Fake it So Real: The Mountain Goats’ Beat the Champ

Roland Barthes famously adjudged professional wrestling to be the “great spectacle of suffering, defeat and justice.” One of the many delights of the Mountain Goats’ new album Beat the Champ is that how it collapses the intellectual gap between the author of Mythologies and a ten-year old kid in central California watching lucha libre with his face pressed up against the screen. “The telecast’s in Spanish, I can understand some/I need justice in my life – here it comes” sings John Darnielle on lead single “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero,” casting himself back once again to the unhappy childhood he’s been mining for material over twenty-five years as the Mountain Goats’ songwriter and principal musician. But the tone is less petulant or melancholy than exuberant. It’s the sound of a boy in happy thrall to a hero whom he believes can right the world’s wrongs simply by dropping a well-placed elbow off the top rope.

Issues of autobiography aside, Darnielle specializes in characters like the narrator of “the Legend of Chavo Guerrero:” marginalized young men living vicariously through macho role models. These include the wannabe metal gods of “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton,” and the disfigured, Robert E. Howard-worshipping protagonist of Darnielle’s eerie and justly acclaimed 2014 novel Wolf in White Van – a psychologically astute portrait of a potentially dangerous lone wolf. The personalities are dark, but Darnielle’s approach to them is illuminating. In both his lyrics and his prose, he has the ability to plunge the listener inside a character’s headspace – so deeply that you can feel the residue when you exit a few minutes later.

Trash and Art: Interview with Film Critic and Author Adam Nayman on Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls

There has probably no movie from Hollywood that has been so reviled and eviscerated as Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls (1995). Having already established himself in the Netherlands as their resident l'enfant terrible in films like Spetters (1980) and The Fourth Man (1983) for their explicit sexuality and violence, Verhoeven would come to Hollywood in the Eighties to continue drawing moustaches on sacred cows in racy thrillers like Basic Instinct (1992) and SF satires like Robocop (1987). But if those films were hugely popular for their outrageous daring, Showgirls, a film about a drifter, Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), who hitchhikes to Las Vegas to find fame and fortune by climbing from stripper to showgirl, was greeted with a tsunami of raspberries (including the 1995 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture).

In the subsequent years, Showgirls has been reassessed, but often in the way Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) gets redeemed, by embracing its badness as a form of pleasure. Film critic Adam Nayman in his book It Doesn't Suck. Showgirls (ECW Press, 2014), however, isn't interested in acclaiming it for its badness, or in heaping empty superlatives at an unappreciated masterpiece. Nayman's vastly entertaining and probing book gets to the core of the prickly undercurrents that upset so many viewers and critics at the time (and even touches on areas that could continue to start arguments today). 

Adam Nayman is a Toronto film critic who has written for The Grid and writes for The Globe and Mail. He is also a contributing editor to Cinemascope. Along with writing about film for the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, Film Comment, Cineaste and Reverse Shot, he also teaches film studies at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University. Nayman is also a programmer for the Toronto Jewish Film Society.

Unlike myself, who saw Showgirls as a professional film critic back in 1995 and experienced the hate first-hand, Adam Nayman became a critic long after the hailstorm, which is where we began our interview.

Lens Wide Open: Adam Nayman Presents The Films of Stanley Kubrick at the Miles Nadal JCC

Director Stanley Kubrick is one of the more paradoxical of major filmmakers. A photographer who became a self-taught movie maker in search of a realist style (Killer's Kiss), Kubrick would eventually become a dedicated formalist making epics (Barry Lyndon). Although he was an American director who began by shooting in real locations (The Killing), he spent most of his late career in a self-imposed hermitage in England inventing locations for his pictures (Full Metal Jacket).While Kubrick is an acclaimed auteur (2001: A Space Odyssey), his films rarely got good reviews when they were released (Eyes Wide Shut). Controversy continually followed him (Lolita, A Clockwork Orange), too. 

Given the perplexities of Kubrick's relatively small body of work, Cinema Scope and Grid Weekly film critic Adam Nayman, who has previously lectured on other controversial directors such as Paul Verhoeven and Catherine Breillat at the JCC Miles Nadal in Toronto, tonight begins a fascinating epic exploration into the long contradictory shadow that Kubrick has cast over the last half-century of American film-making. The Kubrick series is being held every Monday night until June 25th from 7-9pm. Adam and I recently had the opportunity to talk about the series and why he believes that Stanley Kubrick's work still continues to matter thirteen years after his death.