Losers

Robert Ginty was born, and then died. As Eddie Izzard would say, that’s the shortest possible version of that story. But unlike the man Izzard was talking about – Jesus, a carpenter – there actually isn’t much that happened between the two bookends of Robert Ginty’s life to challenge either one for preëminence. He was in The Exterminator, which people enjoy watching ironically, and Warrior of the Lost World, which was featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and White Fire, which was mocked on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst, and – well, you get the idea. Robert Ginty was not an accomplished actor, and his filmography was more a sad epitaph in search of a tombstone than a testament to the eternalizing light of moving pictures.

That Ginty whiffed on fame is not itself notable, or even particularly interesting – almost everyone fails to conquer Hollywood. Its aspirational echelon is kept at the minimum viable population with a fervency approaching numerology, either as testimony to whatever pre-Christian ritual the caste was first given life by, or as the false-scarcity brainchild of the only cabal in town more exclusive than the Beautiful People Club, or just from good ol’ fashioned market pressures. The rest of us are here for flavor, mostly; we’re preserved in our failures and kept, if not viable, then at least fed, and invited to the peripheries of the show for as long as we’re willing to gild its borders with affectionate noise. This is not because we’ve earned dignity in defeat, or because there’s some ameliorating state in the equilibrium that finally activates an empathy reflex once the foot on our throats has left us more purple than properly aerated; no, it’s because the clammy sugar-daddies who long ago ascended to the captain’s chair of the culture at large by virtue of their own violent incuriousness needed and need a warning worse than corpses to harrow the next generation into making the same lucrative and hilarious mistakes that the Ginties of the world make by trying to snuff it in Hollywood, and that you and I make by getting out of bed in the morning.

If this all seems kind of shitty to you, then, congratulations, you’ve solved the economy. And you did it by noticing a fact so monstrously at ease with its own presence at the heart of all markets that it has never bothered to hide itself, and through this steadfastness of gaze has paradoxically achieved greater levels of invisibility than shame or smallness could ever grant it: markets are not empirical. They’re not even inevitable, at least mathematically. No, the economy that we all live in – all of us, even the actors, who simply live in it harder, and clumsier –  is like everything else a product of psychology and violence, and like everything else that is recent gussied up with numbers to make the id feel less obvious. We’ve never stopped being awful, never stopped feeling the rightness of alighting the pent-up frustrations of society onto its most downstream and vulnerable members. The frankness of their condition offends us, so we conclude that we must make their condition worse. Markets are just this impulse disowned, a process that smells a little better but doesn’t amount to any kind of meaningful change from the days of warrior-Popes and Inquisitions, either in substance or outcome or intent or really even methodology – more a change of shirts, hats, branding, and occasionally words. Convincing ourselves that we’ve finally conquered the vile prerogatives of the reptilian brain even as we’ve divvied up those same vile prerogatives and distributed them, imperceptible and unreturnable, into all of our shiny alabaster industries constitutes one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history, and is also probably why we’re doomed.

This is a whole lot of business to place onto the gently feathered head of Robert Ginty, a man who was out-acted in one movie by a chainsaw, in another by an industrial meat-grinder, in a third by his own moustache, and on more than one occasion by Fred Williamson, who himself was out-acted by the chainsaw. But it’s those same surreal Ginty ultra-failures, accrued with an almost literary determinism, that left flowering in their dumb wake a commentary on the human condition more acutely realized than any movie he ever starred in. Ginty felt the pressures of the economy more than any of us, understood them less, and left us something good by accident: a lesson borne almost entirely from how punchably mediocre he was.

—

Robert Ginty got his start in television on a show called Baa Baa Black Sheep, which you’ve never heard of, and that’s fine. It wasn’t a large role, and it didn’t last long, but once you get the scent of Hollywood’s perfume on your collar it’s like sneaking into the popular kid’s party and scoring Seven Minutes in Heaven with the head cheerleader: the Have’s may inevitably wise up to your indecent presence in their midst and throw your ass out the front door, Fresh Prince-style, but to the Have-Not’s you might as well have a birthmark on your cheek shaped like the Virgin Mary, for now and into the foreseeable future you have Experience, and Experience can be traded on. And trade Ginty did, landing a new role on the show Paper Chase, which you also have never heard of, but maybe your parents have.

