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Taking It All Off: Comedy and the Grotesque in Carl Hiassen's Striptease
[continued from last page]

by Alanna Preussner
Truman State University

The film completely downplays the key role of Malcolm "Moldy" Moldowsky, a political hack who's so amorally reptilian that it's tempting to hold the novel with tongs when he's featured. Paul Guilfoyle could have done more with the character, given some directorial moxie. Hiassen describes Moldowsky as a short, elegantly dressed man whose personal hero is John Mitchell. Moldy drenches himself in expensive cologne, and his scent always precedes him into any scene, as does his prodigious lawlessness. He is the perfect fixer, but Dilbeck's escapades and the felonies he commits as cover give him pause, because they make him think:

[A] superb white-collar criminal, he'd been forced out of his element. . . . For the first time in many years, Moldowsky was second-guessing himself. He hated the feeling because he hated all forms of introspection. In Moldy's line of work, a man's worst enemy was a functioning conscience" (212).

Moldy at least gets things done. Erin's former husband is a completely bumbling crook. Because he's a pillhead, he's erratic and stoned-especially when he takes some veterinary morphine his sister uses for the wolf cubs she raises. Darrell is mean-spirited and explosively violent, and like the Energizer bunny, he just keeps going, even with his badly broken arm splinted with a golf club. Robert Patrick turns in a good performance in the movie, but as with Assante, Reynolds, and Guilfoyle, he isn't given enough to do.

For me, the main bright spot in the movie is the wonderfully menacing but kindly performance by Ving Rhames, who seems to have made a sub-specialty of this role. (See, for example, his fine job as a Presidential bodyguard in Dave.) The glowering, chivalrous bouncer might be a stereotype, but Rhames gives it real presence and he has the tone exactly right. As Keith Simanton comments, "He's one of the few people in the movie who seems to know this was supposed to be a comedy" (1). Shad threatens and hurts people for a living, and his utter matter-of-factness about working in a strip club makes topsy-turvy seem normal. In the novel but not in the movie, for example, he and García talk about what they've gotten used to:

"'After a while you don't notice.' . . . 'Really. I'm to the point where I get excited when they put their clothes on. That's what happens after too long. García said, 'I know guys would kill for your job.' 'They can have it. Being around naked women all day is bad for your outlook. After a while it's just tits and ass and nothin' special. Like if you worked an assembly line making Ferraris-before long, they're just cars and that's all" (206).

This exchange shows Hiassen at his deadpan best, especially since García reciprocates by telling Shad that he has a human head in a cooler in the car trunk. The movie, however, never seems to get the fact that a strip club isn't a gymnasium and sorority for topless women. The sets are clean, beautiful, and smoke-free, and the cinematography is sparkling. The strippers are fresh-faced and earnest. From the look of them, no one smokes, drinks, or takes any drug stronger than vitamins. Urbana rides a big motorcycle, but Erin pilots a sensible Volvo sedan. Basically, nobody has that "ridden hard and put up wet" look that someone truly tarty-like Pamela Anderson Lee-would have added. The stripper characters aren't believable, and the club ambiance isn't sleazy or remotely naughty. Even the final scene, in the sugar-processing plant, goes awry by being played for Keystone Kops-type giggles rather than for violent menace and cathartic, relieved laughter.

For film scholars who want to pursue prurience in Striptease, about the only place I can suggest for further research is the movie's official website. If "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" appeals to you, have a look. Apparently, the website's designers had heard some dirty jokes at some point, and they did their best to raise sexist double entendre to the level of interest in the website:

Glide your mouse around each room. If you're good, you'll find the right 'hot spot' and gain a valuable puzzle piece. And there's plenty of juicy bits of info to keep you hard . . . at work. . . .If you want to skip the foreplay, and just want a quickie, you can download . . ., but you know very well that by pulling out too soon, you won't get the goodies! (1).

The star system that paid Demi Moore an obscene amount of money for making an non-obscene and non-interesting movie is clearly part of the problem. However, a good deal of the blame also falls on writer-director Andrew Bergman, who could have done so much better if he had grasped what makes Hiassen's novels such page-turners in the first place. In a recent interview about his latest book, Hiassen said: 'My stories are difficult to make into movies. . . For one thing, they're not star vehicles. They have ensemble casts. And it's tough to get humor across on the screen if the humor isn't funny lines or funny scenes. In my books, it's TONE-and that's hard for Hollywood' (E, 1 ff.).

Joe Quennan echoes some of the same sentiments, comparing Hiassen's novels with Elmore Leonard's. As he states, "Hiassen's stock in trade is to assemble a menagerie of stereotypes-the crooked developer, the sleazy politician, the deranged environmentalist-and then fish-gut them" (1). Unfortunately, however, there's not much fish-gutting in this movie, and precious little ensemble work or over-the-top craziness either. This movie really is a disaster-and a boring one at that. We have a star hell-bent on dominating a movie by looking sweet and empowered while taking off her shirt. We have excellent supporting actors who aren't used to their considerable potential, either individually or collectively. Ultimately, we have a failure to communicate tone, the gonzo, beyond-surfeit grotesquerie that makes you laugh out loud while reading a Hiassen novel-and then feel a little guilty for doing it.

