Toward the end of Bobcat Goldthwait’s blacker-than-black comedy God Bless America, the potbellied, everyman hero, Frank (Joel Murray), meets up in a hotel room with a black market gun dealer toting two suitcases full of weapons. The dealer drops a series of racist cracks as he shows off his wares and finally, unveiling an AK-47, asks Frank, “Is that a honey or what?” A honey—suddenly the scene, in fact the entire movie, snapped into focus for me as I remembered a nearly identical rendezvous in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. “Ain’t that a little honey?” asks the fast-talking Easy Andy as he shows Travis Bickle a .380 Walther. Both Travis and Frank are men driven past the breaking point by their disgust with modern-day America, its selfishness and cruelty and exploitation of the weak. The main difference between the two movies is that back in 1976 Travis was rightly recognized as a maniac, whereas 35 years later Frank seems as lovably put-upon as Homer Simpson.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As a night-shift cabbie in New York City, Travis glimpses humanity at its worst through the windshield of his taxi; all Frank needs to do is turn on his TV. Miserably channel surfing in his apartment one night, he sees a glib right-wing commentator (transparently modeled on Sean Hannity) viciously denouncing a grief-stricken mother who’s become an antiwar activist (transparently modeled on Cindy Sheehan), a news report about kids who set a homeless man on fire, a show called Dumb Nutz!! that compiles home video of foolish stunts gone wrong, another conservative program with a graphic of President Obama as Adolf Hitler, a talent show called American Superstars on which a pathetic fat guy is ridiculed for his tuneless rendition of “Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To),” and finally a show called American Murder that’s revisiting the 1966 shooting rampage of former marine sniper Charles Whitman. One needn’t be a genius to figure out where all this is heading.
Frank and Roxy may be a lot funnier than Travis and Iris, but in both cases the inherent creepiness of a grown man hanging around with a teenage girl is neutralized by his old-fashioned sense of decency. In Taxi Driver, Travis pushes Iris away in disgust when she tries to go down on him, and Frank is similarly uncooperative when Roxy asks him if he’s attracted to her. “I refuse to objectify a child,” Frank replies. “Fuck R. Kelly. Fuck Vladimir Nabokov. . . . Fuck Woody Allen and his whole ‘the heart wants what it wants’ bullshit. . . . Nobody cares that they damage other people.” When he and Roxy are forced to share the same hotel-room bed, Frank chastely sleeps with his feet on the pillow, and when she begins to undress in the bathroom, he quietly pulls the door shut. Yet a real tenderness develops between them: when Frank is stricken with one of his blinding headaches, Roxy relieves his agony by massaging a pressure point in the palm of his hand.
Taxi Driver would never have entered the cultural firmament the way it has if people weren’t simultaneously horrified and gratified by Travis’s climactic bloodbath. God Bless America operates on the same principle but turns the carnage into slapstick, and because all laughter is involuntary you may wind up implicating yourself without even meaning to. As with the earlier movie, this one turns in on its own morality like a Möbius strip, endorsing kindness by practicing slaughter, and pulls us along for the ride. Detractors will call its reasoning ridiculous, and they’ll be right—though I doubt that will bother Goldthwait, who makes a living being ridiculous. Watch out, America: that clown has a gun, and there’s more inside it than a little flag reading POW!
Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait
