Author: Nathan Rabin

1938’s Reefer Madness occupies a special place in stoner lore. Originally conceived as an urgent message film about the dangers of the demon weed, it was rediscovered in the sixties and seventies by scruffy, long-haired countercultural types who grooved on the film’s all-around ineptitude, hysterical tone, manic overacting, and patently false portrayal of pot as a Pandora’s Box unleashing a wave of insanity, murder, and sexual assault. Of course, it didn’t hurt the film’s popularity as an unintentional comedy that many of its second-wave viewers were stoned out of their collective gourd while watching it. Pot smokers in that more progressive, open-minded era no doubt delighted in the surreal contrast between the psychotic, aggressive, and out-of-control behavior of the pot smokers onscreen and their own infinitely more mellow experiences with the drug.

Watching Reefer Madness in 2004 is a different, far darker experience. For one thing, it was released April 20 (4/20—get it, dude?) by no less a corporate behemoth than FOX, owned by right-wing gazillionaire Rupert Murdoch. For another thing, FOX has created a cheekily packaged, inexplicably colorized “special addiction” DVD featuring an audio commentary from Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Mike Nelson. Nelson insists early on that he’s here as an expert on bad movies, not on the deplorable practice of smoking marijuana—though it seems mildly incredible that a guy who has made a profession out of wisecracking through cheesy old movies hasn’t inhaled once or twice.

What’s striking today is how far we haven’t come as a society in our attitude toward pot. In fact, we may have ended up where we began. It is remarkable how closely the film’s histrionic anti-pot message is echoed today in the shrill, fundamentally dishonest anti-pot propaganda that’s being pushed on children by, for example, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

The most memorable and disturbing anti-pot ads don’t just recall scenes from Reefer Madness—they practically replicate them. In the film, for example, a previously wholesome, clean-cut American Youth gets hopped up on the wacky tobaccy and obliviously drives over an unfortunate pedestrian, an incident echoed by a notorious Drug-Free America PSA in which stoners on a munchies run pull out from a drive-through window and run over a little girl on her bike.

In another PSA, a pair of stoned teenaged boys exchange baked small talk before one finds his dad’s loaded gun and accidentally shoots his friend, which eerily mirrors a pivotal scene in Reefer Madness in which two stoners wrestling for control of a gun accidentally shoot and kill a woman. It says something profoundly sad about our values that in a scenario in which two stoned kids have access to a loaded gun, marijuana is presented as the villain. In some strange parallel universe (or, say, the Netherlands or Canada), the gun might be considered the real cause for concern.

In America, however, we apparently send children the message that alcohol, cigarettes, and guns are things they should feel free to indulge in at an appropriate age, while marijuana is an evil to be avoided at all costs. (Could this have something to do with the fact that powerful lobbying organizations back the gun, tobacco, and alcohol industries, while pot’s main advocates are belligerent rappers, unlaundered hippies, and Woody Harrelson?) It’s not clear what makes marijuana so much more dangerous and destructive than say, a fifth of Jagermeister, a pack-a-day Camel addiction, or a 9mm Glock.

In the two creepiest anti-pot ads (and there is plenty of competition), marijuana is implicated in the unwanted pregnancy and sexual assault of twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls, a claim that has its historical precedent in Reefer Madness’ depiction of potheads as insatiable, deranged sex fiends who simply won’t take no for an answer. Never mind that a stoned thirteen-year-old boy is more likely to take a nap or launch a full-frontal assault on a family-sized bag of Doritos than pressure a stoned girl into unprotected sex. In the looking-glass world of anti-pot propaganda, naked appeals to emotion will always trump plausibility. Then again, these ads are no more manipulative than commercials for beer—which actually can be implicated in a number of sexual assaults and unwanted pregnancies—that link alcohol to a sense of fun and freewheeling, uninhibited sexuality. And that’s not even mentioning those horrifying ads linking pot smokers to terrorism.

