The Lowbrow Prince of Greaser's Palace: In Memoriam Robert Downey Sr
I was sad to hear about the death of Robert Downey Senior (a prince!). I’ve typically found his filmmaking to be a source of fascination and frustration, that mix of satire with slapstick with violence with discomfort can be… opaque to say the least. Sometimes his films feel akin to a bad drug trip you wish would end already, circling endlessly around characters who seem to lack control over both their bodies and their raging egos. And the repetition – so much repetitious dialogue. Did I mention the repetition? But his almost obsessive compulsive desire to showcase the worst of humanity was also a large part of his charm. Downey leaned into the chaos of life, trying less to harness it than he did his best to pile more insanity on top of it. He was a master at whipping up a cacophony of irreverent nihilism that just somehow light up both the pain and pleasure centers in our animal brains.
It can be hard to get a recommendation for the man’s films without some mention of an asterisk – even his most accessible films typically come with the (loving) caveat of “if you’re into that sorta stuff.” I had been hesitating on watching Greaser’s Palace (1972) for years – saving it for some point when I felt bold enough to try my luck at what I knew would be either a delightful discovery or an hour-and-a-half booby trap. Upon hearing of Downey’s passing, that time was now overdue. On paper, Greaser’s Palace sounds exactly like my kind of film: the mysterious zoot-suited Jessy (Allan Arbus) whose life parallels that of Jesus Christ, except he’s been parachuted onto Earth, specifically, to travel to Jerusalem and become an actor/singer. It is written that the Agent Morris awaits him! But it’s not really that, that’s just the plot.
Better described as an acid western, Greaser’s Palace bounces around a motley cast of characters; from the titular Seaweedhead Greaser (Albert Henderson) endlessly auditioning various talent to perform in his club and then inevitably murdering them after, to a sheet wearing Holy Ghost or a mysterious broken-backed Indian chief (Pablo Ferro) in need of a mystical chiropractor, the extremely popular exotic dancer Cholera (Luana Anders) and a wandering Woman (Elise Downey) slowly bleeding out in the desert. All the while, Jessy performs miracles throughout the land, healing the dead and injured by laying on white-gloved hands and saying “if ya’ feel, ya’ heal.” While the film is obviously riffing on Christianity, it largely skates around the point without any real religious commentary. Unless you want to count a comparison of the spiritually orgasmic experience of having been touched by the Lord to that of finally taking a giant shit after days of constipation. Because listen, is this your card? Is this it? That one? This one? Is this your card? This one? That it? Is this it? Is that it?
…Is this your card?
That I inevitably find Downey’s films agitating is part of why I keep coming back to them. Beyond his beloved annoyances, I find his shrewd sensibilities, sharp wit and DIY filmmaking prowess to be a shocking match to what I’d call my perfect cinematic experience: mainly vibrant visual intrigue alongside intellectual riddles, comedically enjoyable on both a highbrow and lowbrow level. Downey in particular loved to highlight the lowbrow, honing into a hyper awareness for some of humanities more degrading or unconscious delights. He also loved undermining order and meaning with simply the dumbest of the dumb joke – as grating as it is full-circle laugh-out-loud funny. But even at his most irritating, Downey’s genius lied in always bringing something truthful to the forefront; whether that was exploring universal dread, inappropriate reactions, human ticks, paranoid fear, distilled discomfort or an emphasis on the sort of everyday stupidity we’re forced to tolerate.
Take for example, the deeply cynical joke of Greaser’s son Lamey, or “Homo” as he’s cruelly teased by the men in town. After getting shot in the chest by his own father, Lamey finds himself in a perfect rainbow and baby-filled Nirvana, only to be brought back to life by a chance encounter of his corpse with Jessy. He then returns home seeking revenge, where he is killed again and again – stabbed, shot, death by mariachi band, thrown down a well – and brought back to life each time by Jessy over and over. In another filmmaker’s hands this might be a somber commentary on the brutality of life, the disappointment of realizing our parents’ shortcomings, or a statement on the abusive cycles we subconsciously return to as fueled by our trauma. In Downey’s hands it is all of that, but mainly it’s just a joke about a guy named “Lamey Homo” who can’t seem to read the room. Stay dead, Lamey.
Which is pretty brutally funny. Crass, sure – unnecessarily so. But the most satisfying laugh lies in the subversion of expectations in an overthinking audience expecting depth and the inevitable disappointment after attempting good faith engagement with characters as characters instead of just dumb cheap jokes with legs. Similarly horrifying-amusing is the character of the Woman. In one memorable scene we observe her quiet contemplation, staring out over the horizon after having buried her husband and young son, which is then broken by the sound of a gunshot ripping through her bodice. She tumbles and writhes in pain from what looks to be multiple fatal hits. Then she spends roughly an hour crawling on her hands and knees, covered in sand and sweat, continually moving even as she’s perpetually shot at by some unseen villain. Ironically, this otherwise disturbing scene persists for so long it’s hard not crack up in a mix of our own exhaustion at the absurdity. Especially after we watch her laboriously pull an arrow from her thigh only to be re-shot with another arrow in the same exact spot. Life, man.
Downey excelled at this bizarre mix of lowbrow and highbrow delights because he trusted his impulses. By embracing his gut instincts, Downey in turn extends that trust to his audience as an intellectual equal. A simple act that automatically conjures secondhand embarrassment in the more insecure viewer. It can also be a bit of a dangerous game – it’s nothing new for the public to willfully misinterpret a point in order to permit themselves cruel whims. But for Downey, the only way he knew to communicate with his audience was to level with them. He’d undercut your expectations while openly ribbing your reactions, delighting in the intrigue of blatant overindulgence while acknowledging it with disgust and then forcing you to wallow in it alongside. None of us are above the gutter, we created the gutter. You can spend all day debating the intellectual merits of the sort of cheap laugh derived by the flatulent sound of a balloon being deflated, but it doesn’t make it any less funny. Downey’s ability to both trust and betray his audience can be a thrilling or even downright jarring thing to experience, even some fifty-some odd years after the fact. Or to put in bluntly: in this age of handholding, deliberately logic-bound, mass-appeal-by-committee filmmaking, Downey was fuckin’ punk rock.
“One of these days,” miserly film critic Bosley Crowther stated in his review of Chafed Elbows, “Robert Downey… is going to clean himself up a good bit, wash the dirty words out of his mouth and do something worth mature attention in the way of kooky, satiric comedy. He has the audacity for it. He also has the wit.” Of course he had the audacity and wit, the man was clearly sharp as hell. But he never did bother to dull his edges, and his legacy is all the more glorious for it. To look through Downey’s body of work – from the brilliant satire on race and capitalism that is Putney Swope to the inexplicable Pound, which anthropomorphizes dogs as angry, neurotic, horny humans pacing around a cage – it’s clear that it takes a high level of self awareness to be this sardonic, this casually and shockingly crude. Downey ‘knew better,’ but he also knew how cruel, unpredictable and stupid this world can be. And he knew how funny that was as it was inevitable. And he knew it will keep repeating even after it doesn’t feel funny anymore.
Which is also funny.
Is this your card?
Is this it?
Is that?
Is it this?
Is this it?
Is it that?
This?
That your card?
Is this your card?
