"Monster Mash; What Sort of Animal Makes Music Like This?" The Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2000 I kept asking myself as I muscled through Joe Eszterhas' speedy ruminations on our national id in "American Rhapsody" what on God's green Earth is this thing? Is this Old New Journalism? New Old Journalism? No journalism at all, but instead a tabloid clip job? Once a proud bearer of the Rolling Stone banner of countercultural credibility, Eszterhas, now primarily known as the one-time most highly remunerated writer in Hollywood, has written something entirely other. Is this a book? A media event? The footnotes of the Starr Report accessible finally in all its erotic narrative, with a techno-rave drumbeat of paranoia and sleaze? A wannabe literary nuclear bomb thrown into the trenches of the culture war? For the most part, it is a sort of riff, a diatribe of first- person speculation, multiple-voice regurgitation of everything you've already heard, no longer care about and are quite rightly disgusted by: Monicagate. The subject, woven together with almost nostalgic anecdotes of '80s-style dinosaur misogyny in Hollywood, is a well-gorged-upon carcass, long picked over by more talented vultures, as well as by our finest writers and thinkers. This stuff can't even sustain a mediocre dinner party in Torrance anymore. From what heights or (more accurately) depths does
Eszterhas now address us, literally ad nauseum, about everything we have
already read, reread and retread, like a Norman Mailer with attention
deficit disorder? Think Hunter S. Thompson without the courage to tell
you what stimulant is driving him or the kaleidoscopic originality of
ideas; think "Howl" without poetry or Pat Robertson on acid.
Eszterhas chooses never to distinguish among opinion, fact and utter poppycock.
The difficulty of discerning any morsel of truth from the morass of speculation
is complicated by Eszterhas' invention of a character he aptly names the
Tawdry Little Prick, who is allowed in boldface type to literally make
things up. He speaks as many characters but most outrageously as Willard,
Bill Clinton's famous appendage. This book is definitely a product of this weird season of "Big Brother" and "Survivor." It feels like the publishing instance of the voyeuristic desperation that drives people to place cameras in their bathrooms and broadcast live, 24-7, to strangers around the world. Is this misguided effort at prepackaged pop culture buzz a ploy by otherwise savvy publishing moguls to mimic the behavior of their movie counterparts by marketing a book as though it were a summer blockbuster? It comes with all the trappings of hype and titillating promise, as if something really naughty or salacious or even vaguely original will be revealed. It was said to be a zealously guarded manuscript with a 200,000 first printing and an exclusive magazine serialization. Of what? An expose of Hollywood? I don't think so. Of the Clinton sex scandals? Of wildly flung off-base parallels of Bill Clinton's sexual drive, his allies in Hollywood and the '60s generation? Do these very same smart publishing people actually think Eszterhas' career has earned him a point of view on all this? Or were they merely intoxicated with his go-for-broke, bring-down- the-house willingness to bite the hand that so well fed him? Surely they can do better than a few 7-year-old skanky anecdotes about Sharon Stone, now a happily married woman. Surely there must be equally famous in-need-of-fresh-cash Hollywood types with better access and better gossip. It is a dirty book, but why should that surprise us? Eszterhas has become famous as a dirty movie writer. And he's proud of it. (Arguably, he wrote both the best and the worst of the decade's dirtiest movies, 1992's steamy and smart "Basic Instinct" and the unspeakably repellent 1995 "Showgirls.") As you do with any dirty book, you can skip through the boring stuff and go right to the scummy stuff, of which there's not nearly enough. Why rehash 5-year- old Monicagate drudgery when Philip Roth says everything there is to say about it this year in an often quoted astonishing paragraph in "The Human Stain": "It was the summer when--for the billionth time-- the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one's ideology and that one's morality. It was a summer when a presidential penis was on everyone's mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America." So much for theme, brilliantly encapsulated elsewhere. I am tempted to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen here: Joe Eszterhas is no Philip Roth. So the most intriguing aspect of the book is the vantage point from which its author has anointed himself the speaker of our cultural truths. Is it from his former self, the crusading social reporter who was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974? Or from his more recent incarnation as a celebrity screenwriter musing about movie star-like presidents and celebrity cigar incidents? The answer to this most interesting of questions is in his preface, actually the book's most revealing three pages. Eszterhas explains that he was tiring of his public
life as the most famous screenwriter in Hollywood. From interview to interview,
he confides, the constant attention was reducing him to a "public
persona." So he did that thing we do when we tire of our public selves
and whisked his family to Maui, locked himself in his room and read everything
ever written about the president's erotic life in search of his true self.
