Movies disconnected from reality
One of the cleverest movie commentaries I’ve seen in recent weeks is a photo essay by Vulture speculating how the star-crossed romance of A Star is Born would have been covered by the media in real life.
The film’s fictional tale, now in its fourth Hollywood telling, has no shortage of newsworthy incidents regarding the love match of superstar country rocker Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper, who also directs) and unknown aspiring singer Ally Campana (Lady Gaga). Jackson is seriously addicted, depressed and on the way down; Ally is squeaky clean, motivated and on the way up.
A Star is Born exists in a bubble where we don’t get much of an indication of how the gossipy world at large is reacting to this bold-faced pair and their public incidents both beautiful and tragic. Vulture goes full what-if on it, using faked coverage in everything from Us Weekly to TMZ.com to the New York Times, to convincingly show how it would all play out in the press if this story was really happening.
Suffice to say that it would be a far more scandalous situation than what we see on the relatively sanitized big screen of A Star is Born. (I love Vulture’s fake New York Post headline of a drunken Jackson pissing himself at the Grammy Awards: “Urine Trouble, Mister!”)
This got me thinking about other disconnects between the movies and real life. One of the strange things about getting older is that events and stories you actually lived through begin to show up at your local multiplex or arthouse in cinematic form, often with facts and perspectives that differ from your own.
A case in point is Bohemian Rhapsody, this week’s big opener. Bryan Singer’s biopic of rock band Queen and its lead singer Freddie Mercury plays fast and loose with many facts, especially those to do with Mercury’s bisexuality. It implies that he kept the secret of his sexual orientation so well, he didn’t come out to his own family until the morning of the band’s legendary performance at Live Aid in 1985 — which also wasn’t a reunion show, contrary to the film’s dramatic assertion.
Mercury’s parents were devout Zoroastrians and thus strongly disapproving of homosexual unions of any kind. It makes sense Freddie would have been reluctant to own up. Still and all, had they not noticed his leather biker attire, or taken a close look at the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which many people take to be his coming-out statement to the world?
More to the point, I don’t recall Mercury’s sexual ori- entation being as big a secret as the film suggests. Queen started during the “glam rock” era of the early ’70s, when the likes of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Elton John were demanding inclusive gender orientation, fully mindful of how older generations would react. As Bowie sang in “Rebel Rebel”: You’ve got your mother in a whirl / She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.
Damien Chazelle’s First Man is another current movie that makes me wonder if the real story was as much of a coverup as the screenplay implies. We’re led to believe that the brain-tumor death of Armstrong’s 2-year-old daughter Karen in 1962 had an outsized impact on his personality, turning him into a robotic individual who pursued the moon mission of Apollo 11 to the detriment of family harmony
Karen’s tragic demise was reported in many newspaper and magazine features about Armstrong in 1969, and I read as many of them as I could get my grubby teenage hands on. None of them implied that grief had turned him as gruffly monosyllabic as Ryan Gosling plays him. None of them reported that Armstrong threw Karen’s baby beads into a crater on the moon, because there is no evidence whatsoever that he did such a thing.
This brings me to The Front Runner, Jason Reitman’s docudrama account, opening Nov. 16, of the aborted run by U.S. Senator Gary Hart for the White House in 1988. Hart is played by Hugh Jackman, as a Kennedy-esque Democratic politician who falls prey to his own hubris when he dares journalists to investigate reports of his extramarital adventures.
Journalists from the The Miami Herald do just that and discover he’s having an affair with political supporter Donna Rice, an ex-model and actress turned pharmaceutical sales rep. The ensuing scandal forces Hart to abandon his presidential bid.
In the film as in real life, an outraged Hart claimed that the press had no right to report on his private life and that it had crossed a red line by doing so. The Front Runner implies that many members of the public agreed with Hart’s assertion that The Miami Herald had gone too far.
I think the movie gets this right. My own recollection of these events of 1988 are of widespread public shock about L‘affaire Hart, as much from the man’s actions as from the back-alley journalism that uncovered it.
People back then didn’t want to think the mainstream press could sink so low.
Think of how far we’ve come as a civilization in the past 30 years. The current occupant of the White House is a racist bully who has bragged of sexually assaulting women and who has had multiple wives and extramarital affairs. Gary Hart’s sins seem minor in comparison.
Sometimes the disconnect between movie reality and real life is even stranger than we could imagine.