Major Payne
With Wayans, Karyn Parsons, Steven Martini, Andrew Harrison Leeds, Joda Blaire-Hershman, Stephen Coleman, and Orlando Brown.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What these clay figures do nearly always seems to matter much more than who they are. In most of the films they temporarily become characters, but then they get warped, either by their mandated generic functions–their responsibility to generate uplift, or solicit pity or derision, or produce laughs, or inspire identification–or by the passing whims of the filmmakers (production executives included). Even ugly duckling Muriel and her bullying dad in Muriel’s Wedding–perhaps the closest thing to real characters in the above lineup, though they’re surrounded by shrieking gargoyles–oscillate wildly between grossly caricatured scapegoats to be hooted at and thinking individuals designed to confound all our crass expectations. It’s impossible to take them as both without insulting them and ourselves, but that’s what the movie cheerfully requires.
This isn’t to suggest that these problems are new. Take a look at Russ Meyer’s 1965 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (also opening this week), a delirious camp item whose sole distinction–pace John Waters–is its attention to iconic comic-book images rather than characters. Several weeks back B. Ruby Rich wrote in the Village Voice that this movie was stridently sexist when it came out but has miraculously become lesbian-hip today–implying not so much a sea change in her own standards as a conviction that if the right audience goes for it it must be good. (Her implication is that she was right in the mid-60s and is equally right today–meaning tough luck for any lesbian who unfashionably happened to like the movie 30 years ago.) As a screen for an audience’s fanciful projections, the movie surely caters to diverse sexual persuasions now as it did back then (though check out the drooling male voyeurs at the beginning for a bit of irony about the originally targeted audience). But it’s not a story in which any of the figures, male or female, makes a modicum of sense; it’s a ludicrous contrivance made up of bodies, one-liners, and poses.
I call it a school because that’s what the movie calls it, though as far as I can see there are no teachers and no classes and boys of all ages sleep in the same barracks. In other words, it’s an absurdity, and so is Payne. At best he’s a high-concept clotheshorse designed to hang various gags or scenes on, a premise for a few stand-up routines by Wayans–and most of the time “low concept” would be a better description. We know nothing about him prior to his marine career, and nothing in the role or in the rest of the movie provokes our curiosity; the minute we have to stop and wonder who he actually is he evaporates.
