Barry Champlain...he doesn't care what you think.

Have you listened to talk radio in the last 10 years? How about the last 5? If it’s been a while since you’ve ventured to the dark side of your radio dial let me fill you in on what’s been happening. Fear. That’s what’s broadcast live, 24 hours a day across the radio waves and into our homes and cars. Pure, unfiltered fear. What is it that we’re supposed to be afraid of? Well, everything. If you listen to folks like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh then we should be afraid that the government has gone rogue and is secretly plotting to shred the constitution. If you listen to people like Dr. Laura then you should live in fear of the day that your husband says he’s cheating on you because that will mean you’ve failed as a wife. If you listen to Micheal Savage then you should fear the “global warming liars” who’ve concocted the whole idea of an increase in temperature because it somehow furthers their secret agenda to eventually steal all the gold in the world and use it to blow up the moon…I may be paraphrasing there. And all of this is just from the hosts of these venerable harbors of respectable journalism. Each of these talk radio universes have their own galaxies of crazy surrounding them. Just like the anonymity that the internet provides to those that post endlessly on message boards (or write blogs…self bazinga!), talk radio callers get a chance to hear themselves on the air spouting whatever ridiculously malformed sentences they can muster. It’s a chance to be validated by someone they hold dear in a public forum. The best part is that, in an effort to gain favor with the host, calls sometimes begin with the verbal equivalent of the secret handshake (e.g. “Megadittos, Rush”). It’s scary, abnormal, anti-social behavior…but it’s just so entertaining. And that’s the thrust of Oliver Stone’s “Talk Radio.”

A Brief Synopsis of “Talk Radio”: Originally a play written and starring Eric Bogosian, “Talk Radio” is the story of Dallas-area shock jock Barry Champlain. He’s 1/3 Howard Stern, 1/3 Dr. Laura and 1/3 P.T. Barnum. Barry’s the star of “Night Talk”, a weeknight radio call-in show with open phone lines that seem to be jammed with every nut job in the greater DFW area. He’s sleeping with his young, female producer and embroiled in a love/hate relationship with his station manager (played here by the always gravitas-ful Alec Baldwin). Even his radio tech/phone screener (the always entertaining John C. McGinley) doesn’t seem to be really connected to Barry. We join the “Night Talk” gang on the night that Barry finds out his show is being picked up for national syndication. Even in those moments where Barry’s finding out that he’s about to take a huge step in his career, it feels like a hollow victory for him. Through a series of flashbacks, we see Barry’s rise to fame…and the disintegration of his marriage as a result. The relationship with his ex-wife Ellen (played by Ellen Greene of “Little Shop of Horrors” fame) seems to be the only thing that’s ever really brought him happiness. So when he calls her to convince her to come to Dallas for his first national broadcast it seems like he might finally be reconnecting with that which he really held dear. In the end though, the movie’s all about a different relationship: Barry’s relationship with his wide array of “Night Talk” callers. Over the course of the film, Barry matches verbal wits with everyone from a white supremacist who claims he’s mailed a bomb to the studio to a drugged out smack user who claims his girlfriend’s overdosed on the air. No matter who Barry’s talking to though, his disdain remains the same. Barry always believes he’s smarter than his audience. They need him more than he needs them. And in the end, it’s that attitude that proves to be his undoing. Ellen comes to Dallas for the first national show but ends up “calling in” to the show using the pseudonym “Cheryl Anne” the way she used to in Barry’s starting days and Barry ends up ripping her to shreds on the air…just because it makes for good radio. His national deal gets delayed and he flies into a monologuish rage in which he finally explains to his audience that “I come in every night, I tear it to you, I abuse you, I insult you, you just keep coming back for more. What’s wrong with you? Why do you keep calling? I don’t want to hear anymore, STOP TALKING! GO AWAY!” But in the end, it’s not the audience who needs Barry…but Barry who needs them. He’s a creature of late night radio and he’s just as lonely and sad as the people he mocks night in and night out. The movie ends with a bit of a shock as Barry’s killed by a deranged fan and eulogized by his callers over the closing credits. In the end, Bogosian and Stone are trying to warn us about the disconnected nature of the world of talk radio. In Ghostbusters 2 terms, it’s the river of evil energy slime running beneath American pop culture.

