A Villain and Two Heroes

“If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut

Charlton Heston’s dead. I have only two questions: 1) who will peel Chuck’s musket “from his cold, dead hands?”; and, 2) will he bring himself back from the grave?

It was immediately after the now infamous N.R.A 2000 “cold, dead hands” speech that this Moses of the Moral Majority checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program (I guess drinking and shooting do mix). In terms of his film career, Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958) was about as close as he ever came to a challenging role. If John Frankenhiemer’s “Seconds” (1962) gave Rock Hudson his only serious part, so too did Welles’s film portray Heston in the only fairly nuanced performance in his catalogue. “Soylent Green” (1966) aside, “Planet of the Apes” (1968) allowed Heston the chance to (although he could never know it) struggle out of the Kitschy mire in which he so richly deserved to wallow, and portray the campy man-hero that would forever secure a place in Hollywood cult movie history. In “Soylent” he was just plain bad. His ensemble work with Chuck Connors (The Rifleman) was so pathetic, today’s New York Times obit mercifully omitted it. His finest cinematic moment, of course, came when he appeared in Michael Moore’s award winning documentary, “Bowling For Colombine” (2002). He held forth in all his racist glory, implying in a not so veiled comment, that immigrants and minorities are the reason America is such a violent culture. I thought it might be nice if Charlton, and another quintessentially American icon who makes a brief appearance in Moore’s film, Dick Clark, get together after Clark croaks, and become the first DWM (Dead White Male) same sex couple in a newly diversified Heaven.

While Heston was alive he could have taken a lesson from a real American hero, Larry Flynt, that’s right, he of “Hustler” magazine fame. Larry was just in town at the Ann Arbor Film Festival showing of his latest documentary, “The Right to be Left Alone” (2007). In an interview Flynt did with The Michigan Daily, he decried the fact that it is alright to show a decapitated mutiated body on TV, but not two people having sex. Right on, Larry. He also had this to say: as repellent and abhorent as hate speech may be, it should not be banned; pornography should be legalized and controlled; the age of consent should be set at 16-17; and the Patriot act is a thinly disguised attempt to expand government surveillance of individual citizens. Flynt is a staunch supporter of freedom of speech who has been unflagging in his campaign for social reform. All this in spite of being paralyzed after being critically shot in 1978. Larry, you’re cool.

Finally, allow me to draw your attention to a real Hollywood star who died last week, Richard Widmark. Widmark, who made it a point to never appear on television talk shows, and who adamantly refused lucrative offers from the advertising industry, had this to say to the British newspaper The Guardian in 1995: “When I see people destroying their privacy—what they think, what they feel—by beaming it out to millions of viewers, I think it cheapens them as individuals.” In that same Guardian interview, he said that “the businessmen who run Hollywood today have no self-respect. What interests them is not movies but the bottom line. Look at ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ which turns idiocy into something positive, or ‘Forrest Gump,’ a hymn to stupidity. ‘Intellectual’ has become a dirty word.” Given that the same American public that embraced these films voted for George Bush, not once but twice, and in doing so “cheapened” and tarnished what America has traditionally stood for, I can only agree with Widmark’s pessimistic assessment. To get a glimpse of Richard Widmark at his best, check out “Kiss of Death” (1947). He was way cool.