Charl Blignaut: On stage in Johannesburg
It is no doubt extremely uncool of me to not to gush about Ben Elton’s Popcorn. I mean, I ask you, how can a ”Generation-X West End smash hit” that uses terms like ”Tarantino-esque” in its publicity material possibly be anything but deadly hip?
Actually, the answer is simple; like all blind trendiness, it goes out of fashion.
When Elton first sat down to write his early Nineties novel that was to be converted to the stage in 1997 and then dumped in a Johannesburg theatre, American accents, set and poster all perfectly intact in 1998, perhaps then the debate was still current enough to seem like something more than just escapist retro fluff. The early Nineties were, after all, the heyday of the killer road movies that i nspired Popcorn.
Wild at Heart, Pulp Fiction, Doom Generation. ”Baby, you got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.” Dim slayer-babe chewing gum and fawning over goofy sadist …
But by the time films like Love and a 45 went into production, even the cheesiest pimp in Hollywood must have realised they’d just retold the same story once too many times.
Of course, if Elton’s play pretended to be nothing more than the entertaining fluff that it is there would be no problem. Hell, I can cope with fluff. But it’s not. As several local critics have pointed out, the play is also ”menacing” in its portrayal o f a gun-crazy world inhabited by CNN-slaves. One critic even called it ”terrifying” and Elton himself seems intent on hammering home a moral messa ge. His play is not just some insidious remake of a once-hip celluloid culture. Hell no, it is a piece of pop culture commentary.
What would happen, Elton asks, if the slutty teen serial killer couple from Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers were to pitch up at the director’s Hollywood mansion the day after he has won an Oscar for the film and then proceed to subject him to the kin d of ruthless and trendy torture he has so casually portrayed in his film? And do so on live global TV?
Step aside OJ Simpson.
Does screen violence create violence in society? Have the mass media turned us into a nation of remote-control cannibals who accept that celebrity status can skewer legal norms? Have we come to justify cold-blooded murder just because Hollywood portrays it as cool?
For Ben Elton and Dawn Lindberg, the South African director and soroptomist, the answer to all of the above is, according to the play, yes. Sure we can switch off the violence on our screens, but we don’t. (We are, after all, just a bunch of peroxide blo nd hipsters with no self-control).
Elton’s play is an attempt to inject a shot of morality into the Hollywood equation.
Whether, in the first place, the screen violence/real life violence equation is a problematic assumption or not, is not really the point here.
The point is that if Elton wants to show how film violence carries into society, then he could at least have filtered it down into social behaviour and shown us how this happens in real terms. Instead he clones the culture he is criticising and dumps it into a situation dripping with moral pretention. As far as I can see, he’s not doing much different to what Stone did in the first place. When you think about it, his play is actually a reactionary beast done out in leathers and carrying a gun.
That it could be relevant to an American or British audience last year is one thing, but to replicate it in South Africa and then act like it’s some sort of pop culture breakthrough, is another. We are a country without a viable mass media or film empire . Even though we’re obsessed with all things American, pretending that Popcorn is anything more than popcorn is a bit much. I strongly suggest you go along for the ride and ignore the critics who want to turn it into a morality play.
It is, after all, beautifully acted, passably directed and, if you liked the movie, thoroughly entertaining. Lindberg has done her utmost to stage it exactly as it was staged in the UK. She even copied the poster and programme photo to make us feel like we’re actually on the West End and not in Johannesburg, a city plagued with a gangster scenario all of its own that could make the psycho-trendoid s in Hollywood seem as banal as the flavour of last month.
Popcorn is on at the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg until April 11