The Fanatic: All the Subtlety of a Sledgehammer.
Fred Durst’s commentary on the audience/entertainer relationship goes about exactly how you think it will.
Movies seem to be constantly caught in the tension between their ability to exist as both art and entertainment. Hell, it’s not even that uncommon to encounter those who would insist that the two are mutually exclusive, although this is a sentiment usually deployed from a more defensive position, utilized alongside a denial that movies need to even be “about anything” to begin with, can’t we just turn our brains off and enjoy something for once, geez. And in a way, this isn’t incorrect. While almost every movie is “about” something more than the collection of sentences that summarizes its plot, knowledge of subtext is almost never a prerequisite for enjoyment.
And yet, ownership over the things we watch, what those things mean, and how they mean the things they mean seems to be a ridiculously fervent concern here in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Nineteen. The relationships between our entertainment, its creators, and those creators’ intentions have grown increasingly complicated, and it’s probably safe to suggest that the Internet hasn’t super helped, giving an outlet to many of our worst tendencies and modes of self-expression, when it comes to interacting with the things we love.
And guess what! Fred Durst isn’t super helping either.
His latest film The Fanatic is nothing short of a parade of baffling choices, both on screen and off, in which Durst and lead actor John Travolta (here playing Moose, a character whose first line of film-opening dialogue is, “I can’t talk long, I gotta poo”) are apparently locked in an eighty-eight-minute-long battle to see who can make the most insane possible storytelling and/or filmmaking decision and then commit that decision to film that it may be seen however many times by brave souls who would dare to replay it in the comfort of their own homes.
The Fanatic, in other words, is an absolute fucking party of a film: An almost poetic surrendering of logic and cohesion and feasibility, in favor of a rapidly spiraling descent into half-baked thematic conversation as wrought by a guy who once made an entire record and then named it after an asshole. This is a film about the intricacies of the interplay between art and its audience, as written and directed by someone who also once wrote a song about how sometimes you’re just so angry that you want to smash as much shit as you can find, and in as violent a way as possible.
And it really shows, in some of the most astonishing ways possible.
Perhaps the best part is how apparent the final product makes it that this production was fully convinced it had somehow caught lightning in a bottle. Most specifically, this refers to the absolutely unforgivable number of times the film displays a sorely misplaced confidence in its choice to stop dead in its tracks and just let Travolta do his thing, the moments during which he was clearly just told to go ahead and improv consistently standing in jaw-droppingly stark contrast to just about any other frame of the entire film.
Self-indulgence, if nothing else, is The Fanatic’s defining trait: This is a movie that reeks of someone convinced they have Something To Say, but lacking any of the discipline or planning or even formal understanding as to how that thing might be said well on film. Travolta’s Moose (afflicted with an unspecified Movie Mental Illness whose acting signifiers are about as insulting as just about anything else in this hour-and-a-half long whirlwind of questionable choices) gets increasingly obsessive over apparent horror icon Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa) before…it all just sort of spirals out of control? I suppose? There’s no better way to describe the plot, try as one might: Its mechanics are incredibly difficult to follow, story connections made in the most tenuous of terms and lacking any semblance of internal cohesion, such that the experience becomes less about following an arc from one moment to the next and more about simply digging your fingernails deep into the arms of your chair and living through a series of increasingly bizarre moments that almost seem to challenge your recollection in the following days.
Am I correctly remembering that at one point Travolta’s character play-acts a series of weird movie scenes that his famous movie star prisoner simply doesn’t seem to recognize at all? (I am.) Was there, in fact, a scene in which Travolta, while walking down a random street in the middle of Los Angeles, essentially runs into every major supporting character from the movie, one by one, each of them joining the conversation as though the movie had just turned into some surreal, R-rated, Limp Bizkit version of Our Town? (There was.) Was I fever dreaming a moment in which the film establishes its setting by having a background extra scream “WE ARE IN HOLLYWOOD!” because the production had clearly run out of time to shoot in California and had relocated to Alabama? (I was not.)
And all of this is really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is an absolute embarrassment of riches to be enjoyed here, each one more head scratching and sincere than the last one, both of those qualities existing in an incredible tandem with one another. The Fanatic is a near-perfect reflection of its two primary creative figures: a pair one-time zeitgeist figureheads, decades removed from the time of their relevancy, each of them trying desperately to figure out how they might once again interface with a culture that’s long since left them behind. It’d be more depressing if the results weren’t just so relentlessly entertaining.
