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The
Big Nothing
In
the words of Paul Newman, “Sometimes nothing can be a real
cool hand.”
If you’re not familiar with the movie Cool Hand Luke,
you should know that when Newman speaks this line, he’s raking
in the winnings during a work-camp poker game—winnings earned
with an air of invulnerability and not so much as a pair of
twos. This remarkably unsubtle movie has an almost scriptural
appeal to a certain type of cantankerous young man (young
women, impressed though they may be with young Newman’s aesthetic
allure, are for the most part immune to the charms of Cool
Hand Luke). It’s an Angry Young Man flick, through and
through, which holds up the incorrigible, recidivist scofflaw
lead character as an existential hero. It’s a compendium of
anti-authoritarian attitudes and slogans—one of my favorites
being Luke’s response to praise for the cunning planning of
his most recent failed escape: “I never planned anything in
my life.”
I love this movie and Luke’s reckless, totally improvised,
literally pointless rebellion against rules, against decorum,
against expectations, against society, against God, against
structure. It’s rebellion by default—Luke’s is an instinctual,
agenda-less rebellion—and it gets me right where I live (yes,
Freud, a state of extended adolescence).
Another of my favorite going-against-the-grain moments recalled
from TV was a stand-up segment featuring the consistently
unfunny comedian Colin Quinn, which I watched a little over
a decade ago. Quinn began his routine by nervously admitting
that there had been some miscommunication and that he had
come prepared to do about five minutes of material—the producers
had given him more than twice that time to fill. He looked
like he was in shock, like a traffic-accident victim.
Quinn roamed around the stage shrugging—a broad, terrified
grin frozen across his face—trying desperately to extemporize
something, anything, funny. At one point, he seemed to give
up completely and just sat at the stage’s edge and began a
conversation, apropos of absolutely nothing, with one of the
audience members.
It was excruciating and beautiful—and funny as hell.
My roommate of the time and I watched, slack-jawed and goggle-eyed,
trying to get a handle on whether we were watching the death
rattle of a career—the show-biz equivalent of Faces of
Death—or the most brilliant bit of bullshit we’d ever
seen. We couldn’t figure out whether we were being had by
Ken Ober’s one-time Remote Control sidekick.
“If
he’s doing this on purpose, he’s a freaking genius,” I said.
“Yeah,”
my friend said with similarly awed appreciation. “But, hey,
what is he if he’s not?”
Good question. Everything else we know about Quinn suggests
that he is not a genius: So, he was a boob, I guess, an underprepared
doofus who couldn’t be bothered to read the fine print and
had to wing it, to gut it out, to bluff. Thing is, Quinn’s
never been funnier—before or since, to my knowledge. Something
about the sheer terror of being out there with nothing at
all—out there empty, as it were—left him open to inspiration,
and with not so much as a pair of twos, he killed.
But, as Daffy Duck says, “Yeah, but whaddya do for an encore?”
Quinn couldn’t very well establish himself as the Terrified
Comic, that’d suck the mystery right out of it. And, what’s
more, audiences would give up on it pretty quickly. (If this
were not so, Andy Kaufman would have been as big as his screensake,
Jim Carrey.)
Not too many people, performers or audience, want full-time
uncertainty. Not in their lives, not in their entertainments:
too much risk; not enough quality control. We don’t want to
be asked to make it up as we go along; and we don’t want to
be taxed to interpret something that falls outside the prescribed
and familiar bounds. We want scripts. We want rules. We want
codes of conduct. We want three acts, with intermission. We
want the inverted pyramid. We want to get what we paid for.
You see this everywhere: the armor-plating of gimmick, the
safety of predictable shtick. From the popularity of chain
restaurants, to the obsession shared by both Hollywood and
Broadway for ancient hits (a Dukes of Hazzard movie?
A musical version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels? Have
people stopped writing new stuff altogether?), to the surprisingly
long-lived “New Dylanism” of the recording industry. This
is not to mention the politicians, journalists, Op-Ed and
humor-column writers flogging the same dead horses in the
same soundbites and cutesy clichéd formats—in franchise we
trust.
And frighteningly enough, the appetite for this stuff seems
to be not so much a taste, which would be harmless enough,
but a preference reflective of a mindset: More of the same,
please. We would rather feed the monkey of mediocrity than
face something new on our own, unaccompanied by received opinion.
And we contort to avoid the “What the fuck?” moments, and
lose sight of the fact that those are the necessary springboards
to the “Eureka!” moments.
Admittedly, the eurekas can be few and far between, and there’s
some security in planning and routine: Quinn got his act together
and, despite the cancellation of his most recent show, is
still a pretty well-employed, if uninspired, comedian.
On the other hand, the heroic Luke ends up shot through the
throat. (Sorry for the spoiler; but, c’mon, slowpokes, the
movie’s 38 years old.) Yuck. Nobody—not the most dedicated
improviser, not the most existentially angsty, perpetual teen—hopes
for that.
Even so, faced with the prospect of an encroaching and ongoing
martyrdom to convention, routine or inherited prejudice—a
kind of death in life—it seems nothing can still be a pretty
cool hand.
—John
Rodat
jrodat@metroland.net
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