Perhaps what makes these Partnership ads so annoying to a thoughtful person is their artfulness. Reefer Madness’ ineptitude and lunacy make the film easy to dismiss and ridicule. While these ads send the same message—smoking pot leads to sexual assault, shattered lives, and death—they do so in a far more clever fashion. It reminds me of those hyper-ironic ad campaigns in the nineties that insisted the best way to stick it to the man and to express your individuality was to purchase whatever consumer product was being advertised. (Remember Jeremy Davies insisting that a Subaru was like punk rock, only a car?) These ads speak the vernacular of youth and the counterculture, using irony, sarcasm, and quirky, deadpan slice-of-life comedy to deliver a profoundly conservative message.

The problem is, it’s a bald lie. These commercials establish a disturbing and potentially disastrous precedent by prevaricating to kids about the dangers of drugs. For better or worse, smoking pot with friends has become a rite of passage for many young Americans, especially those enrolled in institutions of higher learning, and it has been for several decades now. When today’s kids find out (as they inevitably will) that marijuana is nowhere near the sinister force demonized in anti-drug propaganda, who’s to say they won’t then wonder if genuinely destructive drugs like cocaine and speed aren’t as dangerous as advertised, either? There are plenty of legitimate messages society should be sending children, but all it takes is one transparent lie to lose credibility permanently. Kids are smarter than that.

Pot smoking is essentially America’s dirty little open secret. Nearly everyone who isn’t Ned Flanders does it at some point, but it’s been so thoroughly stigmatized, villainized, and criminalized by reactionary entities like the Partnership for a Drug-Free America that we as a society are more or less obligated to pretend that it’s something far worse than it is. Far from steering kids away from pot, these ads only add to its outlaw allure by insisting that it’s dirty and wrong and—most horrifying of all to horny, confused teenagers—could very well lead to sex. All it takes is a trip to the Netherlands (incidentally, an increasingly popular rite of passage for young Americans) to see that a culture won’t disintegrate completely if pot is treated as something other than a felonious moral failing. If we came clean about the actual danger posed by pot, maybe we could start dealing with it in a more reasonable and responsible manner.

Reefer Madness is still sort of funny in an unintentional way. But given the current climate surrounding pot, don’t be surprised if the laughs stick in your throat a little. Today’s tactics and techniques might be more sophisticated, but the anti-pot brigade is still peddling the same old lies with a straight face. And that, ultimately, isn’t very funny at all.

If you’ve watched television at any point during the past ninety days, you’ve probably seen the latest ads from Old Navy, a brand that dispenses irony like VH1 serves up nostalgia: cheap, shameless, and unfiltered. In a commercial I cannot for the life of me get out of my head, a waxy Fran Drescher brays, “My shizzle’s gone fazizzle.” She enunciates these words in a way that suggests she’d like very much to be told what the hell “shizzle” and “fazizzle” mean. Needless to say, she’s not the only one.

Lil’ Kim is featured in another Old Navy ad that offers a race-reversed variation. In it, L’il Kim wears the sort of outfit a prep-school girl might pack for a trip to Killington with Muffy and Biff.

Outside the world of inexpensive clothing manufactured by impoverished Asian children, Jerry Stiller stars in an advertisement for the latest Satanic incarnation of America Online. Stiller appears unannounced in the home of a middle-class couple who, like the rest of humanity, feel only contempt and hatred for the AOL discs sent to them on an hourly basis. They’re so turned off by AOL, in fact, that they’ve constructed an elaborate fish sculpture out of the discs. This is upsetting to AOL pitchman Stiller. He suggests that they complete their sculpture with a Snoop Dogg CD. This prompts the arrival of a visibly enraged Mr. Dogg, who admonishes the couple to “wait just one minizzle.”

