The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004)

THE MAD STORY OF A TRUE MAN

Everyone, at some point in their lives, has experienced a sense of the world being against them. No matter what they do, things just seem to be against them, circumstances never in their favour. It’s not fair. Worse still, everyone around seems to be unaffected by this, or at least unsurprised by this lack of fairness in the world. Things are meant to be different, people are meant to be different. How can you be the only one to feel like this? You’ve tried to be decent, hard-working, honest, but you just can’t seem to catch a break. Things have to change. Something must be done. Someone must be responsible. Such is the worldview of perennial loser Samuel Bicke, who decides that his suffering must end and the system must change.

In 1974, Samuel Bicke (Sean Penn) is a lonely and ineffectual salesman who feels wronged by his family, friends, employers and the world in general. He believes he stands for truth, honesty and integrity, so he regularly loses his job rather than lie to his customers. His plans for success are hindered by this sensibility. Pushed closer to the edge, he begins to associate both his failings, and society’s, with President Richard Nixon, who represents all things dishonest. As such, he decides that things must change and that he must therefore kill Nixon.

Almost to make the point of such a universal perception of the world being against you, when the original idea for the story was conceived, it was genuinely begun as a work of fiction. However, over the course of researching the period and story, the writers discovered that something very similar had actually occurred in the early 1970s. A failed businessman, Samuel Jospeh Byck, stormed a Delta Air Lines flight and, gun in hand, tried to get the pilots to get the plane in the air and crash it into the White House… eerily prophetic, right? His attempt failed and the airport police killed him on the plane, although he had already claimed some lives himself. And things didn’t stop at a deranged man attempting to hijack a plane for the world’s most dramatic Presidential assassination. Byck had made several attempts to start a business, all of which failed. As time went on, his marriage became strained, he began to suffer from depression and he also began to harbour conspiratorial theories that the government was secretly trying to oppress the poor and underprivileged. He made his attempts to be heard in some way, by trying to join the Black Panthers, whom he believed shared his outrage at the system; by protesting outside the White House, sometimes dressed as Santa Claus; and sent recorded messages to various public figures, explaining his motives to people he thought would understand. Frankly, if Niels Mueller and Kevin Kennedy had ignored this stuff in their writing, it would have been very foolish.

As it is, they recognised the weight of this story and tailored the idea to reflect Byck more directly. Of course, certain modifications were made for the purposes of a cleaner film. They concentrated more on his personal life, attempting to give a stronger sense of his motivations by focusing on the inadequacies and flaws. They show the awkward ineptitude of his working life, his inability to recognise that his marriage is pretty much over, his strained interactions with other people in day-to-day life. The most significant part of Samuel Bicke’s life in the film is his belief that the reason he fails so consistently is not because he is himself a failure, but that he is simply too honest in a dishonest world. As far as he is concerned, the world is meant to operate on truth and integrity, that the honest people will thrive and the dishonest will perish. Essentially, he bought into the whole idea of the American Dream. The only problem is that world simply doesn’t work like that. Things aren’t fair, things aren’t equal. He looks around and sees racism, sexism, war, lies, dishonesty. How can an honest person get ahead in this kind of system?

Of course, Bicke ignores the reality of his own personality and his own situation. For all of his espousal of being honest and true, he is as big a liar as anyone. The people at his newest job think he’s a happily married man, even though he’s been separated for almost two years. His soon to be ex-wife believes he is doing well in his new job, and can maintain support money for the kids. He likes to think that the reason he keeps quitting his jobs is because he refuses to lie to the customer (certainly an admirable quality), but the fact is that he is just a bad and ineffectual salesman. Considering how meagre an impression he makes on people and how poor he is at effective communication, this is a man of extreme arrogance. It’s one thing to look at the world around you and want to change it for the better, but when your reasons are built on a severe sense of delusion, it’s not going to get you far. His sense of how the world works is so skewed that when he applies for a loan, the fact that he was “honest” in filling out the form means that it’s as good as done. He honestly can’t see that, to the loan officer, he comes across as untrustworthy, unreliable and a little bit too intense. He also has the most bizarre idea for the Black Panthers, which he tries to pitch them directly:

Samuel Bicke: I wanna throw an idea at you… Zebras.

Harold Mann: Zebras?

Samuel Bicke: Zebras. You see, they're black, and they’re white. The Black

Panthers become The Zebras, and membership will double.

