: You’ve never met the maniac.
Hauser delivers the “enforcer and the maniac” line with irresistible lunatic abandon. A veteran of countless shitty B-movies, Hauser looks and acts like the demon spawn of Gary Busey and Rutger Hauer. It’s a performance pitched at just the right level of frothing hysteria.
I was even won over by O’Neal’s wan lead performance. As a malicious cosmic joke, Mailer undercuts his lead actor at every turn. He made the protagonist a passive, weak-willed shell of a man who turns white with fright at the first sign of danger, then cast the great tough-guy character actor Lawrence Tierney as O’Neal’s rough-hewn dad, so O’Neal would look even more effete by comparison.
The apex/nadir of O’Neal’s performance comes when he reads a horrifying letter and cries out, “Oh, God! Oh, man!” over and over while the camera swirls dementedly around him. O’Neal reportedly begged Mailer to cut out the scene to make himself look like less of a jackass amateur, but Mailer refused, cuz nobody tells Norman fucking Mailer what to do. Then Mailer screwed all of O’Neal’s ex-wives simultaneously, did elephant tranquilizers, and beat a grizzly bear to death with his bare fists. Or so I would imagine.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance works best as a darkly comic, horror-tinged melodrama about the emptiness of excess and the soul-crushing costs of pursuing mindless pleasure. Like Godard’s Weekend, it’s about the pleasuring of the body as the death of the spirit, about the agonizing moment when sex, drugs, and wild excess stop feeling like heaven and begin to feel like hell. It’s populated by some of the most repellent hedonists this side of Rules Of Attraction, and written and directed with tongue firmly in cheek.
When I look back at the first half of this essay, I want to punch the fey asshole who wrote it right in his smug fucking face. Then, after he gradually regains consciousness, we can down some Jack and go out looking for trouble. Oh, God! Oh, man! Oh, God! Oh, man! I think Mailer, that crafty old dog, may just be having his wicked way with my fragile psyche after all.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco Turned Secret Success
Dominant-Paradigm-Subverting Case File #137: Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
Originally Posted May 13, 2009
When I told my editor Keith that I was thinking of writing about Gus Van Sant’s 1993 comedy Even Cowgirls Get The Blues for My Year Of Flops, he mentioned that he’d read almost all Tom Robbins’ books, then realized that he didn’t particularly like them. When I asked why, he shrugged. “Eh, I was in college.”
I never went through a Tom Robbins phase, but I have my own mini-pantheon of writers I will forever associate with college. For eternally status-conscious undergraduates, the books they read—or at least litter artfully around their living spaces, in hopes that peers (read: girls) will notice them and be impressed—play a big role in defining themselves. Heck, the fact that they read at all—instead of just watching fucking bullshit reality television like the sheep in [insert name of dorm/frat/sorority we don’t care for]—plays a big role in how their self-images are forged.
So every year, a new group of freshmen establish their individuality, disdain for conformity, and rapacious intellectual curiosity—they’re seekers—by reading all the books they’re supposed to. They’re looking for road maps for life, for mentors and life lessons from the sages their older brothers and sisters and parents and cool uncles followed before them, men and women with magical names like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller and Malcolm X and James Baldwin and Tom Robbins. They’re looking to them as keys that open doors to dangerous ideas and exciting new adult worlds.
Such college students are rebels steeped in tradition, or at least the tradition of rebellion. Accordingly, much of the literature they gravitate toward is synonymous with scenes, countercultures, movements, and attractive people who bathe less often than they should and drink and smoke pot and fuck indiscriminately. There’s a grungy glamour to so much of our extracurricular freshmen reading, and it’s rooted in the cult of personality of writers like Tom Robbins.
Much of what attracts us as young people in search of an identity boils down to sex. By “we,” I of course mean “me.” We’re drawn like Kennedys to an open bar by the aura of sex, danger, kink, and transgression that clings to the oeuvres of artists like Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Robbins. I could tell you I was originally intrigued by Even Cowgirls Get The Blues because it is an adaptation of a cult novel by a major filmmaker, but the truth is, I really just wanted to see lesbians lesbianing it up in a sapphic Western wonderland.