These campaigns at once highlight and satirize the state of race relations in the U.S. They’re funny, one supposes, precisely because they offer such improbable juxtapositions: Fran Drescher and black slang, Lil’ Kim and tweedy ski wear, and Snoop Dogg mixing it up with George Costanza’s dad. These ads are part of a wave of humor based on the lazy melding of black culture with white idiocy. In Bringing Down the House, one of the year’s most popular films, a far-too-enthusiastic Steve Martin adopts a ghetto-fabulous wardrobe and spouts horribly dated Ebonics in an attempt to help real-life raptor and costar Queen Latifah. In Malibu’s Most Wanted, Jamie Kennedy plays a Wafrican-American (White African-American) who doesn’t let his privileged background or white skin get in the way of behaving like a particularly sorry would-be member of Master P’s No Limit army. On HBO’s hilarious Da Ali G Show, a white Brit named Sacha Baron Cohen adopts the comic persona of a clueless Indian who desperately wants to be taken seriously as a B-boy.
There are countless other characters whose humor is predicated on the contrast between their white skin and their black behavior. The feebleminded “wigger” is by now a stock comic character, the walking embodiment of the culture-clash school of comedy.

From an entertainment point of view, it’s easy to see why the wigger is a popular character. It’s an easy gag, one so embedded into our nation’s background that it’s almost a part of our mythology. Why did the chicken cross the road? We still ask that question not because it’s a hilarious joke, but because it’s part of American folklore. Similarly, a movie need only introduce a white character kicking it street-style to win an unearned laugh of recognition.

“Wigger” became vogue shorthand to label white kids who behave in ways considered black. The word gives a good indication of the low esteem in which these characters are held. People who wouldn’t be caught dead using the word “nigger” seem to have no such hang-up about using the word “wigger,” even though it’s nothing more than a contraction of “white nigger.” (Some have argued that blacks themselves coined the word not only as a contraction, but to label someone who had “wigged out” about his or her racial identity. This punning is itself an example of how wonderful authentic black street talk can be.)

White comics who act black usually emulate a particularly debased, broad caricature of black behavior. This sort of comedian is a descendent of the minstrel performer of yore, the clown who earned his daily bread reassuring racist whites that all the negative stereotypes about blacks were true.
The main difference between the minstrel-show performer and the Wafrican-American comic of today is that the latter’s buffoonish behavior is supposed to reflect negatively on whites rather than blacks. He functions as a supposedly self-deprecating white person, the message being “Don’t white folks look ridiculous when we try to emulate cool, black culture?”

But just how incongruous is the Wafrican-American? Black popular culture is increasingly becoming American pop culture, to the point where the two are pretty much one and the same. In practice, plenty of white kids grow up listening exclusively to rap and R&B. Doesn’t it make sense that they’d pick up the affectations of their black heroes? After all, kids are nothing if not impressionable. As the U.S. becomes an increasingly multiracial place, the Wafrican-American caricature continues to suggest the regressive idea that black is black and white is white and never the twain shall meet. (Kids, of course, are smarter than that.)

This is particularly ironic considering that the most controversial, influential, and admired pop star in the world is Eminem, a white rapper whose unironic embrace of black culture is widely and correctly attributed to his natural affinity and deep reverence for it, rather than self-hatred or the delusion that he’s a black man stuck in a white man’s body.

The Wafrican-American stock character isn’t likely to die out any time soon. But there are small signs that artists are increasingly recognizing the complicated and ambiguous state of race relations. One of the many subtle touches in Barbershop, for example, was a white character whose mimicry of black culture is depicted as a natural admiration and respect for black culture, rather than a pathetic attempt to be something he’s not. Eminem’s character in his autobiographical movie 8 Mile was depicted this way too.

Unfortunately, characters like that are still exceptional. But artists in the future would be wise to acknowledge that the boundaries between black and white culture are increasingly fluid and ambiguous—a fact of life refuted by the very existence of the comic Wafrican-American.

Watching Arnold Schwarzenegger lumber his way through Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, I was struck by a nagging, persistent quibble. Why on Earth would anybody build a 55-year-old android killing machine? That’s like building a sex robot modeled after Bea Arthur. Granted, at no point in T3 does the Austrian oak actually pull out a card for the American Association of Retired People, nor does he quip, “I’ll be back—to purchase strained prunes and adult diapers.” But there’s no getting around the fact that Schwarzenegger is, to use the immortal parlance of the Lethal Weapon movies, getting too old for this shit.