To him, it makes perfect sense, it’s flawless. However, it’s a clear signpost that he has a fundamental misunderstanding about how things work in the world, believing that his struggle with the system is no different than that of your average oppressed black man of the early 70s.

In the film, they refer to a good salesman having “competitive spirit.” This is something Bicke most definitely does not have. He ultimately gets pushed too far and begins to take action towards changing the broken system, and uses something of a personal barometer in selecting both his target and his confessor. For the former, he chooses President Nixon, the incredibly unpopular politician who still managed to get elected twice. His boss describes Nixon as the best salesman in the country, selling the public on one thing, not delivering on that promise and then selling it all over again. Clearly, it’s not just Bicke that thinks he’s corruption incarnate. For the latter, Bicke looks to composer Leonard Bernstein, whom he believes is a man that will understand his struggle, his plight, his need for a world built on truth and honesty. Bicke records several taped messages about his motives, his plans to take down the system that seeks to subjugate the poor masses like himself. Shortly before Bicke makes his way to the fateful plane, he mails these recordings from the airport.

The character of Samuel Bicke is very well drawn, and played in typically excellent manner by Sean Penn. Penn has always been someone possessed of a simmering frustration in the world around him, and his constant protests and remonstrations make him the most suitable candidate for the role. Even if you often can’t say you like Bicke, you can sympathise and you absolutely understand how he comes to be as fractured and desperate as he is. As he approaches situations of confrontation, where he feels that something inherently unjust is occurring, he reacts with a blend of queasy discomfort and indignant rage.

However, I feel like there is a degree of incompleteness to the film. Although we do understand why his target is Nixon, because he just flat out tells us, more could have been done to underline these feelings. Nixon is really just an occasional background figure, shown on televisions in bars or Bicke’s workplace. There is never anything really done to make us believe that Bicke believes there to be a direct link between Nixon’s dishonesty and his own failing. Of course, these feelings would have been baseless, since Nixon wasn’t actually out to get this guy, but they don’t really have to make rational sense to us, we just have to think it makes sense to him. Bicke barely mentions him. And on the other side of things, the reasoning for Bicke to make his tapes for Leonard Bernstein feels a bit thin. He simply says that Bernstein writes honest music. Again, the reasons don’t really have to make sense to us, we only have to believe they make sense to him, and I don’t feel it. Honestly, it makes me feel a bit weird to be making these points, since these things actually happened. Also, the real life Byck was clearly not in a correct state of mind when he did these things, so his reasoning was clearly faulty in all sorts of ways. Nevertheless, I personally can’t get past the thin ground on which the film’s dramatic drive becomes based on. If it just felt firmer, if these points were made clearer, if just an extra ten minutes was given to the film to solidify these motives, I would have been more convinced.

Then again, I’ve been known to be too picky at times.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon is a fine drama, with an interesting character conveyed with great conviction by Sean Penn. However, the balance of things in the script and direction hinder what could have been something truly great. A little less information here, a bit more information there and the overall struggle would have been far more resonant and defined. It’s still a very good and interesting watch, but there is just a feeling that it could have been a little bit more.

The Aristocrats (2005)

NO NUDITY. NO VIOLENCE. UNSPEAKABLE OBSCENITY.

For as long as there has been comedy, there has been the drive to push boundaries of what you can get laughs from, be it the anarchic violence of a Tom & Jerry cartoon or the verbal hammer blow of what Bill Hicks would call “a big purple-veined dick joke.” The history of comedy is a history of societal taboos and hang-ups having a light shone on them for satire, for shock, and for laughs. Do you have a comedy line? Is there any particular subject that you absolutely refuse to laugh at or find any humour in? Maybe you don’t have one. Maybe you think any subject is fair game for comedy. In 2005, Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette produced a documentary that would focus on the various subjects often considered too close to the bone for audiences, and how they go to play in the conception and delivery of a joke notorious amongst comedians, but largely unknown to everyone else.

There is a joke that virtually every comedian knows. A joke only told by comedians to other comedians … the Aristocrats joke. 100 comedians are interviewed to discuss the joke, what makes it funny, the varied tellings and interpretations they’ve heard, the history of the joke and have a crack at telling it their own way.

