REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8)
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April 25, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING | BRUCE ROBINSON | 1989
Having written and directed the cult classic Withnail and I (1987), which introduced the world to the incomparable Richard E. Grant, Bruce Robinson next gave us How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Here, Grant plays Denis Bagley, a London marketing whiz on the verge of a breakdown. In Grant’s quasi-Gielgudian accent, Bagley spits marketing wisdom: “Best Company supermarkets are not interested in selling wholesome food,” he chastises younger colleagues. “BestCo wants to go on selling them what it always has, [so] we need a label brimming with health — and everything from a nosh pot to a white slice will wear one with pride.”
The genius of this movie, I implore you to understand, is not so much the heavy-handed anti-marketing satire than the satanic glee with which Grant utters banal phrases like “nosh pot.”
Burned out, Bagley determines to quit the whole business… at which point he develops a boil on his shoulder… a boil that begins to issue dark pronouncements. Bagby’s boil develops into a head, while Bagley’s original head is reduced to a boil! We last see boil-Bagley declaiming an ad-man’s manifesto in cod-Blakean mode: “If happiness means the whole world standing on a double layer of foot deodorizers, I, Bagley, will see that they get them. […] I shall not cease, till Jerusalem is builded here, on England’s green and pleasant land.”
When Bagley gets woke, what’s he supposed to do? His first instinct is to practice conscious consumerism: Wearing nothing but an apron and a manic grin, he short-circuits kitchen gadgets in the bathtub. Yet it’s the total organization of society that’s the problem; and though he gets off zingers about hamburgers and hatchbacks, he doesn’t have a clue how to proceed. Bagby’s psychiatrist’s sole concern is to reintegrate his patient back into society. The one character who might sympathize — a vegan friend of his wife’s who scorns sexist advertising — is a hypocritical liberal. Might he find solidarity among the working class, one wonders? The boil (voiced by Bruce Robinson himself) ventriloquizes their attitude: “You Commies don’t half talk a lot of shit.”
Critics panned Robinson’s sophomore effort: Its satire is broad to the point of silliness, they carped, its tone didactic. True, it’s a bit difficult to sit through the movie’s second half. But this is an Adorno-esque negative-dialectic thriller about the impossibility of living rightly in a wrong society. If it didn’t leave us bourgeois types profoundly dissatisfied, it would on its own terms have failed. How can an un-emancipated subject emancipate society? Perhaps he can’t. But at least he can make himself a royal pain in the neck….
REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Annie Nocenti on AFTER HOURS | Lynn Peril on BRAZIL | Mandy Keifetz on BODY DOUBLE | Carlo Rotella on ROBOCOP | Marc Weidenbaum on GROUNDHOG DAY | Erik Davis on REPO MAN | Mimi Lipson on STRANGER THAN PARADISE | Josh Glenn on HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING | Susan Roe on HOUSEKEEPING | Gordon Dahlquist on SOMETHING WILD | Heather Quinlan on EATING RAOUL | Anthony Miller on MIRACLE MILE | Karinne Keithley Syers on BETTER OFF DEAD | Adam McGovern on WALKER | Ramona Lyons on MILLER’S CROSSING | Vanessa Berry on WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? | Elina Shatkin on NIGHT OF THE COMET | Susannah Breslin on MAN BITES DOG | Tom Nealon on DELICATESSEN | Lisa Jane Persky on RUMBLE FISH | Dean Haspiel on WEIRD SCIENCE | Heather Kapplow on HEATHERS | Micah Nathan on BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA | Nicholas Rombes on SLACKER | Mark Kingwell on WITHNAIL AND I.
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