This process of jumping ship as soon as another opportunity – not even necessarily a better one, just another one – presents itself is a practical necessity in an industry in which even the most popular shows are always just one mild shift in the zeitgeist away from getting shit-canned. But it’s also, through the singular employment of joyless self-interest as measuring stick, launching pad, landing pad, moral compass, personal trainer, and bespoke Objectivist pseudo-religion a ritual through which sentiment is flensed from the mind and body, leaving in its wake a machine calibrated exclusively for striving, an impulse forever activated and firing at a nearly belligerent maximum capacity, pushing for more even when there’s nowhere else to go, when any extra movement amounts to nothing more than noise.

But even shooting up his psyche with mental Botox didn’t pull Ginty from the shitter right away. He was still making the rounds on Hollywood’s untrendy fringe, maybe faster than he would have been without slowly unlocking his inner Patrick Bateman, but still grinding out tickets at the booze-and-vomit-soaked Skee-Ball table of embarrassing jobs, trying to rack up enough of that vile and extremely impractical currency to purchase an entry pass into both the commercial mainstream and sweet, sweet financial stability. There was a lesson, here: as anyone old enough to remember arcades can attest, you always assume that the good prizes will be much cheaper than they actually are, and in your youthful exuberance at being able to purchase something through the economy of games you don’t make the connection that the good prizes are only there to keep you toiling away at the machines, which are bright, and charming.

But Ginty was neither bright nor charming, and his introduction to the exuberant cruelties of a market not even bothering to withhold its inherent scamminess was still too esoteric for him. He may have mistaken its bluntness for welcome, not realizing what he was really encountering was an industry so sure you’ll be driven by the fear of missing out that you’ll hush the more analytical parts of your brain and instead crank the pull-start on the ones that view the world exclusively in terms of scarcity. And that same lawnmower brain doesn’t want to walk away with nothing – you spent hours at that fucking Skee-Ball machine, and it smelled like piss – so you settle for the only thing you can afford: a little rubber duck, down as far away from the top shelf as is practical to place it, in a bin labeled “Consolation.” And of course the rubber duck is broken, doesn’t even quack when you squeeze it, just kind of unlooses this miserable, please kill me gasp-of-a-wheeze, making it sound like the duck had loftier career aspirations once, too, and turned to chain-smoking when they never materialized. And just like you settling for that depressing rubber duck Ginty, after slapping his dozen or so tickets on the counter, and being told that “Robert Redford’s Career, and Also His Bone Structure” costs an amount of funbucks whose zeroes probably constitute a war crime, settled for his version of the squeezy duck that doesn’t even quack: a starring role in The Exterminator.

Even more important than the content or legacy of Robert Ginty’s first lead role (as regards the first: it was one of a myriad of Death Wish knockoff films from the late 70’s and early 80’s designed to rip off both Death Wish and the thing that the Death Wish franchise would become known for, which was the thrill of shooting America’s growing diversity in the back of the head, and being firmly in the right about it. As regards the second: nothing) was how little it did for his career. The film actually didn’t bomb, and unlike the rest of Ginty’s filmography can be watched without having to ignore a space janitor and two robots talking over it, but it still wasn’t made of any of the necessary mettle or acumen to aid a star in being born – this was the type of movie meant for the back nine, that point in a fading actor’s career when just the rhythms of being on-set are enough to satisfy habits grown used to during more propitious years. That Ginty’s first starring role would be in the kind of movie meant to mark the end of something more than any kind of respectable beginning would be more than passingly symbolic.

It would also be a visible turning point, because there was a change taking place behind that classically Ginty straining-at-the-limits-of-his-perceptive-abilities-but-still-somehow-also-kind-of-flabby visage. Remember how we talked about the importance of joyless self-interest in advancing one’s career? Well, maybe it was the fact that he was suddenly staring down life as a laughingstock b-movie actor, or maybe it was just the natural procession of a pathology already present in the mind, but around this time Ginty’s approach to making it began to metastasize beyond the mechanical and into something terrifyingly empty, and craven, even by Hollywood standards. His interactions with interviewers became less fundamentally human around this time, instead settling into this weird recital of words and phrases and observations and experiences clearly not his own, like his mind had merged, The Fly-style, with a pamphlet containing anecdotes from happier and more successful people. It was like he had given up on the whole acting part of becoming an actor and simply tried to assimilate the gestures and tone of successful market members to essentially bullshit his way into their ranks. But even this was done with the usual Ginty clumsiness, as the space suddenly taken up in his mind with words on loan from his mostly-imagined cinematic friends did not cut the bold image he was clearly aiming for – it was as if the process of integrating the market’s incomprehensibly large superficiality into his Ginty-brain had torched all the requisite wirings, reduced his grey matter to mostly arbitrary firings of comforting stories and images.

