Flasz On Film

There was a little stalker film starring John Travolta called The Fanatic that was released in the summer of 2019. If you’d blinked that August, you’d have missed it. More interesting than The Fanatic’s theatrical lifespan, which was scarcely that of a mayfly, was its creative headliners: Travolta and director, Fred Durst. Durst, of course, is better known for his career and public profile back a couple of decades ago when he was frontmanning the band Limp Bizkit and partaking in online feuds with music biz A-listers. More recently, though, he’s seemingly mellowed and been working within other realms of the entertainment industry. He’s acted for TV, directed commercials for e-Harmony, and even written and directed a few feature films. And that eeny-weeny 2019 Travolta release, The Fanatic, was one of them.

The Fanatic was a financial bomb. Actually, by all accounts, it was a crater-making mega-failure and according to the good folks at Wikipedia, it earned a scant $3,150 in cinemas from just one day of release on 52 screens. Based on 2019 ticket prices, this means that approximately two or three people attended each screening on The Fanatic’s first day of release. These facts may not hold up to the scrutiny of a thorough data-check, so don’t hold me to it. After all, I wasn’t there. My point is, though, that no one was there for The Fanatic, and that’s undeniable. It’s one of the bombiest bombs starring a Hollywood A-lister in recent memory—and this is in the context of getting accustomed to an era of cinematic depth charges. We just witnessed a Covid movie market where David Franco’s The Rental was July 2020’s highest grossing film in North America, grossing $1.6M.

Anyway, the Travolta-Durst thriller’s availability slowly trickled out via streaming services and the Redbox rental network. Consequently, people gradually caught up with The Fanatic, and that’s when the film truly managed to get under people’s skin—like an un-extractable splinter. Audiences loathed it. Critics did, too. Durst garnered criticism for the film being brainless and stupid. Meanwhile, Travolta was mauled as well. He was not only decried for his over-the-top performance but also accused of an insensitive portrayal of an autistic man.

I have to come clean here. I actually agree with a lot of the grumblers out there who say The Fanatic has its problems. I concur with a number of the complaints cited in reviews. However, The Fanatic is not entirely meritless as seems to be suggested by the film’s prevailing word-of-mouth and its 16% positive rating over at Metacritic. Much (although not all) of the hate levelled at The Fanatic regrettably seems to be of the unfair, lazy, knee-jerk variety. For starters, Travolta and Durst are long-standing, high-profile stars who are easy to target with public blame and name-calling. So, for some, it’s just easy to gripe about celebrity projects because it’s easy to chuck mud onto faraway household names—particularly celebrities with big targets on their backs courtesy of hit-and-miss histories with PR. Over the years, headlines have linked Travolta to bad films, bad luck, and bad decisions. And Durst, for the good part of a decade, was engaged in ongoing public pissing matches with one musical artist or another. Somehow, it’s just easy to throw vitriolic adjectives at guys like this. The forum of online film criticism and, furthermore, any conversations whatsoever on Film Twitter (or is it Film X now?) are populated with loads of attention-seeking negativity. However, when it comes to The Fanatic, a giant portion of that negativity is misdirected.

Plenty of legitimate narrative holes and annoyances exist within The Fanatic. As a character, Durst wants the protagonist to be both the hero and the villain. Dramatically, this is difficult to reconcile over the course of the runtime. Similarly, the character of Hunter Dunbar (played by Devon Sawa)—the object of obsession—is painted in a peculiar light. Dually, he’s the victim, but also the villain. Buried in all of this, Durst is making a point about fandom and stardom. There are good fans and bad fans, just as there are good celebrities and bad celebrities. And both cross the line sometimes. This, too, is an interesting layer to the film, although arguably as a filmmaker, Durst doesn’t seem experienced enough yet at articulating any thesis within his script or at translating the ideas effectively to the screen. If people dismiss the film on these bases, I understand. Or if people raise other issues with Durst’s storytelling decisions or interpretation of the thriller genre, fine. Whatever. Largely, though, online grumblers’ big complaints don’t gravitate toward academic or interpretation issues. They lie with the main character, and this is where, I feel a lot of criticism is inaccurate.

