I disagree
completely with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it.
Voltaire
I remember the first time I
saw this quote. It was in 1995. We were on the cusp of the era of cable News,
talking heads and social media, all of which would do everything in their power
to make it very clear by both sides that the latter part of the statement was
not merely laughable but repugnant.
I also remember the context
of when I saw that statement. I was in the midst of discovering just how much
of a genius Roger Ebert was. In the absence of the internet, I was almost annually
buying his compendiums of reviews which were published nearly every year. As a
guess it was probably the 1996 compendium where Ebert, who was famous for
prefacing his review with famous quotes, opened his review of The Last
Supper, a 1995 comedy with the quote above. His opening paragraph then said
that the central characters in this film have no use for that statement.
The Last Supper to
say the least was a box office flop. It barely grossed half a million dollars
in its run worldwide. However, I happened
to see it at least half a dozen times on both pay and basic cable when I was
teenager and later in college. I imagine very few people have seen it, even
though it was one of the early films of Cameron Diaz, who was about to have a
brief run as a box office superstar and has one of the best casts of character actors
of any film of the 1990s. It certainly
will be never shown on a college campus, even though I’d argue these are
exactly the kind of people who need to see it. And I’m pretty sure that if some
people on the right saw it, then or today, they would look at was happening on
the screen and view it on the completely wrong level.
I haven’t seen the film in
more than fifteen years but I remember it vividly. How could you not? This may be one of the darkest satires that
Hollywood has ever made, which may very well be why it was buried. Written in 1995 it argues in the strongest
possible sense how utterly intolerant and tone-deaf people on the left can be
even when they claim to be open-minded and in favor of equality. It makes it
very clear just how far they would be willing to go to make sure to silence
opposing viewpoints. They make the exact
same justifications that they claim the right-wing does and don’t even blink
twice about the double standard. In a very real sense The Last Supper was
giving the world a preview of the era of the so-called progressives who claim
to be perfectly tolerant but have no room at all for anyone on the right.
The film opens on a stormy
night when five grad students in Iowa are having their regular Sunday dinner.
For the past year, they have hosted a dinner party where they invite a friend
over to have an ‘open-minded discussion about topics of interest. The five
friends are Jude (Diaz) Paulie (Annabeth Gish) Luke (Courtney B. Vance) Marc
(Jonathan Penner) and Pete (Ron Eldard)
That night while Pete is
driving to dinner, his car breaks down. A man named Zachary Cody (Bill Paxton)
picks him up and drives him there. The friends invite him to stay for dinner.
Within a few minutes, it becomes clear that Zach is not only virulent
conservative but a racist neo-Nazi. Cody eventually becomes increasingly belligerent,
the conversation gets heated, Cody pulls a knife and attacks Zach, breaking his
arm and Mark kills him.
After the shock fades and
they discuss what to do with Zach’s body, they reach the conclusion that they
have done society a service. (For those on the left who argue about how often
the right goes to the Hitler metaphor, the five of them reach this exact justification
within two minutes.). So they make two decisions: they will bury Zach in the
backyard and they will change the format of their dinner party. Each Sunday,
they will invite another ultra-conservative to dinner. They will hear that
person out. Then if they agree, they will offer him a bottle of wine that is
poisoned and bury them in the backyard.
For much of the movie we see
many of these guests all of whom push all the anti-liberal buttons: there is an
anti-abortion activist, an anti-environmentalist, a conservative reverend, a man
who is anti-feminist, a man who believes the homeless should find a job, a man
who claims that he’s not anti-Earth, but pro-Earthling. The writers manage to find a rather impressive
group of character actors to play their parts, among them Mark Harmon, Jason
Alexander and Charles Durning.
It shouldn’t come as a shock
that none of these people go home at the end of the night. What’s just as
interesting is that the more dinners they have, the less patience they seem to
have with the process. Their meals start out as elaborately fancy but then
start becoming simpler, at a certain point one of their guests is clearly
dining on take out hamburgers and doesn’t notice. They increasingly give their guests less and
less time to make their case, by the seventh dinner they barely give them five
minutes.
There are two problems as
the story progresses. The first is that the local sheriff (Nora Dunn) has been
charged with finding the missing hitchhiker and begins to suspect that the grad
students know more than they are telling. Far more troubling is that the students
increasingly begin to fracture and have far less tolerance for who they invite.
