By beautiful coincidence, the critical drubbing of Eddie Murphy’s Meet Dave preceded controversy over the New Yorker magazine’s cover cartoon of Barack Obama as a terrorist-agent. These lampoons depended on hype—both reviews and magazine self-promotion—which is the new virtual reality since actual moviegoers and magazine readers are declining in number. Buzz about Meet Dave and that cover cartoon creates a deafening distraction—about WHO IS THIS MAN? and from the exact types of exaggeration performed in that film and magazine. Yet it is the irrational fact of buzz that demands attention to the actual content of the movie by Brian Robbins and the caricature by Brian Blitt. Guess which one is a success and which one is the failure.
I’m looking at substance here, not the surrounding hysteria. Meet Dave’s childlike, hyperbolic fantasy works like a political cartoon: Murphy is seen in the dual role of a human-shaped spaceship from the planet Nill and as the ship’s miniaturized Captain (Rob Greenberg and Bill Corbett’s script was originally titled Starship Dave). These roles play with the cultural impact of Murphy’s box-office-champ image. It’s also an interesting and unusual instance of celebrity self-examination. That’s rather better than an innuendo-filled tabloid cover, while the august New Yorker employs tactics similar to tabloid magazines. Blitt depicts Obama and his wife Michelle as subversive, gun-toting terrorists who burn the American flag, mount a portrait of Osama bin Laden and fist-bump some secret militant conspiracy. It’s outrageous that so many film critics and political pundits got both exaggerated narratives wrong.
Unlike such Murphy family fare as the wretched Shrek and Doctor Dolittle movies, Meet Dave doesn’t patronize. It is the cleverest sci-fi comics film this summer through its fantasy presentation of how audiences respond to Murphy iconography. Our view of the Dave starship alternates between human and vehicle scale—a buoyant metaphor for Murphy’s star persona. It depicts the globally renowned celebrity trying to adjust to the world, reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s Colossus figure on the cover of the HIStory album. Inside there’s a little man needing love and (self-) respect but with a complex personality (represented by the contentious starship crew who variously stand-in for Murphy’s own psychological conflicts as well as his associates and handlers.)
Fact is, the Eddie Murphy-Brian Robbins pairing is on an artistic roll. Their previous collaboration was the splendid Norbit, which the mainstream media rudely misunderstood—anticipating the racial misconceptions of the New Yorker graphic. Critics who usually ignore evidence of racism and sexism in movies suddenly were disturbed by Norbit’s race and sex humor, blasting it with the lamest label, “politically incorrect”—the thing for which comics like Bill Maher are celebrated. Those bad reviews had no point beyond defending status-quo hypocrisy. Boasting delicate sensitivities, critics sneered at basic burlesque: fat jokes, bully jokes, in-law jokes. These allowed Norbit’s vaudeville tradition to make penetrating jabs at institutional racism (“Black man run fast. Problems run faster”) and complex identity questions (Norbit’s gentlemanliness and the virago Rasputia’s recognizable vanity and femininity—a combination as classically explosive as Punch and Judy).
The mainstream media’s inability to understand what was humane—and funny—in Norbit also occurs in the Meet Dave reviews that refuse to see its value and originality. In the Boston Globe, Wesley Morris blurted, “It’s entirely dumb, as dumb as anyone could hope a movie that ends with a flying wingtip shoe to be.” But that final image of the starship’s severed foot orbiting the globe is ingenious: a lynching reminder, it’s more astute than the record-and-stylus symbol that ends the hip-hop group OutKast’s disastrous showbiz allegory Idlewild. But Meet Dave’s symbolism also evokes the impudence of stand-up comedy. It’s almost literally an ass-kicking riposte to the misinterpretation Murphy and Robbins endured with Norbit (not to mention the minor irritation of Murphy’s Dreamgirls Oscar-loss).
