WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS CRITICAL SPOILERS FOR THE FILM ‘MISTER LONELY’. IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM, I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU SEE IT BEFORE READING THIS, AS THIS GIVES AWAY SOME HUGE PLOT POINTS THAT YOU’LL SERIOUSLY REGRET KNOWING IN ADVANCE. HAVE YOU GONE AWAY? OK, LET’S PROCEED…
The Chaplin vs. Keaton debate is one of oldest in cinema. On one hand, Chaplin, the populist, happy clown who fused sentiment with comic timing and whimsy with heart and became one of the most famous human beings in all history. Chaplin died surrounded with riches, his legacy ensured and statues built to honour him. Conversely, Keaton, the sad clown, the stone-faced existentialist (with no lesser a sense of humour) was largely forgotten by the time of his death, and, though to be later subject to a huge revival and arguably greater acclaim than his obstensive rival, knew nothing but heartbreak and drunken poverty as he passed out of the world and into the great nickelodeon in the sky.
The line quoted above is spoken by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely. She’s talking about her husband, the Chaplin impersonator (Dennis Lavant), and the line spoken early on – together with her later assertion that sometimes Lavant more closely resembles Hitler than Chaplin – is a very revealing one, both in terms of the film’s central theme of identity crisis and the motivation and discourse that underlies it.
The film’s narrative follows a solitary Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who, while entertaining in an old people’s home, meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who takes him to the Highlands of Scotland where she lives on a commune with other impersonators, including her husband, Chaplin. Michael falls for Marilyn while the members of the commune work towards putting on ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ in their D.I.Y. theatre. Running parallel to this is the story of a group of nuns in South America, led by Werner Herzog’s priest character, who come to realise that they can jump from planes with no parachutes and survive, a genuine miracle. The impersonator’s show, though spectacular, fails to attract a significant audience and Marilyn hangs herself, leading Michael to move back to Paris and, after receiving a reassuring visitation from Marilyn’s spirit as a painted egg, take off his disguise, wandering the streets as himself, bewildered. The nuns load up in their plane to travel to the Vatican to meet the Pope (the real one, as opposed to Leo Carax’s Pope impersonator character). The film concludes with Michael, alone in full impersonator gear, riding his motorbike around a race track, the same image with which it opened, while in South America, the nun’s plane has crashed, leaving them dead on the beach, waves lapping over their bodies.
While Michael is ostensibly the central character, and, according to Korine himself, drawn from Korine’s own experiences in Paris, I found Lavant’s Chaplin character to be the more interesting and perhaps more authorial voice in the film. He is far from the loveable tramp figure we’d expect from Chaplin, which is why Marilyn’s comment about his resembling Hitler is a significant one. In one scene, the couple are out sunbathing. Chaplin promises Marilyn that he’ll wake her before her skin burns. As soon as she falls asleep, he skulks away, leaving her to fry in the sun. She returns to the house, furious with him, and, in a particularly physically evocative and effective scene, he forces himself on her sexually, pressing his hands down on her sunburned breasts and shoulders. In another scene, he sits alone, talking to himself about “the show”, repeating each phrase twice. He concludes that his life is worthless and empty.
I single this character out because the most frequently observed aspect of Mister Lonely in reviews so far has been it’s optimism, it’s sweetness and sentimentality and it’s general lightness (and through this it’s mass appeal, something some have labelled ‘selling out’), something which is impossible not to remark upon when considering Korine’s body of work – Kids, Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy and much of Korine’s other work, while undoubtedly possessing a sense of humour and a certain poetry, has a definite bleakness to it. It’s an element that Korine himself has talked extensively about in the promotion for Mister Lonely, even going so far as to say that making the film saved him, that he needed to find that optimism.
I would argue that while on the surface Mister Lonely broadcasts its optimism, through Luna’s voiceover and the moments of catharsis it presents, it is in fact no more or less optimistic than Gummo or Julien. That, while the film is certainly dressed in colours of hope and positivity and faith, this hope and faith is empty, and Korine has actually shown it to us before. It’s in the Jimmy Durante routine performed by Tummler in Gummo. It’s in Julien’s wrestling match with his brother. There are positive sentiments and expressions of universality – as opposed to the marginality represented in Gummo or Julien – in Mister Lonely, certainly, but the film is Keaton uncomfortably impersonating Chaplin. It is not Chaplin.
