Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas (2009)
I wonder how many of the audience in Curzon Soho were already fans or how many, like me, just wanted to find out more about the stand-up comic Bill Hicks. All I knew of him before seeing this documentary came from John Lahr’s New Yorker profile – and I certainly didn’t remember from that how successful Hicks had been on this side of the Atlantic, in London and Edinburgh, just a couple of years before his death (from pancreatic and liver cancer at the age of 32, in 1994). It took me some time to warm to him – even to adjust to his vocal rhythms enough to make out what he was saying – but halfway through I started to find Hicks very funny. It’s frustrating – watching a performer who clearly depended to a large extent on momentum, on taking his political tirades relentlessly to new extremes and new depths – to have to be content with, for the most part, brief fragments of his routines. But the longer sequences are marvelous: his take on the Jack Palance villain in Shane (which Hicks uses as the basis for an analogy with America’s arming of smaller nations and then invading them); his rant against PR and marketing, telling those who make a living from them that the only way they can save their souls is through suicide – and repeatedly reminding the PR/marketing members of the audience that ‘You all think this is a joke but it isn’t a joke’. (This sequence is especially brilliant because Hicks then realises that the PR-oriented will see the moral position he’s taking as admirable because it’s a potential money-spinner; by the time the directors Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas cut away, Hicks seems to be losing the upper hand.)
After introducing the line-up of those who are going to tell Hicks’ story, Harlock and Thomas mostly ensure that these witnesses – his family and friends from childhood and/or the stand-up world – are heard but not seen, or not seen as interviewees at any rate. The directors mix bits of footage (most of them pretty rough video recordings) of Hicks in performance, with photographs of him and those who are talking about him. Often, the photographs are pasted into a physical context – a car, a dinner party, and so on – which is then animated, in a very basic way. It’s distracting at first and, although you soon get used to it, I could never quite rid myself of the idea that Harlock and Thomas were making a conscientious but rather strained attempt to make a motion picture, avoiding the conventional documentary combination of archive film and talking heads. But conscientious is better than facile and it seems very right, at the point at which Hicks’ illness is diagnosed, for us then to start seeing the witnesses as themselves – the abrupt change underlines the shock that the news was to all concerned.
American: The Bill Hicks Story is a rather pompous title yet I ended up feeling it was true to its subject’s spirit. Bill Hicks seems a truly constructive satirist – he has a world view (peace/love/forgiveness, using the US defence budget to feed the starving, etc) that he’s eager to recommend in preference to the ones that he excoriates. But there are occasions, and especially one of his last performances, when he’s evidently using stand-up as soapbox: it really isn’t a joke. This may be the consequence of his awareness of imminent death – but you still wonder, if Hicks had lived on, quite how he would have developed as a comedian. Harlock and Thomas appear to endorse the view of some of the witnesses, and the implied view of the man himself, that Hicks was a patriot – someone whose anger about what was wrong with his country was intensified by his love for it. It’s suggested too that, in spite of using his Southern Baptist parents as continuing grist to his satirical mill, Hicks believed strongly in family. This may well be true (although I’m not sure that returning home when you’re terminally ill clinches the argument). What’s striking is that it’s through the loving testimony of Hicks’s mother, brother and sister (his father died shortly after Harlock and Thomas started making the film) that you become convinced of the strength of family ties – especially in what we hear from Hicks’s mother Mary. Her persistent loyalty and pride in her son’s success made her immune to the subversive content of what he was saying onstage. And he is an inspired performer. Bill Hicks was no oil painting – his jowly, pasty face makes him look less than a picture of health from early in his career and we hear plenty about his struggles with various addictions – to alcohol, nicotine and other narcotics. (When he gets angry, his looks can call to mind Kathy Bates in a rage in Misery.) But I doubt if a non-smoker could have got the comic mileage out of hacking into a microphone that Hicks gets. The way he simulates the sounds of exploding bombs is incredible too: even when he’s not using words, he plays the mike like an instrument.
17 May 2010
