Dupea’s disaffected sense gets clarified by his explanation to Rayette about how he and Elton lost their job, in an excised scene set at the diner where she worked. Perhaps it was cut because Bobby spelled out his alienation in too obvious a fashion, rather than depicting its manifestations. Bobby complains “Everything worth anything is lost,” of how the system is “thwarting the natural instincts of a man,” which results in “the total loss of spirit.”1 This neatly sums up Bobby Dupea’s instinct to separate himself, to disconnect from everything and everyone.
In several instances, Nicholson’s portrayal of Bobby serves as antecedent to his characterization of Jack Torrance in The Shining. The two mirror scenes mentioned above are similar to those in the Kubrick film. He looks without emotion, without admiration, without interest or ego, or even without disappointment or disgust. Bobby looks at himself and feels nothing and looks for himself and finds nothing. He is as detached from himself and his surroundings as is Torrance.
After Rayette shows up at his family’s Washington State home, Bobby escapes the collision of his two worlds and gets self-destructively drunk. Here we see the same disconnected and dangerous expression we later see in Jack Torrance.
Dialogue edited out of the scene in which Dupea plays piano for Catherine once again explained too much. Bobby laments having entered “this predetermined [musical] heritage” last among the family and how he “worked at it every day … from the age of three to the age of 28, hating it.”2 The boy and the man never felt anything, never connected to it, and never experienced satisfaction, so that his family’s approval and enthusiasm “does not mean a crap to me.” He feels the same way about Catherine’s reaction. The deleted words filled in more than was necessary. When Bobby sums up his attitude toward music, he might well be summing up his life: “I don’t feel it!”
Later, as he drives back from his family’s home with Rayette, she sings and she kisses, but he pushes her away. Bobby looks truly dead, in the car with his significant and only other, in the same way he looked dead as Torrance during his drive to the hotel with his family at the beginning of The Shining. In the former, Jack depicts how trapped his character feels right before his final getaway, while in the latter his character is just as trapped, only to escape, first mentally and ultimately with violence.
In Five Easy Pieces’ final sequence, Nicholson sits next to the truck driver and lets his mouth open without expression in a troubling, problematic look. This countenance reflects one of his most foreboding moments in The Shining, one in which Torrance sits on a bed and contemplates hurting Danny.
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While Dupea and Torrance cannot handle the structure, responsibility—and most of all the emotional investments—of family and meaningful relationships, David Staebler in The King of Marvin Gardens doesn’t avoid his family but just does not connect with them, while appearing to have no meaningful relationships from which to escape.
Nicholson plays a radio monologist on a show entitled Etcetera, a strange and wholly uncommercial program of personal observations and anecdotes that are more unloading than involving. He’s not reliving memories because he didn’t live in the first place. Again, Nicholson portrays a man who does not fit, who converses with a microphone rather than with people. He observes rather than participates; notes rather than reacts; reports rather than connects. Staebler talks of his family as he would describe the weather, detached and distant. The actor referred to his character as Kafkaesque.3
Director Bob Rafelson and Nicholson followed their breakthrough and breakout collaboration on Five Easy Pieces with this dour and non-affirming family drama about a non-family. The Staebler brothers weren’t the clichéd dysfunctional family because they usually didn’t function at all.
In the film’s opening story, with Nicholson’s face isolated on black with Meet the Beatles–like half-shadow, it’s not clear that a radio broadcast is depicted. It appears more like a one-sided conversation or confession to a psychiatrist, because the shot’s composition uses dramatic license. Given his position, had David really been doing a radio show, he would have been off-mic for much of the speech. Only when the studio’s red light flashes five minutes into the movie do we get the first hint of what is actually happening.
He’s looking to his right, off-screen, as if toward someone. The slow Nicholson drawl fits the character’s lack of emotion, while the use of his hands is exquisitely expressive. Watching this odd monologue, the question arises, “Who would listen to such a show?” A story about a grandfather choking on fish or family tragedies described non-tragically don’t make for radio ratings winners.
I asked Boston and New York radio legend Dick Summer if he had any impressions about the character and the film, given Summer’s own style as monologist and storyteller (though decidedly in a more romantic and openly sensitive manner). “I tried to do what I think Nicholson did so well. Whatever you heard on the air was pretty much what I am. It’s surprisingly hard to get out of the way of really being yourself on the air.” The secret wasn’t a gimmick, but an indirect connection:
When I was on the air, I considered my listeners to be part of my “huddle.” I was the quarterback, and we were all gathered around for mutual protection, with the singular goal of making it through the dawn together. It was real…. I think Nicholson managed to get the “real” into every character he ever played. Not a PR fiction. The real guy.4
Unlike Summer, Staebler is a lost soul and not one to seek what could be recovered. They are alike in avoiding sensationalized call-ins or calculated posturing in favor of a personal and human perspective. The difference: Summer delivered the human feeling while Staebler couldn’t find it and couldn’t fit in.
