Word: tabloidal
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...Bobbitts, the Jacksons, the Menendez clan and that favorite new horror sitcom, The (O.J.) Simpsons, the American family has entered its postnuclear stage. Talk shows offer quack catharsis from every form of spousal and parental abuse. We're shouting at each other in National Enquirer headlines and have promoted tabloid newspapers and TV programs, once on the fringe of journalism, up to its hot center. It's Armageddon with commercial breaks. Why, the whole bloody mess could be straight out of an Oliver Stone movie...
Three men want them bad, which is the only way Mickey and Mallory come. A brutish detective (Tom Sizemore) hopes to capture these miscreants and maybe write a best seller about it. A tabloid-TV newsman (Robert Downey Jr.) figures he can exploit their exploits, turning this Mansonized Romeo and Juliet -- 52 murders, no regrets -- into media darlings. A crazed warden (Tommy Lee Jones) is determined to achieve fame as the man who put them to death. It's the ideal recipe for a Stone-crazy parable of greed and abuse. Shake well, pull the pin and stand back...
...still on the surreal side, and not just in the carnage that almost earned the picture an NC-17 rating (see box). NBK is also a blanket indictment of the American family (breeders of abuse), the justice system (sadistic and incompetent) and the avid media that find in tabloid crime the no-brain modern equivalent of Greek tragedy. And intentionally or not, NBK romanticizes its hero and heroine, because they are smarter and sexier than their pursuers. As the kid in the movie's fake news footage says, "If I was a mass murderer, I'd be Mickey and Mallory...
This dish, much of it spilled long ago in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon (where Dean is dubbed "the human ashtray"), should not stop the presses of any tabloid. For that matter, they should not have started any presses at Viking. Stuffed with exotic by-products and lots of filler, the book could be sold in supermarkets as Jimmy Dean pork sausage...
...since you'll want to recite them to anyone who'll listen. The slightly obsessive narrators of these stories make them particularly suited to out-loud readings (most of them were probably created for National Public Radio). Sedaris has a masterful ear for popular culture talk--arm-chair psychology, tabloid gossip, etc. He is particularly sensitive to that time-frame known in contemporary chit-chat as "right now"--as in "I'm really interested in underwater birthing right now," or "Right now I'm trying a lot of herbal teas," or "I 'm concentrating on me right now, just...