The Year of Lovesick Primates, Recycled Ideas and Everyone Watching Everyone Else
By
Greg Beato
Poor Peter Jackson. He spent millions on special effects and only created 2005's fourth-most-terrifying primate. Easily topping King Kong's leading beast? Love-crazed pixie Tom Cruise, power-beaming with passion for his own pet starlet, Katie Holmes. Michael Jackson, vindicated in court but forever perfumed with the sweet baby-oil stink of scandal. And finally, Pat O'Brien, infotainment icon and problem-voicemailer: His beastly phone messages to a seemingly indifferent beauty, which somehow found their way onto the Web in March, were a case study in pure hairy id, the year's funniest, saddest, scariest and, ultimately, most riveting performance.
"I want to f--king go crazy with you," O'Brien began, self-conscious at first, his voice a soft feral purr. "You are so f--king hot." Then, emboldened by these tentative stabs at dirty talk, he grew more forceful, brazenly promising to lick and suck the lucky woman into a frenzy—if his girlfriend Betsy would let him, that is. By the end of the calls, O'Brien was in the full thrush of carnal abandon, yapping obscenities like a rabid poodle and so desperate to escape the suffocating binds of infotainment-industry propriety he could barely string words into coherent sentences: "We can have any of these f--king hookers, too. Let's just f--king have sex and fun and drugs. F--king eat and go crazy."
Step aside, Kong! O'Brien makes you look like a dainty metrosexual!
And yet, beneath the entertainment journalist's lusty, brutish outbursts, wasn't there also the fragile murmur of a human heart? These are anxious times we live in: Haunted by hurricanes, terrorism, evolution, the war in Iraq; who doesn't long for the tender solace and liberating vertigo that only coke-fueled five-ways with your girlfriend, some hookers and a hot chick who never answers her phone can provide?
Even if you weren't rolling like Pat O'Brien, however, there were still ways to distract yourself from 2005's grim realities. Like, for example, 50 Cent's The Massacre. Upon its release, 50 achieved a feat no other artist has accomplished since the Beatles did it in 1964—placing four singles in the Billboard Top 10 at once; apparently, nothing gets a party started like upbeat jingles about murder and oral sex. Another popular diversion: Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, which took our minds off nightly news body counts with its silver-lining look at the upside of alien invasion. It doesn't matter how much your kids hate you, Spielberg gently taught us, sometimes all familial reconciliation requires is worldwide devastation at the hands of lethal robot insects.
Then, of course, there was the year's most ubiquitous song: Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone." With its familiar power-pop riffs and nth-generation I-will-survive lyrics, it was instantly narcotizing—if you closed your eyes and turned up the volume, it was easy to imagine you were back in 1980, when Pat Benatar prowled the airwaves, floods of biblical proportions only afflicted Third World countries and Osama bin Laden was still on our side.
President Bush seemed to be opting for the escapist pleasures of nostalgia, too. In mid-April, the contents of his iPod made headlines: When everybody else in the country was listening to Clarkson and 50, Bush was listening to Huey Lewis, Bryan Adams and Hall and Oates. "It seems to be the playlist of somebody who stopped listening to popular music in the 1980s," concluded one industry observer. Meanwhile, in the year's most perfect metaphor, a young boy who'd been in a two-week coma awoke after his parents played him his favorite song, Green Day's caustic ode to our leader, "American Idiot."
Just weeks after his iPod made news, President Bush scheduled a rare prime-time news conference to address important matters of state. Alas, no one was interested; Fox actually cut away from the end of it to ensure a full airing of The Simple Life: Interns. This was good news for the administration, though; when you get pre-empted by Nicole Richie, how bad can things be? Then a grieving war mom and Mother Nature ruined everything—the negative publicity generated by Cindy Sheehan's Crawford camp-out and the FEMA debacle in New Orleans resulted in the lowest approval ratings of Bush's presidency.
