The Adventures of Ford Fairlane

Although the protagonist calls himself Ford Fairlane, he is actually just the renamed Diceman, and therein lies the downfall of this now forgotten and, in its time, allegedly cult movie. That brash, flippant and bombastic rockabilly boor was (and still is today) the stand-up persona of the film’s lead actor, Andrew Dice Clay. Though the Diceman is only a role that is evidently incompatible with Clay’s personal demeanour, it is based on the principle of caricature; he is not a satirical character such as Stephen Colbert’s persona in The Colbert Report. Colbert ridiculed his inspirations, his audience knew what he was doing and, through him, laughed at what he was caricaturing. Furthermore, the foundation of the entire show consisted in familiarising the audience and guests with the fact that it was a parody. Conversely, recordings of the Diceman’s performances at the time offer a chilling image, where the caricature-based exaggeration becomes the framework that legitimises the use of boorish vulgarities, which the audience applauds while failing to see the perversity, ossification, ignorance and limitations of the character, because that character is not a clown or a mirror placed in front of the audience, but rather an assertion and validation of their own values. There are many cases in which caricature-based satire remains misunderstood and the people whom it makes fun of become its devoted and enthusiastic audience, as was the case with Married with Children and Australian icon Barry McKenzie. In contrast, the Diceman shows no signs of reflection or uncertainty for his audience, at best coming across as a pragmatic project that enables one person to earn a living by behaving like an asshole and other assholes are more than happy to pay him for his efforts. Because of Dice’s involvement, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane becomes a schizophrenic film in which Dice is the ideal performer to play the lead role of an uncouth rockabilly detective, while he is also the reason that the entire film gives off a whiff of repulsiveness. After all, schizophrenia is an essential element of the film, which straddles various tendencies and directions, as a result of which it does not belong anywhere. The protagonist’s rockabilly stylisation and his boastful glorification of 1959s machismo and sexism serves as a late contribution to the wave of exaggerated and campy ’50s retro represented in cinema by a number of films ranging from Grease (1978) through Streets of Fire (1984) and Radioactive Dreams (1985) to Cry-Baby (1990). Conversely, self-reflection and pointing out the clichés of genre films and their characters turned film toward the trend of sophisticated, more or less meta genre movies, with The Last Boy Scout (1991) and The Last Action Hero (1993) at the fore. Unlike those enduring and retrospectively appreciated films, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane crashes and burns on its central character. Fairlane is an anachronism, but not only does he not admit it (as in The Last Boy Scout), but the whole world around him does not notice it at all. The same is true of the extent to which he is merely a movie character who realises that he is an unrealistic construct when, unlike in The Last Action Hero, he never has to step out of his comfort zone. On the other hand, thanks to everything that has been outlined here, Fairlane was, in his time, an ideal hero for adolescent film buffs. In their predisposition to an egocentric view of the world and wallowing in their supposed superiority, they were blind to the fact that the protagonist is simply an unlikable dick, but they were able to see in him a big tough guy emanating wit, good humour and coolness, and then declared the whole film to be somehow progressive and unappreciated. That youthful ignorance is the basis of the ratings here, where ecstatic responses mostly are predominantly from the time when the database was established, or from witnesses who saw the film when it came out on video, while the more sober and disappointed responses evidently come from older viewers who were curious about this highly praised phenomenon. (08/29/2016) (less) (more)