| One sort of film, plentiful enough by now to be called
a genre, is a mixture of film and theater. The concert film – so it is
called – presents a stand-up comic standing up, before an audience. The
concert films of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy were theater performances
at which some cameras were running. The audience, with its laughter and
applause, is itself part of the genre, a factor in the creation of the
film, especially when the material is raw. (Spalding Gray filmed two of
his solo pieces without an audience, not unsuccessfully, but he is not
a comic and his material is not raw.) Of course in a theater performance
of any kind the audience is in some measure a collaborator, but the concert
film takes this theater matter into another stratum. This is the only film
species in which an audience in the film is essential. The audience creates
a symbiosis with the performer, something like an orchestra accompanying
a singer.
Consider: the idea of a stand-up comic playing only to a camera, though it probably has happened, seems impoverished, almost ghostly. Not only is that earlier audience part of the show, but when the material is raunchy, the audience’s responses certify the film. It’s not that we need that audience’s approval; but the laughter and the applause are nudges toward the date, the year, the very moment of the society we are in. The whole occasion, comprising the comic and two audiences, reminds us that this performance, like just about everything else these days, is a brief pause in continual transition. Margaret Cho’s work is a perfect instance. Her latest picture, which is her second, is Notorious C.H.O. (Wellspring). It was filmed in a Seattle theater last winter, and it crystallizes a social moment. Yet the originating reason for the film’s being is not societal, it is Cho. Her talent. She is a clever mime, vocally ingenious, scalpel-sharp in her timing, with blithe self-confidence, and with an odd combination of casualness and intent that is very quickly engaging. Her subject is sex – her own sexual life, which is prodigiously varied; her observations of others’ sex lives; her fantasies, her frustrations. Sex is more than her subject: it is her observation post, her stance, her agency. Cho is a plump, thirtyish Korean-American whose face is not in itself distinguished but becomes a slow-motion kaleidoscope as she works. She wastes no time in defining her terrain and her tone. At the start she tells the audience that she is just back from stricken New York, that she visited Ground Zero, and that she fellated all the salvage workers. (Not her verb.) So, less than a minute into her act, she announces that we can choose to be offended or not, but that she is going to treat everything – matters serious and less so – in the style of Margaret Cho. In the following hour and a half she takes us through her upbringing, her friendships with homosexual men and women, her sex with them and with a number of straight men, her relations with her parents (an agreeable couple who are interviewed briefly before her act begins and who accept her as she is), her views on sexual prejudices, selfhood, marriage. (One point of possible import: she never utters the word “love.”) What is chiefly memorable about her film, other than her talent, is its popular acceptance. Cho performs frequently in clubs and in theaters here and abroad, but those appearances, compared with film, are private. Her Seattle audience, we are told, was largely gay and lesbian, and thus was favorably sensitized to much of her material and opinion. I do not know whether her audiences are homosexual in the same measure wherever she plays, but she makes us think that, for all of us, the raunchy concert film has become a valuable social index and chronicle. (Porno films are a different subject – in a certain sense much less daring, because the audience attends for one blatant reason.) Aristophanes told us in The Clouds, “Remember – nothing’s shameful.” Margaret Cho, with her unblinking serenity and her sharp mode, is putting him to the test. And the genre will go on, with her and with others. If Aristophanes were curious about his sway today, he would need only to look at the concert films of the last twenty-five years. |