Murphy gets slammed just as he enjoys the most creative phase of his movie career. Critics are insensitive to the expression this phenomenally successful artist offers the world. It seems Meet Dave was ridiculed simply because it wasn’t just another summer blockbuster—in spite of its obvious references to a star’s projected id, inflated personality and inner turmoil. The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Morgenstern got it right, describing: “The logic is that the whole expensive movie was built in the image of Eddie Murphy...Mega-budget grotesque is an art-form of its own.” Even that accompanying WSJ pen-and-ink caricature of Murphy is not so far from the spaceship itself—a stiff simulacra.
Some of Meet Dave’s oddest gags show Dave attempting to move, dance and shake hands—communicating as common humans do, as tabloid celebrities find it difficult to manage. And better than Murphy’s recent kid-friendly hits, the F/X here have popular appeal: These macro/micro stunts (the starship crew crawling out of Dave’s ear—as when the captain and his girlfriend Gabrielle Union dodge gargantuan buses and basketballs in Times Square) recall Honey, I Shrunk the Kids but are as quaintly charming as the superior Honey, I Blew Up the Kids. How could the generation familiar with that series deny this film?
Morris’ sarcastic ad hominem attack was the sort that not-bright people mistake for wit. What could be queenier than bitch-slapping Murphy’s performance as “a post-colonial Caribbean queen”? In fact, Murphy’s stilted voice as the ship (or Captain) evokes the “proper” talk of an upwardly mobile Negro—like Obama, when no black people are around. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Carrie Rickey was also fair, assessing the film’s “performance and scenario that might have been developed for Steve Martin.”
Meet Dave’s negative press shows the tendency to deny Murphy the intelligence and ingenuity regularly granted to white comedians from Steve Martin to Will Ferrell. But those guys rarely make political gestures in their work; Murphy has come to use ethnicity as a fount of his comedic richness, even as he critiques the social circumstances in which race is perplexing and discomforting.
Gentle rage is implicit in Meet Dave’s crew scenes (derived from Star Trek as well as Fantastic Voyage), where the Captain’s orders are challenged by an upstart, No. 2 in Command (Ed Helms). It recalls the rivalry between Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide but with racial undercurrents. Although this is a more genial affair, don’t overlook the allegorical significance of a modern black pop star at war with his conscience—as well as his white colleagues. (Fans of Vampire in Brooklyn know Murphy harbors some personal resentment.) Meet Dave’s comedy springs from the complexity of these ambivalent feelings; Murphy and Robbins have found an imaginative way to release the confusion and rancor. The good feeling in Meet Dave (he befriends a fatherless white kid and his mother) borrows from Spielberg’s extraterrestrial tradition, but it is primarily a gesture of pop-star magnanimity. Here, the line between children’s innocent humor and adult sophistication is miraculously transparent—and generous.
When the Captain bids farewell, he steps out on the spaceship’s vestibule: Dave’s tongue/platform sticking out of his open mouth/portal. (Remember, the term “vaudeville” means “voice of the people.”) It is a terrific symbol conveying Murphy’s sense of his own gregarious grandeur. If the Captain’s speech is stilted, that’s because Murphy’s playing a spaceship and an alien(ated) being. Meet Dave’s probing subtext includes gestures of flashy, celebratory gayness that boldly acknowledge/confront Murphy’s rumored sexuality.
These risky self-implications deserve approval, not Morris’ twisted snark. (Or as Captain Dave says of an adversary: “Put him in my ass.”) The film’s title change was more than fortuitous; it announces Murphy’s artistic candor. But that, apparently, is anathema to the mainstream media. One critic squawked, “Was that Oscar-nominated performance in Dreamgirls just something I imagined?” Yes! Murphy had already proved his talent in previous roles, not as Dreamgirls’ miscast R&B miscreant.
This bizarre insistence on dominating and maintaining Murphy’s image is reflected in the New Yorker caricature spin. Blitt’s cartoon doesn’t highlight what people think about Obama; on the contrary, it hierarchizes the Obama discussion—subjecting his difference from traditional, white-male American presidential candidates to the incendiary terms of sedition, treachery and dishonesty. That cover actually revealed how the mainstream media intends to control our thinking about Obama.