The evidence isn’t hard to find, even across the dearth of profiles that survive. In an interview recorded during the making of The Exterminator 2 Ginty claims about the first movie, while leaning back thoughtfully, “I read the material and I saw what I could do with the character,” before roping Straw Dogs and Deliverance into the conversation, trying to place his film on the same level as those actual, real movies. This is a bizarre angle to take with regards to a laughably incompetent rip-off of another film, and about a performance that consists mostly of staring blankly and waiting for each scene to end. “I had an uncle who was a Congressman” he informs another interviewer, pointlessly, a few years later, before comparing himself to Sidney Lumet. Even when trying to be self-effacing in that very same “my uncle was in Congress, and could beat up your uncle” interview Ginty can’t help but end with a bristling disregard for the facts of his life in the same way that a comedian feels compelled to always close with a joke: “If [the lead role in The Graduate] had been offered to me, I might have accepted it,” he says, careful to throw in a spiteful might to make it clear that even though nobody was going to offer The Graduate to the Paper Chase guy, well, maybe the Paper Chase guy didn’t want it, anyway. These flights of weaponized fancy would never subside in subsequent interviews, and a quick glance at his filmography would show that they didn’t work, either.

You can’t really blame Ginty for trying to sneak in through the chimney when the front door refused to budge. People do weird shit to make a name for themselves in Hollywood! But watching the progression of those mid-80’s interviews is like watching a person being assimilated by a television set that has been left on for a decade straight. It seems like he’s barely there at times, talking more to himself than the interviewer, like his target audience by this point in his career had shrunk down to Robert Ginty’s Freefalling Sense of Self-Worth. The paralyzing fear of not being accepted into the Hollywood economy caused Ginty not to abandon the chase for that economy, not to accept just how little use it had for him, and maybe that he had for it, but to abandon himself in favor of someone who, whoever laughably manufactured, possibly could make it in the Big Show. Belonging was all that mattered, with the actual trade of acting revealed to be what it always had been: a vehicle whose only purpose was to bring him closer to the heart of mainstream acceptance of any kind, because proximity to that massive body was the only metric by which he was able to measure himself, even if “himself” had to be someone else.

There’s a simple reason why Ginty’s attempt to use violent somnambulance as a floatation device for his career didn’t work, beyond him simply not being a tremendously talented man: he made the mistake of approaching the cogs of business with his vulnerability in-hand. Any vulnerable movement against a market, even if that movement is a desire to embrace that market, is a neon-drenched bullseye indicating opportunity for labor extraction. You’ve revealed a need to an entity that itself has no needs, or requisite timeline upon which to function, so all it has to do is dangle the balm to that need in front of you – or just let you imagine that you can see it in its large and impersonal body – and wait for weak knees and sweating hands to take over. You have a soul, and the market doesn’t, and trying to swap, share, or mix your respective characteristics with that big pile of nothing and motion only exposes the meatiest part of your body to a collective that is never not hungry. Ginty could imitate the language and gestures of the market all he wanted in a desperate attempt to become closer to it, but the limited amounts of him available to channel the nearly cosmological levels of indifference seen in market prerogatives would never result in any traction, and all while the industry would simply being preparing itself for another meal.

So like a poorly-thrown punch, “the confidence of a madman, and also the confusion” was always destined to be caught and thrown back in Ginty’s face with almost comical ease. And sure enough, before long Ginty’s now-pathological insistence that he was a serious actor starring in serious movies – The Exterminator, Warrior of the Wasteland, White Fire, and worse films still to come – was, instead of granting some magical and improbable respectability to these turd salads, instead tacitly approving of their terribleness, allowing the market to appropriate Ginty’s straight-faced seriousness about the dross he was starring in order to trick you, the consuming public, into thinking they were real movies. The market responded to Ginty’s gambit by doing what the market does best –getting a victim to become complicit in their own abuse. It’s a wonderful trick, really; asking an insecure man for his autograph and then using that signature to formalize the contract sending him to the bottom will never not work, because an insecure man will never turn down an opportunity to sign something.

