Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television

by Chuck Klosterman

  Kilmer and his two kids are playing with the cats. Because there are two of these animals (Ernest and Refrigerator), the living room takes on a Ghost and the Darkness motif. While they play with the felines, Val casually mentions he awoke that morning at 4:00 A.M. to work on a screenplay, but that he went back to bed at 6:00 A.M. His schedule is unconventional. A few hours later, I ask him about the movie he’s writing.

  “Well, it’s a woman’s story,” he says cautiously. “It’s about this woman who was just fighting to survive, and everything happened to her.”

  I ask him if this is a real person; he says she is. “Her first husband died. Her own family took her son away from her. She marries a guy because he promises to help her get the son back, and then he doesn’t. The new husband is a dentist, but he won’t even fix her teeth. She ends up divorcing him because he gets captured in the Civil War. She meets a homeopathic guy who’s probably more of a mesmerist hypnotist. For the first time in her life, at forty-two years old, she’s feeling good. But then she slips on the ice and breaks every bone in her body, and the doctor and the priest say she should be dead. But she has this experience while she’s praying and she gets up. People literally thought they were seeing a ghost. And then she spent the rest of her life trying to articulate what had happened to her. How was she healed? That’s what the story is about: the rest of her life. Because she lived until she was ninety and became the most famous lady in the United States.”

  His vision for this film is amazingly clear, and he tells me the story with a controlled, measured intensity. I ask him the name of the woman. He says, “Mary Baker Eddy. She died in 1910.” We talk a little more about this idea (he’d love to see Cate Blanchette in the lead role), but then the conversation shifts to the subject of Common Sense author Thomas Paine, whom Kilmer thinks should be the subject of Oliver Stone’s next movie.

  It is not until the next morning that I realize Mary Baker Eddy was the founder of The Christian Science Monitor, and that Val Kilmer is a Christian Scientist.

  “Well, that is what I am trying to be,” he says while we sit on his back porch and look at the bubbling blueness of the Pecos River. “It is quite a challenging faith, but I don’t think I’m hedging. I just think I am being honest.”

  There are many facets to Christian Science, but most people only concern themselves with one: Christian Scientists do not take medicine. They believe that healing does not come from internal processes or from the power of the mortal mind; they believe healing comes from the Divine Mind of God. Growing up in Los Angeles, this is how Kilmer was raised by his parents. This belief becomes more complex when you consider the context of the Kilmer family: the son of an engineer and a housewife, Val had two brothers. They lived on the outskirts of L.A., neighbors to the likes of Roy Rogers. Over time, the family splintered. Val’s parents divorced, and he remains estranged from his older brother over a business dispute that happened more than ten years ago (“We have a much better relationship not speaking,” Val says). His younger brother Wesley died as a teenager; Wesley had an epileptic seizure in a swimming pool (Val was seventeen at the time, about to go to school at Juilliard). I ask him if his brother’s epilepsy was untreated at the time of his death.

  “Well, this is a complicated answer,” he says. “He was treated periodically. There is a big misnomer with Christian Science; I think maybe that misnomer is fading. People used to say, ‘Christian Science. Oh, you’re the ones that don’t believe in doctors,’ which is not a true thing. It’s just a different way of treating a malady. It could be mental, social, or physical. In my little brother’s case, when he was diagnosed, my parents were divorced. My father had him diagnosed and Wesley was given some medical treatment for his epilepsy. When he was in school, they would stop the treatment. Then periodically, he would go back and forth between Christian Science and the medical treatment.”

  I ask him what seems like an obvious question: Isn’t it possible that his brother’s death happened when he was being untreated, and that this incident could have been avoided?

  “Christian Science isn’t responsible for my little brother’s death,” he says, and I am in no position to disagree.