I was a college freshman, appropriately enough, when I saw Even Cowgirls Get The Blues on videotape in 1994. It would be a year before I lived in a co-op myself, but I was looking for a cinematic contact high from the drugs, groovy vibes, and sexual free-for-all of the era it depicted. But mainly, I hoped to see hot chicks getting it on. My high ideals were both at odds with my baser instincts and perfectly in sync with them.
“The sur-prise of Sissy Hankshaw is that she did not grow up a neurotic disaster,” Tom Robbins drawls in the narration that opens the film, as a pint-sized incarnation of a protagonist who will grow up to be Uma Thurman blows out her birthday candles while being fêted by a trio of Eisenhower-era suburban grotesques. The period detail is assaultive, the performances cartoonish, and the narration self-consciously wacky.
The heroine of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues was born with a genetic abnormality: freakishly large thumbs that will someday allow her to become the world’s greatest hitchhiker. Her parents (played by counterculture icon Ken Kesey and Grace Zabriskie) want their daughter to live a normal life. But Sissy Hankshaw quickly becomes fixated on hitchhiking as a way of life, a ticket outta Squaresville and onto the holy open road.
After getting picked up by a sharp-dressed black man, Sissy opines on the virtues of American cheese (“It’s the king of road food”) and talks cosmically of embodying “the spirit and heart of hitchhiking. I have the rhythms of the universe inside me. I’m in a state of grace.” She rattles on and on in language that clings to the page and stubbornly refuses to become cinematic: “You may say that my pleasure in Indianhood and my passion for car travel might be incongruous, if not mutually exclusive. But after all, the first car that ever stopped for me had been named after the great chief of the Ottawa.”
In New York City, far from her spiritual home on the highways and byways of our great country, Sissy meets up with mentor the Countess, a feminine-hygiene magnate played by John Hurt. The Countess first tries to get Sissy to lose her virginity to a Mohawk Indian watercolorist played by Keanu Reeves, but when that proves a bust, the Countess tells her to travel to the Rubber Rose Ranch, a “beauty farm” named after a popular line of douches, so Sissy can make a triumphant return to modeling in a feminine-hygiene ad costarring some legendary whooping cranes.
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sp; At the Rubber Rose Ranch, a civil war has broken out between the overly coiffed, sweet-smelling forces of repression and a group of saucy sapphic sensualists who call themselves Cowgirls and rebel against the narrow-minded bourgeoisie by smoking pot, taking peyote, having mind-blowing orgasms, and not washing their vaginas. Seriously. In Blues, the scatological is political; the film is fixated on the ideological ramifications of body odor. The Countess’ obsession with purging women of their vaginal odors is representative of society denying women their sexuality, independence, and autonomy. The Cowgirls, however, are fierce and untamed: wild, natural creatures free to explore their passions and impulses, forces of nature that can’t be controlled, conquered, or co-opted.
I didn’t remember much about Even Cowgirls Get The Blues from my first viewing, beyond its tragic dearth of hot lesbian action, but I do remember being mightily impressed by Rain Phoenix as Bonanza Jellybean, Sissy’s love interest and the leader of the Cowgirls. Looking back, I wonder exactly what kind of crack I was smoking in 1994, because Phoenix is fucking terrible here. Hilary Duff terrible. Malin Akerman in Watchmen terrible.
A brilliant, seasoned actor like John Hurt can barely wrap his lips around this stilted, overwritten dialogue, so you can imagine how awful the following lines sound when delivered in a Keanu Reeves–like monotone by a rank amateur like Phoenix:
Cowgirls exist as an image. A fairly common one. The idea of cowgirls, especially for little girls, prevails in our culture. Therefore, it seems to me that the existence of cowgirls should prevail.
Every living thing is a chemical composition, and anything added to it changes that composition.
This here discussion is destined to become academic.