—

Far below the adored landings and timeless light of Hollywood’s Olympian quarter there is a huge pile of trash. It smells exactly like you would expect a huge pile of trash to smell, except somehow cheaper, like even the most self-evident kinds of verisimilitude proved too challenging for whatever accidental architects have been trying fabricate an identity down here. Looking around you try to excuse the uncanny geometries of the, let’s go ahead and call them houses, that line the boulevards as some kind of butt-dumb obvious post-modernist commentary, like Vincent Gallo at it again, but there are people crawling out of them and looking only about a fifth of the way out of the bag they were halfway in last night so, no, those are living quarters. It occurs to you that you might have died, and this is some kind of toilet-based purgatory, because you can’t remember arriving here or even how you would get here, or even what sequence of choices in the waking world could have possibly terminated in your coming here by natural methods. It is harrowing, and uncanny, this situation of yours. Anyway, everybody is at the circus, the largest and least ashamed-looking structure around, so that seems a good place to start your inquiry, vis-à-vis what in the fucking fuck.

And what a slate of games on display under the ol’ big tent! Comparing tumor sizes on cancer patients, betting which rodeo midget the bull will throw the farthest –  treating the pathologically unsuccessful, in many cases the legitimately unwell, with guiltless glee sure is a real gas! It’s a form of violence only the absolving innocence of entertainment can provide. The audience is a hoot, too: some are tourists, laughing with hatreds uglier than any of the games on display; some watch the entertainers with an almost familial concern, like they’re happy these old friends of theirs landed somewhere, but are still worried about them; some look like they really would rather be taking in the sights up in the Olympian quarter, but got lost; a few are honest egalitarians in their thinking and don’t find any of this perversity better or worse than the entertainment anywhere else, but they’d feel better if they knew the cancer patients and midgets had good healthcare, and got weekends off.

You want to ask members of this first group how they got in, and how they’re going to leave, but you get the impression that such an admission of helplessness would be the funniest thing they’ve seen so far, and they will thank you for the laugh by directing their noxious smiles at you, and with the deliberate and dismissive deafness of someone not even willing to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong mark you as a member of this mutant community, and in doing so trap you down here forever. Maybe you’ll just keep to yourself, stay comfortably small.

Robert Ginty’s descent to b-movies might have been unique in its dead-eyed blandness, but he wasn’t alone down there. Cameron Mitchell, Rudy Ray Moore, Pam Grier, whatever malfunctioning computer algorithm wrote Zaat, Robert Z’Dar, Don Dohler, and Robert Mitchum were his new neighbors. Some of these people were legitimate stars once – Cameron Mitchell was the bad guy in a Sidney Poitier Western, and Robert Mitchum was once Robert fucking Mitchum – and others (Moore and Grier) probably should have been stars, but were doomed to obscurity by being too effortlessly themselves in a time when audiences were both significantly more racist and expectant of a certain level of artifice in their art and entertainment. But regardless of what their deformity was in audiences’ eyes these actors were plucked all the same off the assembly line of good taste and tossed by quality control in the direction of the nearest shitter, degradation being a funnier response to disappointment than rehabilitation.

But sometimes a funny thing happens on the way to the toilet. These dismissed people, not necessarily out of a romantic attachment to acting or directing so much as the inertia of their own incredible strangeness simply kept on working, chugging along as if a market still existed for their skill-set and doing so with such resoluteness that the act seemed to retroactively create such a market. If there was ever an ideal testament to raw stupidity and endearing sincerity as our best weapons against the market it almost certainly has to be actors recently stripped of an audience simply continuing to behave as if they have one, with no regard to market practicality or even basic reality, and somehow landing, however drunkenly, on their feet. I mean, the dumb anti-plan really did kind of work – maybe it was game respecting game, or a quit pivot by market forces to an even quicker buck during the rise of home video, but a smaller, secondary market absolutely sprung up around these deeply discounted and deeply outcasted actors, and it was one they could eat out on, at least for a little while: the small-time VHS market, browsed almost exclusively by the bored, lost, morbidly curious, and deeply confused.

(But don’t romanticize too much: this new market was no less exploitative than its larger antecedent; it’s just that its arms were weaker, and its incisors didn’t tear as well, so the devouring was more a silly nibbling. But home is home, even when the currency is embarrassment.)