  We’re still sitting on his porch, and his daughter walks past us. I ask Val if he would not allow her to take amoxicillin if she had a sore throat; he tells me that—because he’s divorced—he doesn’t have autonomous control over that type of decision. But he says his first move in such a scenario would be to pray, because most illness comes from fear. We start talking about the cult of Scientology, which he has heard is “basically Christian Science without God.” We begin discussing what constitutes the definition of religion; Kilmer thinks an institution cannot be classified as a religion unless God is involved. When I argue that this is not necessarily the case, Val walks into the house and brings out the Oxford English Dictionary; I’m not sure how many working actors own their own copy of the OED, but this one does. The print in the OED is minuscule, so he begins scouring the pages like Sherlock Holmes. He pores over the tiny words with a magnifying glass that has an African boar’s tusk as a handle. He finds the definition of religion, but the OED’s answer is unsatisfactory. He decides to check what Webster’s Second Unabridged Dictionary has to say, since he insists that Webster’s Second was the last dictionary created without an agenda. We spend the next fifteen minutes looking up various words, including monastic.

  So this, I suppose, is an illustration of how Val Kilmer is weird in unexpected ways: he’s a Christian Scientist, and he owns an inordinate number of reference books.

  I ask Val Kilmer if he agrees that his life is crazy. First he says no, but then he (kind of) says yes.

  “I make more money than the whole state of New Mexico,” he says. “If you do the math, I’ve probably made as much as six hundred thousand or eight hundred thousand people in this state. And I know that’s crazy. You know, I live on a ranch that’s larger than Manhattan. That’s a weird circumstance.” Now, this is something of a hyperbole; the island of Manhattan is 14,563 acres of real estate, which is more than twice as large as Val’s semiarid homestead. But his point is still valid—he’s got a big fucking backyard, and that’s a weird circumstance. “The thing I’m enjoying more is that there are lots of things that fame has brought me that I can use to my advantage in a quiet way. For example, a friend of mine is an amazing advocate for trees. He’s so incredible and selfless. He’s planted [something like] twenty million trees in Los Alamos. I actually got to plant the twenty-millionth tree. And we got more attention for doing that simply because I’ve made some movies and I’m famous.”

  Kilmer’s awareness of his fame seems to partially derive from his familiarity with other famous people. During the two days we spend together, he casually mentions dozens of celebrities he classifies as friends—Robert DeNiro, Nelson Mandela, Steve-O. Val tells me that he passed on the lead role in The Insider that eventually went to Russell Crowe; he tells me he dreams of making a comedy with Will Ferrell, whom he considers a genius. At one point, Kilmer does a flawless Marlon Brando impersonation, even adjusting the timbre of his voice to illustrate the subtle difference between the ’70s Brando from Last Tango in Paris and the ’90s Brando from Don Juan DeMarco. We talk about his longtime camaraderie with Kevin Spacey, and he says that Spacey is “proof that you can learn how to act. Because he was horrible when he first started, and now he’s so good.” We talk about the famous women he’s dated; the last serious relationship he had was with Darryl Hannah, which ended a year ago. During the 1990s, he was involved with Cindy Crawford, so I ask him what it’s like to sleep with the most famous woman in the world. His short answer is that it’s awesome. His long answer is that it’s complicated.

  “Cindy is phenomenally comfortable in the public scene,” Kilmer says. “I never accepted that responsibility. If you’re the lead in a film, you have a responsibility to the company and the studio. With a great deal of humor, Cindy describes herself as being in advertising. She’s
an icon in it; we actually talked about her image in relation to the product. And I was uncomfortable with that. We got in a huge fight one night because of a hat she was wearing. The hat advertised a bar, and I used to be so unreasonable about that kind of thing. I had a certain point of view about the guy who owned the bar, and I was just being unreasonable. I mean, she knows what she’s doing, and she’s comfortable with it. But I knew we were going to go to dinner and that we’d get photographed with this hat, and I was just hard to deal with. It was a really big deal.”

  This is the kind of insight that makes talking to an established movie star so unorthodox: Kilmer remembers that his girlfriend wearing a certain hat was a big deal, but he doesn’t think it was a big deal that the girlfriend was Cindy Crawford. Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy. He mentions that he is almost embarrassed by how cliché his life has become, despite the fact that the manifestation of this cliché includes buffalo ownership. However, there are certain parts of his life that even he knows are strange. This is most evident when—apropos of nothing—he starts talking about Bob Dylan.

