By Armond White

Mister Lonely
Directed by Harmony Korine


A few years ago at hipster emporium Kim’s Video, I inquired if a DVD of Michael Jackson’s music videos was available for rent. The Kim’s clerk snorted—like Courtney Love expelling bad coke. Michael Jackson has replaced Elvis Presley as the hipster’s idea of tawdry bad taste. But that’s a perverse bohemian attitude, which is also why Harmony Korine blithely exploits Jackson’s notoriety for his latest piece of denigration, Mister Lonely.
Korine is a zombie filmmaker. Yes, he makes movies about repellent creatures, but his directorial career—one of the freak occurrences of the ’90s—is also back from the dead. He slimes the big screen again with Mister Lonely’s roundup of celebrity impersonators—pathetic losers who’ve internalized the mania of People, Star, In Touch and OK magazines and who desire to “look like somebody else...to become less ordinary and find some purpose in this world.” That’s the testament of Diego Luna playing a Michael Jackson impersonator—he has no other name. Korine’s not pleading for such fragile outcasts; he’s a sideshow barker and Mister Lonely is his freak show.

As a social observer, Korine thinks the sight of nuns doing regular-people things (like smoking) is either hilarious or radical. So when Diego/Michael joins a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) at a commune, Korine crosscuts the parallel story of a priest in Panama (Werner Herzog) leading an order of nuns who dive out of his rescue-mission plane without parachutes. (It’s a Boomer joke: The Flying Nun.) The subject is faith and risk and how both inevitably lead to sorrow. It’s the hipster rejection of average working-class experience and conventional religion; it’s also fetishizing outlawry, kookiness, the insanely ridiculous and the Not-As-Smart-As-Me Other.

Fact is, Korine’s not as smart as Nicholas Roeg, whose excellent 1987 film Insignificance grouped iconic Monroe, Einstein, Joe McCarthy and DiMaggio figures to tease and theorize about energy, sex, politics and American mythology. In Mister Lonely, Korine less cleverly uses the emulation of famous people to comment on rampant celebrity-worship while condescending to unfortunates with self-destructive neuroses. Through them, Korine objectifies Jackson’s eccentricity and the pariah status conferred by haters who deny his artistry, humanity and myth status. Korine even has the temerity to title different scenes after Jackson songs: “Thriller,” “Beat It,” “Man in the Mirror” and the exquisite “You Are Not Alone.”

But this exploitation is erratic; Korine conveniently switches contexts: Diego/Michael is first seen in the distance riding a midget motorbike and trailing a chimpanzee in a winged outfit so we think it’s actually MJ while the soundtrack blares Bobby Vinton’s 1964 hit song, “Mr. Lonely.” Korine ignores the inarguable power of Jackson’s own oeuvre (and avoids song-usage costs), but he has substituted treacle. Vinton’s recording is an example of pop banality—especially compared to either a virtuoso sentimentalist like Johnny Ray or a transcendent recording, like Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone.”

Surely no one who knows “You Are Not Alone” (or its supernal music video) should tolerate the lachrymose view of celebrityhood that Korine presents. Jackson’s song (actually written by R. Kelly) is a powerful statement of empathy’s cross-currents. In the video, Jackson walks through Pop Icon venues as an isolated troubadour and beseeching lover (he’s pretty, in fact). Yet he has an apparition’s spiritual aura—way cooler than any image Korine manufactures. Instead, Mister Lonely’s freaks (Abe Lincoln, Chaplin, The Pope, Queen Elizabeth, Shirley Temple, Buckwheat) inhabit an asylum-like environment—not commiserating with each other so much as betraying and feeling sorry for themselves. They’re like the commune’s black sheep who (of course) must be slaughtered for contracting a disease.

To make this moist extrapolation of human experience out of Michael Jackson’s example is as imperious as that Kim’s clerk’s stupid disdain. Korine’s sarcasm protects him from true feeling. His religioso subplot (enabled by Herzog’s irresponsible participation) mocks spiritual devotion in the guise of pathos. It’s all bizarrely ugly—including the exploitation of Samantha Morton’s corpulent backside and wide thighs in see-through dresses, a distortion of Monroe to match the Jackson meanness. Diego Luna salvages a portion of self-respect with a performance as elegantly melancholy as Jean-Louis Barrault’s in Children of Paradise. But Korine remains indifferent to such romantic evocation. He prefers the kinkiness of Morton/Monroe being tortured: After getting sun-burned, she endures a session of sadistic love-making that blatantly echoes Fassbinder’s Martha. Is this a case of simple-minded actors playing mental defectives or just Korine and Herzog trying to pass off their insensitivity as P.T. Barnum poetry?

Humanist filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich was able to create sympathetic understanding in his Chaplin-Hearst-Davies celebrity tale The Cat’s Meow, but Mister Lonely is just full of bathos. When Anita Pallenberg as the Queen states Korine’s thesis—“We impersonate in order to keep the spirit of wonder alive”—it’s as innocent as someone selling the Brooklyn Bridge. Mister Lonely is an offshoot of our celebrity-mad culture, like the National Enquirer morphing into The Maury Povich Show.