My Year of Flops (26 page)

The language we use to talk about these figures of mass lust says much about the safe voyeurism of moviegoing. The term “America's sweetheart,” for example, conveys our shared appreciation for women so glorious that a cultural consensus has been reached that they embody everything that is good and American about womanhood. Who doesn't love Audrey Hepburn, in spite of her being, you know, not American? Only a goddamned Nazi, that's who. And Nazis have no business pining for our Audrey.

Sex symbols, in sharp contrast, need only ignite the universal libido. America's sweethearts are always metaphorical virgins; sex symbols are voracious whores seducing us from afar.

An amusing subsection of the sex-symbol genus is what is quaintly known as the thinking man's sex symbol. That concept flatters cinephiles' innate sense of superiority. It implies that even their libidos are discerning. Let the ignorant rabble have their saline-inflated Pamela Andersons and Jessica Simpsons. These sophisticated souls prefer the rarefied likes of Maggie Gyllenhaal or Tina Fey.

Critics consequently walk a fine line between acknowledging the innate voyeurism of moviegoing and coming across as trenchcoat-sporting superpervs. Pauline Kael playfully acknowledged the voyeurism of cinephilia by giving her books suggestive titles:
I Lost It At The Movies, Taking It All In, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, Deeper Into Movies, When The Lights Go Down, Afterglow,
and the infamous
Handjob By The Popcorn Stand.
Other critics let their prose drool for them. Reading
Nicole Kidman,
David Thomson's heavy-breathing “appreciation” of the Australian ice queen, I didn't know whether Kidman should send Thomson a thank-you letter or take out a restraining order against him. Similarly, Jeanine Basinger spends so much time panting over Tyrone Power in
The Star Machine
that I feared that she'd dig up Power's skeleton, dress him up in fancy clothes, and gush, “My goodness, Tyrone, you're even more divine looking as a rotting bag of bones! Why, if I were 20 years younger and you hadn't died 50 years ago, I don't know
what
might have happened!”

What does any of this have to do with this My Year Of Flops Case File on 1991's
The Rocketeer
? Well, I have always wanted to write the world's longest, most lascivious, and needlessly digressive introduction to an essay about a PG-rated family film. Mission accomplished, just like our glorious commander in chief said when he single-handedly won the Iraq War. USA! USA! USA!

More to the point,
The Rocketeer
features the most divine creature in the history of film: a 20-year-old Jennifer Connelly. Connelly plays a character whom the late comic-book artist Dave Stevens originally modeled after Bettie Page, whose strange, sordid career was predicated on being an impossible object of desire, a beautiful blank upon whom perverts could project their twisted fantasies. In Stevens' comics, the love interest is even named Betty, though the film changed the character's name (to Jenny Blake) and profession (from nude model to actress). Page lived to be seen, worshipped, adored. Connelly plays an idealized version of Page, the one Bettie Page wanted to be: an actress and a good girl, not the kind of virgin-whore who retains an air of innocence even while getting paddled by a mistress in bondage gear.

In
Career Opportunities
and
The Hot Spot,
Connelly radiated the steam heat of a classic sex symbol. In
The Rocketeer,
she's the quintessential America's sweetheart. Since
Requiem For A Dream,
she's become a frighteningly skinny waif who suffers disproportionately for our sins in an endless series of downers, earning her ambiguous status as a thinking man's sex symbol. She's mastered the art of being all things to all people.

Connelly isn't the only breathtaking aspect of
The Rocketeer
. It's a film of staggering glamour and beauty, an all-American tribute to the dangerous, exciting world of pulpy serials. Disney undoubtedly
thought it had the next blockbuster franchise on its hands. It was not to be. A film series got snuffed in its infancy, leaving behind a raft of unsold
Rocketeer
action figures, cookie jars, lunch boxes, models, pins, cards, and videogames. Bill Campbell and Connelly both signed on for sequels that were never made. Even the biggest TV-ad push in Disney history at the time couldn't drive audiences to the film. In spite of okay reviews and okay box office, the film was a brutal disappointment to Disney.

Today,
The Rocketeer
stands as both a fascinating precursor to the film adaptation of
Iron Man
—though
Iron Man
made its comics debut decades before Stevens introduced the Rocketeer in a
Starslayer
comic in 1982—and as an antidote to the current spate of revisionist superhero efforts. We've been inundated with so many cinematic superheroes in need of therapy and mood stabilizers as of late that it's refreshing to see a superhero whose biggest psychological weakness involves neglecting his bestest gal in favor of flying.