Pundits are calling the terms—clumsily. Just as film critics got Meet Dave all wrong (tagging it everything from a failed E.T. to a failed Love Guru), the media has floundered over interpretations of the New Yorker graphic. The terms used have been unhelpfully imprecise. Like lots of film critics they take these terms for granted and don’t really know what they mean.
James Rainey in the 7-15-08 L.A. Times wrote, “It seemed fairly obvious to me, my 8-year-old and, likely, the majority of readers of one of America’s finest magazines that the cover drawing by Barry Blitt was a parody. In other words (for those still struggling with the concept), the joke was not on the Obamas but on the knucklewalkers who would do them harm...” Aside from his liberal condescension, Rainey seems unaware that to “parody” something is to copy it in an exaggerated way whereas the cartoon only copies the Obama fist-bump (which is accurately portrayed as modest). Everything else in the image is added, imputed. And that’s dangerously prejudicial.
Even London’s July 15, 2008, Guardian got it wrong, describing “The controversy over the New Yorker’s cartoon parody.” This insistence on misidentifying the cover as parody occurs not for accuracy but to defend the prerogative of a fellow journalistic institution.
These weak defenses also conflict with those who say “satire.” That’s closer to the mark but still off. A satire is not innocuous; it suggests a political position that no pundit has yet dared to admit—a position defined by the meaning of satire itself. Satire is a tool of sarcasm and ridicule, used to expose, denounce or deride vice or folly. It holds human behavior to scorn or derision. Problem is, the New Yorker cover’s satirized subject is not the Obama-haters that Rainey decries, but Obama and his wife. It is their difference, their probable (sneakily African-American) treason that the cartoon ruthlessly depicts.
The tone of Blitt’s drawing is sardonic, which is to be scornful. The shaky lines and comical facial expressions (the Obamas’ smirking complicity) imputes a sharp, almost virulent wariness; it suggests that a reader should suspect their probity and trustworthiness. Pundits who say cartoonist Blitt should have chosen other subjects in order to mock Obamaphobes are overlooking the phobia in that four-color 8-by-11 folio.
And make no mistake, that cover is mockery—and not of some off-page knuckle-walking fanatic. This should raise alarms about how far journalists (not comedians) feel they’re entitled to go, especially when inciting further Red State/Blue State, Black/White, Republican/Democrat division. Much of this confusion would be allayed if we could clarify our terminology and honestly face the cultural impact that black public figures have on a conflicted society. That’s the opportunity that Meet Dave affords. Instead of taking the easy way out by thoughtlessly dismissing the film as failing summer blockbuster standards (a dubious criterion), it is imperative to recognize Murphy’s wit and artistic integrity. Revealing himself helps to reveal ourselves—something artists should always attempt and something that politicians only strategize.
As misunderstood as the New Yorker’s Obama cover, Meet Dave truly is a parody—of Murphy’s 2002 sci-fi flop, Pluto Nash. He goes at it again, not out of stupid stubbornness, but to get it right and make the character revelation more personal. It’s also a genuine satire, but not in ways that pander to audiences; its story is full of characters bickering and struggling through chaos and loneliness and competition, resentment and envy. That enmity, accurately displayed, is what makes it funny: When Dave speaks before sarcastic school children, one stands up with egotistic authority—reminiscent of a vain journalist’s sense of authority—and threatens to report him. A resentful crewmember gives the order to “vaporize the child”—an angry reflex such as placating politicians suppress.
In the lovely, cheeky way that Meet Dave brings together comic images of the Statue of Liberty, American leisure, public education and popular entertainment, Murphy teases our misunderstanding of his entertainer’s mission. It invokes the strongest, finest routines of his comic career from “Kill My Landlord” on Saturday Night Live to the fond fierceness of Norbit. The impact of all this mocks our misconceptions about comedy, celebrity and race. Meet Dave has clarity and richness; qualities the New Yorker cover lacks. Meet Dave gets the terms of cultural discourse right. Plus, it comes with Murphy’s brazenly proud, self-protective retort to any Murphyphobes or scoffers—advice that Obama wouldn’t dare give: “Put him in my ass!”