Ginty never accepted being part of this group, even though he fit the diaspora bill better than nearly all of his fellow forgottens. He instead trudged on alone, delusions to maintain, essentially exiled from two communities now, the second one by dint of his obsequious dedication to the first. And in his blindness he fell some more: once American studios had squeezed as much shameless heat from The Exterminator as one could plausibly expect from a film that forgets to explain why its lead just kind of has a flamethrower in one scene, or why it disappears without further comment shortly thereafter, he was pretty much done stateside. His landing was only vaguely softened by the fact that one country’s chinless weirdo at the end of his window of ironic usefulness is another country’s chinless weirdo at the beginning of another one, and as long as you’re willing to do the same embarrassing schtick, just smaller and louder, well, you’ll eat for a few more years. It was this sad truth that would culminate in the Italian production Warrior of the Lost World (Mystery Science Theatre 3000, S5E1) an accidentally surrealist Mad Max knockoff that would be the closest Ginty would ever come to reliving The Exterminator levels of unexpected success, and it would not come close.

Years later, in an interview with Joan Quinn, whom you’ve also never heard of before, which is fine, Ginty would claim that the globetrotting phase of his now-kaput career was an homage to the great American director John Huston, whose passion for travel informed many of his legendary films. So Ginty’s sad act of simply pretending his career was a success, and characterized by similarities to Hollywood icons, had not subsided – if anything the delusion seemed to exert even more power over his imagination now that the lie no longer had a living and dynamic filmography to contend with, but instead could make malleable a sad body which now had a definitive beginning and end. There is, as usual, not a hint of irony in these declarations of his, just a sad and wanting man who felt the economy squeezing as much juice out of him as possible and instead of taking offense to the violence responded by gently pushed the economy’s hands aside and reassuring it that he could strangle himself better. This was an end, really; all that was left to do to complete his miserable arc was to undertake the most 90’s thing possible – become a satire of himself. But the market would beat him to that, too.

—

Nobody watching the weird, sad, and poorly-conducted take on Mardi Gras that characterized the direct-to-VHS era actually thought it was going to last, if for no other reason than whatever dark energy was keeping Cameron Mitchell biologically alive had to give out eventually. And somewhere in some forgotten filing cabinet in some abandoned office on some studio lot there is almost certainly a moldy document laying out strategies by which to reclaim the cultural dross the studio system had saddled a generation of forgotten actors with before realizing how lucrative dross could be. But the return to the Hollywood hinterlands to reclaim the precipitates of the industry’s most careless industrial processes was spearheaded not by middle-aged men suits but a new generation of low-brow entertainers who through the benefit of emotional remove could create and comment on garbage faster than the pseudo-genre’s actual progenitors could – and who, worst of all, weren’t really low-brow at all.

The Ben Stiller Show, Mystery Science Theatre 3000, Mr. Show, The Dana Carvey Show, The Simpsons – the 1990’s introduced a level of irony into popular entertainment that made prior strands of the silly stuff seem fucking funerial by comparison. The winking commentaries of Hal Ashby and Robert Altman may have been some high-heat irreverence by the mustachioed standards of the 70’s but the next generation of satirists dropped the concern for characters and traditional storytelling almost entirely and instead focused their sights and their fart jokes onto works so gleefully unsophisticated and indifferent to audience expectation even they seemed unsure how serious they were at any given moment. And that was just on the television side of things – even the august medium of film started to admire the new style of bespoke cultural garbage: Clerks and Slackers delight in the look, with even the portentous Pulp Fiction probably having more in common with the newfound fuck it ethos than the earlier self-serious epics that it might more superficially seem to resemble.

Those 90’s television shows in particular had seemingly no interest in creating new cultural moments so much as vacuuming up existing ones with gleeful anarchy, flipping the switch on the wet-dry vac, and then blowing the discombobulated conflagration back into society’s face – the final product much less important than the irreverence with which the process was undergone. This was a riot to a whole generation of television watchers, but was also a shot across the bow to the prior generation of classical-failed actors, who had painstakingly carved out similar, just significantly less lucrative, existences over the course of the 80’s. The older generation achieved what they achieved by gradually allowing the overwhelming strangeness that characterized the back end of their careers to settle into an uneasy equilibrium with a generation of direct-to-VHS hack directors who needed cheap labor – but now this dynamic was being outpaced by the unmatched efficiency of the young, their corporate backers, and, most importantly of all, a freeing detachment from the pain and embarrassment by which the earlier entries achieved the label of “garbage, but funny.” Trash, like everything else, had gone corporate, and also like everything else it had done so by capitalizing on the tailwinds the market always grants to those who don’t really have any affection for what they’re making.