It’s frankly a little difficult to discuss the content of The Aristocrats because, honestly, they do a pretty good job of doing that in the movie. The joke itself gets told a handful of times, but the majority of the film is taken up with a multitude, a plethora, a veritable overabundance of comedians talking about the joke from various different angles. And they all have interesting ideas about it. They openly pontificate on what they think makes the joke work, what subject gets the best laughs, what the limitations of the structure are, the flaws of the joke, what you can tell about the person telling the joke from what subject they spend the most amount of time describing. On a broader level, they use it to talk about the reactions people can have to the more problematic areas of comedy, like incest, or rape, or race, or bodily fluids. All of the comedians seem to be aware that there is a line in people, but take great pleasure in trying to find that line and then cross it. As far as dissection and deconstruction goes, it’s fairly thorough. Since this is the case, I’ll talk more about whether or not I think the film itself works.

The first time I saw The Aristocrats in a theatre, I was one of a little over a dozen people. Only around fifty percent of the audience made it to the end of the film, the rest having walked out before the halfway point. I mention this because I get the feeling that there are two kinds negative reactions that people can have to The Aristocrats. One is that they are very offended by what they are hearing, their limits of taste and decency having been pushed too far. The other negative reaction is that, despite the grotesque images being conjured up, many people will genuinely not like it because they just don’t think it’s funny… Have you ever been told a joke that you didn’t think was funny, and the person telling it then accused you of being “too serious” for not laughing? This is how some will react to the film. In fact, there are a few people in the film that don’t get the joke, that don’t understand why it’s meant to be funny, that simply don’t laugh because they think it’s a bad joke. It’s even something they talk about in the film, before making the point that it’s the absurd journey of the set-up that draws the laugh and not the admittedly weak punch line. You may find yourself spending more time awkwardly waiting to laugh than actually laughing. It's also quite likely that many of the people who said they never laughed so much at a movie in their lives were trying to avoid being regarded as too uncool or serious to "get it."

I laughed a lot the first time I saw The Aristocrats, and still laugh when I see it now, though not as much. There is a lot of flab to the film, what feels like pointless gurning in an attempt to drag a particular laugh from the audience. This seems to come from a lack of real direction from Provenza. It seems like he thought that if he just interviewed as many comedians as possible about this joke, the direction would reveal itself in the edit and he would be able to construct something of great comedy and great insight from there. Sadly, this is not the case, with so much of the film feeling like padding, a showcase for a vast array of comedy talent. As such, there’s a cacophonous element to the film that it never really gets over, as if they all want to be the one you remember by film’s end by screaming the joke the loudest.

Several of the comedians on show equate comedy in general, and this joke in particular, to jazz: “it’s the singer, not the song.” I’m a big fan of jazz, but I can certainly understand why some people don’t like it. It’s something you need to kind of learn how to appreciate. Really good jazz can take an old standard and build on it, improvising and experimenting, utilising the talents of great musicians to create a single piece of great music that’s very satisfying to hear; really bad jazz can have a group of disparate musicians openly competing with each other for supremacy, turning that old standard into a ragged string of dissonant notes and sounds that’s often quite painful. The Aristocrats film has more of the latter than the former. There’s an undeniable feeling of some people striving to get the biggest overall laugh with their piece. It’s natural to understand that they would try, but… have you ever seen a stand-up try to flog laughs from a dead joke and get nothing? That’s what it feels like every now and then. The primary rule of comedy is timing and, in truth, this film would have been much better served if it lost about half an hour from its running time.

However, there is still some truly great stuff in there. A silent version of the joke as acted out by Billy the Mime is excellent for its uniqueness; Gregg Rogell’s telling, though broken up in the edit somewhat, is great for the superb way in which he’s structured each part of the joke and the enthusiasm he puts to it; just Bruce Vilanch’s delivery of the phrase “fountains of jism!” is superb; Kevin Pollack’s impression of Christopher Walken telling the joke is brilliant, even if he crumbles before he gets to the end; the animated South Park piece is really very funny; and Sarah Silverman’s abuse confessional is a stellar piece of acting. You will also likely gain a newfound respect for Gilbert Gottfried from the segment of him telling the joke at Hugh Hefner’s Comedy Roast, which served as the inspiration for the documentary itself. And there are many smaller laughs to be had throughout, so you should be able to find a chuckle or three in there somewhere.

The Aristocrats is certainly a very interesting film, which will have a multitude of effects on different people. It has moments of comedy genius, and even manages to tap into what makes comedy such a vital part of society. However, there is also a lot of the film that is a bit of a slog, with stuff that you just have to get through until the next funny bit. There’s just a lack of overall direction or pace or an idea as to what they want to say that makes it feel like there’s still something you’re not getting about the whole thing. It’s got great stuff in it, but it’s not all gold.