To the Dreams That Make Us Who We Are: An Appreciation of Harmony Korine’s ‘Mister Lonely’
(Note: I first wrote this essay in 2016 as part of the Dissolve Facebook group’s “Lovefest” series in which writers mount defenses of maligned films. With the upcoming release of Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum, I’ve taken the opportunity to revise and repost it here).
What does it mean for a movie to “work?”
For some, it’s as simple as the beat sheet laid out in Blake Snyder’s screenwriting manual Save the Cat (page 8, theme stated; page 20, catalyst, etc). Others might feel like the PAGE Awards judge who once told me, “The three-act structure is hundreds of years old for a reason — use it.” I think, though, that for most people it’s more like Justice Potter Stewart’s attempt to describe pornography: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description…but I know it when I see it.”
All of which is to say: by almost any measure, including my own amorphous one, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely does not “work.” It’s a muddled, saggy film full of bold images that are arguably meaningless. And yet I love just about every minute of it. Mister Lonely it works, it just does so in a very particular way.
It must be hard to be Harmony Korine. Exploding into the film pantheon in 1995 as the teenage screenwriter who shocked the world with Larry Clark’s Kids, he was branded with infamy on sight. Every film he’s made since feels like a reaction to the one before it — Gummo, his first directorial effort, seems both a challenge (You think Kids was upsetting? Get a load of THIS) and an act of catharsis (while Clark gave Kids a documentary aesthetic, Korine could now established his own eerie, perversely poetic voice). Of course, critics were distinctly unkind to Gummo (Entertainment Weekly awarded it an enraged F, and The New York Times’ Janet Maslin declared it the worst film of the year), but if nothing else, the film an undeniably singular vision created by a man barely old enough to buy liquor. He followed Gummo with Julien Donkey-Boy — the first American film to bear the certificate of Dogme 95 — which feels even more like a provocation; if Gummo was unpleasant, Julien Donkey-Boy is borderline unwatchable.
And then he stopped. In the next eight years, he directed a documentary short, a music video, and a documentary about magician David Blaine. It’s hard to be sure what else he did. He probably lifeguarded. He probably lived in Paris watching his teeth fall out. He may well have gone to the Panama to live with a cult that searches for a rare fish — at least he claims he did. He had an invisible dog that he heard bark once. It’s hard to be sure what’s fact and what’s mythmaking, but as he told ‘Vice’ in 2008, “I just felt a general disconnection with things. I couldn’t really figure out what was going on and was pretty unhappy with where I was.”
And so it was that in 2007, the enfant terrible of the 90s returned to feature filmmaking with a heartbreakingly sad, gentle, beautiful film called Mister Lonely.
“I don’t know if you know what it is like to want to be someone else. To not want to look like you look. To hate your own face.”
These are the first lines of dialogue in Mister Lonely, and they’re spoken by a man known only as Michael. He’s a Michael Jackson impersonator played by Diego Luna, whose repertoire largely consists of gestures and high pitched ee-hees. Soon, he meets a woman who lives as Marilyn Monroe, and she brings him to Scotland to live in a castle inhabited by her husband, who lives as Charlie Chaplin, their daughter, who lives as Shirley Temple, and a group of assorted others including Madonna, James Dean, and Sammy Davis Jr. For the remainder of the film, they mostly lounge around the castle like college students on Saturday morning, all while ostensibly preparing to put on a show for the locals — the greatest talent show the world has ever seen.
Oh, and there’s also a parallel plotline involving Werner Herzog as a priest, and a group of nuns who decide to test their faith by jumping out of a plane with no parachute. It has no clear tie to the other plotline. Except that it does.
That’s the thing about Mister Lonely. It’s so oblique that it’s easy to dismiss, and Korine seems to dare us to do so. On first glance, you might see only broad, grotesque scenes of Abraham Lincoln spinning a basketball while snarling the Gettysburg Address under a strobe light, or Buckwheat giving the weeping Pope a bath in a claw-foot tub in a Scottish field. They’re unique and audacious tableaus, and may well be designed only for the sake of shocking incongruity. In interviews, Korine seems to shrug off the film — and all his work — like a kid afraid to show he gives a shit about an assignment he secretly worked all weekend on. When asked by Eric Kohn in IndieWire whether Mister Lonely can be seen as allegory, Korine responded, “Sure, why not?” In a Q&A at Chicago’s Music Box Theater, he declared, “there’s always a misconception about [my films]…that there was something to be got.” And while there may be nobility to the notion that these films are more poetic than literal, his evident disdain for anyone attempting to find meaning in his work does a disservice to their artistry.