I’m looking at substance here, not the surrounding hysteria. Meet Dave’s childlike, hyperbolic fantasy works like a political cartoon: Murphy is seen in the dual role of a human-shaped spaceship from the planet Nill and as the ship’s miniaturized Captain (Rob Greenberg and Bill Corbett’s script was originally titled Starship Dave). These roles play with the cultural impact of Murphy’s box-office-champ image. It’s also an interesting and unusual instance of celebrity self-examination. That’s rather better than an innuendo-filled tabloid cover, while the august New Yorker employs tactics similar to tabloid magazines. Blitt depicts Obama and his wife Michelle as subversive, gun-toting terrorists who burn the American flag, mount a portrait of Osama bin Laden and fist-bump some secret militant conspiracy. It’s outrageous that so many film critics and political pundits got both exaggerated narratives wrong.
Unlike such Murphy family fare as the wretched Shrek and Doctor Dolittle movies, Meet Dave doesn’t patronize. It is the cleverest sci-fi comics film this summer through its fantasy presentation of how audiences respond to Murphy iconography. Our view of the Dave starship alternates between human and vehicle scale—a buoyant metaphor for Murphy’s star persona. It depicts the globally renowned celebrity trying to adjust to the world, reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s Colossus figure on the cover of the HIStory album. Inside there’s a little man needing love and (self-) respect but with a complex personality (represented by the contentious starship crew who variously stand-in for Murphy’s own psychological conflicts as well as his associates and handlers.)
Fact is, the Eddie Murphy-Brian Robbins pairing is on an artistic roll. Their previous collaboration was the splendid Norbit, which the mainstream media rudely misunderstood—anticipating the racial misconceptions of the New Yorker graphic. Critics who usually ignore evidence of racism and sexism in movies suddenly were disturbed by Norbit’s race and sex humor, blasting it with the lamest label, “politically incorrect”—the thing for which comics like Bill Maher are celebrated. Those bad reviews had no point beyond defending status-quo hypocrisy. Boasting delicate sensitivities, critics sneered at basic burlesque: fat jokes, bully jokes, in-law jokes. These allowed Norbit’s vaudeville tradition to make penetrating jabs at institutional racism (“Black man run fast. Problems run faster”) and complex identity questions (Norbit’s gentlemanliness and the virago Rasputia’s recognizable vanity and femininity—a combination as classically explosive as Punch and Judy).
The mainstream media’s inability to understand what was humane—and funny—in Norbit also occurs in the Meet Dave reviews that refuse to see its value and originality. In the Boston Globe, Wesley Morris blurted, “It’s entirely dumb, as dumb as anyone could hope a movie that ends with a flying wingtip shoe to be.” But that final image of the starship’s severed foot orbiting the globe is ingenious: a lynching reminder, it’s more astute than the record-and-stylus symbol that ends the hip-hop group OutKast’s disastrous showbiz allegory Idlewild. But Meet Dave’s symbolism also evokes the impudence of stand-up comedy. It’s almost literally an ass-kicking riposte to the misinterpretation Murphy and Robbins endured with Norbit (not to mention the minor irritation of Murphy’s Dreamgirls Oscar-loss).
Murphy gets slammed just as he enjoys the most creative phase of his movie career. Critics are insensitive to the expression this phenomenally successful artist offers the world. It seems Meet Dave was ridiculed simply because it wasn’t just another summer blockbuster—in spite of its obvious references to a star’s projected id, inflated personality and inner turmoil. The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Morgenstern got it right, describing: “The logic is that the whole expensive movie was built in the image of Eddie Murphy...Mega-budget grotesque is an art-form of its own.” Even that accompanying WSJ pen-and-ink caricature of Murphy is not so far from the spaceship itself—a stiff simulacra.
