The lies and highs of Michael Alig.
Writers-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato seem to think it's necessary for us to share the Indiana native Alig's dissociated, drug-induced, big-city debauchery. They use digital-video blur, a generally facetious tone and such self-conscious narrative devices as Alig (played by Macaulay Culkin) and his friend and biographer James St. James (played by a nasally Seth Green) both addressing the camera. Bailey and Barbato imply that a simple presentation of facts and behavior are insufficient for understanding events that led to Alig killing his drug-dealing roommate.
"It's a morality tale immorally told," is the nonsense explanation Barbato slung in HX magazine. Like I said, duck.
Isn't it late for Bailey and Barbato to think they're bringing fabulousness to moviemaking simply by not telling a story straight? They make no commitment to the truth. Instead, they approach filmmaking as if promoting a party (the duo were in fact part of Alig's nightlife scene, performing in the mid-80s as the musical act the Fabulous Pop Tarts). By the early 90s, when Bailey and Barbato launched drag performer RuPaul's pop assault through a delirious and challenging set of music videos, they seemed able to balance sub-cult excess with social goodwill. Their Back to My Roots video for RuPaul remains one of the last decade's cultural landmarks; it redefined the "dirty south" as the "flirty south" and advanced a sprightly case for identity politics through specific cultural customs such as hairstyles, nail sculpture and Southern Fried Chicken. They celebrated unabashed hedonism as a route toward achieving community and acceptance.
How different from an early scene in Party Monster where Alig mangles the William Blake quote, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Bailey and Barbato themselves seem confused. Perhaps that all-American, multiracial, ambisexual sentiment of their early videos was actually RuPaul's personal message (caricatured in the hit "Superstar" but sincerely expressed in the very good dance track "House of Love"). Without RuPaul to provide an ethical basis, Bailey and Barbato wind up justifying Alig's perversity.
If Party Monster honestly rated the appellation "morality tale," it would offer some insight into why Alig, from a working-class, fatherless background, and trustfunder St. James (nee Clark) both went so far in their deliberately transgressive behavior. Seeking attention through rebellion, these boys chose outrageousness over responsibility.
"I didn't want to be like all the drearies and normals," Alig moans, suggesting desperate flight from social conventions that had either betrayed or ostracized him. (His backstory includes being molested as a child?a joke to Bailey and Barbato.) The makeshift family he creates among New York nightclubbers wasn't an adequate alternative to the dull, middle-class ideal. It was composed of other young desperadoes as well as Peter Gatien (played by Dylan McDermott), the shifty, eye-patch-wearing older businessman who owned the Limelight club (a deconsecrated church) where Alig threw his parties and whom, the film suggests, Alig would eventually betray.
Despite this new pre-fab urban family, Alig apparently never demonstrated trust, reliability or caring, the basic traits troubled adolescents are said to desire. Bailey and Barbato show Alig's fondness for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (he repeats Frank N. Furter's advice "Don't dream it, be it" to a group of wannabes), but they don't admit that vanity and self-satisfaction were at the root of his climb. Alig adopted the fantasy of Rocky Horror as a lifestyle but refused to regard it critically; that's the same incapacity Bailey and Barbato demonstrate when they merely indulge being outre as a postmodern conceit. (Producer Christine Vachon should consider that her true-life films about gay male criminals are always whimsical, but only Boys Don't Cry, a film with a female victim, dares solemn judgment.)
Party Monster exploits the fearless righteousness young gay people assert when flocking to big cities. Their desperation gets distracted into impromptu subway parties and mob scenes at burger joints. By presenting Alig as a kind of warped, deluded hero (a gay Holly Golightly), Bailey and Barbato fail to recognize Alig's political error?he mistook license for liberation. While Alig played at imitating Warhol, he never produced anything substantive, let alone approximating cultural revolution or anarchy. His special-k-fueled soirees were merely an exercise in privilege. Exploitative gossip columns coddled Alig as he played Pied Piper/drug dealer to New York's "club kids." Bailey and Barbato further perpetuate this rank mythology that keeps them from achieving the tough, informed perspective of Alex Cox's 1986 Sid & Nancy. Cox gauged the distance between rebellion and sheer insolence in modern bohemia; Sid and Nancy also worked as a love story, because its characters' emotional needs were openly displayed, not hidden behind attitude. A credible, unsettling account of punk as social phenomenon resulted.