Schwarzenegger and rival Sylvester Stallone (who can currently be seen camping it up in a jokey supporting role as the bad guy in Spy Kids 3-D) are among the last of a dying breed: the rugged, stoic action hero, the kind who can carry an entire rusty vehicle on his muscle-hewn shoulders.

When I was growing up in the 80s, there was an unchanging constellation of action heroes. At the top there were of course, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Clint Eastwood, alpha-male Horatio Alger-types whose rise to glory had already become the stuff of legend. Below them were lesser but still commercially viable pretenders to the throne: pretty boy Jean-Claude Van Damme, Methuselah-like Charles Bronson, unsmiling Dolph Lundgren, hirsute redneck Chuck Norris, and ponytail enthusiast Steven Seagal, who is best known these days for running like a girl, lying about CIA connections, and getting shaken down by the mob.

Needless to say, nearly everyone in that list, other than Eastwood, who moonlights as a respected auteur, has aged about as gracefully as a Zubaz track suit, and many of Eastwood’s most recent acting roles have made references, usually explicit, to the advancing age of The Man Who Long Ago Played The Man With No Name. With the exception of Eastwood and Schwarzenegger, all the other guys have starred in at least one film that’s skipped multiplexes altogether, on its way to a less-than-auspicious premiere at the neighborhood Blockbuster. Haven’t been seeing much of Stallone on the big screen lately? That’s probably because his last two starring vehicles, the sadly titled Eye See You and Avenging Angelo both went direct to video.

Then again, Stallone is a direct-to-video newcomer compared to Van Damme, who has recently struck out with such not-ready-for-the-multiplex fare as Derailed, The Order, Replicant, Coyote Moon, and The Legionnaire. Or Seagal, who has alternated between direct-to-video vehicles and Joel Silver-produced theatrical releases where his fading star is augmented by a motley array of co-stars and sidekicks.

Schwarzenegger hasn’t had a flat-out hit since 1994’s True Lies, and one of the unexpectedly poignant aspects of T3 is that it writes Arnold’s (and company’s) approaching obsolescence into its narrative. Schwarzenegger’s character in the film is the android equivalent of an Atari 2600—a hulking anachronism who just can’t compete with the sexy new technology represented by Maxim cover girl Kristanna Loken. It’s thematically fitting, since technology, particularly the kind used to great effect in The Matrix (and much lesser effect in its army of imitators), has played a large part in killing off the action hero. If special effects, wires, and high-tech trickery can make Tobey Maguire, Drew Barrymore, and Keanu Reeves look like they can outfight Bruce Lee, then what’s the appeal of a 50-something martial artist like Seagal? His non-existent talent? The pony tail, maybe?

Given the cruel, Darwinian nature of survival as an action star, it’s no wonder today’s most promising action heroes (Vin Diesel, The Rock) look like freakish, steroid-addled caricatures of their predecessors. In order to survive, the action hero has to evolve, and that evolution has been halting and troubled at best.

Another factor in the demise of the conventional action hero is the skyrocketing cost of making, marketing, and releasing movies. A decade and a half ago, a definite theatrical niche existed for modestly budgeted action vehicles. As budgets rise exponentially, outstripping inflation and squeezing out all but the most fool-proof, high-budget, high-concept fare, that theatrical niche simply doesn’t exist anymore. Like an aging athlete still trying to make a living with his best years behind him, yesterday’s action heroes have been demoted to the movie-making equivalent of the minor leagues.

No wonder Schwarzenegger is considering a move into politics. Mr. Maria Shriver has fared much better than nearly all his contemporaries, but his career has been sliding downhill for a long time; he hasn’t been a sure thing at the box office for around a decade. Reprising his most beloved roles—sequels to True Lies and Conan the Destroyer have been rumored for years—will probably keep Schwarzenegger on professional life support, but as the actor approaches his 60s, juicy new roles are likely to elude him.

