One of the joys of the trashterpiece is that, while many bad movies are alike, trashterpieces are all bad in their own unique ways. Some trashterpieces are the product of sheer narcissism—movies born of one person’s deluded notion that they’re the next Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick, born auteurs destined to show the world their singularly tormented vision by writing, direct, producing, and often starring in their own works. These renegades are willing to buck the system at all costs, even good taste—especially good taste—to show a judgmental and critical world that they are worthy, that their stories and ideas do matter. Regardless of anything else you can say about the Tommy Wiseaus and Neil Breens of the world, money rarely factors into conversations about their films. While THE ROOM has become fantastically successful, Wiseau was already independently wealthy when he made the movie, bankrolling the production himself for a tidy sum. Neil Breen is open about the fact that the message behind his films (which appears to be that he thinks he’s Jesus) is more important than the box office, and, like Wiseau, he finances all of his own projects, apparently via a successful career as a real estate agent. While movies solely focalized through the creative lens of people with no experience, talent, or clue may end up becoming the stuff of midnight movie or MST3K fodder, one thing you can never say about them is that they’re crass. Authenticity, sincerity, and love drip from every frame.
Then, there’s another type of trashterpiece entirely. These films exist at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum—movies whose ineptitude comes not from a lack of talent but a lack of caring. Movies so soulless in their conceptualization and execution that they can’t even rest on the laurels of clueless self-obsession. Movies so blatantly crafted to cash in on some craze, tragedy, or scandal and so artificially manufactured for the sake of a quick buck that rather than sincerity these films drip emptiness, to the point that emptiness becomes something of a spectacle in its own right. This is how we’ve ended up with such cinematic abominations as THE HOTTIE AND THE NOTTIE (Paris Hilton is big, right? Stick her in a movie!), or MAC AND ME (ET and McDonalds are big, right?), or CALIGULA (the sexual depravity of the Roman Empire is big, right?). Art was never the objective with these films—cold, hard cash was. Ironically, money is exactly what they’ve tended not to make. While some of the aforementioned box office notbusters have entered Hollywood lore for their bombastic failures—things that burn fast also burn hot and bright and get a fair amount of attention—others have quietly slipped under the radar, waiting to be rediscovered and welcomed into the pantheon of so-bad-it’s-good cinema. Such is the case with yet another of my Chrismakkuah Wrapping Party trashterpiece choices, the made-for-TV bomb THE JAYNE MANSFIELD STORY.
Looked at from the perspective of its raw DNA, there’s nothing narratively remarkable about JAYNE. It’s a pretty standard by-the-numbers biopic, beginning with the infamous car crash that killed 1960s also-ran sex bomb Jayne Mansfield, who made a fuckton of money off of her movies but was never quite as beloved as Marilyn Monroe and never quite achieved the same comfortably-scandalous status as Mamie van Doren. Told within the frame narrative of her widower, bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, giving an interview in the wake of her death, the film hits all the high points in her life, from her youth as an academically gifted and canny young woman in Texas to her move to Hollywood in the single-minded pursuit of fame. Each major incident in her life is featured in a matter-of-fact, “here’s what happened” pseudo-documentary manner with little pizzazz, energy, or narrative innovation. Jayne struggles to get her big break. Jayne gets her big break. Jayne exposes herself at public events to maintain relevance in the tabloids. Jayne meets Mickey. Jayne falls in love with Mickey. Jayne’s star rises. Jayne’s star falls. Jayne dies. The end, roll credits.
Where JAYNE enters trashterpiece status is in the execution of those very bland ideas, beginning with its casting. The pairing of Loni Anderson—then halfway through her run on WKRP in Cincinatti– and Arnold Schwarzenegger—whose star was rising following a Golden Globe win for STAY HUNGRY and his iconic appearance in PUMPING IRON—should have led to a ratings bonanza, and it’s easy to imagine that the entire project was reverse-engineered from the potential cinematic pairing of the two. Anderson had demonstrated herself adept at playing women whose superficial vacuousness betrayed hidden depths and wells of secret intelligence, the perfect descriptor for the polyglot Mansfield, who was smart enough to engineer her own dumb persona. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, was the man who helped move bodybuilding out of the subcultural closet and into the mainstream, and it was clear he was only going to keep getting bigger; who better to play a tormented proto-bodybuilder turned witness to history?
