Thanksgiving Brutality: Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I like brutal art — no mercy, no quarter. I like any sort of brutality on the part of the artist, by which I mean the refusal to temporize or euphemize or in any other way permit the audience to gloss over or ignore reality. Understand, I don’t seek a gratuitous squalor, but rather an unforgiving acknowledgment that reality is what it is. This is what I love so much in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, who gives me ambiguous or tragic endings and teaches me more about real life than a dozen treatises.

All that is by way of introduction to a recommendation: The film Talk Radio by Oliver Stone and Eric Bogosian. It’s the most amazingly brutal film I’ve ever seen, absolutely no let-up from start to finish. I have Bogosian’s original playscript, but the film screenplay is substantially richer. Moreover, Stone’s camera tricks are superb; the film plays huge implication games with reflections, focus-shifting, facial reactions, etc. Similarly, Stewart Copeland (of The Police) provides a deeply disturbing score. Finally, the actors — especially Bogosian as radio talk show host Barry Champlain — are outstanding.

The film is “based on a true story,” the last days of Denver talk radio host Alan Berg, as documented in the book Talked to Death by Stephen Singular. But “true stories” are omnipresent and banal, where art is the thing that won’t turn you loose. I defy anyone to even breathe in Act III of Talk Radio. The film builds and builds until the tension is so immense it envelopes the room. And then, just when you can’t stand it, Stone and Bogosian throw the most horrifyingly perfect five minutes of agony right in your face, and you sweat and the tendons in your neck pop and you strain and you strain and you strain, desperate to turn away. But you can’t turn away, you can’t stand what you’re seeing and you can’t bear to miss a second of it.

Hedda Gabler, always, and Ghosts, and the fourth and fifth acts of Hamlet. I can think of more examples, but not many more. Great art says, “Your ass is mine.” Great art doesn’t have this quality or that quality. Great art takes over your mind and releases it only when it is through with you. This is the quality that permeates Ibsen; you must know precisely what you cannot bear to know. And this is the quality that informs Talk Radio, the most Ibsen-like, Greek-like drama ever committed to film.

I first wrote this a little over ten years ago, and the film version of Talk Radio is just about old enough to vote by now. Means nothing. Art in America is such a vacuum that nothing has come along since 1988 to supplant this film in my mind.

Eric Bogosian thinks he has a weblog, but he’s wrong.

Bogosian is stealing every scene he appears in in this season’s episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent on NBC-TV.

The stage play version of Talk Radio, substantially different from the film, will open at the Longacre Theater in New York City in February of 2007, with Liev Schreiber playing Barry Champlain.

And none of that matters, nor does any of the rest of Bogosian’s corpus — or Stone’s. Buy or rent Talk Radio. This film is one of the singular artistic achievements of the twentieth century — in its writing, acting and directing an incomparable testament to the power of filmmaking as an artform.

If you can endure its unrelenting brutality, you will have earned your Thanksgiving Dinner…