On Fox's short-lived animated series, The Critic, film critic Jay Sherman spelled out a couple of simple rules for the American movie-going public. "If it's a sequel to a sequel," he cautioned, "don't go see it. If it used to be a television show, then for the love of God don't go see it." He made his rules back when we had a fighting chance, back when we could have sent Hollywood the message that we would absolutely refuse to watch the Clampetts on the big screen--no matter who the studio executives got to play Jethro and Ellie Mae.
But right now it's time for us to face the fact that we as a public did not stand up for ourselves back in the 90s, when it might have mattered. It's time for us to take our medicine, to accept the fact that we are the same people who authorized Hollywood to go in this direction in the first place. We could have roared "No!" when the studio executives decided to translate The Flintstones to the silver screen. But we didn't, did we? And now that the Hollywood hacks have actually done enough of these televisual translations to have gotten the hang of what they're doing, we pretend that we were opposed to the project from the very beginning.
Charlie's Angels is actually rather a brilliant movie that we're inclined to whine about because it refuses to blame its own existence on Hollywood. Instead, it blames us. It blames us sarcastically and mercilessly and somewhat nastily. But it doesn't let us off the hook--not for a moment.
Those who have seen the film are likely to say that it begins with an action sequence, a sequence in which a man on a plane who has strapped a bomb to himself is wrestled to the emergency exit and flung off the plane by Dylan Sanders (Drew Barrymore), who is disguised as L. L. Cool J. for no conceivable reason.
Before the action sequence, however, we get a glimpse of the in-flight movie, which is a cinematic adaptation of T.J. Hooker. L. L. Cool J. (Sanders) groans and grumbles, "Another movie based on a television series?"
"Yeah," replies the bomber, "what are ya gonna do?"
"Walk out," says the disguised Sanders, grinning. Obviously the characters can't walk out. They're on a plane.
And yet they walk out nevertheless. The answer to the bomber's apathetic "What are ya gonna do?" is that only television heroines can rescue us from movies based on T.J. Hooker.
In other words, Charlie's Angels does not begin with an action sequence. It begins by mocking us, its viewers--particularly those of us who aren't on planes and can walk out on the movie without exposing ourselves to danger. We are not so lucky as the bomber. We don't have a private guardian angel in the person of Drew Barrymore--someone who will not only rescue us from a cinematic piece of garbage, but remove the bomb that is attached to us (our drive to destroy ourselves by feeding on cultural junkfood). We don't have a second guardian angel who will swoop down out of the sky to rescue us by sharing her parachute. Nor do we have a third guardian angel (in a bikini, no less) to drive the motorboat that we will land in.
But such guardian angels are precisely what we want. We want brilliant, beautiful, nurturing women to preserve us from our own self-destructive cultural impulses. Apparently we, the American movie-going public, want our sexy mommy to take the remote control away from us and prevent us from watching the films that blow up in our faces again and again. And the writers of Charlie's Angels have chosen to show us how puerile we are by giving us precisely what we want.
They'll coddle us with jiggly bosoms and predictable plot devices and the very literal absence of the father figure (Charlie) who will have the patriarchal audacity to claim that he is looking out for his angels at the end of a film throughout which they have done nothing but look out for him. They will be the strong, self-reliant, capable women that we ask all mothers to be--and also the giggling, empty-headed, frivolous sex toys that we ask our girlfriends to be.
Charlie's Angels gives us precisely what we knew to expect from any successful television show of the 70s: unadulterated fantasy. Like The Dukes of Hazzard or The Love Boat, Charlie's Angels was a fantasy designed to celebrate our seemingly endless capacity for empty-headedness. All things are possible; happiness oozes from one smile after another; and there's absolutely no point in worrying about whether everything will work out in the end. Before we ever sat down to watch an episode of Charlie's Angels, we knew that apart from a happy ending, the only conceivable ending was one of those little "To Be Continued" messages that would lead to a happy ending the following week. There's no such thing as unhappiness. In a worst case scenario, happiness is only deferred for a week.