Why is it a PCBS? You could make the case for lots of Stone’s movies being important landmarks in Pop Culture. I’ll cop to a bit of an obsession with “JFK” in the early 2000’s the culminated with a trip to a certain book depository in Dallas and the purchase of a worn out book-on-tape version of “On the Trail of the Assassins.” But this movie slipped through my fingers when it first came out…most likely because I was 8. I’ve always had a bit of a weird relationship with talk radio. At my first high school job, I was talking politics with my boss and he asked if I’d ever listened to Rush Limbaugh. “No” I said, rather shocked since both he and I knew that we were both liberals. “You have to listen to the other side or you don’t really know what you’re disagreeing with.” That’s a sentiment that struck home with me then and still pulls me to talk radio today. I spent summers at the park and at the beach listening to some truly insane talk radio hosts. If you’ve never spent any real time with folks like G. Gordon Liddy and the Rushman, you don’t really know what you’re missing. I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to come into those programs at the height of right-wing Clinton paranoia. It’s funny to think back on the rhetoric from those days as it’s basically the same stuff that’s being parroted across the airwaves today. For me, it’s always seemed like talk radio is a way to whip people into a frenzy about something that otherwise might only get play in the back pages of a daily newspaper. They take a small piece of any story and blow it as far out of proportion as possible. It’s the same echo chamber technique that Fox News uses on a daily basis…but I don’t want to get off on a rant about Fox News. Stone’s movie and Bogosian’s play are really about that echo chamber cycle between audience and host. How the ideas and energy put out by the host feed the audience who then feed it back to the host in a weird negativity circle of life. It’s hard to see “Talk Radio” as a cautionary tale as these problems were happening long before the movie premiered. In fact, the play is based loosely on the life Alan Berg (a shock jock who was killed by a deranged listener in 1984). Instead, “Talk Radio” holds a mirror up to a part of society that doesn’t get a lot of scrutiny. Even today, as the country fragments into the Huffington Post and Drudge Report crowds, we still don’t have a grasp on the seething anger that seems to propagate itself on the nations airwaves each day.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? “Talk Radio”‘s message of hateful speech on the air begetting hateful actions in the real world is something that’s been explored many times since 1988 (Stone himself revisited the idea in  1994’s  “Natural Born Killers”). In the battle for ratings, the discourse has only gotten more vitriolic in the 22 years since the movie debuted which only adds depth to the message. As psychotic and sociopathic as Barry’s callers were,  they pale in comparison to the nut jobs that call into some of today’s most popular shows…and those people are quite sane compared to their internet cousins. Some of the worst ideas from the past few years have either started (or gotten daily fertilization) from the upper ends of your AM dial (both “Obama’s a Muslim” and “Obama’s not a US citizen” got heavy play from the lone wolves with microphones). A quick glance at WorldNetDaily (which I’m purposely not linking to) gives you headlines like “How to survive the coming martial law in America” and “Boehner to McCartney: ‘Apologize to American people'”. Micheal Savage recently referred to the President as “Obama the destroyer.” Ideas like those start out in the fringe of talk radio and work their way towards legitimacy with a heavy dose of daily affirmation (Fox News asks the question today “Is the Government Taking Over the News?”). Every day, the Barry Champlains of our country spew out whatever they think will get them the highest ratings and thus the most money in return and every night thousands of callers across the country dial in to yell crazy down the phone and have it pop out their radios on the other end. There’s one part of the movie that deserves a special mention though. Towards the end of the movie, Barry gets into a heated argument with “Chet” (voiced by “Home Improvement” actor Earl Hindman) over “The Turner Diaries”, a book detailing a (then) future war between a white supremacist militia and the “new world order” government that’s taken over the United States…in 1991. Chet’s adamantly defending the book to Barry who calls it out for the racist, inflammatory, hate filled piece of garbage that it is. Why is this so important? In 1995, Timothy McVeigh would channel the rage he felt toward the US government into a truck bomb that he parked in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. When asked later about his motivation, McVeigh would specifically name “The Turner Diaries,” which he had helped to promote. The book also served as motivation for “The Order” (who took their name from the book itself) in their 1984 murder of radio talk show host Alan Berg. It’s not like “Back to the Future 2” predicting the future winner of a World Series, but it’s good to see that people were calling out this hateful book before Oklahoma City.

Final Thoughts: At some point, it becomes preaching to the choir. We all know that talk radio only serves to preach to an already converted choir. We all know that some people are more impressionable by the media than others. We all can see that things in America are getting out of hand…we just don’t all agree on which 50% of the country is wrong. Today’s talk radio gives us things like Sarah Palin and the manufactured rage of the Tea Party. “Talk Radio” is the movie equivalent of “see, I told you so.” It’s a warning to the future of a situation that we’ve already gotten so bogged down in that it’s hard to see how we’ll get out. Watching Bogosian tell his wife “Fuck our marrige!” you realize just how far he’s fallen. He needs his audience more than he needs her (or at least he thinks that he does) and he’s willing to sacrifice her in order to get more. It’s that attitude that drive both host and audience off the cliff (both in the movie and in real life). The cycle must continue at all costs even as the price of poker goes higher and higher. It’s outrage simply for the sake of outrage.

Sadly, no matter how outrageous it all seemed in 1988, in 2010 it seems almost pedestrian. Q: Just how far off the cliff have we gone? A: Glenn Beck. The inmates have taken over the asylum.