I finally saw 'Talk To Me' and it hit me in the Bryant Gumbel zone. I had forgotten that I had it.
Once upon a time when Bryant Gumbel was the only black sophisticate on television besides the dude on Mission Impossible, I used to sit and watch him while sweating through my shirts. It took a long time as a kid before I could be comfortable that the black guy was not going to screw up in front of everyone 'and send the race backwards 100 years'.
Talk To Me, is finally the most mature look back at the stylized 60s. It picks up an angle as serious as The Spook Who Sat By the Door, with the kind of sophisticated, anachronism free portrayal of the day that we deserve. Without a lot of hokey black and white montages interspersed, Talk To Me does a good, unsentimental, yet emotional job of bringing us back to the days of porkchop sideburns and the slow burning to the ground of Jim Crow America.
It's the story of two black men, one a doer and the other a talker, both from the streets of DC who find in each other an opportunity to transcend. They are a portrait of styles and ambition in conflict, one an ex-convict, a bad man from the bad side of the tracks speaking in the ribald tones of pain and abandonment, a street guru whose rhymes you can easily imagine being the doggerel fueling a thousand black ministers' oratory. The other is a slick operator with everything to prove, a daring man with a bold plan to manage the new black voice of America into a transforming force, a man with six balls in the air, including his own. They need each other, they respect each other, they triumph together but they ultimately fail each other, each by failing to do at all what the other man does so well.
I could feel the climactic scene coming a mile away, and I could feel myself starting to sweat. It was the debut of Petey Greene, the man with the mouth and the drinking problem, on the Tonight Show. He punts, of course, which is why so few of us have heard of his name. He might have been another Redd Foxx or the successor to Dick Gregory, instead he was not.
All though the film, I felt some sympathy for Green. In his own way, he foretold the decentralization of media - ordinary people talking to ordinary people rather than communications product following the dictates of the same old means of production. The fundamental truth of Barry Gordy being a pimp might be said. Holding that fact in abeyance didn't save anything but decorum, but ultimate everyone's character flaws defeat them. If we have merely moved to a level of communication that makes all defeat public, it may not be a boon until generations have lived in that fishbowl. If everybody is a punk-ass at some level, should we all always see that level? I'm not so sure. For only a short time in all of our lives are we truly actually beautiful naked. Walking around with X-Ray Spex is sick. Yet Petey was what he was, a hustler and a drunk, a raw man not built for saying more than anyone around him could say, just ballsy enough to say it. In the end he was not a vehicle for himself or anyone else - his talent could not support him. And so he drifted back to the bottom.
A lesson.
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