As a concerned citizen, I find the idea of Governor Schwarzenegger terrifying. I still vividly recall the T3 star endorsing the elder President Bush with the following bit of heavily accented would-be mirth: “I just played da Terminaytor on da big screen, but Maacheel Duk-a-kis is da real Terminaytor of America’s few-chah!”—a patently ridiculous claim that brings to mind far-fetched images of the shrimpy former governor of Massa-chusetts striding maniacally through a post-apocalyptic U.S wasteland of his own making.

But as someone who loves a compelling, larger-than-life personal narrative, I find the idea of Governor or even President Schwarzenegger to be infinitely compelling. If he were to go into politics, Arnie would be like Ronald Reagan adjusted for inflation, a true-blue, all-American success story as improbable as it is irresistible. At worst, he’d be the next Governor Ventura: an amusing idea in theory, an unfortunate one in practice. Even if he lost, he’d still continue to loom large as one of his chosen country’s biggest icons.

Schwarzenegger’s film career, though still monstrously lucrative, offers nowhere to go but down. If Arnold runs for office, the second act in his brilliant career could be a doozie. I’m just glad I don’t live in California.

When I heard about EMI’s deluxe re-issue of Ice Cube’s first four albums, I was struck with a strange sense of nostalgia for both the albums and the era they represent. Of course, nostalgia is kind of a quaint emotion to feel for ultra-violent, incendiary, unabashedly angry albums that viciously attack Jews, white men, women, and Koreans (and that’s just for starters).

Yet I couldn’t help but think back to the days of my tortured adolescence, when I memorized the lyrics to “It Was A Good Day,” watched Yo! MTV Raps every day and played Dr. Dre’s The Chronic until the tape broke. Like countless other melanin-light rap lovers, the bottomless rage of early gangsta rap spoke to me and my life in ways other kinds of music didn’t. It didn’t matter that Ice Cube rapped about being a cynical black outlaw in South Central L.A while I was a white, hooky-prone kid in Chicago. At its heart, gangsta rap, like The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks and a lot of other revolutionary music, was all about being young, angry, poor, and at war with corrupt authority—themes as timeless and universal as any in popular music.

Nirvana’s Nevermind is generally given credit for banishing the plague of hair metal from the pop-music landscape, but the gangsta rap revolution initiated by NWA deserves equal credit. After all, compared to the scowling, police-hating, renegade bad-asses in NWA, Motley Crüe couldn’t help but come off as mascara-abusing girly-men recycling Sweet chords and dressing up in their mommy’s clothing. It’s no coincidence that when metal eventually came back, it had mutated into a rap-rock beast that drew heavily on rap’s unparalleled ability to piss off parents and antagonize adults.

Popular music is inherently a young person’s game, and rap music is even more youth-obsessed than other genres. When Ice Cube wrote much of NWA’s seminal Straight Outta Compton and his own AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990), he wasn’t old enough to legally buy beer, but he was experienced enough to convey to a receptive interracial audience the anger and hopelessness of life in the ’hood. Before the Rodney King riots, Cube’s music served due notice that there was a city full of people with nothing to lose who were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. Collectively, Cube’s music, the riots, and films like Boyz N The Hood (Cube’s cinematic debut) and Menace II Society forced white America to come to terms with the rampant poverty and alienation of its inner cities.

There’s always been an element of voyeurism in white folk’s embrace of black music. Ice Cube’s early albums allowed white suburbanites to vicariously experience the heightened emotions and lawless hedonism of West Coast thug life without ever having to leave the security of their parents’ basement. Ice Cube’s early work rejected outright the utopian promises of integration and assimilation. In albums like AmeriKKKa’s, the crushing poverty and rampant crime of ghetto life made integrationist fantasies like The Cosby Show and similar yarns of endless upward mobility seem like particularly sick jokes. Like the great pulp novelist Jim Thompson in Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me, Ice Cube invited audiences to look at the world through the eyes of a violent sociopath. But in his early albums at least, there was a distinct political context for his misanthropy. To borrow a phrase from Malcolm X, Cube was the hate that hate made, the stone-hearted consequence of America giving up on its inner cities. Cube threw the American dream back in his audience’s face, suggesting that greed, hatred, and racism were the building blocks of a nation founded on slavery and genocide.