The elaborate, almost sadistic wordiness of those phrases might have a pleasing, perverse rhythm in print, but on-screen, they groan and lumber, secretly beckoning audiences to check their watches and contemplate dinner plans. Robbins’ loopy poetry and stoner lyricism died somewhere in the fraught journey between page and screen. Whimsy has a way of becoming grotesque when rendered in the literal-minded vocabulary of film.
Ah, but back to the plot. At the Rubber Rose Ranch, Sissy falls in love with Jellybean, but Sissy’s allegiances are divided between her new lover and her old mentor. Looking to get away from the craziness, she makes a spiritual journey to visit a mysterious figure known only as “the Chink,” played by Pat Morita. Morita is either a profound mystic or a horny old mountain goat. Possibly both. There’s a Chauncey Gardiner–like mock profundity to his homemade aphorisms. Or they’re bullshit. Or they’re simultaneously bogus and profound. Free your mind, square! Forget bullshit fake dichotomies!
In Blues, the spiritual is wrapped up in the physical, which is wrapped up in the scatological, and everything is a cosmic joke. The Chink treats the world like a perverse laugh. His belief system succinctly boils down to, “Ha ha, ho ho, hee hee.” Morita’s sham mystic gets Sissy high, then has sex with her. That’s life: You save yourself for Keanu Reeves and end up losing your virginity to Arnold from Happy Days.
Morita plays the character with an exquisitely light touch, as an amiable goof. If only the film had followed suit. Instead, Blues stumbles when it should skip. Morita’s performance and k.d. lang’s dreamy music both seem to belong in a different version of Blues, one that doesn’t suck.
Blues goes from bad to worse when Sissy accidentally injures the Countess with her gargantuan thumb. In the groan-inducing words of Robbins’ narration, “A sorrowful Sissy had her thumbs transport her to the one person she knew who could disarm her. Or should we say, de-thumb her.” Thurman has her glorious thumbs reduced to normal size and loses her mojo in the process.
Meanwhile, back at the Rubber Rose Ranch, the Cowgirls have taken the whooping cranes—the beauty ranch’s pride and joy—as hostages and are feeding them peyote to keep them from becoming pawns in the Countess’ tawdry empire of shame and repression.
People sometimes complain about terrible adaptations ruining great books, to which the common and proper retort is that books will always exist as autonomous, untainted entities. Blues proves especially resilient; no matter how badly Van Sant tries to translate Robbins’ text into cinematic form, it clings to its literary roots. It simply will not become a movie. In spite of Van Sant’s considerable talent, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues feels throughout like the world’s most elaborate, expensive staged reading.
I don’t want to dissuade anyone from reading Tom Robbins. By all means, read Tom Robbins, young person, especially if you think it will help you get laid. Live. Love. Dream impractical dreams. Set out on a spiritual and intellectual journey of self-discovery with folks like Tom Robbins as your guides and gurus, even if you’ll probably wind up with a mortgage, a drinking problem, a bad back, and a lifetime of regrets. (Man, I feel like I’m delivering the world’s most depressing graduation speech here.) Don’t let me kill your youthful idealism and curiosity. Life will do that for you soon enough.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure
How Do You Solve A Problem Like Lolita? Book-Exclusive Case File: Lolita
Rereading Lolita for this Case File was like getting a chummy letter from an old friend. That might seem like an odd sentiment, considering that Lolita takes place largely in the psyche of a pedophile, alcoholic, and murderer. But revisiting Lolita, I discovered anew how much I like Humbert Humbert.
What’s not to like, beyond murder, statutory rape, snobbery, deceit, sham marriage, sinister calculation, kidnapping, lying, and pedophilia? What I responded to was not Humbert’s deplorable morals but rather a voice that is erudite, brutal, self-lacerating, viciously funny, sad, perversely wise, and oftentimes just plain perverse. Above all, Humbert speaks to us in a voice that is so brazenly modern that the book might as well have been written tomorrow.
