‘But, you don’t understand’: A Look Beyond The Idiotic
To many, Two Idiots
In Hollywood is a rubbish film - one of the very worst. Robert Rakeridge of
Films “Я” Us Quarterly hated it. Fellow film critic Loupenis Jones
thought it lacked ‘momentum and any real characters you could identify with’.
The movie’s own conceptualist, T. Barry Armstrong, notes its feeble budget and
total loss of continuity. And yet, if we look hard enough, we can see the
profound exploration of the ‘klutz and clamour’ of Hollywood that T. Barry, so
Icarian, was aiming for, and that Loupenis comments upon. From its very title,
the film promises to address the question all filmgoers ask themselves: are
there really ‘idiots’ in Hollywood?
We are shown at the
outset that the film is set in the Void (Outer Space), bracing us for a sense
of vacuity. Immediately, in Taylor and Murphy’s preoccupation with doing a film
character impersonation (the eponymous character from 1941 classic The Wolf
Man), and ‘getting it right’, we see members of a younger generation who
are somewhat bewitched by the silver screen. The small screen, too, has the
power to denigrate and persuade.
Don’t
ever call me Goonshow.
Hey, it
ain’t that bad to be called Goonshow.
Yeah,
you’d love it I bet.
No, I wouldn’t
love it, but I wouldn’t hate it that much. I wouldn’t cry.
Oh yeah?
Yeah.
It’s a hit show in Australia.
You lie.
It’s
true. I saw it on Entertainment Tonight.
Yeah?
- Taylor and Murphy
When they fail to
score with their dates, Taylor and Murphy come to view Hollywood as the answer
to their problems. Murphy, referring to his job in Dayton’s soda pop factory,
yearns to avoid being ‘bottled up’ by escaping to Los Angeles (the city of
angels - heaven?). Furthermore, it has the appeal of non-stop television - the
industry that Murphy hopes to penetrate.
But when the pair
reaches LA, we see that it may not be the panacea they hoped for. Their new
apartment offers nothing new (‘the buttsteaks left the phone switched on’), and
Taylor and Murphy find themselves lying to their new landlord (‘I write for The
Batpoon Show... Public Access’). Joc Jeremy himself illustrates the perils of
living in La long-term - he has a terrible back injury from a life of
‘bondage’. But Taylor and Murphy move in; and soon the TV is on.
‘Today,
we watch Entertainment Tonight; tomorrow, I hit the studios.’ - Murphy
The following day,
after an excited drive through Hollywood, Murphy reaches the hub of its
entertainment industry - the National Broascasting Association. It is an open
house: Security lets in Perry White, a prig who feels that his hopeless jokes
are good enough for TV; and Security admits Murphy, with (literally) trash. We
see Dan Skink, the President Of Television, who is stressed and desperately
‘needs good ideas for television’.
‘Look at
me, getting ulcers wondering what ideas for new televisions shows I’m gonna
give the Boys From New York. It’s all just crap anyway ... We fill our lives
with deceit, indolence, the lust for money; where did it all go wrong? Where?’
- Skink
It is ironic that it
is the President of TV who is so conscious of the fetid hollowness of
Hollywood. He himself is forced into self-preservation, and has questionable
religious faith, as he prays to Jesus for ideas that will keep him employed, with
his chauffeured limousine and huge office. He then has an almost inverse
epiphany, in picturing $40bn under the guidance of Murphy, who is presenting
himself to Skink for his own financial gain.
‘I come before
you today because I get great ideas for television all the time, just like
Carol Burnette or the E.T.’ - Murphy
More on E.T. later.
Skink relaxes by thinking about ‘what Reagan did to the world’ - Ronald Reagan,
who rose from the film industry to the highest echelon of politics.
Murphy’s idea - The
Pac-Man Comedy/Drama Hour - is picked up not only because it is potentially
very lucrative (the Boys From New York have little difficulty in picturing
$40bn), but because it appeals to the executives as an incestuous hybrid of
different facets of the entertainment industry, looking back to the dramaturgy
of 1920s cinema (Cops and The Lost World have clips featured in
the dramaturgical breakdown), sideways at television, and forward to
‘blompety-blomp years’ of video gaming. While Joe Clark highlights this
transcendence by playing himself, William Shatner, with his successful Star
Trek transition from TV to film (Outer Space), is also suitable. (Hence, Reagan
and Shatner both earn places at the Hollywood Waxworks Museum).
However, Murphy’s
ambitions nosedive when The Pac-Man Show mutates from high- to low-concept TV,
and he is no longer wanted. Feeling used and heartbroken, he soon falls into an
hallucination where his own family are monstrosities, his best friend is
killed, and he is hounded by zombies he has awoken, baying for brain. As they
chant ‘we need good ideas’ relentlessly, we think back to Skink’s hunger for
good ideas, and T. Barry’s openness for good ideas about The Robot From
Outer Space. Murphy’s dream gives us a view of Hollywood as unstable,
parasitic and dangerous. His only escape is to ‘wake up’, and realise that it
is his friend who truly needs his good ideas.
