Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #210 Talk Radio (1988)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of the late Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

If nothing else, watching and writing about all of Oliver Stone’s movies for a generous and much-appreciated patron has made me appreciate the satire of Ben Stiller in a whole new way. 

Stone is the perfect satirical target for Stiller: a macho, self-important ARTIST and consummate narcissist unburdened by self-awareness, a man’s man who believes in his own greatness more than anything else. 

“Oliver Stone Land”, which imagined a theme park inspired by the drug-fueled imagination of the Scarface screenwriter rather than Walt Disney, was one of the highlights of The Ben Stiller Show. 

I’ve watched Tropic Thunder way too many times for me to be able to take Platoon even the least bit seriously. Re-watching Talk Radio for this column gave me a new appreciation for the less heralded but equally incisive sketch where Stiller played a chain-smoking, shit-talking, listener-baiting self-loathing radio show host very much in the mold of Barry Champlain, the self-destructive provocateur Eric Bogosian played first onstage and later in Stone’s film adaptation of Talk Radio. 

The sketch in question is simultaneously a parody of hack horror anthologies with heavy-handed messages and easy to predict twists and the self-conscious “edginess” of Talk Radio stylistically, tonally and thematically. 

Stiller absolutely nails the hyperactive style of Talk Radio, the sense that since the director was obviously on cocaine the camera had to be as well, and consequently could never stop moving for a fraction of a second. 

But he also captures how Talk Radio depicts contemporary American life as a circle of hell and its anti-hero/villain as a demon on the shoulder of his listeners, whispering dark thoughts into their suggestible minds.

Talk Radio was inspired by the life and death of Alan Berg, who was murdered by white supremacists in 1984 but Bogosian also studied professional misogynist Tom Leykis, who single-handedly makes the world and the airwaves a worst, more toxic place through his presence. 

In its original theatrical form Off-Broadway Talk Radio took place entirely in a radio station where cynical, hate-fueled shock jock Barry Champlain is recording his last show before making the big jump from regional to national.

Barry Champlain represents a contemporary strain of American manhood that has been with us for a very long time: arrogant men devoid of curiosity and humility for whom life is a monologue, a rant, a furious verbal explosion, never a conversation or an equal exchange of ideas. 

Stone and Bogosian are men like that to some extent so there’s an element of admiration for Barry along with horror, disgust  and contempt. Barry may say and do horrible things just to make people mad but he does so with style. In Oliver Stone’s world that counts for an awful lot. 

In Talk Radio, Stone takes the concept of “opening up” a claustrophobic play to borderline comic extremes. Talk Radio might just be the rare theatrical adaptation that’s too cinematic. 

Stone’s style is every bit as aggressive and unrelenting as Barry’s machine-gun patter. It’s full of deep focus compositions and  sweaty close ups designed to give a sense of relentless forward movement despite the movie very much being about a guy in a studio talking to people over the telephone. 

Onstage Talk Radio took place over the course of one night but Stone’s film provides a sort of super-villain origin story for its anti-hero set during the days of disco when Barry didn’t just have the world’s biggest Jewfro wig: he appeared to be wearing an entire wig store on his scalp. 

Once upon a time Barry was just a suit salesman with a gift of gab until a popular radio personality came into his store and invited him to come down to the station to hawk his wares. On air Barry discovers a genius for saying outrageous and provocative things that connect instantly and deeply with the public that can only be described as Loqueesha-like. 

Barry stops being the King of Suede and becomes the Bad Boy of the Airwaves. In performance mode, Barry is the Two-Face of radio. It’s as if he tosses a coin internally before each call and depending on the outcome either chooses to be playful and irreverent or attempts to steamroll the caller into committing suicide. 

There’s precious little in between for Barry. It’s all or nothing all the time and that corrosive, destructive intensity can be intentionally exhausting as well as exciting in a dark, transgressive way. 

Barry gets off on being hated. It’s the oxygen he needs to live, the fuel for his fire. No matter how badly he treats the women in his life they keep coming back for more. For in Talk Radio Barry has the enviable problem of being too sexually desirable for his own good. 

Barry has got the energy of a rabid sewer rat and women like his ex-wife and current much younger lover/producer can’t resist his feral appearance and rodent-like sexuality. More than anything, they can’t resist the way that Barry talks and the incoherent, incandescent rage that seems to animate his every word and idea. 

Talk Radio follows Barry as he works himself into a frothing fit of rage at the entirety of existence, casting Old Testament judgement on a world unworthy of his wrath. 

Ladies Love Cool Barry!

If Wall Street found Stone, fueled by a combination of ambition and cocaine, channeling Clifford Odets circa The Sweet Smell of Success, this is Stone doing Paddy Chayefsky in Network mode. He’s mad as hell and not going to take it any more but the exhaustion and world weariness of Lumet’s film has been replaced by a more adolescent sense of decidedly non-righteous rage. 

In 1988 Stone and Bogosian could posit Barry Champlain as a lone, angry voice in the wilderness. In 2021, however, he’s less a solitary figure than a sadly ubiquitous type: the troll. 

These days there’s an entire army of sad, angry men who devote their lives to saying awful things they may or may not believe in order to make as strong an impression as possible and “own” the other side. 

They’re men like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, the expectorating, hating, vibrating-with-rage descendants of Barry Champlain. But they’re also anonymous assholes hiding behind screen names like MAGAPatriot1776 and TrumpWon2020. 

And they don’t do it to become rich and famous and get laid the way Champlain did, or even to antagonize an entire city for fun and money. No, they do it for the sake of being obnoxious and the tawdry little thrill that comes with making an online stranger apoplectic for no damn reason at all. 

So while Talk Radio is dark and despairing about the nature of humanity and the grotesque distortion found on talk radio, it’s not quite dark or despairing enough. 

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