Some of Meet Dave’s oddest gags show Dave attempting to move, dance and shake hands—communicating as common humans do, as tabloid celebrities find it difficult to manage. And better than Murphy’s recent kid-friendly hits, the F/X here have popular appeal: These macro/micro stunts (the starship crew crawling out of Dave’s ear—as when the captain and his girlfriend Gabrielle Union dodge gargantuan buses and basketballs in Times Square) recall Honey, I Shrunk the Kids but are as quaintly charming as the superior Honey, I Blew Up the Kids. How could the generation familiar with that series deny this film?
Morris’ sarcastic ad hominem attack was the sort that not-bright people mistake for wit. What could be queenier than bitch-slapping Murphy’s performance as “a post-colonial Caribbean queen”? In fact, Murphy’s stilted voice as the ship (or Captain) evokes the “proper” talk of an upwardly mobile Negro—like Obama, when no black people are around. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Carrie Rickey was also fair, assessing the film’s “performance and scenario that might have been developed for Steve Martin.”
Meet Dave’s negative press shows the tendency to deny Murphy the intelligence and ingenuity regularly granted to white comedians from Steve Martin to Will Ferrell. But those guys rarely make political gestures in their work; Murphy has come to use ethnicity as a fount of his comedic richness, even as he critiques the social circumstances in which race is perplexing and discomforting.
Gentle rage is implicit in Meet Dave’s crew scenes (derived from Star Trek as well as Fantastic Voyage), where the Captain’s orders are challenged by an upstart, No. 2 in Command (Ed Helms). It recalls the rivalry between Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide but with racial undercurrents. Although this is a more genial affair, don’t overlook the allegorical significance of a modern black pop star at war with his conscience—as well as his white colleagues. (Fans of Vampire in Brooklyn know Murphy harbors some personal resentment.) Meet Dave’s comedy springs from the complexity of these ambivalent feelings; Murphy and Robbins have found an imaginative way to release the confusion and rancor. The good feeling in Meet Dave (he befriends a fatherless white kid and his mother) borrows from Spielberg’s extraterrestrial tradition, but it is primarily a gesture of pop-star magnanimity. Here, the line between children’s innocent humor and adult sophistication is miraculously transparent—and generous.
When the Captain bids farewell, he steps out on the spaceship’s vestibule: Dave’s tongue/platform sticking out of his open mouth/portal. (Remember, the term “vaudeville” means “voice of the people.”) It is a terrific symbol conveying Murphy’s sense of his own gregarious grandeur. If the Captain’s speech is stilted, that’s because Murphy’s playing a spaceship and an alien(ated) being. Meet Dave’s probing subtext includes gestures of flashy, celebratory gayness that boldly acknowledge/confront Murphy’s rumored sexuality.
These risky self-implications deserve approval, not Morris’ twisted snark. (Or as Captain Dave says of an adversary: “Put him in my ass.”) The film’s title change was more than fortuitous; it announces Murphy’s artistic candor. But that, apparently, is anathema to the mainstream media. One critic squawked, “Was that Oscar-nominated performance in Dreamgirls just something I imagined?” Yes! Murphy had already proved his talent in previous roles, not as Dreamgirls’ miscast R&B miscreant.
This bizarre insistence on dominating and maintaining Murphy’s image is reflected in the New Yorker caricature spin. Blitt’s cartoon doesn’t highlight what people think about Obama; on the contrary, it hierarchizes the Obama discussion—subjecting his difference from traditional, white-male American presidential candidates to the incendiary terms of sedition, treachery and dishonesty. That cover actually revealed how the mainstream media intends to control our thinking about Obama.
Pundits are calling the terms—clumsily. Just as film critics got Meet Dave all wrong (tagging it everything from a failed E.T. to a failed Love Guru), the media has floundered over interpretations of the New Yorker graphic. The terms used have been unhelpfully imprecise. Like lots of film critics they take these terms for granted and don’t really know what they mean.