The effects were felt across the landscape of former freakshow stars. Cameron Mitchell, when he appeared in the flesh at all, was usually sitting, wrapped like a grandma going to a doctor’s appointment, and decked out in sunglasses so audiences wouldn’t be able to tell if he had fallen asleep during the take. Robert Z’Dar and Rudy Ray Moore continued working, but disappeared almost entirely from the public consciousness. Pam Grier kept Pam-Griering her way through each new affront to her status as the Godmother of Ass-Kicking and/or Stomping, but wasn’t the draw she had been years earlier. Only Bruce Campbell, eternally prepared for all things by virtue of his affection for nothing, seemed limber enough to make the leap from sheepishly-cheap movies to downright farce – he landed on a series of successful camp-action shows, always careful to turn his Bruce Campbell meter to ever-increasingly levels of self-satire in order to keep up with market inflation, and kept his career chugging along.

But on balance the parade was over, and ironic Mardi Gras had been replaced with the inevitable corporate-sponsored knockoff event, one that was superficially more enjoyable in every possible way, because it was designed to be, but to those morbid enough to investigate the foundation of the new and significantly shinier party was always revealed to be built on the careers of those unfortunate enough to be sincerely and compellingly ugly, rather than agreeably and marketably so.

Ginty was around for all of this, of course, to the extent that he was ever really present for anything other than his fantasized moment of acceptance and validation. He was still polishing that marble idea of how his career was supposed to have gone, which by now he had somehow probably waxed to chrome, when the 90’s brigade showed up and started fucking around with everything. If you’re waiting for a moment of grace, don’t: the Gint-meister responded to this crisis of content with the same inane gestures he responded to everything with, a process which at this point probably resembled day-drinking more than anything else.

Directing was his game now, presumably because the impulse to be taken seriously must constantly alight on newer and even more tempting escapes from reality, while considerations like joy and passion are slowly lost into the obscuring fog of your increasingly disowned self. The business this time was a television pilot, a little courtroom melodrama not trying to show out boldly against the competition so much as not fuck anything up, although to hear Ginty describe it you would think he was behind the camera for Thirteen Angry Men, like the Henry Fonda movie but with an extra juror because thirteen is a larger and therefore more impressive number than twelve. But for once Ginty’s blandly insatiable desire for the accoutrements of respectability had, if only by accident, brought him into some interesting company. He was directing in this pilot both Robert Mitchum and taking-a-shot-at-acting-which-was-probably-not-a-great-idea Bo Derek.

This could have been perfect. A b-movie 80’s guy just barely young enough to convince himself that mainstream success was still possible directing both a legend reduced to wandering the halls of his former greatness and a model so laughably bad at acting that every time the camera cuts to her she looks like she’s about to hurt herself through the sheer effort of making a face that doesn’t appear to coincide with any emotion felt by either the genus or the species she belongs to. The cathartic blitheness, the solidarity, the 80’s guy finally understanding that he belongs to a community of losers and that’s okay – all the kind of stuff you’d find in the best of Alexander and Karaszewski, a loudly quietist tribute to people whose best chance of success is not – could never be – the kind that we’re taught from the youngest possible age to chase without hesitation or reflection.

But of course it didn’t happen.

Ginty, as always, was either too dense or too self-absorbed to see any depth or potential in his matching with Mitchum and Derek, and instead viewed the pilot as another audition for the big-times that had never bothered to forget his name because it had never bothered to learn it in the first place. In that same interview with Joan Quinn Ginty wouldn’t acknowledge the striking opportunity that three losers corralled together by fate had to achieve some kind of special empathy together – he instead pretended he was on the Tonight Show, and provided anecdotes in which he somehow, some way, managed to both compare himself to John Huston and claim that Robert Mitchum told him that he, Ginty, was a lot like the legendary Hollywood director, except better. Even with the opportunity for solidarity staring him right in the face Ginty’s only use for Robert Mitchum was in the telling an anecdote – who even fucking knows if it’s true – about how great of a director Robert Ginty was.