Of course, they forced his hand.
“C’mon, Harmony,” Paul Tatara wrote for CNN after Gummo, “Mano a boyo. What are you really trying to prove here? I know, I know. I’m such a toady to the straight-laced mass media, I couldn’t possibly get the gist of anything as perceptive as a movie where kids shoot a comatose old woman in the foot with a BB gun and (gasp!) sweet little kitties get drowned and shot. I suppose you want to prove that audiences can still be shocked.”
In the face of such intense condescension, all as punishment for trying to make art that matters to you, it must be easy to adopt an air of detachment — you think I’m trying to prove something? Fine, I’ll make a movie that tries to prove nothing at all.
On my most recent viewing, though, I decided to ignore Korine and try to make some sort of sense of Mister Lonely, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a much richer experience than my first viewing (even if I’m still poring over my notes like a conspiracy wall on Homeland). This is unquestionably a movie you feel, one made of tone and image without much plot to speak of (and when there is something like plot, as when Charlie begins sadistically punishing Marilyn for what he perceives to be a flirtation with Michael, the film becomes dull and unpleasant), but there are themes that emerge, and with work and some leaps of interpretive faith, there is meaning to be found. Maybe it’s a Rorschach test that shows me what I want to see. But art that claims to be anything else doesn’t tend to linger in the mind for very long.
So how DO those nuns tie in? There’s certainly no connection between the storylines, no moment when Michael reads a news story about nuns jumping out of planes. But the two plot threads are thematically linked by their exploration of defiant optimism, an unshakable faith in beauty in the face of a world that seems filled with pain. This is a film about the rejection of suffering, both your own and others’. The nuns attempt to ease others’ suffering by airlifting food to those in need, while the impersonators believe they’re serving the world by “keeping the spirit of wonder alive” (as claimed by the woman living as The Queen). But even if they can’t acknowledge it, either aloud or internally, all of these disparate people find it too painful to live as they were born, and so have deliberately reshaped themselves as people they believe to be worth something more.
Mister Lonely is a film about refusing to experience hurt, made by a man trying to make sense of his own, a man who returned after eight years in the wilderness to offer audiences a shirtless Charlie Chaplin alone in the corner of a room endlessly repeating, “It’s going to be OK,” before settling on, “My life, it don’t count for nothing.”
“The Lord wants to test us,” one of the nuns says. “He wants to see us fly.” And, in the end, Marilyn fails the test, succumbing to the pain she’s kept at bay. In her final scene, she tearfully asks Michael if anything ever really changes, a shocking desire to hear from a woman who’s devoted her life to stasis. And after the talent show, in which the impersonators joke and dance for a paltry, unenthused audience, she commits suicide. She can’t live as herself, and apparently she can’t find fulfillment as Marilyn, either.
Nor can the nuns fly — one of the film’s final images is of their corpses on a beach — so they must have failed the test, too. Or maybe by even trying to fly, they failed the test. Or maybe there’s no test, and there’s no God.
“They’re looking for answers,” a finally un-costumed Michael says as he finally walks among normal people. “What they don’t realize is they have found it already.”
Maybe the answer is to live your life. To Find meaning in being who you are. To not worry about divine tests. To stop avoiding suffering. To not run away and lose your teeth in Paris, or run away to hunt rare fish with a cult. To stop hating your own face. “All I want is to find some purpose in the world,” Michael tells us at the beginning. By the end, he’s stopped trying, and so gotten to the point that he might finally be able to start.
Mister Lonely is a disorganized, stream-of-consciousness film. But it’s also a document of a moment in a man’s life, as much a journal entry as the one Michael dictates: “It’s hard to always laugh when you don’t know what people find so funny.” Maybe it took a movie about people who try to be other people for Harmony Korine to tell us about himself.