The first NWA member to bolt from Eazy-E and Jerry Heller’s Ruthless Records plantation, Ice Cube made a historic decision to record his solo debut with East Coast-based The Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s sonic assault team, and one of the most innovative production teams in music history. Cube’s decision had long-lasting political and cultural ramifications, and his association with Public Enemy gave him added credibility among the sizable but largely overlooked rap audience described once by Common as “coffee shop chicks and white dudes.”

Never one to hold his tongue, Cube made his opinions about that particular demographic painfully clear on Death Certificate (1991) and Lethal Injection (1993). On “Cave Bitch,” Cube railed against white women for, um, being white, while on “Horny Li’l Devil,” he chastised white men for the same crime. Ice Cube’s first four albums are maddening amalgams of razor-sharp social criticism and psychotic hate. One moment, Cube’s incisively calling out America for committing the very crimes it condemns in individuals; the next he’s launching a blatantly racist, unforgivable attack on Koreans for doing business in black neighborhoods.

Lethal Injection marked Cube’s last solo album until War & Peace Volume 1: The War, which came out five years later, in 1998. During the interval, rap music underwent a distinct paradigm shift. The success and eventual martyrdom of Notorious B.I.G. presaged the P-Diddification of rap. Rap had always put a premium on image, but Puff Daddy’s reign led to an emphasis on crass materialism that drove countless people away from rap and did irreparable damage to the genre’s soul. Then too, Tupac Shakur’s similar martryrdom created an army of Tupac clones, some enormously successful (DMX, Ja Rule, Master P), some not, all essentially derivative.

A generation of rap-loving crackers and whiteys who grew up on Public Enemy, NWA, Beastie Boys, EPMD, and Boogie Down Productions found little to identify with in music that seemed more concerned with flash, image, and money than social criticism. Lyrics became borderline irrelevant. Gangsta rap’s misanthropy and misogyny overtook its latent streak of social consciousness. Master P built an empire on little more than brand loyalty, assembly-line production methods and loud, flashy album covers. Mainstream hip-hop seemed to forget its history, focusing only on the now.

Meanwhile, Ice Cube became a movie star. Rapping seemed to become a sideline, something to do between films, commercials, and television appearances. Accordingly, when he returned from his hiatus, he had absolutely nothing to say. The man who once boasted one of the most important voices in popular music was reduced to being just another anonymous gangsta rapper barking out monosyllabic bursts of unimaginative thuggery.

Rap is far from dead, though. One need only look at MCA’s roster (Blackalicious, Mos Def, Common, Talib Kweli, The Roots, Nappy Roots, Black Star) to find signs that it’s not just alive but thriving. And that’s not even mentioning Outkast, Missy Elliott, N.E.R.D., Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, Timbaland, and Lauryn Hill. On the independent front, labels like Def Jux, Stones Throw, and Rhymesayers (home of Minnesota’s own Slug, rap’s most important slacker-depressive since Basehead) have all established sterling reputations for creativity and innovation. Good, important, relevant rap music is still being made. But do you care?

Magicians occupy a peculiar place in American pop culture. Logically, they should be an anachronism, an antiquated relic of a time when simpletons were easily duped by non-digitally enhanced sleight-of-hand, a time when minstrel shows and vaudeville competed for ye olde American’s hard-earned entertainment dollar. After all, who could possibly be duped by an old-fashioned rabbit-in-the-hat act in an age where television and film can create entire universes out of cyber-scratch?

Yet magic has not only survived but thrived. Blockbusters like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars series all draw heavily on magical forces, while David Blaine has unsuccessfully attempted to make magic cool by dating Fiona Apple and hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Blaine, like many of his peers, has thrived largely because he’s working a niche—in his case as the world’s only “street magician,” a patently ridiculous title that conjures up images of B-boys pulling alley cats out of trash cans and gangsta-ass magicians capping their enemies with elaborate card tricks.

