WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT
With Bob Hoskins, Joanna Cassidy, Christopher Lloyd, Stubby Kaye, Alan Tilvern, and the voices of Charles Fleischer and Kathleen Turner.
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It’s an irritating but essential facet of the most exciting and original movies that they’re the hardest to describe with any precision, and the preceding paragraphs, at best, sketch the point of departure for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the explicit meaning of its title–which uses the film noir meaning of “framed” to ask, Who set Roger up? A less obvious reading of “framed,” a self-referential and cartoon meaning, leads to the question of where Roger and his movie came from–another mystery, and one that’s much harder to solve.
Indeed, one of the central metaphysical conceits of this movie, underlying many of its most interesting effects, is that the separate worlds of Walt Disney, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and others are strangely compatible; and thanks to real-life, behind-the-scenes agreements, Donald and Daffy, Bugs and Mickey, Porky and Tinker Bell can all rub shoulders for the first time.
The elaborate and exquisitely detailed interactions between Toons and real people, Toons and real objects, real people and Toon objects can’t all be subsumed under a fully coherent metaphysics, but they create some exhilarating moments: Eddie and Roger, in a talking Toon taxi named Benny (whose voice, like Roger’s, belongs to stand-up comedian Charles Fleischer), are chased by Judge Doom and his weasels in a real black van; Eddie arms himself for Toontown with a Toon gun given to him by Yosemite Sam, and loads it with talking bullets that sound like Andy Devine and Chill Wills; Benny the Cab climbs into a real car next to Roger and takes over the driving. The world thus assembled (or disassembled) may be an unsteady one, but it feeds on the power of both genres, and the characters from each take on certain capacities they never had before.
The mix of clashing genres that sparked the French New Wave almost 30 years ago, yielding such unstable yet volatile cocktails as Shoot the Piano Player (an untidy blend of thriller, slapstick comedy, and tragic love story) and A Woman Is a Woman (a “neorealist musical”), is behind some of the peculiar intensity offered here, and whether the jarring mismatches can be enjoyed by the Star Wars audience remains to be seen. What this movie shares with the other Spielberg/Lucas blockbusters of the Reagan era, for better and for worse, is an inability to view history as anything other than a reflection of film history (rather than the other way around)–which is as succinct an expression of the Reagan legacy as I can think of.
