PRIVATE PARTS
PREDICTIONS OF FIRE
A film review by Dave Cowen
Copyright 1997 Dave Cowen
In order to write this review, I need to admit that at one time I considered myself to be something of a Howard Stern fan. It was about the time back in college when I had shown a number of friends Stern's Pay-Per-View special, in which a man sets his private parts aflame. The man explained that he was trying to combat a case of the crabs and had succeeded in burning them to death by dousing that area of his body with lighter fluid. This sparked a discussion among my friends about the safety of using lighter fluid to burn off bodily hair, which ultimately ended in one of them running down the hallway of the dorm to the bathroom with a flaming hand. He spent the rest of the day with his hand in a bucket of water. So much for the safety of using lighter fluid to burn off bodily hair.
But watching Howard Stern's PRIVATE PARTS provoked something in me that I've only felt one other time when watching a movie, and it wasn't the kind of combination of titillation and amazement that Stern's radio and TV work seems to inspire. During the climactic scene, after Howard is cut off of the air after interviewing the first naked woman on radio and has stormed into his producer's office provoking a fight, I felt nauseous. My legs gave out, my stomach seized, and for once, I wanted nothing more than to get out of the theater. The other time this had happened was during the second half of Scorcese's GOODFELLAS, in which I was overwhelmed by the paranoia Ray Liotta's character was experiencing. At the viewing of PRIVATE PARTS I attended, though, it wasn't paranoia that made we want to leave the theater. It was disgust.
Throughout the past couple of years, I've found myself strangely charmed by two movies which portrayed men who found success in life by doing things that offended other people: Terry Zwigoff's CRUMB, and Milos Forman's PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT. CRUMB, seemed to overcome the insanity present in his family and provide brilliant social commentary by venting those impulses through brilliantly illustrated comics. Flynt, in a somewhat inadvertant way, upheld the rights for Americans to parody public figures and display the human body without restriction. I expected PRIVATE PARTS to trigger the same feeling in me: the triumph of an underdog who pays his dues, but ultimately gets what he wants in life by acting on his impulses, the "moral majority" be damned. But after Stern's on-air massage from a naked woman, during the fight, I didn't find Stern heroic... but pitiful. What was he fighting for?
Critics have expressed surprise that PRIVATE PARTS would portray Stern as being a good-hearted family man, and that at many times, PRIVATE PARTS seems to want to do nothing but espouse family values. How could it be any different? If you were making a movie about your life, with you playing yourself in the starring role, would you really make yourself look like, well, you really are? Of course not. With the vast majority of life stories, the film would be a huge flop. It's all ridiculously cynical -- in order to make the film make money, you've got to play to the type of person that the masses want to see, so you make yourself seem like you're just "playing a role," that you're really a sweet person underneath it all to win over both friends and enemies. Throughout the film, Stern gripes that he's always misunderstood. No wonder! With such brazen manipulation of public perception, glossing over the contradictions in his personality, Stern seems nothing more than a money grubbing jerk. "Put the kids in the last scene! People will eat it up!" It's that cynical calculation of alternating sleaze with a family values image that made me literally sick to my stomach.
The film isn't without good points. Stern's acting is natural, and his co-hosts Robin Quivers and Fred Norris do an admirable job in front of the camera. The film moves at a fast pace, and Stern, when he's shown doing the show itself, never fails to be hilarious. It's when the movie goes "behind the scenes" that it become artificial, treacly and rings horribly false.
The Neue Slowenische Kunst have a similar problem. NSK, an art collective based out of Ljubljana, Slovenia, bathe traditional art such as music, painting and dance with the overtones of fascism. Adopting the images and sounds of the totalitarian rule of their hometown Ljublijana, industrial musicians Laibach create pounding modern symphonies, often converting American or European pop standards into a frightening, pounding industrial brew. Their album Let it Be, in which the entire Beatles album Let It Be is transmogrified into a throbbing, stomping teutonic sound, is a classic of industrial music. It's also very funny, and very obviously an ironic joke. It's a pity that PREDICTIONS OF FIRE isn't as well.
In a completely deadpan style, director Michael Benson analyzes the development of the Neue Slowenische Kunst and the origins of their art, linking it with Ljublijana's history of occupation. Benson spends most of the movie's time showing old newsreel footage and reciting, in a dry and monotonous tone, the history of Slovenia.
How does hostory ultimately affect Neue Slowenische Kunst's art? Very little, it would seem. In what brief moments of what we see of Laibach, Irwin, or any of the other artists in the collective, it would seem that they're doing nothing more than pulling off postmodern pranks in the art world (similar to Britain's K Foundation, whose film debut was the much more impressive and direct WATCH THE K FOUNDATION BURN A MILLION QUID), adopting the image of fascism to do nothing more than shock. The mixture of dry documentary footage and art terrorism never meld, and much of the output of the NSK is glossed over to make way for history lessons which sound recited from a textbook. Like PRIVATE PARTS, PREDICTIONS OF FIRE seems to be revisionist history, trying to force NSK's output into a historical context to make it look serious or important, and ultimately, PREDICTIONS OF FIRE rings just as false.
Signed: ESCHATFISCHE, david (esch@fische.com) --------------------------------------------------------
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