Specifically, The Fanatic is a lightning rod for opinionated musings on Travolta’s portrayal of autism. Travolta plays a movie-loving, 60-year-old man named Moose who adores his horror movies and collection of autographed collectibles. He’s the titular fanatic. He becomes infatuated with action star Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa) and takes his fan-crush entirely too far. Making Moose a character on the autism spectrum is a very specific script decision. Typically, stalker characters like Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction or Office Pete Davis in Unlawful Entry come to the screen with good, old-fashioned ‘Hollywood crazy’, which, if anything, features undiagnosed traits of borderline personality disorder. However, Travolta portrays the protagonist with common autism mannerisms and social difficulties. He shows self-stimulatory behaviours, poor eye contact, and conversational fixations. Travolta is a master of magnetic, larger-than-life leading-man shenanigans. Just look at his work with John Woo in Broken Arrow and Face/Off. Here, in Durst’s film, he isn’t going for a Hollywoodized characterization of anything. He’s delivering a bang-on, convincing portrayal of the neurodevelopmental condition. And very few people who’ve seen the film appear willing to give him this credit. In fact, Travolta is arguably so good as Moose that watching his performance requires the same understanding, patience, and adjustment that is needed in real world situations around folks exhibiting the same conduct. It’s a very real thing. Real humans, some on the spectrum and some not, have live with these idiosyncratic behaviours, and others feel uncomfortable spending time with them. In The Fanatic, Travolta’s performance seems to have triggered this same uncomfortable response.

It’s sad, but it’s true, that not everyone feels natural or comfortable around people like Moose. It appears that many film goers are equally uncomfortable having neuroatypical behaviours in their films’ leading men. They don’t want to see Travolta—or any other star—stimming on his vespa or getting frustrated with bartenders for not serving milkshakes. So, if people are impatient with such behaviours, it stands to reason as well that they may criticize The Fanatic based on how they felt whilst watching the movie, as opposed to actually exploring why they may have felt prickly watching a man obsess over his movie memorabilia. A lot of the hate that The Fanatic has attracted comes from that uncomfy vibe that people get from Travolta’s character—not from his actual performance. People feel weird watching Travolta in this, so they spew their acerbic opinions into the mosh pit of negativity that is social media. And even worse, this short-sighted nastiness has formed the centrepiece of some film reviewers’ appraisals. Take a quick scrolly scroll through the list of Rotten Tomatoes’ top critics’ capsules. Among some legitimate grumbling about the film’s narrative and directorial choices is a significant share of dismissive commentary about Travolta and his performance. Inexplicably, you’ll even see the R-word bandied about as a slight of Travolta and a dismissal of the film. When the conversation shifts over to Letterboxd users, you get even more condemnation of Travolta’s performance.

And again, for me, it’s hard to see the ‘outlandishness’ or the ‘low-brow’ misfire that folks are talking about in Travolta’s work. Sure, he’s not subtle, but he’s giving his all to this performance. Travolta is earnestly mining some sincerely-researched neurodevelopmental territory. According to some reports, he took this role as a tribute to his late son, Jett, who passed away in 2009. Jett was on the autism spectrum. Travolta, I surmise, is very familiar with the condition, which is probably partly why his performance sees so detail-rich and accurately informed. Even still, though, the decision to take this role to honour his son feels like an unusual decision. Moose is, after all, a character who becomes an obsessed burglar, attacker, and kidnapper. He’s ‘the’ stalker in this stalker film. So how on earth could this serve as a tribute?

Upon closer inspection, Moose is a unique character in the context of Hollywood’s history of dramatic inclusion. Hollywood’s representation of fictional characters on the autism spectrum has traditionally been extremely limited. Autism has mostly only ever been characterized in film and on TV in one of two ways—either in feel-good, overcome-hardship melodramas or via offbeat comic relief. You pretty much only ever see onscreen ASD in the form of either Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man or Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. Once in a while, you get the likes of Forrest Gump or Atypical that strives to elicit both—the tears and the chuckles.

