Frank Oz and the Beautiful Lie
At this time of widespread anxiety and despair, I have turned to something that always brings me comfort: the films of Frank Oz.
It is hard to overstate the presence of Oz’s work throughout my life (and, I suspect, the lives of many others). As a child I spent countless holidays watching Muppet Show reruns with my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents: three generations, in on the same jokes. When I was growing up in the ’80s, my parents — film lovers but overprotective ones — rarely let us watch contemporary films that weren’t explicitly made for kids. One of the few exceptions to our diet of MGM musicals, Disney cartoons and vintage screwball comedies was Oz’s film HouseSitter, simply because my father loved it so much. When my brother and I were teenagers, we watched In & Out so often that we had a silent shorthand — the wrist motion from Kevin Kline’s “look at my hand!” scene — that meant, “Hey, let’s watch In & Out!” Dirty Rotten Scoundrels introduced me to twist endings and sparked a lifelong love of con-artist stories. Little Shop of Horrors showed me that a story can go to very dark places without losing its heart or humor.
That these films have aged well doesn’t surprise me. With their character-driven humor and clever stories, they’re somewhat timeless, recalling films of the 1940s as much as the movies of today. (Or the movies of tomorrow: both Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and What About Bob have recently been optioned for gender-swapped remakes.) Most of Oz’s movies lend themselves to endless rewatching. But there are particular reasons why watching them now is so gratifying.
Some of these reasons are admittedly superficial. Oz’s films are usually set in dreamy locations: the idealized New England village in House Sitter, the lakeside vacation town in What About Bob, the French Riviera in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the jazz-infused Montreal of The Score. The films are a pleasure to listen to as well, with universally excellent scores, many of them by the late Miles Goodman. Then of course, there are the stars: Bill Murray (What About Bob), Steve Martin (HouseSitter, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Bowfinger, Little Shop of Horrors), Joan Cusack (In & Out), Eddie Murphy (Bowfinger), and Goldie Hawn (HouseSitter) at the peak of their comedic powers; Marlon Brando (The Score), Bette Midler (The Stepford Wives), and Debbie Reynolds (In & Out) playing unforgettable characters; Miss Piggy (directed, created and performed by Oz) intimidating cat-calling construction workers in The Muppets Take Manhattan.
But there are deeper reasons why Oz’s films make a viewer feel lighter, more hopeful by the end. For me, it comes down to two themes that recur throughout his work. The first is the idea of misfits forming a tribe, in which their peculiarities and insecurities are amplified and embraced. This is no doubt in Oz’s blood after decades of working for and alongside Jim Henson. In Oz’s documentary Muppet Guys Talking, Oz and his fellow Muppet performers describe Henson’s practice of gathering people around him and encouraging them to take great creative risks, catching each other if they fall. The Muppets themselves are a collection of oddballs with deep flaws, often drawn from the puppeteers’ own inner lives. Together, they complete each other.
In that same way, the profoundly untalented filmmakers and actors assembled by Steve Martin’s title character in Bowfinger are able to collectively make their Hollywood dreams come true. In HouseSitter, a grifter (Goldie Hawn) forms the family she never had out of a one-night stand (Steve Martin) and a couple she literally pulls in off the street. Richard Dreyfuss’ buttoned-up family in What About Bob becomes whole with the addition of an actual crazy person (Bill Murray). Even the opposing con artists in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels form a trio at the end, their quirks and vulnerabilities proving surprisingly complementary. The characters in Oz’s films draw deep connections with each other and by extension, the viewer; you sense that they would embrace your flaws as well.
The other theme that winds its way through every Oz movie is that of identity. Characters in Oz films often pretend to be something they’re not, and in the process, discover their true selves. Seymour (Rick Moranis) in Little Shop of Horrors becomes an overnight celebrity through the plant’s trickery, only to discover that his dream woman (Ellen Greene) loved the loser he was before. Gwen (Goldie Hawn) in HouseSitter is a pathological liar, until her biggest lie turns into something true. Bowfinger masquerades as a real filmmaker until he is one. Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) in In & Out pretends to be heterosexual, fooling even himself, because he’s scared of being rejected in his small town; instead, his revelation brings them all together. In Death at a Funeral, every member of a family arrives at a funeral hoping to impress the others, until a ludicrous disaster exposes them all and makes space for real connection. In each of these films, the lie comes from a place of purity: a love of films, a love of family, the love of a woman, the dream of a better life. Only through elaborate deception can these characters speak their truth. As Christine Baranski’s character in Bowfinger says of her boss’s pretend film: “It was a beautiful lie.”
These films show that our identities are limited only by our imaginations. Deep down, we all fear that we are not enough, that we may be exposed for the vulnerable, flawed, needy people we really are. Oz’s films say, let yourself be exposed; the very fault you are trying to hide is your strength. Don’t be limited by what you think you are. At the other side of the lie, there is joy.
That theme is more present than ever in Oz’s latest work, which is not a film (Oz hasn’t made a narrative film since 2007) but an entirely unique off-Broadway play. In & Of Itself is a one-man show, that man being magician and performance artist Derek DelGaudio. Over the course of the evening, DelGaudio bares his soul to the audience, interweaving personal stories with astonishing tricks. Through the artifices of performance, he explains, he can be himself. “You won’t believe a word I say. That’s why I can tell you the truth,” DelGaudio declares. Of course, the audience has no way of knowing whether his stories are literally true; they only know that this is how DelGaudio expresses his truth. But that truth involves a deep inner struggle over his own identity, and whether the things he believes about himself are more or less real than the things other people believe about him. Throughout the evening, he demonstrates how the stories we believe about people and objects can transform them more dramatically than any magician’s trick. And in the final moments of the show, DelGaudio tells every individual in the audience a truth about themselves that he couldn’t have possibly known. It’s a good trick. What is not a trick is how DelGaudio looks each person in the eye, showing them that he sees and acknowledges them for who they really are, or want to be. It’s an extraordinary, transformational experience. By directing In & Of Itself, Oz has turned everyone in the audience into a character in one of his movies. And at the end of the play, rather than shuffling to the exit, audience members stop to talk to each other. At the performance I saw, there were hugs and laughter between people who didn’t know each other when the house lights went out. By allowing ourselves to be seen for who we are, and by allowing DelGaudio to do the same, we became — for a moment — a tribe.
When Oz talks about the characters in his films, or his work with the Muppets, there are two words he often uses: purity and innocence. “I don’t think optimism is really something I identify with as much as purity and innocence,” Oz told me in a 2017 interview. “I believe in my heart, without being a goody two-shoes, that there are people in the world who are really good, and unfortunately it’s the people in power who are often not.” By his own admission, Oz doesn’t make films for those powerful people; he makes them for ordinary, broken people like us, who connect with the purity and innocence of his characters.
Those qualities, purity and innocence, are in short supply on the national stage lately. Our American identity is becoming dark and unrecognizable. But like Oz, I believe that most people are good. In my better moments, I believe that we can work together to turn each other’s flaws into strengths, shed the lies, and become the nation we believe we can be. Frank Oz’s films give me hope.