However, he did grow—only to fall when all the life and hope and dreams were destroyed. Nicholson moves Staebler from a talker to a doer, slowly and convincingly. When Bruce Dern, as brother Jason, gives him a big welcoming hug, David’s discomfort (displayed by a slight backward recoil) is priceless. Jack is aware of his body. He accentuates his character’s uneasiness with receiving such open affection and physical intimacy by pulling away his neck to draw attention to its flesh folds.
As the brothers work together on their hapless dream, David is drawn out bit by bit. Jack first breaks out his own bigness after a sprint run on the Atlantic City beach, ending up doubled over and practically dying through wide open mouth breaths and a stance like a penguin. To underscore the pain, he spits up something into his handkerchief. Of course, just having a handkerchief in the early ’70s says something about the character.
David comes to life when selling junk to some ladies on the boardwalk … and his transformation begins. Jack’s character becomes more physical and more demonstrative compared to his earlier subdued self, who was never more emotive than when showing a half-smile.
Even at his most open and spontaneous, he remains his brother’s opposite. Dern is huge, loud and boisterous—ever the optimist and always the schemer. Relationships in The King of Marvin Gardens are atypical and awkward. The one between the brothers is strained. They have nothing in common, a point which was symbolized when they are shown opposite one another on different colored horses. The relationship between Sally (Ellen Burstyn) and Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson)—mother-daughter or mentor-protégé?—is bizarrely physical, though it excuses Jason’s sideways dalliances.
There is a key scene with Jessica as a beauty pageant contestant and David as the master of ceremonies that forces him into new territory. The man who normally hides behind the mic in radio anonymity becomes the focus, as host (albeit in rehearsal). Nicholson is this man, his character energy infusing a rough transition into the light. He appears natural in his unnaturalness, true in his discomfort, but trying his best to be the host with much less than the most as well as a reluctant ham.
Look at David’s discomfort with this big welcoming hug from his brother in Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). When Bruce Dern (right), as brother Jason, emb
races the radio monologist, Nicholson accentuates his character’s uneasiness through this backward recoil.
Nicholson employs the perfect nuance of mocking sincerity during an obviously fictitious dolphin story to Asian investors. He adopts a rougher, rhythmic, staccato delivery when feigning tough talk with Lewis (Scatman Crothers), as his words get ahead of themselves to the degree that he eventually runs out of air in his attempt to match his brother’s style with his own tremulous voice.
Getting such a penetrating performance wasn’t without conflict, as actor Josh Mostel (who played the radio station engineer) recounted. “He complained [doing an impression of Nicholson]: ‘It’s not like acting. You’re doing everything in groups of three.’ It’s like there were so many takes, with Bob Rafelson. So he just sort of complained about that a lot, you know. [Impression of Nicholson:] ‘Oh gee, let’s not.’”5
The production, though dealing with such a downbeat character, wasn’t completely devoid of laughs. Mostel told me, “I forgot my line or something and I just sort of stood there with egg on my face, and [Nicholson] went, ‘I tried to work with him, but I was getting nothin’.’ It was funny.”6
Nicholson may seem restrained or appear to underplay, but much goes into this portrayal. The subtleties of David’s emergence are small to us, but large to David. That is what makes the role work as real.
David’s last step in his advancement was a big blowup at Jason, pleading with his brother to open his eyes and his ears—for once—to reality. Even in this confrontation, the closest David could come to a Jacksplosion, Nicholson holds just enough back in order to be true to the man, keeping both hands in his pockets to stay small and constrained by his own inhibitions about emotion. While yelling at his brother, Nicholson’s David only removes a hand from his pocket temporarily, a momentary expansion that he then reels back in. When David yells, he exposes his upper and lower teeth, perhaps holding in some sound as he always remains partially closed. This is Nicholson’s loudest, most uncontrolled moment, yet he still confines his character within narrowly defined limits.
No matter, as Jason could never see the reality because he chose not to, and with good reason. The reality was always obvious: The dream was over, though it never truly began. A nightmare took over, violently ending the dream in the only way it could be made final. Dern’s Jason would never see that the dream could never happen for them, for any or all of them, and so he had to go away in the only way that made sense, forever.
Nicholson historian Don Schiach classes The King of Marvin Gardens and Five Easy Pieces “as companion movies, variations on the theme of the fruitless chase after the American Dream of happiness, success, money, love and community.”7
Later, as his murdered brother’s body is being loaded for transport, David goes right back to being as dead as he had been at the beginning of the film. David Staebler’s journey ended with his return to his original personality, to his former home, and to the only means of reaching out to others—as anonymous and unconnected as it was—over the radio. Like outsiders and misfits Warren Schmidt and Bobby Dupea, David can only weep to himself as he recounts his experiences as radio monologue. Schmidt pitied himself instead of Ndugu; Dupea broke down over his own misanthropic choices; Staebler shared his tragedy with a microphone. David could only bring his own experience to true emotion in story form, as an abstraction rather than an expression, after which he wrapped up the program almost as if it had been a fiction.