When you see autism in film, productions directly highlight the condition and use it for some sort of central dramatic or entertainment impact. This isn’t a complaint, but autism in film is always a ‘main point’ of a film rather than a ‘supporting detail’. However, in The Fanatic, Moose is simply a regular dude; he just happens to have this condition. He seems to have had interventions and strategies taught to him along the way. Travolta doesn’t exaggerate anything for an audience reaction. He appears to be committed to an honest portrayal. The film’s plot around Moose goes for heightened genre storytelling—but Travolta’s main character does not. Moose is neither a savant, nor a doctor of physics who delivers hilarious one-liners. He’s an older, low-income gentleman with a small group of friends, his own apartment, and a collection of B-movie artifacts to occupy his spare time. Furthermore, despite Moose’s various behavioural challenges and struggles with social nuance, he’s actually somewhat of a success in his own right. He’s living his best life. There are no signs of an assisted living program where someone must check on him. And at the same time, he’s not living in squalor either. It’s hard to say that Moose has a gainful employment (he’s a busker who dresses up as an English Bobby and poses for pictures with tourists on Hollywood Boulevard—and he’s not particularly good at it), but at the same time, he seems to have a regular income. Moose would have had extensive challenges learning how to live independently, but we see that he is doing just that and probably has been for decades. He’s on social media and has a small network of friends who seem to look out for him. He has his challenges, sure, but he is living independently in the community.

Independence and individualism are two gifts that Durst’s script grants to Moose. The Fanatic never stops to dwell on these points. They’re just there. But because they’re there, The Fanatic is doing something rather special. It’s taking an autistic character—just as he is—and dropping him (passions, quirks, fixations, and all) into the service of a genre film—as a main character, no less. It’s simply not done in Hollywood unless the thriller needs a one-note role of an autistic savant who’s memorized vital corporate data. I wonder if it’s Moose’s unspoken, background successes that appealed to Travolta. This is how he could honour his son, and also the autism community. The Fanatic showcases the successful independence of an autistic man—a guy who’s portrayed as an everyday member of a realistic society. Sure, the film goes a bit off-the-wall, and it’s a bit weird that Moose partakes in wild, illegal behaviour. However, The Fanatic is not a film about an obsessed autistic fan; it’s a film about an obsessed fan who happens to be autistic.

A running joke on The Big Bang Theory is that Sheldon (who has long been interpreted as a character on the spectrum) has his own spot on the couch, and that’s where he sits—because it’s his spot. Autism, for what it’s worth, has long been sitting in its own assigned spot on Hollywood’s couch. That is, characters with ASD are only employed for feel good melodramatics and eccentric comedy. The Fanatic in its own small way is breaking the mould. Travolta’s Moose does NOT sit in his assigned spot. He’s an autistic character in a thriller genre of all places. He’s not played for laughs, or tears. He’s a protagonist, has his own agency, and a lived-in background. Travolta plays him with an understanding of the condition beneath the idiosyncratic behaviour. Furthermore, he’s sort of a good guy, but he’s also sort of a bad guy. And for some reason, critics have reacted to Moose—and Travolta—by losing their minds with negativity or simply by dismissing Travolta’s work altogether, for no other reason that I can glean except they feel uncomfortable watching it.

If Hollywood wishes to work on how it goes about representing autism, they would do well to follow Moose’s lead. Show a man or a woman on the spectrum who lives in a viable, lived-in world, influenced but not dominated by autism. Show the character with the condition, but don’t simply hire actors to play the condition’s foibles. If gatekeepers of Hollywood storytelling want a world where disabilities are more thoughtfully represented in entertainment, then they could follow the lead of Moose in The Fanatic. On-screen representation of autism in Hollywood, is basically a sedentary ailment. To do better, just get out of your spot on the couch, and go do something different.