What is it about the '60's that's got it coming back? Is it the failed policies of the anti-evolutionary forces these past seven years? And why start with 1960 -- picking up in the cigarette haze where George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck left off?
My own theory is that these creators were all children during that era. I, personally, was born somewhere in the middle of what will be the first season of Mad Men. So this isn't the nostalgia of those who lived through that decade as adults or even cognizant teens. These are the legends, the revisionist legends, filtered through a child's view of that mysterious, threatening, alluring adult world of the time.
Since Talk to Me takes place both later and is based on true material, I'm thinking to discuss it later. I can tell you that it is well worth seeing, not just to see Don Cheadle break out like you've always known he could, but also for the power of the story, and a great evocation of the constant tensions of the times.
In the middle of watching Hairspray I realized why it was succeeding in an age where the numbers in movie musicals are either performed onstage in sagas about musicals, or awkward breaks in otherwise naturalistic direction. The difference is that this adaptation of the recent Broadway smash hit, itself based on the 1988 film by indie camp king John Waters, is the first Mad magazine movie musical, applying that populist ironic voice to the very decade where its readership blossomed. Just enough youthful disrespect has survived.
When I watched Batman back in the mid-1960's, I was a little kid so I took it seriously. I'm generally not a big fan of camp, which I find replaces subtext with a rather obvious mocking knowingness. The rare exception would include The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which not only had subtext but showed a lot of reality in the shooting (vast landscapes, faces with age) and was genuinely moving. While his movies have always been satiric and filled with meshes of parody, what makes John Waters the biggest exception of all, at least for me, is that his career-spanning theme is so honestly delivered, the floor upon which all his laughs dance:
Accept yourself for yourself; accept everybody else for who they are or "kiss my ass." (That last quip courtesy of the character Link to the racist authorities in the movie.)
The genius of the core Hairspray story has always been a previously unrecognized equation of overweight people with the Civil Rights Movement. Tracy Turnblad goes from local dance show aspirant to crusading protester over the course of the picture, with the enemy being prejudice, plain and simple. But beyond where it gets all the metaphors right, it's as far from reverential as you've ever seen in successful mainstream musical, opening with a number about Baltimore that includes Tracy singing to sidewalk rats, the neighborhood barfly, pregnant ladies smoking as they drink martinis, and Waters himself in a cameo as the local flasher.
The whole cast is great, with John Travolta bringing a well-suited new version of Tracy's mom, Edna, a somehow mandatory cross-dressing role played by Divine in the original movie and Harvey Fierstein among others on Broadway. Travolta goes for the vulnerability, with no obvious winks at the audience, and his performance somehow endorses the movie: Waters' vision finally hits the big time.
When I was a kid movie musicals had the ability to get you choked up, but these days overflowing emotion in musical numbers provoke audience embarrassment more than any desired effect. But I found myself wiping tears away at crazy moments in Hairspray. Is it that purity of theme, or the commitment to depicting that very real racial equality struggle from our lifetime, or maybe just the joy of seeing John Waters writ large?
I'll have more to say about Mad Men in the future as well, but I can say that also reaches towards parody of real world early-1960's conventions, albeit in a different kind of high stakes dramatic setting. AMC has boldly evolved itself to where they've now launched the best new drama series since The Sopranos, and lo and behold it's written and directed by vets from David Chase's show.
If Hairspray is a blast of exhilarating teenage life accelerating a ready to rock culture into new openings and acceptance, one struggles hard here to discern the sprouts of life desperate to pop through a crack in the morally bankrupt affluence that kicked off our modern era. There are clues all over the place, in the free-spirited career girl, in the closeted Art Director, in the cracking-up suburban wife.
For those of us who remember from growing up in that era, the populace of Mad Men had best start fastening those seatbelts -- the ones none of them appear to be wearing.
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