  “I am a friend of Bob’s, as much as Bob has friends,” Kilmer says. “Bob is a funny guy. He is the funniest man I know.” Apparently, Dylan loved Tombstone so much that he decided to spend an afternoon hanging out in Kilmer’s hotel room, later inviting Val into the recording studio with Eric Clapton and casting him in the film Masked and Anonymous. Much like his ability to mimic Brando, Kilmer is able to impersonate Dylan’s voice with detailed exactness and loves re-creating conversations the two of them have had. What he seems to admire most about Dylan is that—more than anything else—Bob Dylan never appears to care what anyone thinks of him. And that is something Val Kilmer still cares about (even though he’d like to argue otherwise).

  “I never cultivated a personality,” he says, which is something I am skeptical of, but something I cannot disprove. “Almost everyone that is really famous has cultivated a personality. I can safely say that no one who has ever won an Oscar didn’t want to win an Oscar. I think that Bob Dylan would have loved to win a Grammy during all those years when he knew he was doing his best work. Advanced or not, he was certainly ahead of his time, and he was more worthy than whoever won … Dylan was doing stuff that was so new that everyone hated it. Like when he started playing the electric guitar, for example: he toured for a year, and he was booed every night. Onstage, I could never take three performances in a row and be booed. I just don’t think I’m that strong. I think that I would just go to the producers of the play and say, ‘Well, we tried, but we failed to entertain here.’ But Dylan spent a year being booed. They were throwing bottles at him. And he still can’t play it! Forty years later, he is still trying to play the electric guitar. I mean, he has a dedication to an ideal that I can’t comprehend.”

  On the shores of the Pecos River, nothing is as it seems: Kevin Spacey was once a terrible actor, Bob Dylan remains a terrible guitar player, and Val Kilmer is affable and insecure. Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy. Gusty winds may exist.

  1. For a protracted explanation of Advancement, see “Advancement,” available in Chuck Klosterman IV or the ebook collection Chuck Klosterman on Living and Society or as an individual ebook essay.

  2. I have no idea why I would cast Jude Law in this role, particularly if Heath Ledger were available.

  Q: You have been wrongly accused of a horrific crime: Due to a bizarre collision of unfortunate circumstances and insane coincidences, it appears that you have murdered a prominent U.S. senator, his beautiful young wife, and both of their infant children. Now, you did not do this, but you are indicted and brought to trial.

  Predictably, the criminal proceedings are a national sensation (on par with the 1994 O. J. Simpson trial). It’s on television constantly, and it’s the lead story in most newspapers for almost a year. The prosecuting attorney is a charming genius; sadly, your defense team lacks creativity and panache. To make matters worse, the jury is a collection of easily confused sheep. You are found guilty and sentenced to four consecutive life terms with virtually no hope for parole (and—since there were no procedural mistakes during the proceedings—an appeal is hopeless).

  This being the case, you are (obviously) disappointed.

  However, as you leave the courtroom (and in the days immediately following the verdict), something becomes clear: the “court of public opinion” has overwhelmingly found you innocent. Over 95 percent of the country believes you are not guilty. Noted media personalities have declared this scenario “the ultimate legal tragedy.” So you are going to spend the rest of your life amidst the general population of a maximum-security prison … but you are innocent, and everyone seems to know this.

  Does this knowledge make you feel (a) better, (b) no different, or (c) worse?

  DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER

  In 1989, my favorite television show was The Wonder Years. This was because The Wonder Years was the only TV program that allowed me to be nostalgic at the age of seventeen; when you haven’t even been alive for two decades, it’s hard to find media experiences that provide opportunities to reminisce about the past. One of the things I particularly loved about The Wonder Years was Kevin Arnold’s incessant concern over the manner in which certain people liked him. (This person was usually Winnie Cooper, but also Becky Slater and Madeline Adams.) The core question was always the same: Did these girls “like him,” or did they “like him like him.” And Kevin’s plight begs some larger queries that apply to virtually every other aspect of being alive, especially for an American in the twenty-first century. How important, ultimately, is likability? Is being likable the most important quality someone can possess, or is it the most inherently shallow quality anyone can desire? Do we need to be liked, or do we merely want to be liked?

