Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor: Stick Figure Finds His Voice - Page 2

In silhouette Pekar is a schlub, a comic sadsack. But the movie doesn't make him loveably harmless, the way Woody Allen presents himself in Take the Money and Run (1969) and Play It Again, Sam (1972). Pekar is too prickly for that, and though he's Jewish he doesn't have the runt's paranoia about goyim and bigger, more successful men. Nor does the movie make him pitiably loveable, like Ernest Borgnine in Paddy Chayefsky's Marty (1955), or Pruitt Taylor Vince in James Mangold's Heavy (1995), a more sophisticated version of the same approach. The point is that the movie isn't emotional, thank God for once. Berman and Pulcini aren't trying to get you to feel a particular way about their protagonist but to get you to see his story they way he sees it.

The squeaky response to his wife's departure, the stick figures, and the sequence in which Pekar and his wife heatedly argue about whether Revenge of the Nerds (1984) is just another Hollywoodization of marginal experience or whether it will be the equivalent for nerds of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, might suggest that American Splendor is a work of irony, but it isn't, really. Pekar's aesthetic doesn't have the necessary detachment. Some of the characters, especially Toby Radloff (Judah Friedlander), the nerdy co-worker the Pekars see Revenge with, are as loopy as in a Christopher Guest comedy, but they're presented straight-on, without implied held-in laughter (or the alienated iciness of hipper forms of irony). One of the best qualities of American Splendor is that it doesn't assume that "we" are of a different species from the dysfunctional people on screen. They're not so passively "seen" as that.

The movie's Pekar has a discussion about Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and like Dreiser he becomes committed to representing exactly what his life is like, which makes him straightforwardly heroic in a way true to his unvarnished idea of representation and impossible for an ironic protagonist. Pekar has cited Henry Miller as an inspiration but though he's a truth-teller, he isn't a flagrant wallower like Miller, or a Whitmanesque visionary. He doesn't seek an elevation above the mundane. It thus makes sense that Pekar keeps a weblog. His webpage features a cartoon of him with a dialogue bubble reading, "Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff!"

The movie begins, in fact, with young Harvey trick-or-treating as himself alongside little boys dressed as comic book superheroes. When a woman is confused by what he's supposed to "be," Harvey gives up in disgust and kicks his way down the street alone. This opening doesn't have the practiced-comic punch of the young Alvy Singer's Coney Island childhood scenes in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), but it has a much bigger payoff in the conception of the movie. The point of Pekar's comic books, and of Berman and Pulcini's movie, is that there should be a niche for artists simply to tell you what life is really like, without superhuman heroes, inflated rhetoric, florid symbolism, and pumped-up battles over polarized values.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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