Blaine’s street magic has admittedly breathed new life into the field, but he’s only one of a number of magicians who’ve discovered and cultivated a marketable, magical niche. Smart asses Penn & Teller have cornered the market on hip, ironic anti-magic, while their ideological opposite, Siegfried & Roy, dominate the über–kitschy world of tiger-enhanced, Vegas-style conjuration. Harry Blackstone Jr., Doug Henning, and Harry Houdini all have that “dead” thing working for them, which leaves only David Copperfield, perhaps the most famous solo magician of them all. But what is the secret to his appeal? Unlike Blaine, he’s never canoodled with Fiona Apple or kept it real with his street magic, and he doesn’t possess the hipness and credibility of Penn & Teller, or the camp value of Siegfried & Roy. Yet he remains a pop-culture fixture and one of the highest paid entertainers in the world. Why?

Like all inquiries into the strange, unfathomable, and extremely dorky, mine began with a search on the web. And like nearly all web searches, mine yielded a bizarre web of exhibitionism, broken links and dreams, emotional neediness, and paranoia. My journey into the unknown began, naturally enough, with Copperfield’s own site, a clean, minimalist site distinguished only by its unintentionally revealing “rumors” section. In it, Copperfield addresses the various rumors that have plagued him throughout his career. The rumor that ruffles him the most, of course, is that he’s gayer than Siegfried & Roy on a Judy Garland-themed float on Gay Pride day in San Francisco. “Of course not!” begins Mr. Copperfield’s amusingly defensive response, the exclamation point seemingly intended to illustrate just how not gay he is. Elsewhere, Copperfield refutes the rumor that his marriage to Claudia Schiffer was a sham. “She doesn’t need the dough, and frankly, I don’t need to pay a woman to be seen with me.” Presumably this means his leggy female assistants are volunteers, or at least fans whose payment consists of getting to bask in their idol’s reflected glory.

As a source for advertising about herbal viagra and penile enlargement, the internet is, of course, priceless. As a conduit for other kinds of information, however, it’s extremely limited. So The Rake decided to go straight to the source and attend a David Copperfield show in advance of his appearance here. More specifically, we attended the seventh of eight shows the highy virile magician played over four nights at the Rosemont Theater in Rosemont, Illinois.
As befits a decidedly non-homosexual performer, Copperfield made his grand entrance on a motorcycle. Granted, he wasn’t actually riding the motorcycle, but merely sitting on such a masculine machine was enough to assuage any lingering doubts about his sexuality. He then began his show in earnest, mixing Catskills-style banter with vague new-age talk about the importance of escape and fantasy (the loose theme of the matinee show) and magic tricks that felt uncannily like slight variations on tricks he and every other magician have been doing for years.

And though Copperfield’s dark good looks have won him a reputation as the Fabio of magic, onstage he’s disconcertingly life-sized, less romance-novel hero than reasonably handsome Jewish dentist, right down to his George Hamilton-like perma-tan. Copperfield’s onstage patter is similarly humanizing: He might be able to walk through the Great Wall of China, but he has considerable difficulty getting his audience helpers to do what he tells them to. At one point, Copperfield grew visibly irritated by an especially confused senior, but later tipped the moral scales back in his favor by magically reuniting a sad-sack grandma with her estranged granddaughter through a “portal” connecting the show with a tropical island. It was pure, unadulterated cheese, but at least it was cheese of some scope and vision, which is more than can be said of nearly everything that preceded it. At another point, Copperfield brought out a clown for some urine-related comedy, followed by a barrage of Michael Jackson jokes that so amused the pair that they giggled for more than a minute, making only the feeblest attempt to muffle their guffaws.

By the time Copperfield finished sleepwalking through his final trick, it was difficult to conceive of anyone, no matter how devoted, being impressed by the show. Walking out of the magic man’s schlockfest, I was confused. Copperfield’s appeal still eluded me. I have faith though that fans will keep coming, fattening up Copperfield’s bankbook and ego, and making sure he retains his vaunted thirteenth place on the list of the world’s highest paid entertainers. That, perhaps, is the most impressive trick of all.

David Copperfield appears at the State Theatre, April 26-28, 2002.