Patton Oswalt has long ago secured his place in the pantheon of great modern comedians. His stand-up covers topics ranging from the cult-culture specific (such as meditating on the idea of using time travel to kill George Lucas before he can make the Star Wars prequels) to global issues (religion, politics) to the nakedly personal (his struggles with depression, fatherhood, self-loathing, etc). Whatever the topic on demand, Oswalt never fails to find a core, bitingly funny, humanity.
One of the things that comes across in both his comedy and writing is the keen intelligence and hunger for knowledge. There are few topics, cultural or social, which Oswalt cannot speak to with passion and depth, whether he’s trying to make you scream with laughter or just contemplate a new idea.
He’s put that wicked hunger to use in prose on two occasions now. The first, the excellent Zombie. Spaceship. Wasteland., was a sort of memoir-sketch comedy-manifesto amalgamation, an almost stream-of-conscious examination of past, present, concerns, interests, hopes, humor, etc. You could feel Patton experimenting with each new chapter, as if he was testing the waters of every potential format and seeing which ones fit him best.
Oswalt’s new book Silver Screen Fiend ditches the anthological structure, settling for a more focused memoir, centered around the four years when he found his entire life based around watching as many movies as he possibly could at the New Beverly Cinema (lately in the news for owner Quentin Tarantino’s decision to turn it into a shrine to celluloid over digital).
It’s a topic close to my own heart, given my own tendencies towards film-freakery. I’ve definitely had that period of my life where I wasn’t so much engaging with films, TV shows, erotic puppet shows, books, what have you, so much as inhaling every single bit of culture that I possibly could, hardly halting to breathe before moving on to the next one. Instead of mainlining classic movies at a theater, my addiction took the form of entire nights spent awake taping whatever was on TCM or any of the other myriad channels we had. It’s a natural thing, for a geek to suddenly find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer tonnage of content in the world and to go on a spree of seeking. There are movies from that time period that I know I saw, that I can remember sitting down with, but the actual content has evaporated. Not enough room in the memory banks. Overloaded.
Every film junkie has their process, and I’m sure all of the movie-minded folk on Twitter have their story about the time when they became fixated on a certain filmmaker, a certain actor, a certain theater, etc, etc. You hope to figure out a balance between the hunger for culture and the rest of, you know, being alive, but sometimes that balance can get way lost.
Patton was lost for four years. While Fiend weaves in and out of other major milestones in his life and career (his brief stint with MadTV, the advent of the West Coast alternative comedy scene, the beginning of King of Queens) the drive to consume as much film as possible is a constant presence, infiltrating and disrupting other threads, like an errant itch that can’t be scratched out of existence.
It’s a good thing the book has this sort of central spine, as it often seems susceptible to the old memoir problem of devolving into a series of vaguely related anecdotes. Oswalt is a strong writer with a lot of great stories to tell (one of which only reaffirms the notion of Louis CK as the foul-mouthed, ginger Buddha the modern world needs) so it’s not a bad thing to read through his misadventures and close calls with sort-of fame, but there are points where readers may grow impatient with the entrenched meander of Silver Screen Fiend’s text.
This is especially true given the occasionally frustrating sense that Oswalt is gliding over the surface of stories or topics that required a greater plunge. Whereas Zombie. Spaceship. Wasteland. (and some of his autobiographical essays that can be found online) have shown Oswalt ready and willing to break down his experience with the comedy industry in exacting detail, Fiend glosses over the contentious points in the growing scene, preferring to mention the kinds of rifts and feuds that could emerge without actually going into detail.
I’m sure that a lot of this has to do with most of the people documented here still being alive, active, and friendly with Patton, so it’s not like I’m asking him to piss all over his friends and peers for the sake of a book. Well, I mean, if he did do that I would enjoy it. Probably his career would be over, but still my enjoyment would remain. Other people would probably enjoy it too. Probably there would be children among that number.
You know what, I’m going to have to insist that Patton Oswalt piss all over his friends and peers for the sake of a book. Because of the children.
My point is, it feels like there is even greater material to be mined, but Patton’s decision to base the book around the addiction arc means we never break past that initial surface with the other stories gestured at here.
And maybe that fits with the overall theme. Because Patton, by his own admission, kept the physical at a distance for so long, finding greater kinship with the flickering ghosts, he only had those surface attachments. We may curse the lack of detail, but so might he. There’s a palpable sadness at the time lost, the time gone, a sadness that means every description of the burnished magic of the movies has a bitter aftertaste.
It’s strange, because I’m still younger than Patton Oswalt’s younger self depicted here, so I haven’t learned anything close to what he has, or did even back then. But I’m glad that someone with his gift for communication, his knack for finding empathy, took the time to look back on a scary and uncertain part of his life with as much openness and intelligence as he brings to every other subject. Write more books, Patton.
For the children.