  I started rethinking Kevin Arnold’s quest for likability while I was reading The New York Times on the day after Christmas.

  On the back page of the Times’s “Year in Review” section, there was a graphic that attempted to quantify a phenomenon countless people have discussed over the past three years—the decline in how much other countries “like” the United States. The Times printed a poll comparing how the international opinion of America (in a general sense) evolved between May of 2003 and March of 2004. The results were close to what you’d likely anticipate. In March of 2003, 70 percent of British citizens viewed the U.S. in a manner they described as “favorable.” That number had dropped to 58 percent by March of ’04. In Germany, the “favorable” designation fell from 45 percent to 38 percent over the same time span; in France, 43 to 37. Interestingly (and perhaps predictably), America is now more popular in places like Turkey and Jordan (in Jordan, the percentage of people who saw the U.S. as “very unfavorable” used to be 83 percent, but now that number is down to 67).

  The explanation behind these figures, I suppose, is rather obvious; many nations—particularly European ones—don’t like America’s military policy, so they subsequently don’t like America. Meanwhile, countries with a vested interest in America’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have started to like us more. This became a hot issue during the election, as ardent John Kerry supporters insisted that George W. Bush needed to lose his reelection bid because “other countries hate us now.” Yet the more I think about this point, the more I find that argument to be patently ridiculous. There are easily a thousand valid reasons why Bush shouldn’t be president, but how other nations feel about America is not one of them. Americans allow other nations to exercise the kind of sweeping ethnocentrism we would never accept among ourselves.

  There are 1.3 billion people in China. We are generally taught to assume that most of these 1.3 billion people are nice, and that they are hardworking, and that they produce their share of handsome low-post NBA athletes who pass out of the double-team exceptionally well. However, these 1.3 billion people also have a problem we’re all keenly aware of; these 1.3 billion people are governed by an administration th
at has a propensity for violating human rights. As Americans, we are philosophically against this practice. But if someone were to say, “Hey, have you heard about those human rights violations in rural Beijing? I fucking hate the Chinese!” we would immediately assume said person was a close-minded troglodyte (who would be hating the same people who are having their human rights violated).

  From a very young age, we are taught that people are not all the same, and that it’s wrong to hate whole countries based on specific stereotypes. Remember that “freedom fries” fiasco that was supposed to illustrate our anti-French sentiment before we went to war with Iraq? Do you recall how every intellectual in America decried that practice as idiotic? The reason intellectuals made that decree was because this practice was idiotic. No intelligent American took that kind of childish symbolism seriously. It made no sense to hate France (or potatoes) simply because the French had a different foreign policy than the United States, and any conventional liberal would have told you that. But what’s so confusing is that those same left-leaning people are the Americans most concerned about the possibility of France not liking us, or of the British liking us less, or of the Netherlands thinking we’re uncouth. These are the same kind of people who travel from New York to Ireland and proceed to tell strangers in Dublin that they’re actually from Canada. They lie because they are afraid someone might not like them on principle. But why should we care if shortsighted people in other countries are as stupid as the shortsighted rednecks in America?

  I can totally understand why someone in Paris or London or Berlin might not like the president; I don’t like the president, either. But don’t these people read the newspaper? It’s not like Bush ran unopposed. Over 57 million people voted against him. Moreover, half of this country doesn’t vote at all; they just happen to live here. So if someone hates the entire concept of America—or even if someone likes the concept of America—based solely on his or her disapproval (or support) of some specific U.S. policy, that person doesn’t know much about how the world works. It would be no different than someone in Idaho hating all of Brazil, simply because their girlfriend slept with some dude who happened to speak Portuguese.