Charlie's Angels does an excellent job of duplicating the obnoxiously feel-good quality of the original television show, but it does an even better job of mocking that quality--and of mocking us for wanting it. The strongest moment in the film is the line that could very easily have been used to wrap up an episode from the television series. After the bad guy has blown himself up with his own missile, Charlie asks his angels what happened on their latest case. "The client was blown away," they respond. And they erupt into precisely the same mindless laughter that was typical of the show. But instead of cutting to the credits, the film continues. The eerie silence following that hollow laughter makes us painfully aware of how vapid and unsatisfying such phony conclusions are.
More amusing (if less damning) is the use to which the screenwriters put the angels' trademark hair-flicking. We get one slow-motion closeup after another of the angels flicking their hair. In one particularly hilarious scene, Alex (Lucy Liu) actually instructs Natalie (Cameron Diaz) to flick her hair. Anyone who watched the original series knows how essential the hair-flicking was to the artistic integrity of the show. It was what the television producers thought we wanted.
Or rather, it was what they told us we wanted. And we agreed to want what they told us to want. If I was buttering a piece of toast when Farrah Fawcett flicked her hair, I was jeered by my brother for having "missed it." What he meant by 'it' was nothing less than the point of watching the show. We didn't care about the plots. We knew the plots would take care of themselves. We tuned in specifically for the hair-flicking.
That and the sapphic leering. The way that the angels looked at one another was perhaps even more important to us than the way they flicked their hair. And there's plenty of sapphic leering in the film. Whenever one angel bends over, another is sure to look at her suggestively. In one scene, the plot makes it necessary for the angels to dress up like Alpine maidens and swat one another as they squeal with delight while an important executive looks on. They distract him while Bosley (Bill Murray) measures his retina with a camera hidden inside a tuba. The executive thinks he is merely observing a trio of beautiful women, but he is himself the object of study.
To put it another way, he is a metaphor for the audience. He may imagine that he is merely the spectator of some light-hearted sexual playfulness. But that light-hearted play is part of a larger conspiracy designed to manipulate him in a preordained way. Gee, I wonder whether we could say the same sort of thing about the attitudes that we brought to any of the other films that Hollywood adapted from television?
Charlie's Angels is nothing less than a remarkably witty and scathing indictment of what we, as an audience, want. I howled with laughter through the movie. I don't think I ever stopped laughing during this film for more than three or four minutes at a time. Just when you think it's out of Aaron Spelling-esque stupidity to show us, it comes up with more.
The angels seem to look upon Charlie as a father figure not because he provides for them, but because it enables them to generate a bizarrely incestuous fixation on him (a fixation that he absolutely reciprocates). And when they finally make their way to the mysterious Charlie's house, they remind us of Dorothy in Oz or of a redeemed soul at the gates of Heaven. This guy whose voice we hear over the telephone has taken on immense metaphysical stature that is predicated on nothing apart from our own extremely unimaginative curiosity. Will we finally get to see Charlie? Will we even be so lucky as Bosley, who claims to have seen Charlie's hand? (Remember that even Moses didn't get to meet God face-to-face, but had to settle for a glimpse of his backside.)
I know it's just supposed to be a playful little show, but the guy who has angels working for him is God. The guy that we never get to meet face-to-face, but who communicates with us indirectly, is God. The guy whose voice is as confident as the voice of John Forsythe must be God. The absent father figure is always the author of our being, our creator. And before the Angels enter Charlie's house, they brush the grime off each other's breasts. They straighten their hair. And they open the door so that all three of their heads can peer through the crack simultaneously.
"Come to Daddy," we are ready to hear Forsythe say. But he is gone. He has vanished. It's up to Mommy to raise us in his absence. And she's sure to do a bang up job if she models herself on the angels!
They re beautiful, they re brilliant, and they work forcharlie. This is a sexy, high-octane update of the popular hitshow, natalie, dylan and alex, al...More at Buy.com
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