Eric Bogosian's Heart Attack |
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| Written by Joel Crary |
| Wednesday, 25 November 2009 00:00 |
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With a slew of award-winning plays, novels, and solo shows under his belt, Eric Bogosian is a modern creative renaissance man. In the 1988 Oliver Stone-helmed adaptation of Bogosian's Pulitzer Prize nominated off-Broadway play Talk Radio, the young writer/actor delivered one of the greatest performances in the history Like Bogosian himself, Perforated Heart's protagonist Richard Morris is a writer in his mid-50s. He has had a string of successful novels and short story collections, but his heart isn't what it used to be. There are stitches and scars where a passionate intensity used to flourish. While recuperating from surgery, he discovers his old journal collections, written by much a younger man with his future laid out before him. Morris is entranced by the seemingly never-ending physical and emotional alertness of his younger self on paper. He retraces his steps, hunting down the people who were there when his artistic life began to take shape. What he ultimately finds is an assault on his own perceptions: a realization that he has spent his time taking from others for his own purposes, confusing deception, drug use, and promiscuity for a life lived. Bogosian's own younger days produced the unforgettable Barry Champlain. In Talk Radio, Barry sits in his DJ booth mouthing off to a collection of the angriest, most disturbed and most self-righteous degenerates in the southern United States. He paces his A good character is armed with his own truth. studio floor, rapidly chain-smoking and attempting to control the chaos that seems to be pulsing from the endless expanse of city lights 20 floors below. The voices of callers tear apart the sterile studio environment, shrieking bigoted opinion like ghosts in the throes of death, floating through patch cords and into his ears, bringing his eyes to bulge and his tongue to lash. When an actor inhabits a role completely, he or she creates the illusion that a script is unnecessary; they give the impression that they have the words to meet any given situation, no matter how ugly. They need to feel the words inside and out. They need to have invented them and put them to paper. They need to have practiced them and performed them night After reading Perforated Heart, I have a deeper understanding of how and why Bogosian undermines his heroes, who are very much flawed in spite of emitting a glowing and honest brilliance. Celebrity can be a noxious poison for the mind. To revel in it is to accept the God in one's self without paying due to His grace. While feeling the pinch of age, the elder Richard Morris exonerates his younger self for the mistakes he made along the way: "The ultimate goal is to tell the truth. This is what I do. Personally, privately, publicly, all of it. And so I am alone." A good character is armed with his own truth. He will defend it to his core because it is the only way he can get through life. He will encounter the truths of others, and perhaps bend a little out of a need for companionship, but ultimately remains alone. Over the course of his career, Bogosian has given us characters who cannot compromise. They are self-aware yet fascinating in how little good that does them as people. Bogosian himself has grown as an artist, first and foremost remaining true to his work.
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of cinema. Now, more than twenty years later, he explores the dark side of a fully-grown artist's attitude toward success and artistic growth in his recently released novel Perforated Heart.
in and night out, alone in a room or in front of an audience, with the faith that they would necessarily touch a nerve. Bogosian wrote Barry Champlain for the stage, but, on film, he is a martyr for furious human decency.
Joel Crary lives in Ottawa and reviews films. Read his blog at 
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