The greatest actors alive can only work with what they’re given, though; not even Ian McKellen could save CATS and not even Anderson and Schwarzenegger—who are very fine actors when working within their wheelhouses—can salvage JAYNE. Like other attempts to explore the contradiction and curiosity that was Mansfield’s life (most notably the confused and confusing MANSFIELD 66/67, worthy of its own Trashterpiece entry), the script—cowritten by Canadian playwright Charles Dennis and Nancy Gayle, from the book Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties by Amherst women’s studies professor Martha Saxton—never manages to get a hold on her as a person, instead getting distracted by equal turns spectacle and melodrama. Combined with free-fall direction from Dick Lowry—who would go on to find success as the man behind the Kenny Rogers GAMBLER movies—the result is that both stars gravitate towards the extremes of their own screen personas, in turn transforming their roles into burlesques. Anderson appears to have been instructed to play Mansfield as a horny chihuahua, exaggerating the real Mansfield’s trademark vocalizations into a near-constant, borderline Tourette’s-style* yipping tic and seeming perpetually ready and eager to jump on any man who comes within a five foot radius of her.
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, takes the opposite tack, showing none of the steely charisma or intensity that would become his trademark; instead, he delivers a “I’m doing this for the money and exposure” performance that’s even more anemic than some of the mercenary roles from later in his career. So it is the movie becomes bifurcated: When Anderson is onscreen, there’s too much free-wheeling energy, and you’re never quite sure if this is meant to be parodic or sincere. When Schwarzenegger takes center stage — and remember, he’s narrating this– all the life leaves the room. Oh, and speaking of that script: Even though this is ostensibly Mansfield’s life as told from Hargitay’s perspective, a good ¼ of the movie depicts her life prior to meeting him, including incidents she’d have had to tell him about in excruciating detail in order for him to recollect, including some very bland, inconsequential stuff that’s necessary for a biopic but which most people would have no practical reason to relate to a romantic partner. It’s a case of the movie forgetting its own narrative conceit.
The biggest failure of JAYNE is that nothing is 100% wrong—it’s like one of those Sunday funny “spot the difference” puzzles where, at surface level, everything seems right before the flaws start to sink in. There are occasional concessions to period detail which are only thrown into sharp relief when someone pops up with 80s hair and Sally Jesse Raphael glasses in a scene meant to be taking place in the 50s; the script will hit upon some genuine insight into Mansfield’s life or character before she’s popping her top at a Hollywood soiree; the pacing will pick up and it’ll seem like some energy is about to be injected before it simmers down again. JAYNE is less of a train wreck and more of a fender bender, where no one dies and everyone just gets back in their cars and goes home. It’s not a smooth trip, but it’s also not quite bad enough to be the spectacle it could’ve been.
Still, JAYNE has earned a secure if not lofty place in the trashterpiece canon. It’s a made-for-TV movie featuring an actress who was one of the biggest TV stars in America and an actor who would become one of the biggest movie stars in the world, at a time when made-for-TV movies were still destination viewing. It’s the not-so-sensational story of a very sensational woman that becomes sensational in its own right for sheer ineptitude. It’s a crassly commercial effort that only succeeded at being crass. It’s one of Razzie Award Founder John Wilson’s “100 best bad movies.” It’s certainly not THE ROOM, but for scholars and completionists of cinema of the truly awful, it’s required viewing.
*I have it, so, I feel comfortable making the comparison.
Tags: arnold schwarzenegger, CBS, Columns, Dick Lowry, G. D. Spradlin, Jayne Mansfield, Loni Anderson, Mickey Hargitay, TV
No Comments