MB Civic

By Charles Taylor | August 25, 2006 | The Boston Globe

AMONG MOVIE BUFFS, “Putney Swope” has long had a reputation as one of the most outrageous American movie satires. In Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 film, a Madison Avenue advertising firm comes under the control of the title character, the sole black member of the company’s board. Swope keeps a lone white employee on as a token and fires all the others. And that’s the least of his changes.

The film was rereleased this month on DVD, and most of it turns out to be very bad — a collection of clumsy, sputtering scenes without the coherent development needed to take ideas to their logical, outrageous extreme. But for all his movie’s faults, Downey wasn’t out to cozy up to his audience. He understood that satire is supposed to make us uncomfortable.

The funniest things in “Putney Swope” are bits that, even in the age of “South Park” and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, would be attacked as affronts to political correctness, were they to appear at all: The firm’s Chinese client announces, “I’m not a happy chappy.” In one of the parody commercials, a college-age interracial couple shown in gauzy focus proclaim their love in song. “It happened last weekend/at the Yale-Howard game,” the young black man sings. After a line I can’t repeat, his white girlfriend answers, “You gave me a soul kiss/it was really grand.”

If that were to appear in a movie at all these days, the director would have to justify it with tripe about attacking stereotypes and so on — instead of what Downey is really doing: pushing to see how much he can get away with.

But his approach has been all but forgotten. Somewhere along the way, satire became confused with well-meaning facetiousness, joking that serves the common good. Rather than startle us, today’s satire only confirms what we think we know. Take this spring’s film “Thank You For Smoking.” Even its most outrageous moment — Aaron Eckhart’s tobacco lobbyist appears on a television talk show opposite a teenager who got lung cancer from smoking and says Big Tobacco doesn’t want the teen to die because that would mean losing a customer — exists to reassure the audience. People can see the movie as “wicked” fun without once feeling discomfited or implicated.

Satire needs to skewer the orthodoxies on all sides — which is what the hourlong “Homecoming,” written by Sam Hamm and directed by Joe Dante for Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” series, fails to do. In “Homecoming,” the American soldiers killed in Iraq rise from the dead in the fall of 2004 to vote George W. Bush out of office. When the Karl Rove character notes that casualties are up, that recruitment is down, and that recycling dead soldiers would solve both problems, Dante and Hamm are operating in the realm of true satire — conscious exaggeration insisting that it is no exaggeration at all.

But “Homecoming” goes all treacly and solemn about its own antiwar convictions: Rather than locate the bull in their own beliefs, Dante and Hamm present them as unassailable.

In one scene, a couple whose son is fighting in Iraq offer shelter to a zombie soldier, and it’s played for sappy poignancy; a war mom based on Cindy Sheehan is presented reverently; a zombie solder makes a stirring antiwar speech.

What if Dante and Hamm had had the guts to show that zombie soldier giving a John Kerry-style salute and announce that he’s “reporting for duty”? Or if the Sheehan character were presented as someone who only figures out that war is bad when it’s happening to her?

“Homecoming” does hint at the problem that faces contemporary satirists — that real life keeps outstripping satire. When a character based on right-wing pundit Ann Coulter fires a shotgun at a squad of zombie soldiers and calls them wimps for wanting to pull out of Iraq, it’s not satire; it’s barely an exaggeration — not when Coulter suggests that 9/11 widows enjoyed their husbands’ deaths.

What’s more outrageous? An insane cartoon version of Mel Gibson on “South Park” flinging his own poop at his detractors, or a drunken Gibson claiming Jews are responsible for all wars? Editorial cartoons of a childish president living out his combat fantasies, or Bush in “Top Gun” drag on his way to proclaiming “Mission Accomplished”?

All of which may explain why the best satire now comes courtesy of “The Daily Show.” To make public figures look ridiculous, the show can just roll tape and let them speak for themselves. Whether the pen (or the camera) is mightier than the sword is no longer pertinent . For satire to flourish, the pen and the camera have to be mightier than the rope our public figures are fashioning for themselves.

Charles Taylor is a pop culture columnist for the Star-Ledger in Newark.