James Rainey in the 7-15-08 L.A. Times wrote, “It seemed fairly obvious to me, my 8-year-old and, likely, the majority of readers of one of America’s finest magazines that the cover drawing by Barry Blitt was a parody. In other words (for those still struggling with the concept), the joke was not on the Obamas but on the knucklewalkers who would do them harm...” Aside from his liberal condescension, Rainey seems unaware that to “parody” something is to copy it in an exaggerated way whereas the cartoon only copies the Obama fist-bump (which is accurately portrayed as modest). Everything else in the image is added, imputed. And that’s dangerously prejudicial.
Even London’s July 15, 2008, Guardian got it wrong, describing “The controversy over the New Yorker’s cartoon parody.” This insistence on misidentifying the cover as parody occurs not for accuracy but to defend the prerogative of a fellow journalistic institution.
These weak defenses also conflict with those who say “satire.” That’s closer to the mark but still off. A satire is not innocuous; it suggests a political position that no pundit has yet dared to admit—a position defined by the meaning of satire itself. Satire is a tool of sarcasm and ridicule, used to expose, denounce or deride vice or folly. It holds human behavior to scorn or derision. Problem is, the New Yorker cover’s satirized subject is not the Obama-haters that Rainey decries, but Obama and his wife. It is their difference, their probable (sneakily African-American) treason that the cartoon ruthlessly depicts.
The tone of Blitt’s drawing is sardonic, which is to be scornful. The shaky lines and comical facial expressions (the Obamas’ smirking complicity) imputes a sharp, almost virulent wariness; it suggests that a reader should suspect their probity and trustworthiness. Pundits who say cartoonist Blitt should have chosen other subjects in order to mock Obamaphobes are overlooking the phobia in that four-color 8-by-11 folio.
And make no mistake, that cover is mockery—and not of some off-page knuckle-walking fanatic. This should raise alarms about how far journalists (not comedians) feel they’re entitled to go, especially when inciting further Red State/Blue State, Black/White, Republican/Democrat division. Much of this confusion would be allayed if we could clarify our terminology and honestly face the cultural impact that black public figures have on a conflicted society. That’s the opportunity that Meet Dave affords. Instead of taking the easy way out by thoughtlessly dismissing the film as failing summer blockbuster standards (a dubious criterion), it is imperative to recognize Murphy’s wit and artistic integrity. Revealing himself helps to reveal ourselves—something artists should always attempt and something that politicians only strategize.
As misunderstood as the New Yorker’s Obama cover, Meet Dave truly is a parody—of Murphy’s 2002 sci-fi flop, Pluto Nash. He goes at it again, not out of stupid stubbornness, but to get it right and make the character revelation more personal. It’s also a genuine satire, but not in ways that pander to audiences; its story is full of characters bickering and struggling through chaos and loneliness and competition, resentment and envy. That enmity, accurately displayed, is what makes it funny: When Dave speaks before sarcastic school children, one stands up with egotistic authority—reminiscent of a vain journalist’s sense of authority—and threatens to report him. A resentful crewmember gives the order to “vaporize the child”—an angry reflex such as placating politicians suppress.
In the lovely, cheeky way that Meet Dave brings together comic images of the Statue of Liberty, American leisure, public education and popular entertainment, Murphy teases our misunderstanding of his entertainer’s mission. It invokes the strongest, finest routines of his comic career from “Kill My Landlord” on Saturday Night Live to the fond fierceness of Norbit. The impact of all this mocks our misconceptions about comedy, celebrity and race. Meet Dave has clarity and richness; qualities the New Yorker cover lacks. Meet Dave gets the terms of cultural discourse right. Plus, it comes with Murphy’s brazenly proud, self-protective retort to any Murphyphobes or scoffers—advice that Obama wouldn’t dare give: “Put him in my ass!”
anonymous