But two can play at greater scrutiny. A few weeks ago, the New York Times broke the news that our government has been spying on American citizens. Politicians of all stripes expressed outrage over the controversial program, but Bobby Brown, Danny Bonaduce, Tara Reid, Hulk Hogan, Britney and Kevin, Tommy Lee and Pauly Shore must have been wondering what the big deal was. Our Founding Fathers valued their privacy, sure, but in 2005, having your every move recorded and broadcast (preferably on a major network, but basic cable would do in a pinch) was the American dream.
At least a government wiretap means someone was paying attention—with the ever-rising tide of boxed sets, special-edition DVDs, mix-tapes, podcasts, cable channels and blogs flooding the mediascape, it was easy to get lost in the mix. In the pages of Blender magazine, for example, Ricky Martin explained exactly how he bangs—"I love giving the golden shower"—and no one did a spit take. Even in the genteel world of poetry, allusive subtlety gave way to explicit auto-surveillance. Here's Donald Hall in his 2005 memoir, The Best Day The Worst Day, describing how he got his groove back after diabetes-induced impotence sabotaged his love life and his verse: "A different device left a permanent hard-on—but the penis could swivel down, so that it would not stick out and be embarrassing. ... Now, prosthetic manliness brought back vigor to my poems."
And anyone who was not so quick to expose their bionic erections? Eventually, their secrets ended up on the Internet anyway. So, ultimately, you have to wonder: Is Bush's secret spy program even necessary? Those 12 people on the planet who haven't been exposed by Gawker.com and don't have their own tell-all myspace.com page or reality TV series? They're the f--king terrorists!
Of course, government surveillance is not that much of a threat to the land of the free-ish. If Bush's spies are anything like the rest of us, they can only watch so much. To break through all the noise and clutter, many content creators resorted to material that audiences were already acquainted with. Six of the year's 10 highest-grossing movies were sequels, remakes or adaptations, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. 2005 also saw new versions of The Dukes of Hazzard, The Amityville Horror, The Longest Yard and Gilligan's Island, to name just a few. Unfortunately, the same rule that applies to Buddhists also applies to entertainment: If you're bad in your first incarnation, you're usually even worse in your second.
Still, who didn't welcome, say, USA Network's resurrection of Kojak? You didn't actually have to watch it to feel as if you'd already seen it—it was like an even more efficient version of TiVo. And that left more time for the good stuff. On her debut album, Arular, M.I.A., a 28-year-old Sri Lankan refugee who's lived in England for the last two decades, limned a world where guerillas in training, Nike factory workers and Missy and Timbaland all got equal billing. With its flat, public-address-system vocals floating over beats sourced from every hemisphere, Arular sounded like a festive emergency, the end-times party that Prince imagined years ago.
Crash, written and directed by Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, was also fueled by multi-culti collision. While its depiction of LA as racial demolition derby was even less subtle than Kanye West's "Concert for Hurricane Relief" speech, it was also wickedly funny, genuinely heart-wrenching, and as tightly plotted as a pauper's cemetery.
Then, of course, there was Phil Spector's new fake hair—the fright wig he wore to his murder trial— which was to his old fake hair what Peter Jackson's new King Kong was to the old King Kong: an exponentially more spectacular achievement.
Or to put it another way, we sometimes forget what remarkable times we live in. In January, when Johnny Carson passed away, commentators didn't just mourn a beloved entertainer—they mourned the demise of the context in which he thrived, the glory days of mass media. When Carson was the only game in town, the game seemed more special: Celebrity appearances were rarer, audiences were bigger and an ad-libbed double entendre aimed at a minor starlet was enough to get 10 million people talking at water coolers the next morning.
Now, Tom Cruise can beat the crap out of Oprah's couch and achieve only half the buzz. And even if the ghosts of Carson, Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Pryor decided to come back and channel their collective genius through, say, Jimmy Kimmel, no one would notice—our attention's spread too thin now.
And, really, as unique and pioneering a talent as Carson was, if you had to choose between just him every night or Jay, David, Conan, Jimmy, Jon, Steven and that Scottish guy, too, who would you choose? Sorry, Johnny, but we're all Pat O'Brien now, and monogamy no longer satisfies.