The impersonators in Mister Lonely demonstrate a total faith in their unique and unreal existence, and the joy it brings them, and it is through this that many of the film’s moments of ‘optimism’ are presented. Yet, this faith is also their undoing. When their audience fails to show, Marilyn kills herself. Prior to this, the characters all express their doubts about whether an audience will appear. They realise that their performances will not satisfy anyone outside their isolated circle, so any attempt to do so is destined for failure. Yet, the very purpose of their performance is to reach outwards to an audience. It is effectively doomed from the outset. Their faith, though assertive and joyful for a time, is ultimately empty and pointless.
The same can be said for the nuns. Though they do demonstrate to themselves, through their faith, that a miracle is possible, they cannot in any way follow through on their miracle and demonstrate or relate it to the outside world. They are killed by an – unseen in the film – act of either chance or faulty technology (their plane) which was to carry their message.
This futility rings through all the characters, and embodied especially in Chaplin as the only truly cruel character in the film, and the only real voice of hard line pessimism, expressed as such, as opposed to the self doubt that Michael relates. Chaplin, who used to be a Keaton impersonator, is the most animated, most expressive, and least ‘real’ of the impersonators, and the one with the greatest sense of desperation. It is also notable that, while the film features three directors cast as actors, Chaplin is the only director character in the film – though it is admittedly arguable that his directing is not what Chaplin was best known for. It is perhaps for this reason that his character brings with it a greater sense of authority and experience than the other impersonators, and perhaps through this that he achieves the authorial voice that I referred to earlier.
He has tried to be one person, and was dissatisfied, and so is trying his hand at being another, more pleasing personality, yet remains cruel and bitter. This is where I see a parallel with Korine. He too has been known for his nihilistic and existential work, a Keaton side perhaps, to continue to mine this metaphor, and with Mister Lonely is markedly attempting to travel a very different path, one with arguably wider appeal, a more Chaplinesque side – this new optimism has been noted in almost all reviews of the film – and yet the basic theme of the film, it’s essential heart, remains as it has been in his previous work. It’s a celebratory heart, one that revels in the splendours of human imagination and potential and aspiration, but equally one that realises that this potential can never be reached. “Does anything really change?” asks Marilyn in her final sequence of dialogue. “Yes,” replies Michael. “But does it really change?” she asks. “No,” he replies.
Yet, Mister Lonely is a joyous film. Were a similar statement to be made about Gummo, it would be met with widespread scepticism, but the elements that make Mister Lonely so joyous are equally present in Gummo, and they relate to Korine’s knowing handling of cinema itself.
Mister Lonely is perhaps the most cinematically self-referential film to emerge in recent years, possibly only matched by Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (and, incidentally, is it coincidence that Mister Lonely opens with a colour-saturated sequence and a Bobby Vinton song?). But while INLAND EMPIRE is about cinema in structural terms, and the process of creating it, Mister Lonely is about the people who populate it, the not-quite-real characters who glide across the screen in projected light and live there, and can only live there, and who, in the real world, are so easily crushed. Those dubbed ‘stars’.
The most striking, effective and emotionally powerful sequences in Mister Lonely are those divorced entirely from the narrative. Little Red Riding hood walks along the train tracks singing an old blues song about hanging. Marilyn Monroe stands at the foot of a pond, her skirt blowing upwards in slow motion. The entire cast of impersonators perform a dance to Fred Astaire’s Cheek To Cheek and take a bow. Korine’s manipulation of aesthetics, and his presentation of these sequences that feel so familiar – because they are the distillation of what film itself is – and yet so unique are in fact the very faith that is felt by his characters. This faith amounts to nothing, it is true, but then, what does cinema itself amount to? You leave the cinema, your life is as it was. The very basis of the medium is escapism, it’s lifeblood is entertainment. The myths of the modern world are those of aspiration to stardom.
Perhaps this is the faith that Korine talks about (re)discovering in his promotional interviews. An individual living in reality can never be Charlie Chaplin, with his sentiment and catharsis and everything his more populist cinematic world contains. An individual living in reality can, however, be Keaton, panicked and worried and never entirely satisfied. To impersonate Chaplin though, to pretend, is possible.
Mister Lonely celebrates the futility and nihilism and necessary isolation that lies at the centre of all faith, be that in god or fiction or the cinema – and, crucially the creative process. It challenges you to remain stone-faced in the face of it’s empty revelations. In that, it not only re-establishes Harmony Korine, post-hiatus, as one of the most important directors working today, it makes impersonators of us all.