Eszterhas senses in his isolation that he and Clinton have much subterranean
conflict in common: In Maui, Eszterhas writes, he "was living a reclusive
life--not even calling agents [yeah, sure], lawyers, and friends back,
still refusing all interview requests--lost in a mirrored sea of my own
creation, in snorkeling pursuit of myself and Clinton, swimming though
his past in search of my own soul." Here emerges the theme of "American
Rhapsody," mythological narcissism: Joe is Bill. Once I came to understand the narrative conceit
of "American Rhapsody," I tried to wrap my brain around its
oeuvre. Some guesses: A pornographic political rave? A political pornographic
rant? Dialectical pornography? A lurid, sleazy melodrama without a plot
to speak of? A secret document issued from the vast right-wing conspiracy
to discredit any last vestige of '60s idealism? There are at least four kinds of falsehoods contained
in this book: I suspect that part of the problem here is that Joe has been out of town for a while now. His last interview given at the February 1998 release of his satire on the movie business, "An Alan Smithee Film: 'Burn, Hollywood, Burn,' " was called "How a Jaded Hollywood Screenwriter Looking for Fun Turned Tinseltown Upside Down." Eszterhas has been trying to turn Tinseltown upside
down like a cock-eyed gunslinger, a motley Clint Eastwood, ever since
he began his screenwriting career in 1978 with the labor drama starring
Sylvester Stallone, "F.I.S.T.," and for a moment in 1989, after
the success of "Jagged Edge" (1985), he almost did. It was a
publicity stunt worthy of P.T. Barnum. It was his coup de gra^ce, his
moment, the bugle call of his ambition. In 1993, he sold "Basic Instinct" for $3 million, then the highest amount ever paid for a screenplay. You get a sense of how far Eszterhas' social consciousness had evolved when he became the first screenwriter to claim he invented a movie star by writing a scene that displayed her pubic hair. Finally in 1995, he pulled out all the stops with the epic disaster "Showgirls," which collapsed many careers. A word about Stone, for whom one gains a lot of sympathy while reading this book: There seems to be something deeply significant to Eszterhas about the fact that he "made" Stone, "[s]omeone I created . . . someone I'd made a star." He mentions it often. Perhaps this act of Pygmalionism gives him the power to arouse and provoke the president, elevates him to Clinton's stature. To my mind, Stone made Eszterhas, and it isn't very nice of him to say every single mean thing he can think of because she's the most famous person he knows. But this is his book after all. Anyway, the notion that she made him fits less well into the grand unified theory of narcissism that ontologically connects him to his subject: Joe-Bill. Finally, after Eszterhas onanistically digests all the most salacious details gleanable from a) the Starr report footnotes; b) Juanita Broaddrick's sworn or unsworn testimony (only a member of the special prosecutor's office could trace all these leaks); c) Gennifer Flowers (his primary source); d) Monica Lewinsky; e) that irritating Kathleen Willey again; f) Dolly Whatever-her-name-is tell- alls; and g) everything ever fantasized by horny Arkansas state troopers, so that we think we finally know everything that is metaphysically possible to know about the size, characteristics, personality, history, pleasures and interior monologues of the presidential penis, he takes on others. People, not genitals. These added-on chapters about peripheral personalities grow increasingly distant from any recognizable narrative; we drift from Goldberg; Linda Tripp; Matt Drudge; Vernon Jordan; Bob Packwood; Wayne Hay's mistress, Elizabeth Ray; and Arianna Huffington to Monica's interior monologue as Hitler's whore and to every hooker who ever had a congressman. (Or so it seems.) My mind wandered wildly for a common notion tying these disparate biographical threads together. It had to be sex. I found it in the vile and gratuitous attack on the homosexuality of Michael Huffington, thereby trying to justify an ugly chapter on his ex- wife, and in the scattershot list of every minor ancient Hollywood sex scandal-rumor of the last 20 years (Evans, Baumgarten, Farrah, Ryan, please!) in no context whatsoever. Trees have been felled for this. Why? Haven't we had enough? By the end of the book, one suffers not so much Clinton Fatigue as just mere fatigue. In the end, Eszterhas has given us 45 chapters on . . . nothing. |
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