More than half a century later, Lolita doesn’t feel like a period piece. Vladimir Nabokov is still the smartest guy in the room, a man who perfected a highly evolved form of snark decades before “snark” became a nauseating buzzword. The world Humbert describes with such delicious disgust is recognizably our own, a naughty pop realm of motels and billboards, highways and ubiquitous advertising where the emptiness of pop culture assaults us from every direction in the form of clamorous pop songs, B-movies, and glossy magazines adorned with this week’s reigning pretty boy.
It’s a mad world filtered through the myopic prism of a madman. Humbert Humbert is the ultimate unreliable narrator. While professing to reveal all, he tilts everything in his favor. Lolita inhabits a moral universe so corrupt that it all but absolves its simultaneously self-deprecating and self-serving narrator of his mortal sins. Humbert presents himself not as a wolf in a henhouse, but rather as a wolf surrounded at all sides by mega-werewolves and figures beyond even H. P. Lovecraft’s imagination.
So you see, ladies and gentlemen of the novel’s imaginary jury, Humbert is ultimately blameless. It was that devilish minx Dolores Haze who seduced him. He was powerless before her nubile charms. He was likewise blameless in the unfortunate death, deceit, and betrayal of her mother. Surely a woman that pretentious, deluded, and worst of all gauche deserved to die. Actually, being run over by an errant automobile in the prime of her handsome womanhood was too good for such a monster of banality.
Humbert isn’t even the worst pedophile in Lolita. That dubious honor belongs to Claire Quilty, shape-shifter, intellectual, appreciator/defiler of truth and beauty, sexual adventurer, orgy enthusiast, and child pornographer. Compared to his sinister shadow self, Humbert is a pussycat. Humbert ultimately isn’t even to blame for his sexual attraction to preadolescent girls. Or rather that’s what Humbert would have you believe. There are two big problems with Humbert’s account: He’s mad as a hatter, and he’s lying.
Having written a memoir, I can attest that narrators have entirely too much power. The people I write about in The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture don’t get the back half of my book to tell their version of
the events chronicled within. It isn’t Rashomon. It isn’t a democracy, or a message board where the ghosts of my past can confront me. The reader is at my mercy. It’s my version of the tale they’re buying.
In the same vein, we see the tragicomic world of Humbert Humbert solely through his eyes. He seduces us with his wit, intellect, eloquence, and cracked romanticism. He renders us complicit in his crimes. This charming devil’s greatest trick is not convincing the world that he doesn’t exist, but rather that he’s really not that bad, that it’s the world that’s mad and cruel, not him. Humbert may be a victim, but he’s also a victimizer. Only in his own mind is he equal parts predator and prey.
“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” famously teased the tagline for Stanley Kubrick’s deeply flawed, deeply compelling 1962 adaptation of Nabokov’s masterpiece. It refers, of course, to the thorny problem of trying to smuggle an adaptation of a book about a man’s passionate affair with a 12-year-old temptress past the puritanical busybodies of the early 1960s.
But it also speaks to an even larger problem facing filmmakers hoping to do right by Nabokov: So much of the book’s brilliance is fundamentally unfilmable. It’s rooted less in film-friendly fodder-like dialogue and plot than in the exquisite nastiness of Humbert’s narration, in the unspeakably cruel, viciously funny little character studies of the sad souls who populate his tawdry tale. Humbert is like the world’s meanest, funniest sociologist, casting a cold, judgmental eye toward the American booboisie in their natural habitat. He takes in their bizarre customs, laughable pretensions, shameless perversions, and pathetic delusions with visceral disgust. He’s equally ruthless with himself. We see the world through Humbert’s eyes as a realm of unspeakable beauty and unrelenting horror. He gets under our skin. We become one with Humbert.
Kubrick’s film captures the dark comedy and scathing satire of Nabokov’s novel while draining it of sex. Part of this is attributable to the times; had Kubrick filmed a doggedly faithful, literal adaptation, his film would have been banned in every country, and he’d be sent away as a child pornographer and moral degenerate.