The Travolta/Cage Project #21/My World of Flops Sweaty Fuck Palaces Case File 159: Perfect (1985)
At least the “hot bodies” and “high energy” parts are accurate.
When we launched The Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast, an epic journey through the complete discographies of Face/Off co-stars and preeminent trash culture icons John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, the goal was to determine, scientifically and objectively, which actor is better.
I almost instantly found myself falling into the role of the podcast and column’s requisite Travolta champion, apologist and defender despite my extraordinary love and respect for Cage. I expected Cage to be the more popular figure with our audience but I did not expect him to triumph on a near-universal level.
It seemed like literally every patron preferred Cage to Travolta. So I took it upon myself to advocate on behalf of Travolta and his many, many, many terrible movies. Man, you know who has made a fuck-ton of bad movies? Fucking John Travolta, that’s who. It gets a little oppressive after a while and I’m not just saying that because I just saw Perfect, which followed Two of a Kind, which followed Staying Alive in Travolta’s filmography.
In the same stretch, Cage made Vampire’s Kiss, Moonstruck and Raising Arizona. I’ve held out for as long as possible, which turns out to not be that long at all, and now I am willing to throw in the towel and concede that Cage is DEFINITELY the greater actor, icon and human being. I am in awe of Cage at this point in his career, while my patience with Travolta is wearing thin.
Vampire’s Kiss and Perfect have proven oddly, almost uncannily complementary movies. Each is about the hedonism and decadence of the 1980s, about impossibly good-looking, narcissistic yuppies with ripped bodies and pretty faces who take advantage of the freedoms of the Reagan decade to have casual sex with beautiful women with perfect bodies.
But where Vampire’s Kiss is a pitch-black satirical masterpiece at once timeless and unmistakably a product of its time, Perfect is a very dumb movie and a very silly movie that has deluded itself into thinking that it is very smart and very serious.
If there is a deeper meaning to the health club boom of the 1980s, Perfect most assuredly does not find it. That’s certainly not for a lack of trying. Even when it’s in horned out pervert mode, which is much of the time, to its ultimate credit, Perfect still takes itself very seriously.
Perfect certainly has an impressive pedigree. It reunites the winning creative team behind Urban Cowboy: writer-director James Bridges, star John Travolta and journalist Aaron Latham, who wrote the stories Urban Cowboy and Perfect are based on and co-wrote the screenplays and, for good measure, inspired Perfect’s lead character Adam, the stunningly handsome, brilliant, principled yet sexy crusading journalist John Travolta plays here.
With a resume that includes The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome and the aforementioned Urban Cowboy, Bridges is an old pro at making socially conscious docudramas inspired very directly by real stories but fitness proved a VERY sexy yet ultimately empty and limited and limiting subject.
It turns out there is a big difference in making ambitious, socially conscious docudramas about the grueling nature of law schools, and the psychological toll it takes on students, the threat of nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, working-class Southerners finding escape and identity in honky Tonks and horny people in spandex doing jumping jacks, lifting weights and then boning.
Perfect opens, pointlessly, with our dashing journalistic hero cranking out obits, the ultimate low-glamour gig. We then experience a time jump of Bratz: The Movie-level length and abruptness: it’s suddenly five years later and Adam now has the ULTIMATE glamour gig: he’s a REAL writer for Rolling Stone, writing about manly, important shit that could get him killed or tossed in the hoosegow but he doesn’t care because he’s a journalist with ethics chasing down the story of a lifetime.
Then Adam sees some people in workout clothes and it inspires a pitch of pure hackdom: are health clubs the single bars of the 1980s? Adam pitches boss Mark Roth and his editor, envisioning a funny, satirical takedown of Southern California airheads, gives him the green light.
Roth is played by real-life Rolling Stone owner and founder Jann Wenner in a part so large that the first time thespian receives the kind of “And” credit usually reserved for the likes of Christopher Walken or William Hickey.
When I think about Jann Wenner he is forever writing a five star review for an otherwise politely ignored late-period solo album from his good friend Mick Jagger. So it is exquisitely on-brand that Wenner’s character is introduced fawning over photos of a solo Mick Jagger looking pretty much exactly the same way he looks in every photo shoot ever.
Frankie, a female photographer who will serve as Adam’s foil and image-obsessed nemesis gushes of her own work, “At last someone has managed to capture his true essence.”
I don’t want to be cynical, but I’m pretty sure all Rolling Stone does is capture Mick Jagger’s true essence. When the Rolling Stones frontman dies fifty or sixty years from now I’m sure there will be a commemorative 500 page issue of Rolling Stone of just photographs that capture his essence from the magazine’s extensive files.
