The Spirit of the ‘90s is Alive in Plucklandia

I miss Fred Ward. He died this past week. The hard-nosed yet handsome character actor had played everyone from Gus Grissom in The Right Stuff to “Phil” Lovecraft the paranormal P.I. in Cast a Deadly Spell, with other memorable roles in Tremors, Short Cuts, The Player, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, all from an uncertain beginning in early ‘80s cheesy sci-fi flick Timerider: the Adventures of Lyle Swann. According to his bio, he started acting in Italy and was in a few of Roberto Rosselini’s TV features, and that’s how Hollywood discovered him. And perhaps his most memorable role, if you’ve seen it, was as amoral homicide cop Hoke Moseley in the stellar adaptation of Charles Willeford’s brutally funny and delightfully absurd Miami Blues.

Charles Willeford was one of a kind, and Hoke is equally unique in fiction. He’s a homicide cop who may as well be a janitor; he just wants to do the job and go home. He’s on the murder case of a Hare Krishna cultist who had his finger broken at the airport and died of shock; this puts him in the path of his polar opposite, an equally amoral violent thief played brilliantly as a blue-eyed psychopath by Alec Baldwin. To throw him off the scent, he assaults Moseley and steals his badge, his gun, and his dentures, and uses the first two as props to make the thievin’ life easier. And Moseley is less interested in justice than getting his teeth back. Between them is another perfect performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh. The story is a bit simplified for the movie, and I highly recommend reading the book before or after, to see the details of the characters (one of which we never really know) left on the cutting room floor. The movie also has a great trailer, cut by my friend the brilliant crime writer Josh Stallings:

I watched Miami Blues and Cast a Deadly Spell again to honor Ward’s passing and they both hold up wonderfully. The latter was a made for HBO movie set in the film noir playground of old Hollywood, except now magic is real and everyone uses it… except an ex-cop turned gumshoe named Howard Philip Lovecraft, played by Ward. He had a face for film noir that fits well under a fedora, and he plays the patter well. Julianne Moore is a bit wasted as a femme fatale chanteuse, but she has fun with the role. The story may as well be Chandler, with a rich dame with a protective father, who’s got HPL looking for a stolen book called the Necronomicon—maybe you heard of it—being chased by everybody, like Hammett’s Maltese Falcon.

The film’s tongue is pressed firmly in its cheek at times, but only so we’ll buy the substandard special effects. My favorite character is Clancy Brown’s diminutive henchman played by Ray O’Connor, a killer with a magic touch who relishes his job. He kills one victim with a tornado of paper cuts, and that scene still makes me wince. What the effects lack in quality, we get in quantity—there’s a gargoyle come to life, gremlins who were brought back during the war, and everyone’s favorite Old One comes calling at the end. The whole thing’s up on YouTube, but it’s also on HBO Max if you have a subscription and want better quality.

I’ve been waxing nostalgic for the ‘90s lately, not only because it’s before 9/11 made America lose its collective mind—and I worked in Manhattan that day—but because it’s the last time I remember there being a sort of collective hope for the future. After Y2K disasters were averted, the spirit of the ‘90s kept me going a while, until the 2000 election was decided by the Supreme Court and we had mere months before the consequences hit us like… well, a war that is still going on. There was plenty of terrible stuff in the ‘90s, but lately it seems idyllic, between the Cold War and the War on Terror (unless you were in Serbia, Oklahoma City, or … stop it, Tommy, just stop! Positive waves, Moriarty!)

For example, I was listening to Warren Zevon last night at stupendous volume. What album? Mr. Bad Example, his comeback from detox, a brilliant reinvention of his music and a reunion with his pal Waddy Wachtel. I know practically every lyric, but “Model Citizen” has been on my mind, now that I’m a suburban homeowner. The song is rather like American Psycho applied to the suburban dad instead of the stockbroker; and it’s got me thinking of the tyranny of the patriarchal nuclear family unit, the isolationism of the suburban enclave, and how it all ties together as a microcosm of a capitalist society that can’t give up quick profit for long-term survival.

I feel like I’ve doomed us all by making this lifestyle change. James Morrow wrote a wonderfully depressing book called This is the Way the World Ends, where the nuclear apocalypse is pushed over the edge when a father buys a radioactive hazard suit for his daughter, much like we sell bulletproof backpacks for grade schoolers today. His purchase was the deciding grain of sand on the scales of fate that sends us over the edge, and he is punished by the gods for it. That’s kind of how I feel every time I go out to get my mail. I do what I can; I don’t use pesticide or weed killer, to my neighbors’s dismay, and let the bees enjoy the clover. I converted the pool to saltwater, which uses less chemicals. I’m looking at solar panels. I bought the Subaru over the Jeep. These all feel like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, when I bought a house.

Other things that aren’t helping: I read the wonderful book Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Adams, that brutally funny creator of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, uses his well-earned book moneys to go on several trips to see several endangered species before they cease to exist. Along the way we get his brilliant thoughts and realizations, one of which stuck with me: that tourism is rather like quantum physics, in that the act of “seeing” these places changes them, much like observing an object’s quantum state requires bombarding it with photons, which change the quantum state. Any place you go to see because it is beautiful eventually becomes overcrowded with tourists like yourself and becomes a place you would never want to visit in the first place.

So do we stay home or not? I’ve stopped visiting Hawai’i because the Hawaiians want us to stay the hell away, at least until the pandemic is better under control.¹ I’ll never visit Galapagos for this reason. I can watch Planet Earth. I never wanted to ascend Everest, but now it’s a shitslide of corpses and trash thanks to how many people climb it each year. Australia is still on the menu. One more dumb American isn’t going to ruin the continent. And I’ll respect the wishes of the Aṉangu people when we visit Uluru.²

Two other early ‘90s movies I love, that gave me such hope, were Smoke and Blue in the Face, directed by Wayne Wang, and written by Paul Auster. I remember seeing them in theaters and loving them so much, that indie filmmakers and authors were teaming together to give us great stories, to rival Hollywood! And yeah that didn’t last. But the movies are still great. I recently watched a bad copy of Smoke and bought the DVDs to watch again. The story centers around a neighborhood smoke shop run by Augie, played by Harvey Keitel (who really resembles Fred Ward in his old age. They both have that smashed boxer schnoz) and the people he meets through their mutual love of tobacco. One is William Hurt, a writer; another is Giancarlo Esposito, who looks so different than his famous role as Gus Fring in Breaking Bad that you may not recognize him. Stockard Channing, Forrest Whitaker, Victor Argo, Mel Gorham, Jared Harris, Harrold Parrineau, and many others show up. And Blue in the Face is a part-improv semi-sequel made from unused scenes, ad-libs, and fun bits played by famous actors who visited the set of Smoke. Madonna, Michael J. Fox, Roseanne Barr, Jim Jarmusch, Lily Tomlin, and Lou Reed all have memorable scenes. And it even stand on its own.

I probably told you to watch these already, but you won’t be disappointed. Smoke especially; it makes great use of music, its cast, and its Brooklyn setting. If you’re not too depressed about the future already, Joyce Carol Oates shared a great glimpse of dystopia on her substack. Right now I’m reading The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. LeGuin and loving it.

Stay safe and keep killing the spotted lanternflies.³

1. Yay me.

2. Yay me.

3. Yay you.