Bailey and Barbato ignore what was pathetic and alienating about the club-kids spectacle by staying enthralled with Alig's social aggression. The one moment Alig relents?when he falls for the Asian clubber Keoki (Wilmer Valderrama)?Bailey and Barbato withdraw from the serious implications of their romance. ("Are we going far?" Keoki asks. "All the way, I hope," says Alig.) The burst of fireworks that conceals their hook-up in a dumpster is strangely dishonest. It's Bailey and Barbato's cute way of implying gay audacity while inexcusably avoiding the social frisson of Alig and Keoki's attraction.
Alig's earlier neophyte's plea to St. James ("I want you to teach me how to be fabulous") only confessed a shared sense of privilege, but his affection for Keoki was the essence of his social transgression. It lifted him onto a new level of social/racial power relations he was too excited by to respect. Alig's willingness to exploit and manipulate his coterie (including Keoki and the doomed Latino drug dealer, Angel Melendez) was the distinctively New York aspect of his phenomenon?it's why his ascent (eking out a reputation as a downtown celebrity while renting a hovel in the Bronx) was also a descent.
RuPaul might have pointed out this social irony as an aspect of the class and race biases that persist even in hipster subcultures, but Bailey and Barbato are too infatuated with the scene to analyze it. They trot out tired, tv-generation excuses: vacant-eyed clubgoers chanting "Money! Success! Fame! Glamour!," dressed as clowns, nurses, monsters, ghouls?a panoply of disaffected social roles. But exactly how high-living mixes with low-life gets lost in the revelry.
Surprisingly, Culkin contributes the perfect, dull astonishment. He's good at showing Alig was not clever, just determined to be noticed. His straight, dark brows, lanky blond hair and overripe lips are the portrait of a boy waiting to be despoiled. When Alig first looks at Keoki, Culkin melts into Valderrama's warm brown eyes?a bolder ploy than simply playing swish, it reveals cross-cultural heat. This performance goes way beyond Bailey and Barbato's cliche about a "poor, pathetic frightened little boy, too scared to face reality." Not Home Alone's Kevin! Culkin seems to understand the essence of urban mischief, the secret resentment of the white boy lording his privilege?especially over a pair of dusky, susceptible lovers. Bailey and Barbato traduce Culkin's realism when they depict the killing as a sped-up home-movie, including Alig injecting his victim's body with Drano and then dismembering and discarding it. A murderous New York neurotic isn't surprising, but to treat his crime matter-of-factly as k-hole inertia is horrifying.
Party Monster ends on the cheap irony of the Feds caring more about getting Peter Gatien for drug infractions at the Limelight than they care about the death of Angel Melendez (played in a few brief scenes by Wilson Cruz). Fact is, considering the film's emphasis on club kids' folderol and the pathos of Alig's small-time celebrity, Bailey and Barbato don't care much about Melendez, either. They're too fabulous to be appalled by murder.
Marci X
Wayans plays Dr. S (born Kelvin Drell), a soft-voiced version of Dr. Dre whose best-selling Bad Medicine album hawks pharmaceuticals to the ghetto as if promoting "The Chronic." Corporate and congressional controversy forces Marci to confront Dr. S. They fall in love naturally?two brats from different social environments. When he raps about "The Power in My Pants," she counters with "The Power in My Purse." The basic race-mixing of the hiphop industry has never been derided so succinctly. Marci gets pilloried Lizzie Grubman-style (A Jewish Forward headline reads "SHONDA!"). And homeboys question Dr. S's solidarity and masculinity ("You're turning into a Jewish chick"). Though not a definitive rap parody like Rusty Cundieff's Fear of a Black Hat (1994), Marci X is a bolder and clearer showbiz critique than Spike Lee's Bamboozled?even its Lee-tweaking title points out how hiphop culture, in the name of commercialism, has demolished all sacred cows.
Funnier than the filmmakers may have realized is a Dr. S/Marci rap performance that turns into a gospel celebration led by Ann Duquesnay, the singer-actress who won a Tony award for wailing similar hollow encomiums ("Thank you, Jesus!") in Bring In 'Da Noise, Bring In 'Da Funk. Black zeal is always enjoyable/exploitable. The best jokes in Marci X (along with the especially witty costume design) come from recognizing the racial stereotypes the rap industry manipulates?and profits from. When Dr. S is called to defend "a proud oral tradition" before Congress, it's Marci who enthusiastically translates "motherfucker" as "My dear friend." Ignore the studio; check out this movie.