The instability of
Hollywood is such that not only do the Armstrong brothers intervene to explain
bout scene excision, but are in turn interrupted by a film review segment,
presented by Robert Rakeridge and Loupenis Jones, who proceed to show unseen
clips from Two Idiots In Hollywood, and from T. Barry’s new movie, The Robot
From Outer Space. This is another nail in the coffin of normal continuity, and
the critics’ segment descends into bickering, then disintegrates altogether.
The fact that Robert and Loupenis lead the undead against Murphy shows that
even they are not above Hollywood’s deformed hostility.
Besides this view of
the entertainment industry, we hear from T. Barry of another, even more malign
Hollywood force.
‘Lawyers
are such horrible, horrible people.’ – T. Barry Armstrong
Not only have they set
up an investigation of his profit-sharing proposal for The Robot From Outer
Space, and eviscerated his movie of its most ‘crucial, hard-hitting scenes’,
but they are a threat within the movie, as illustrated by Taylor’s
misadventures. Following Joc Jeremy’s death, his police interrogation is
unnervingly warped; and the defence lawyer he is later allotted does him no
favours, by allowing him to be guided by his libido (he signs a confession in
the hope of scoring with female prisoners).
It is Taylor’s trial
scene that forms the richly elaborate crux of the film’s social commentary. We
are immediately unsettled to see that the statue of Justice is in fact an
immobilised person. The mutant Judge’s two heads are no better than one, as he
influences the jury, to the powerless frustration of the lawyer, who later
falls asleep. As the prosecution lawyer cross-questions Taylor, we are abruptly
reminded of the power of the small screen - this time, to repulse.
‘You watched
TV?! After a vicious, homosexual torture-murder – your Honour I’ve heard enough!!’
– Prosecuting Attorney
When Murphy later
mentions TV-watching, it is met with convulsions, vomiting and screaming from a
public terrified by the screen and its menacing implications. The barbershop
song brings about the complete degradation of the legal proceedings, with the
audience dancing, and the jurors regressing into Native Americans and hula
dancers. Taylor is then almost condemned under the false patriotism of the Jury
Foreman (‘I’ve lived in this great country America for 62 years to be exact’),
and then the Judge.
‘Hippies,
Yippees, Beatniks, and now this. It’s people like you who make a sham out of
civilisation and turn the Me Generation into a cruel joke.’ - Judge
Taylor is saved by the
arrival of the ghost of Joc Jeremy. He is accompanied to the courtroom doors by
Abraham Lincoln and Puck, but no further - for his speech will not quite reach
the heights of the Gettysburg Address, or of Shakespeare. (Besides, Lincoln,
having been killed in a theatre, would be uneasy in post-Reagan Hollywood.)
Jeremy is met with great fear, from an audience which has seen E.T. and
Poltergeist on the big screen and feels unsettled by such aberrations. (Also,
E.T. reminds us of the power of Entertainment Tonight.) Joc has a higher
purpose; an eloquent speech chiding Hollywood for its inept atavism.
‘You all
act like dogs, so eager to get a big dinner.’ - Joc Jeremy
Appropriate, since the
courtroom has featured both a buffet and a pack of dogs. So like Shatner’s
Pac-Man, the people of Hollywood live for food and sex. But unlike Pac-Man’s
ghosts, this ghost is neither ‘the slow terror of a wasted past’ or ‘faulty
sentimentality’ - he is the genuine sentimentality of a cherished past. Joc promotes
a more sedate, less Californian, yet more active life, such as the prelapsarian
serenity of his own youth. And then, the screen itself is redeemed, as we see
it used for good purpose - the family home video, with all the purity, dreamy
simplicity, love and friendship therein.
So, Taylor and Murphy
have survived Hollywood intact, but have they too been mutated? Apparently,
they’re still idiots, but with the Landlord’s admonition ringing in their ears,
they are ready to look for the best of all worlds, as it were, within the
Hollywood they have stumbled into. Murphy decides that the solution is DJing:
it is entertainment, but without the NBA’s lust for ideas; they ‘can talk’ and
‘like music’; they’ll get ‘tonnes of snatch’. And, if reality gets corrupted
again, and they can’t have it all,
‘We can
always dream.’ - Murphy
At this line, T. Barry
Armstrong has appeared on screen and points at us. We realise that this is the
point: the better we dream, especially in a world of nightmares, the better we
thrive. Finally, T. Barry’s own dream comes true: the Void is filled; the Robot
from Outer Space is with us.
|
|
|
|
Analysis
|
|
|
|
|
|
||