Perhaps the most troubling one comes when
they invite an adolescent conservative to their dinner and Luke is radiating
open contempt. He practically begs her to drink before the rest of his friends
pull him into the kitchen and they have a violent argument in which they nearly
come to blows.
To be clear, it’s hard to
know if they actually feel guilt for what they are doing or the sheriff’s investigation
is starting to make them wonder if they will be caught. At one point the sheriff
does become suspicious and ends up on their doorstep the night they are entertaining.
Eventually she herself ends up in the backyard.
The movie comes to a climax
in the final half-hour. Throughout the film we have heard in the background a
conservative talk radio host called Norman Arbuthnot, certainly modeled on Rush
Limbaugh. He represents everything that they as liberals loathe. One day they
encounter Arbuthnot (a wonderful Ron Pearlman) who is en route to give a
speech. Considering both that they live
in Iowa and that the move takes place in 1995, the implication is that
Arbuthnot is about to declare he is a candidate for President. The opportunity is
too good. They invite him to have dinner with them.
The students go into
elaborate preparations as they haven’t in months. They decide to make a spaghetti
with homemade sauce. For the record, the ingredients come from the garden where
they have buried the bodies; I have little doubt they are aware of the irony.
Then the conversation begins
and it takes a strange turn. Arbuthnot is not only more of an accomplished
speaker but far more tolerant then he is on his radio broadcasts. Indeed at one
point he actually says much of his broadcasts are giving the people what they
want rather than what he personally believes. His hosts are increasingly puzzled
as he has a rational and reasonable answer for everything. One of the last
questions as is a variation on their justification for what they doing – and he
gives a response that they absolutely did not expect from him.
This is usually the part
where I say that I will not give away the ending. The thing is, no matter how
many times I watched the film, I still couldn’t figure out how the movie
ended. The last scene of the film leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and
the few minutes that led up to it gave us no insight as to what the characters
would do. It depends on what you think
Arbuthnot knew and what kind of person he is. Was he the monster the students think
he is or was he far more open-minded? Did the students realize the error of
their ways or did they go through with it? I don’t think it’s the last one,
given how the final scene is, but there is also the possibility that they might
well have been willing to die for their beliefs or perhaps because of their own
guilt, which was building on them. Perhaps that is yet another reason this film
was not successful, aside from the dark satire and politics. In 1995 movies
with ambiguous endings were never regarded that highly and after everything
that happened in The Last Supper, perhaps viewers wanted to know just what
the title reference was referring to.
What I do know is that The
Last Supper was a radical independent film in an era where even independent
films were not willing to go nearly this far yet. Satire is a genre that as George Kaufman
famously said ‘closes on Saturday nights’. (Another reference I learned from
Ebert.) Nearly thirty years later, any time I find myself accidentally reading
an article written by a ‘tolerant leftist’, my mind will occasionally turn to
this film. All five characters in this film speak with the same blanket intolerance
and justification I hear mentioned far too much in these blogs. Of course, there are some key differences:
none of today’s leftists would even bother having one of the guests home for
dinner, much less giving them an evening to change their minds and even they
did, I could see quite a few of them doing the same for other people who just
slightly disagree with them. They’d never bother to have Tucker Carlson at one
of their dinners, but they’d open their doors for Bill Maher.
The Last Supper is
currently available streaming on Amazon and I urge everybody on either side of
the political aisle to take a look at it.
For the record, this film is hysterically funny, brilliant savage and actually
scary. All of the performances are generally good, and it is well written and directed.
It’s not a cinematic masterpiece, but it is a very funny film.
That’s not the only reason
I think people should see it, of course. I honestly there’s something for
everybody to enjoy, though how you view may well depend on what side of the
political spectrum you’re on. The right might very well look at this as a true
perspective of just what the left thinks of them behind closed doors and may
interpret the ending to believe that they’re not nearly as smart as they claim
to be. The left will laugh at this with a hollow sound – ‘we would never go
this far’ I can see them saying awkwardly – and hoping that their interpretation
of the ending. And those of us in the middle – like myself – will marvel at the
fact that there was a movie thirty years ago that showed for all to see just
how utterly alike the left and the right could be in their intolerance in the
other side but not themselves. Maybe you
look at the ending and hope for a happy outcome – that after the toast, they
had a nice dinner and they actually went to the campaign rally. It’s the least
likely interpretation, I grant you. But isn’t fantasy what Hollywood is about?
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