Word: concert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Peck, for one, has found the price of devotion to rock unnecessarily steep. She and Dr. Flash Gordon of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic recently founded an outfit named HEAR (for Hearing Education Awareness for Rockers) to alert performers, technicians and concert-hall staffers to the perils of pounding music and the precautions that can be taken. First among them: regular hearing checkups. They hope the message will filter down to young fans...
...question is, why the rest? He's given good performances in other movies (a moody, sarcastic DJ in Down By Law, and Jack Nicholson's decaying companion in Ironweed), and he's obviously interested in doing more than just translating his concert to the screen; the result is close to surreal...
...movie opens with Waits getting into a bed surrounded by large glowing colored boxes, which, we discover later, make up his concert set. By the bed is a TV buzzing with static; Waits harrumphs and coughs, scratches himself, sits on the bed to shave his neck, then, curious, points his electric shaver at the set and hits the button: zap, the fuzz snaps for a second to Waits furiously singing. Hmm. He hits the shaver again--Waits in a Lone Ranger mask. Again--Waits in a satin white jacket. Chuckling, he turns away, pulls a sheet over his boots...
Waits is playing with all kinds of innocence and perversion: one concert scene flashes between an emotional gospel tune and a simpering, streetcorner Bible thumper, also played by Waits; another shifts between Waits singing on stage, and, as Frank, mouthing the same song on the roof of a building, as if the hard-luck lyrics were straight reportage of what's below him. Because there's no plot or dialogue to speak of, almost everything is conveyed by symbol--the three characters, the handheld lamp which focuses the audience's attention on his face, the bathtub that Frank sings...
Again, you can ignore all the symbolism and visual weirdness in Big Time as irrelevant and just enjoy the concert scenes--or you can look, in Frank's last song, for Waits' resolution of his struggle between musical innocence and cynical showmanship...