Talk Radio

(Oliver Stone, USA, 1988)

We’ve all known for a long time that no film can be a window on the world; and most of us today believe that nobody down the tracks ever really thought it was.

However, once we give up crude, totalising notions of realism, there are still all sorts of tiny, nagging cultural phenomena that insist in our consciousness – hokey or elaborate moments and devices that manage to achieve a fleeting reality-effect: a brush with the real, an invocation of the world outside the theatre (or screen) that seems bracingly or chillingly true.

At these moments, it is as if a magic spell of some kind had suddenly materialised: a vague, vast and often frightening realm of reality from which fiction is usually comfortably distant. Many great minds, from Roland Barthes to Philip Brophy, have dwelt on the meticulous construction of such seductive, spectacular reality-effects.

Even (or especially) in the midst of the most patently artificial or theatrical conceits (the original To Be Or Not To Be [1942] by Ernst Lubitsch is a great example), such moments of reality can leap out of a film – often on the fine, showbiz principle that only that which is not seen, only heard, can really carry that special reality-wallop (i.e., a myth of film not as a window on the world but a receiver of transmitted signals). [2024 postscript: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) works exclusively on this principle.]

The use of radio can be, in this regard, a film’s ace up the sleeve. Think of all those Hollywood fictions that interrupt their imaginary proceedings with a blast of History announced from a nearby radio, carefully faked to sound tinny and ancient: the sinking of the Titanic, the beginning of a World War, or (a brilliant gag in Woody Allen’s Radio Days [1987]) the Martian invasion, courtesy of Orson Welles. Reality impinges, even if only for a few seconds – and then proceeds to drag the rest of the fiction in its thrall. Propaganda-entertainment efforts made by Hollywood during WWII, such as The North Star (1943), were already hip to this trick.

Talk Radio began life as a 1987 theatrical monologue co-written (with Tad Savinar) by its star, Eric Bogosian (who is wonderful), playing a slick and angry talk host named Barry Champlain. On a stage, one can imagine how the piece would derive its own powerful reality-effect from the extent of its paradox: a completely artificial, static space, with (as it were) the limitless real world on tap, flowing in through a talk-back line.

No matter that all the calls are written, performed, contrived: it’s more a matter of a showbiz dare, chutzpah. Helping out the artifice/reality exchange in this instance is the particularly intense and topical slice of radio talk singled out: the American phenomenon of shock radio, in which host and caller are given free rein to abuse each other violently.

Beyond its so-so commentary on this particular media phenomenon, Bogosian’s text/performance is a fascinating metaphoric workout of a theme that returned to the fore of American cinema and culture in the later 1980s (as in Good Morning, Vietnam [1987] and Punchline [1988]): what Erving Goffman once called the presentation of self in everyday life, where the insistent sociality of modern urban existence forces a non-stop, public performance out of us all.

Once in director Oliver Stone’s hands, the Talk Radio property undergoes several intriguing transformations – the relatively simple fiction/reality gambit of the original gets pulled around and multiply-knotted in some crazy ways.

About two-thirds of the piece stays with Champlain in a studio, at the microphone; these sections work well. Stone (with cinematographer Robert Richardson) gets very into the surface naturalism of the setting: the glass booth, with its numerous reflective surfaces; burning cigarettes in ashtrays; and a confused, crowded, aural space.

As a cumulative result, the felt distance between this shut-in, heightened fragment of reality and the whole vast zoo of life outside the studio (including the host’s own private life) becomes unbearably tense and creepy. Excusing one long and rather awful flashback at mid-way, Talk Radio remains true to its own jolly, rigorous sense of shock cinema – with the soundtrack supplying most of the shocks.

But, we wonder: is Stone really happy about this triumph of chutzpah? It was, after all, he who angled the project towards incorporating the real-life case of Alan (as distinct from Alban!) Berg – a shock-host killed by a fanatical band of neo-Nazis for his controversial incitements. (The film draws upon Stephen Singular’s account Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg.)

From one angle, Talk Radio (probably the play as much as the film) begs to be taken seriously as a timely reflection on a Burning Social Issue (aka The Media and its Effects on Life in the Modern Metropolis) – and not as showbiz. Little wonder, coming from a director who, with Platoon (1986), perfected a sure-fire mixture of bleeding-heart, State-of-the-Nation liberalism and awesome, elegiac art-effect; a director who went onto the ominously titled Born on the Fourth of July (1989). (Of course, some of us know, from his scripts for De Palma and Cimino, that Stone, once upon a time, had a fond understanding of shock, hype and hustle – but this memory is becoming hard to sustain.)

It’s in this non-showbiz context that Talk Radio’s claims on reality overstep the achievement of a cleverly staged effect, and become rather more strident and over-earnest.

Talk Radio is riddled rotten with contradictions. What can you say about a film that pretends to have its ear to reality, and then materialises – in one shockingly embarrassing, over-reaching scene – a caricature of a young, doped, Heavy Metal head (Michael Wincott as Kent, descended from real-life Satanic Panic poster-boy Ricky Kasso) that makes most teen movie stereotypes look modestly true-to-life by comparison? A scene that expresses not the state of the nation, but only a middle-class cinema’s rekindled hatred of the lower classes (a sentiment reflected also in Fresh Horses [1988] and The Accused [1988])?

And what can you say about a director whose principal (often only) stylistic mode is hysteria (every flashing light on the console, every tense silence portends death; every key dramatic moment propels the camera or the actor 360 degrees around the room ad nauseam maximum) – but whose film pretends to decry the effects of the mass media’s emotive hype and sensationalism? How do you deal with a film – a big, slick, exciting film – that is itself ashamed sick to be a spectacle?

Pretending to raise and address a complex of social issues, Talk Radio’s political line is merely Gothic, apocalyptic. Screwing up all its anger, hysteria and remorse, all it can say, in the “lonely hour of the ‘last instance’” (Althusser), is that we are all burning in Hell together right Here and Now on earth – an easy out for a mode of energy realism (Raymond Durgnat’s useful term) neither willing nor able to face up to the substance of its own contradictions.

It is one thing for a well-intentioned, neo-liberal filmmaker to suggest, via a dramatic sleight-of-hand, that there are a lot of troubled people out there in the real world, and that we should diligently, urgently, try to understand what’s troubling them. It is another thing altogether to construct those invisible, teeming masses as, in their dark, unsocialised hearts, sick, stupid and psychotic – a bunch of uncultured hicks.

Yet what else is that Metal head deployed to prove, to witness (against all good showbiz sense), and what are all those concerned, superior looks from Champlain, his ex-wife, his lover, his best friend, mobilised to evoke, but exactly this?

Talk Radio, in its passing appropriation of Berg’s description of the airwaves as the “last neighbourhood in town”, raises the hope of a postmodern populism in and for a fragmented, scared, scarred world. But the film hates the People it constructs more profoundly and surely than it annihilates its own hero, its handy, liberal Christ of Free Speech.

MORE Stone: Alexander, Any Given Sunday, Heaven and Earth, JFK, Nixon, U Turn

© Adrian Martin April 1989