Andrew Bergman doesn't take this movie anywhere close to the edge. Perhaps his failure isn't surprising, given Hollywood's taste for investing in big stars, special effects, and endless sequels and prequels. Having the artistic freedom to make high-priced actors look scuzzy may simply not have been possible in this movie, but I fondly wish that somebody anarchic and smart like Quentin Tarentino or Terry Gilliam had been given the chance. The directors who brought us Pulp Fiction and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could made the world of the Eager Beaver edgy, funny, and frightening.

It may be, as Richard Schickel opines, that Andrew Bergman wants people "to know that his mind, at least, is not in the gutter" (1). Disassociation from the sleazy may be a good psychological strategy for a stripper looking to make a career change, but it is deadly in this movie. As Schickel notes, "[T]he crazy, nothing-to-lose anarchy of people living below the margin and beyond the fringe is not within Bergman's fastidious reach" (1) Essentially, he wimps out and doesn't let this movie portray the dark, seedy, and hysterically funny world Carl Hiassen so deftly portrays.

Carl Hiassen clearly knows that humor is an extraordinary weapon against the terrible people and immoral situations his novels describe. He has a reformer's zeal, rather like Edward Abbey's in The Monkey Wrench Gang, and he shows us that too much is generally just about right. In a recent piece for the New York Times, Joe Queenan puts Hiassen's achievements into perspective, comparing him to Elmore Leonard:

Unwilling to go completely over the top, Leonard is much closer to Thomas Berger or Donald Westlake; Hiassen is closer to Harry Crews and Eugene Ionesco. This is, by the way, very good company" (1).

While I'm not here to tell you that Striptease is a brilliant novel-that honor goes to Double Whammy, a riotous send-up of evangelical Christianity and tournament bass fishing-I am saying that Carl Hiassen provided a lot of raw material that could have been made into a trenchant, transgressive film. Striptease, however, squanders the chance for a fresh look at the sex industry and political whores. Sadly, its gaze is ultimately narcissistic. Demi Moore gets to show off the engineering marvel of implanted, cantilevered bosoms, and we get to look at her looking at herself.

This film could have used mean, gonzo humor as a transgressive device. It could have trained our view on the star system and flesh (or votes) for sale. Hiassen's novel prepared me to expect something extraordinary, with humor used as Dario Fo has described it:

[T]he grotesque, satire, and irony serve as a concentric mirror; that is, they direct light. They take light and turn it into something that burns. They take words and moments, they synthesize and accumulate them, they concentrate them in images, in ideas, until they become a beam of light that burns, that sets fire, that perforates, that can even destroy barriers" (91).

Unfortunately, in Striptease, the only mirror we see is the one Demi Moore uses to admire herself, and the light it reflects doesn't even warm us, much less burn anything. "Taking it all off" is an obvious tease, but this movie reveals just bare bodies and directorial gutlessness. It lacks the savage hilarity and grotesquerie that could have made it a tone poem on the demimonde. To come back to my earlier metaphor, Striptease is a rather bland, cold lunch-and an unsalty and uncritical one at that.

Works Cited

Bancroft, Colette. "Murder Under the Palms." Colette's List Archive. 1-6. Online. < http://www.pictograph.com/Clist/html > Sept. 1, 1999.
Byerly, Jim. "HBO Film Reviews." 1. Online. < http://www.hbo.com/Filmreviews/reviews/striptease.shtml >. Sept. 1, 1999.
Ebert, Roger. "Striptease." Chicago Sun-Times. "Roger Ebert on Movies." 1-3. Online. < http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1996/06/062804.html >. Sept. 1, 1999.
Hiassen, Carl. Striptease. London: Pan/Macmillan, 1994.
Levins, Harry. "Hiassen's Sick Puppy Takes Name from a Dog, Not the Zany Characters He Finds in South Florida." St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Jan. 12, 2000. E1 ff.
Maslin. Janet. "Striptease." New York Times. June 28, 1996. 1-3. Online. < http://www.nytimes.com/library/filmarchive/striptease.html >. Sept. 1, 1999.
McBride, Joseph. "Striptease." Boxoffice Online Reviews. 1. Online. . Sept. 1, 1999.
Quennan, Joe. "Everything is Rotten in the State of Florida." New York Times on the Web. Jan. 9, 2000. 1-2. Online. Point-Cast Network. < http://www.nytimes.com >.
Schickel, Richard. "Only the Bare Essentials." Time Magazine. July 8, 1996. 1. Online.. Sept. 1, 1999.
Shulgasser, Barbara. "Demi Moore's Vanity Affair." San Francisco Examiner. June 26, 1996. 1-4. Online. . Sept. 1, 1999.
Simanton, Keith. "Review of Striptease." Film.com. 1. Online. http://strip-tease.com/club02.html. Sept. 1, 1999.

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