Austin Powers in Goldmember
Only Human After All
“You can’t shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination. If you way a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all that means is that you’ve read his autobiography.”
– P.J. O’Rourke, “Notes for a Blacklist for the 1990’s”
This is insightful, as usual, but it isn’t quite true. You can shame celebrities, but only after they become unprofitable. The most embarrassing film of the last ten years, Battlefield Earth was not an embarrasment for John Travolta because of its ridiculous premise or its horrid dialogue or the sight of Travolta with hair extensions and platform jackboots, but because it didn’t make any money. If Battlefield Earth had been profitable, everyone in Hollywood would be studying up on their Dianetics and practicing their evil leers, and you know it. Similarly, no self-respecting Hollywood celeb would ever let film crews come into their mansions and watch them fiddle with the remote control and generally make apes of themselves — at least not until Ozzy Osbourne showed people that you could make money that way. Now everyone wants to do it.
So when we look at Mike Myers, when we see him in that hairpiece that looks like a vole has died on top of his head, when we see his yellow teeth, when we see him wearing a horrid rainbow-colored pinstripe suit, prancing around like a morris-dancer, wearing — at one point in the opening credits — a purple tutu, we can only wonder “Isn’t that a little embarrassing?” The answer, of course, is a resounding “No — at least not until audiences stop showing up, it isn’t.” The Austin Powers series is, in fact, so popular that everyone wants to get in on the act; Austin Powers in Goldmember boasts more than its share of celebrity cameos.
The clothes, of course, are just the tip of the iceberg. The embarassment potential for Austin Powers in Goldmember is extraordinarily high because of Mike Myers’s insistence on wringing — literally, in some cases — comedy out of every concievable bodily orifice. And although all of this is very funny — excepting a few scenes with the truly awful and offensive Fat Bastard — one wonders if it is all really necessary, if the obsession that Myers seemingly has with the body and its functions is absolutely integral to the Austin Powers franchise and to his own comic sensibilities. One wonders if the thinking part of the audience could, in the words of Dr. Evil, catch a friggin’ break from all the fart jokes.
Of course, such a thing is not possible, and one wonders if it is wise. A brief example. Fred Savage is introduced as a British agent serving as a spy in Dr. Evil’s headquarters, or a “mole” in the intelligence parlance. When the Savage character is introduced to Austin Powers, the obvious joke would be to cue up the Daniel Stern monologue for a spoof of The Wonder Years. Instead, Savage is given a giant, hairy mole on his upper lip, and the joke — the oft-repeated, overworked joke — is Austin’s reaction to it. “Moley-moley-moley-moley!” Now, the first joke would be funnier, and classier, and would give poor Daniel Stern some much-needed work. But it would go right over the heads of the ten-year olds in the target audience, and it would be absolutely incomprehensible a hundred years from now. The bodily humor, while crass and sometimes unfortunate, is not just low common denominator humor. It is pitched to the lowest possible common denominator, purposefully. Myers’s comic style is lowbrow, coarse, and crude, granted. But Austin Powers in Goldmember is terribly funny and in its way, almost eternal. It is a very human kind of comedy — human in its persistent attention to bodily functions, of course, but human in the way that we all share these bodily functions, human in the way that we want our parents to love and respect us, human in the way we laugh when a little, pompous, evil wart of a man like Dr. Evil gets abused by flying model planets and asteroids.
Austin Powers in Goldmember is not afraid to be human, not afraid to risk embarassment, not afraid to stoop to a low level of comedy. It is hard, then, to say that it is anything other than a complete success, given its goals. Austin Powers in Goldmember is by far the best of the three Austin Powers movies. The first movie introduced us to the characters, and illustrated the problems of transporting a 1960’s agent into the 1990’s, and that was about it. The second movie was a mess, as Austin was forced to mope around without his mojo while jokes were recycled all around him. Austin Powers in Goldmember looks outward, not inward, splicing in DNA from all sorts of diverse sources. Dr. Evil is captured early on, and there is a homage to Silence of the Lambs with a wonderful, absurdist ending. Beyonce Knowles, the lead singer for Destiny’s Child, steps in to channel the spirit of Pam Grier as Foxxy Cleopatra. In the most inspired bit of casting, Michael Caine steals a leaf from Sean Connery’s book in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, stealing scenes as Austin’s no-good father. (There is even a small backhanded reference to the Harry Potter books, although not quite enough is made of this.)
Not everything works here. The new evil character, Goldmember, is painfully unfunny. Played by Myers, he is a gold-spangled, freckled roller-skating Dutchman, and that is all you really need to know. Seth Green is shuffled off to the side for most of the movie; his character, Scott Evil, abandons his snarky ways and starts to follow in his old man’s footsteps a little. The rest of Dr. Evil’s crew gets short shrift, too, especially the inimitable Robert Wagner.
Austin Powers in Goldmember is nobody’s good idea of a great movie, but it is a very funny and very human film, and is enjoyable for what it is. It should be very popular, and deservedly so, for once. And as long as the Austin Powers franchise stays popular — that is to say, as long as it makes money — expect to see Myers prancing across the screen in his cool blue velvet suit with the puffy white ascot for a good long time.