For me, it was the two young women on the bus. The two women who cranked their headphone tunes ‘til they were well-audible to everyone else; who shot back at the man objecting with laughter and curses; who got to leave the bus without paying because that’s how much the bus driver wanted them gone, and who were last seen standing in front of the local college, smoking and still cursing that complaining passenger who was returning fire as he stomped down the street.
Bad behavior. Yes, we all see it, and yes, if you’re even remotely like me (which may be a stretch), you wonder what the world’s coming to, or abhor what you figure it’s already come to.
And perhaps you fantasize about getting a gun.
Bobcat Goldthwait’s new film “God Bless America,” which opened Friday June 29th at the SIFF Cinema Uptown with an open-ended run, starts with a man named Frank Murdoch, played by Joel Murray. Although he owns a gun, his violence towards his uncouth neighbors stays in the realm of fantasy at first. He lies awake at night listening to a fusillade of reality TV from the other side of his wall.
Murray’s a little thick at the midriff, a little jowly. He looks like no one in particular in early 21st-century America, which of course is what Goldthwait wants. Murray looks more than a little like Brian Wilson, a Beach Boy with the loud shirts but without the latterday smile. Imagine Brian Wilson never redeemed, never famous, maybe never lauded, looking at the America he made in his mind slipping ever further into the America the future made.
Bad news, good intentions, and more bad news put the gun in Frank’s hand. As one friend of mine remarks, he wants to kill fools. And while in theory fools could come from anywhere, they’re especially easy to find through the television.
A more mainstream film would run the blood faster, longer, and straighter. In Goldthwait’s film, as in real life I imagine, taking lives proves messy. Frank learns this around the same time he learns that help is on the way, whether he wants it or not.
Roxy Harmon (Tara Lynne Barr) offers her help. She’s a teenage girl with, she says, nowhere to go and nothing to do except follow Frank on his trail of gore. Roxy’s an unlikely character, and subtle clues suggest she isn’t entirely real. Shielding herself from Frank’s possible suicide, she takes refuge in a motel garment bag shining her shoulders into wings. She comes with a ready smile, a disarming smirk, and an appetite for goading Frank into further destruction, but she remains an angel of death.
Goldthwait wants to feed our visions about how much better things would be if we, and not they, ran things. But oddly enough he doesn’t serve up full, satisfying portions of revenge fantasy. Frank and Roxy spend as much time debating who to kill and why, as they do pulling triggers (both shooting left-handed; could this be a political statement?). And many of the shootings go by obliquely, with just enough gore fests left in to satisfy gore hounds.
The “Bonnie And Clyde” duo respond to the volume-crankers and trash-talkers of the world, respond to those who take unwarranted license in public life, by absurdly, if sometimes amusingly, re-upping with a homicidal license of their own. They’re also perfectly OK with making martyrs of right-wing shock jocks, even after their first right-wing shock-jock target warns them off this approach with one of his last breaths. It’s OK to create martyrs, they reason, because the killings satisfy their own personal agenda. They don’t waste much time thinking about the rest of the world. Not too different from the original Bonnie and Clyde.
Goldthwait recognizes that Frank can’t resolve his own inner contradictions, and as the movie’s climax makes clear, he especially can’t cope with the horror of learning that some of the “victims” he’s been “avenging” actually like the world the way it is. He can’t stand other people taking their ideas from other people, but he must face, finally, that Roxy’s been a devil in his ear.
The director wants us to take a pause, to engage our brains and our wise minds before engaging our outrage. And whatever the nature of the outrage—I’m watching the footage of the cops pepper-spraying the Pride Festival while I sit typing this—that’s advice worth engaging. Even through all that gore.
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