Oh, how I wish Perfect was one of an endless series of movies blessed with Wenner’s Brandoesque charisma and brute sexuality! I want Jann Wenner buddy cop movies where he plays a fussy Rolling Stone editor paired with a conspiracy-minded wildcat played by Jesse Ventura! I want Jann Wenner action movies where he and Michael Dudikoff take on Columbian drug dealers threatening an orphanage! I want Jann Wenner Westerns and musicals and a Secret Honor-like one man show where he plays his greatest and most natural role: Rolling Stone editor. I want Jann Wenner as Thanos, Thor AND Loki!
Alas, it was not to be. Perfect teased us sadistically with the promise of a Jann Wenner Cinematic Universe but this turned out to be more of a dead end than a riveting new beginning.
Adam then heads to Los Angeles and The Sport Connection, a sexed-up, super-popular gym and fitness mecca whose most popular instructor is Jessie Wilson. Jamie Lee Curtis. I had a massive crush on Jamie Lee Curtis as a kid, which is a precious way of saying that I masturbated feverishly to her image as a young man.
Watching Perfect that crush roared back to life with a new force and intensity. Though she doesn’t have much in the way of good dialogue, or a character arc, or development, physically she is a goddamn wonder to behold, a sex bomb whose hip thrusts aren’t just sexual: they’re goddamn pornographic.
Perfect is so brazenly sexual that a porn parody would be redundant. This already feels like soft-core porn with pretensions to being something much more.
The way Jessie leads aerobics class is more sexual than the way most people fuck on their best and kinkiest day. Fitness is foreplay here; aerobics a prelude for fucking. In Perfect, health clubs aren’t just the singles bars of the 1980s: they’re sweat-soaked, spandex-clad fuck palaces, hyper-sexual dens of sin and inquiry.
Adam understandably falls into a deep, instant state of lust with the sex bomb fitness instructor . He doesn’t just want to seduce her; he also wants to interview her for his story but she proves a harder interview to nail down than J.D Salinger. She’s been burned before but Adam bulldozes past her formidable defenses with a pretentious monologue about the health club as a cathedral of Emersonian self-reliance and harbingers of a Great Physical Awakening on par with the Spiritual Great Awakening of a century earlier in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America where institutions have lost authority.
In a savvier, more self-aware movie, Adam’s pretentious spiel about Emerson’s spirit pervading every juice bar and beginner cardio class at your local health club would be posited as the self-important blather of a pretentious tool, but the filmmakers seem legitimately impressed, positing his nonsense as legitimately intellectual, not painfully faux-intellectual.
The health club’s resident sex bomb makes fuck-me eyes at Adam while dry-humping the air to the music of Lou Reed and Jermaine Jackson in a magnetic erotic display and soon tumbles into bed with the sexually irresistible yet professionally driven stud.
Jessie throws herself at Adam. She seduces him by sauntering over to his primitive word processor and saucily typing, “Wanna fuck?” But then Adam has to dash off to work on the other story that proves that he’s a REAL REPORTER. This sets off a pattern where Adam keeps pushing the perfect woman with the perfect body away by being a careerist creep who puts his work above the feelings of others.
Perfect portrays its rugged journalist hero as Woodward and Bernstein, Edward G. Murrow and Walter Cronkite in one, a dashing reporter willing to risk his freedom and his life for the sake of ethics and integrity.
Yet when Jessie reads what Mr. Journalism has written about her friends and the world they inhabit it’s slut-shaming garbage about a promiscuous gym addict played by Laraine Newman Adam charmingly refers to as “The most used piece of equipment in the gym” and a six-on-one group sex session where she had sex with bodybuilders in a series of positions designed to recreate different exercises.
We’re led to expect Hunter S. Thompson having a satirical go at fitness freaks; instead we get Tucker Max writing for Screw magazine, something vulgar and gross and snickering but also devoid of wit and insight.
Jessie feels hurt and betrayed and storms out, at which point, Adam, because he is a REALLY good guy despite ample evidence to the contrary, writes a bullshit pretentious story about health clubs as sacred commercial cathedrals for Emersonian self-reliance and it cheeses Wenner’s editor and an underling played by a young David Paymer off so much that they go back to his notes and cobble together something salacious and creepy and sexist and judgmental and overflowing with character assassination.
Incidentally, Wenner claimed that Perfect was very realistic, and incredibly true to life at the magazine, which is perplexing because the whole third act revolves around the magazine stabbing Adam in the back by deliberately running a much different, much sleazier and more misogynistic story than the one he wanted the world to see.
Yet Jessie comes back to Adam because—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—despite behaving like a total sleaze the entire movie he’s obviously a good guy who would never deliberately hurt someone he cared for. No, the only scoundrel low enough to pull a cheap stunt like that would be that monster Jann Wenner, or at least the Jann Wenner figure Jann Wenner plays here.
Thanks in no small part to the gorgeous work of legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Manhattan, All The President’s Men) Perfect looks phenomenal but there’s both too little and too much going on in its pretty little head.
As a sexy drama Perfect succeeds spectacularly in being sexy but is a total bust dramatically,
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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