As played by pretty boy Billy Campbell, Cliff, aka The Rocketeer, is a man devoid of existential angst and neurosis. All he wants to do is fly. He's unabashedly a comic-book hero. We are dealing with archetypes here, characters lustily embodied by the dependable likes of Alan Arkin (as Peevy, the crusty father figure) and Paul Sorvino (as sausage-fingered mobster Eddie Valentine).

The Rocketeer
is defiantly old-fashioned. Like his mentors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, director Joe Johnston injects the pulp ephemera of yesteryear with newfangled technological sophistication. Period films tend to age gracefully;
The Rocketeer,
like the Indiana Jones series, feels like it could have been made in 1940 or yesterday: It's timeless.

The filmmakers give
The Rocketeer
an epic scope and comic book sensibility. It's a movie movie: Many of the film's central characters are actors and filmmakers, including Connelly's radiant starlet; heavy Timothy Dalton as Neville Sinclair, a mustache-twirling bad guy modeled on Errol Flynn; and dashing Terry O'Quinn as filmmaker/aviator Howard Hughes.

The Rocketeer
's plot concerns a glistening, alluringly mammary-like rocket pack developed by Howard Hughes; it falls into the hands of mobsters, then gets discovered by hotshot flyboy Cliff and mentor Peevy. Cliff is immediately fascinated. What red-blooded American boy wouldn't want a jet pack of his very own?
The Rocketeer
taps into four fantasies shared by every strapping heterosexual American lad: flying, being a superhero, battling Nazis, and having sex with Bettie Page.

Cliff uses the jet pack to become costumed adventurer the Rocketeer. By superhero standards, the Rocketeer is a little lacking: He doesn't shoot fireballs or have X-ray vision or superpowers or titanium skin. He's just a handsome guy with a rocket pack. But rocket packs are so inherently awesome that they render other superpowers unnecessary.

The Rocketeer
takes place in an alternate-universe 1938 Hollywood where Bettie Page is an innocent extra, Errol Flynn is a Nazi secret agent, Howard Hughes is a dashing Good Samaritan who happily sacrifices lucrative government contracts for the sake of the public good, and a rocket pack has the potential to shift the balance of power between the good guys and Nazi bogeyman. In that respect, it's like James Ellroy by way of Richard Donner's
Superman.
In reality, Hughes was less Mr. Smith than Mr. Burns. But in
The Rocketeer
's flag-waving comic-book world, even mobsters and war profiteers are patriotic above all else.

The Rocketeer
soars as pure spectacle. Every element feels perfectly in place. The dialogue is slangy and fun. The setpieces are constant and astonishing, including a swashbuckling epic where Jenny and Neville meet, the many flying sequences, a spectacular climax aboard an exploding Nazi zeppelin. The supporting parts are uniformly executed with panache. Bit players like a hulking mob flunky who looks like Boris Karloff after taking a few too many frying pans to the face illustrate the truth of Konstantin Stanislavski's famous line about there being no small parts, just shitty roles played by horrible fucking actors who waste everyone's time with their terrible performances. All this,
plus the most gorgeous woman in history (other than my girlfriend) at the height of her nubile beauty. As a great man once said, “USA! USA! USA!”

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success

Chapter 5

Unsexy Sexy Films

Reality Bites Case File #56: The Real Cancun

Originally Posted August 7, 2007

On April 25, 2003, the pagan gods of cinema faced down a threat greater than piracy, the Internet, and the Wayans combined: reality television, the insidious cultural poison that transformed the medium of Edward R. Murrow and Rod Serling into a forum to explore the complicated psyches and love lives of Corey Feldman, Vince Neil, and various
Playboy
playmates and
Survivor
losers.

Cultural barbarians were clamoring at the gate, eager to corrupt a venerable institution that gave the world Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and
Citizen Kane
—and, to be fair, two competing films about the lambada that famously pitted Golan against Globus. Our culture stood at a perilous crossroads. In just a few short years, the reality plague had completely transformed television. Now it looked primed to do the same to film. The test balloon in question?
The Real Cancun,
a potentially revolutionary “reality movie” from Bunim-Murray Productions, the demon spawn behind the MTV sensation
The Real World
.

From a production standpoint, reality movies boasted myriad advantages over fictional films. They were cheap, could be filmed and edited in a fraction of the time of their fictional counterparts (
Cancun
was filmed in 10 days, then hit theaters five weeks later), and didn't require demanding, expensive stars or batteries of screenwriters and script doctors. Most important, they featured the most powerful force known to man: boobs. Who needs Dame Judi Dench when there's an endless supply of strumpets willing to doff their tops for a shot at the limelight?