Oliver Stone makes ugly heroes. He became famous for his picture of ugly
Americans in the third world (Salvador, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July),
ugly Americans on Wall Street (Wall Street), hate-radio hosts (Talk Radio),
and more lately has painted the abusive, booze-slogging, dope-toking rocker
Jim Morrison (The Doors), presidential assassins (JFK), and serial murderers
(Natural Born Killers). The only place a likable guy can be found is in
Heaven and Earth, and there the guy is a girl and the movie lacks all punch,
except in one scene about abusive, dope-toking ugly American GIs. Now Stone
has made Nixon, about a fellow who had a talent for making ugly scenes uglier.
Through all this thankless muckraking, Stone has become wildly popular with
the public (they can look at his heroes and say, I may be a thickening,
beer-slogging, junk-food-chugging, loud lout, who's sold out his dreams
for a VCR, but I am not as bad as THEM). Yet he has become steadily unpopular
with the U.S. film press--the higher brow the press (Chardonnay rather than
beer) the greater the disdain. On Nixon's release in the U.S., film critics
of an intellectual cut raced to say what a mess the film was. (I am one
of the few critics with letters after her name that liked it--in public.
I am one of the few girl critics of any sort that liked it.) The film is
over the top, the Chardonnay set said--though they said it rather loudly
for a white-wine crowd. Undaunted, Stone goes on, making films about unlovable
heroes. Perhaps he does so because he himself feels so unloved: what could
be more deflating than the disdain of critics who don't do Big Mac. Or perhaps
he is unloved for the same reasons that his heroes are.
Oliver Stone is the Camille Paglia of filmmakers. Paglia is a feminist professor
and author famous for her 718-page Sexual Personae praising the pagan, which
for some reason she believes women should embrace. She has earned the disdain
of other feminists who say she is over the top. She irritates me because
she is not: she says what scores of solid scholars have said for the last
30 years yet pretends she is the first to say it. More importantly, she
writes with an exclamation point at the end of every sentence (often literally,
always figuratively) and I cannot stand the din. At bottom, Paglia is not
satisfied to have good ideas within feminist scholarship: she wants to be
Don Corleone. She wants the rages within her breast to be writ large, and
so does Stone.
His films are indeed over the top, as are his heroes. Watching his camerawork
is like wrestling with a baby hippo. But Stone, like Paglia, has good ideas,
and his outrageousness, like hers, is often the burr under the ass that
quieter works are not. If one wants a quieter film about modern corruption,
see Lamerica (about Albania since the fall of the Soviet Union) which has
the pacing and silent power of an avalanche. But to appreciate Lamerica,
one need not dismiss Stone. Only those afraid that their voices squeak fear
his boom.
Stone is a boy; boys are noisy. Paglia said so, and when she did, people
heard it.
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