These characters don’t think for the now, but lament the past. They do not act with intent, but react with impulse. They live mostly unnoticed, unless their antisocial tendency brings attention. Schmidt and Staebler are both weak, not so much wallflowers as wallpaper. Dupea minimizes himself, weakening his prospects and himself. Yet all three are among the strongest examples of rich and nuanced character energy in the career of Jack Nicholson. As Dick Summer put it, “I have a hunch that Nicholson really is as complicated, as humanly muddy, as the characters he played. And he let us see it.”8
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Jonathan in Carnal Knowledge and Francis Phelan in Ironweed both became broken men, Jonathan by slowly self-destructing and Francis through a single careless act. Jonathan comes to hate women, for reasons that are not exactly clear, though we can surmise it’s grounded in competition with friend Sandy (Art Garfunkel) combined with a free-at-any-cost rebellion against female control. Francis is Jonathan’s opposite. He genuinely loves the women in his life. He loves his wife Annie (Carroll Baker), despite having left her behind due to his shame about having dropped their baby to his death. He loves his fellow hobo-alcoholic-girlfriend Helen (Meryl Streep), living together as normally as Depression-era homeless and aimless souls can. Francis has devoted so much of himself to his women that he can give to the memory of his former life while simultaneously giving to his current companion. Jonathan instead has no devotion to give, nor any desire to try.
Nicholson takes quite a journey in his portrayal of Francis Phelan in William Kennedy’s screenplay, based on his novel. Francis is lost, and then he’s found. He finds his real family again, briefly, only to lose his later adopted family. Jack plays a caring friend, a tender lover, a besotted drunk, a clean visitor. He’s fallen angel and killer dad, happy and remorseful and tormented and nostalgic. Nicholson’s Phelan hallucinates with pleasure and with torture.
Director Hector Babenco struggled to understand giving three years of his life to the project. “There is something about the guilt of this character, something about establishing harmony with your past, something about having the courage to come back to the home base of your past and face it.”9
When we first see Nicholson in the film, he is hardly recognizable. His voice is familiar when he yells while having imagined “arguments” with the ghost of Harold Allen (Nathan Lane) as he rides a streetcar together with excellent supporting player Tom Waits (as Rudy). After a bath at his former wife’s home, he does finally look like Nicholson, and he and Carroll Baker are cute together—like on a first date—only thicker and grayer and older.
Nicholson’s range in this role is as powerful as Francis’ story. When he violently confronts a phantom group of dead people, his delivery, gestures, body language and even his speech pattern is suddenly (and for just a moment) like his Jimmy Hoffa at his most explosive.
Yet, in his attempt to reconcile with his family after so many lost years, Jack plays Francis so humble and soft-spoken and tentative, until he reads the heartbreaking little girl’s letter to the same now-adult daughter. At this moment, he transitions to a real man, alive and in control, with confidence and memories, as he recounts playing baseball in Toronto.
There is a cemetery scene, no less striking than that in The Crossing Guard, during which he talks to his dead son, the son he drunkenly dropped; the son who died from a careless second in time. Nicholson’s monologue reminds us of the one delivered by son Bobby Dupea to his immobile, wheelchair-bound father in Five Easy Pieces, as well as the closing radio speech in Marvin Gardens. All share a progression from composed to crying back to composed and back to crying, a human bounce from complex emotion toward reflection and from regret toward inconsolable guilt.
While Carnal Knowledge’s Jonathan cannot connect in any meaningful way with his parade of women, Francis remains committed to his pair of loves even after they are gone.
Upon discovering Meryl Streep’s character dead in her rooming house, Francis sinks and slumps, as whatever life he had slips away. His defeat is real, yet he perseveres to compliment her on retrieving their possessions from a pawnbroker, making the room nice, and on her appearance—how she was “mighty pretty.”
Nicholson is portraying true love, perhaps purer because Helen and Francis had no possessions aside from one another. Now, Francis is left with only memories. On his final train ride, he conjures the false image of Annie. When he realizes that what he sees cannot be real, Francis directs true hatred at his bottle of booze. We see a man who for the first time realizes a
nd admits to himself the source of his pain and the waste of his life. We feel the tragedy of a good man. About Jonathan, in contrast, we merely gaze as voyeur toward a slump of a futile life. We have sympathy for Francis but no empathy for the pathetic Jonathan.
Nicholson called Ironweed “one of the best movies I’ve done, but was it a commercial success? Some movies are jazz, some are rock and roll.”10 The musical metaphor extended to his acting duet with Streep, “a dream” working in a manner that is “kind of like dancing with a partner where you don’t have to do anything, you just get carried along by it and fascinated by it.”11
To Babenco, the film served as “a collective soul” about anonymous vagabonds “showing the courage and beauty of people we don’t usually think of as having deep and complex emotions.”12
In Ironweed, Nicholson embodies his character in a pas de deux with Streep, far from movie stardom and closer to the bone and a reality that’s too real, a loss that loses too much, and a life that wasn’t quite lived, but sustained … barely sustained.
Francis is that fly, something hardly noticed, inconsequential in life and unmissed when dead. He’s glimpsed in flashes, but mostly he’s ignored and looked through as if nonexistent. He’s swatted and cursed and waved away. That is, until he buzzes around the periphery before he finally disappears.
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