This dumb interview may have been the final instance of anyone paying any attention to Robert Ginty in any medium other than his obituary. Because even if he kept working after this – and he did, kind of – what else was there to comment on? He had succeeded at this point in the fresher and more achievable goal he had pivoted to mid-career when he realized that nothing but fading Exterminator knockoffs were his future: to hermetically seal himself from the actual, real world and instead alight upon a much more enjoyable Ginty-verse of unbridled and improbable success. His pursuit of market respectability – in all of its almost farcically superficial trappings – had led him so far afield into both the economy of movies and his own mind that there really wasn’t any need for the film part of film anymore. The rolodex of calming stories he had been accumulating for so long was now robust enough that he was assured to have forgotten the first entry by the time he loving re-read the last, and that was as close to a Hollywood ending as he was ever going to get.

—

Cameron Mitchell had an angry pride that manifested itself as so much yelling, which at least made his somehow both rapid and interminable decline reverberate with an energy that could almost be mistaken for passion, if not the occasional stab at acting; Robert Mitchum could still trade on the residual heat of his voice’s former grandeur, imbuing even the clunkiest late-career dialogue with the sobering sight of a man at odds with the memory of himself; Rudy Ray Moore had a blast, until the end, and Z’Dar did, too. Grier was revitalized by a slightly off-kilter admirer and cinephile who somehow found himself with enough clout to make an A-list vehicle just for her; Campbell continued being Campbell, which he will presumably be doing after we’re all dead. This is all fine, and absolving in the lowness of the stakes. But we can’t just smear some Hollywood bittersweet over an unexpected diaspora and call it a day, not unless we want to capstone these stories with the same artifice that denied so much of their truth in the service of capitalizing on their delightful strange. Ending the ugly of a b-story with the fake smile of the A-treatment is an insult to hard-won memories, so let’s go a little deeper:

Whatever cultural footprints those banished to the fringe may have left behind were eventually traced over with clown shoes by an industry and a culture eternally conflating size and indifference with progress. The greater the ease with which you can obliterate the rawness of your source material’s pain, the greater the efficiency with which you can mock their truth into acceptably impersonal comedic fodder, the more efficient your machine must be. And the rest of us have been conditioned to follow whatever our moment’s most powerful machine is, if for no other reason than we’re terrified of being thrown in front of it ourselves. In front of the machine isn’t our place, you see – that’s where the losers go.

And this isn’t to pick on entertainment as some vile outlier of an industry – striving to freeze-dry your target and offer them up for mass-consumption is how the big money is made, and that process can’t commence until all human relatability has been denied and the product can be enjoyed as nothing more than a product, vacuum-sealed and sterile and ready to be reheated for a nice, if rather tasteless, TV-dinner.

But it was Ginty who somehow managed to place an entire layer of extra failure on top of this first one with his usual Ginty virtuosity. He became convinced that his mindless impression of a real actor could trick the culture’s glint-eyed and gleeful take on entropy into delivering him to where he felt he didn’t just belong but had to be if his life were to have any relevance. But haughtiness cranked up to eleven he was still overtaken by the irony mudslide that was the 90’s alongside the other b-actors he refused to acknowledge the comradery of, and is still mocked in syndication and on the internet today just as frequently as Mitchell and Z’Dar and Moore and all the others he wanted nothing to do with – his pride and delusion and love of the market over other people only managing to make him more alone during his identical descent into cinematic oblivion. He didn’t want to booze out with his buddies on the lead float of Mardi Gras, but Dumb – he wanted to party at the big corporate counter-parade, and to this sad end accepted watching the bigger and sexier version of The Show from an alleyway, alone.

There are romantic explanations as to why someone would do this, but none of them are correct. Ginty tried to trick the ghouls that haunted his vocation with a string of laughably bad and self-serious performances for the same reason that Shaggy and Scooby did and still do nearly every week – the complete inability to think of anything else to try, a kind of mud-brained helplessness that only smacks of boldness or guile if you first project onto your subject talents that they clearly don’t possess. To argue that there was some philosophical purity, a kind of Lord Byron choosing to die on the battlefield in Italy in order to adhere to the same romantic standards he evangelized about in his poetry, would be to insist on at least the faintest bittersweetness to Ginty’s story. But this is delusion, and a weak pandering to our collective desire to be soothed by some kind of meaning in the destruction of the very same people we choose to destroy – because as much as we want to destroy people on the sadder side of the divide we also want to strike ourselves as sympathetic to their decline, the performative guilt tricking us in the same way that Ginty was never able to trick anyone except himself, allowing us to feel like we’ve balanced whatever karmic ledger governs the cannons of casual cruelty, allowing us to simultaneously disown further still our relationship to that deliberately motivation-less weapon and giddy ourselves for its next round of firings.