Although it’s been a couple of weeks, my mind turns back, about midnight on the weeknights since, to the PBS biography of comedian Johnny Carson. That two-hour documentary had everything — we viewers learned a lot about an American cultural icon — but for me it went two steps too far.
Watch Johnny Carson: King of Late Night on PBS. See more from American Masters.
(At the above window, you can see this program. It’s two hours long. Maybe over the weekend or sometime?)
Of course I watched it, having been fascinated since childhood with this kind of variety show.
The lesser wayward move was seeing way too many minutes on Carson’s relationship with his mother, Ruth. This is a decent Protestant, Midwestern family. For our hero, being born in 1925, the embedded memories of his childhood span the hardest years of the Great Depression.
The mom gave and took away — probably no different from parents at the time or even now — gave him a book that explained how to perform basic card tricks and other elementary magic. She obviously allowed him to perform in the area while a teenager. Yet for the rest of her long life she consistently would not be the one to give him a swell head. She saw him grow famous, in other words, and if a monologue fell flat, she told him — when he asked.
This documentary all but states Mother and her negativity weighted him down. It very well might have, but not so much as to make him fail. Lots of mothers have treated their eventually successful sons far worse. Lots of adults with either kinder and crueler mothers suffer humdrum lives, for an infinity of reasons.
Failing a Freudian or Oedipal explanation, the filmmaker moves to his second theory.
The Carson biography’s narrator (actor Kevin Spacey) even voiced that step, the words of the filmmaker, Peter Jones — the point of his work was to find Carson’s “Rosebud.” Through years of research, Jones says, he wanted to find the totem that motivated this television giant. (For Charles Foster Kane, in Orson Welles’ movie, Citizen Kane, Rosebud was the brand of a sled the child Kane loved.)
For Johnny?
Jones points to that book of card tricks, showing it to us as a still photo, repeatedly.
He says the book was the key of Carson’s success, both literally as it provided the basis of his neighborhood shows as a teen and figuratively as the singular kindness of his mother.
Maybe may not, and so what? This pocket of the country, within years of Carson’s birth, also provided Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando — and Dick Cavett. Rosebud simply could’ve been some key minerals in the waters of Nebraska and Iowa. Or inhaling the particulates from the Dust Bowl in formative years. No Rosebud can explain the thousands of others born in the Plains who lived far less glamorous lives.
This PBS program didn’t need the props, neither the fixation on what Mother Ruth did or didn’t do (unless she acted or spoke to extremes, which Jones would’ve pounced on if they happened), nor the hunt for a singular childhood relic.
Nor is Carson’s book of card tricks. More important was his sense of accomplishment perfecting sleight of hand at home then the appreciation he got in those early performances.
I mean, do you have a totem from which your adulthood’s path flows? Do I?
Wait, I do. The Orange Stick, which I’ve written about. From personal experience, it’s an important childhood relic, but it’s no Rosebud.
The documentary did not need mom awe of humility or the magic manual, was diminished by them.
Johnny Carson: King of Late Night is a case where members of a general audience, not just a PBS audience, could’ve figured out what made Johnny Carson tick, with a logical amount of minutes spent on Mother and a tick of a scene to describe the magic manual.
As a fellow creative, here’s a suggestion: Jones needed a theme with which to organize his research then to edit the interviews and other filmed bits. That’s normal in building an object of words or images. But that theme can be dropped before presented to an audience, if the work can hold together. This one can: A man who needs no introduction, late night funny man Johnny Carson — got me to the screen — and chronological order will keep our attention fine, especially with the key clips and frank interviews.
There must be some never-ending loop where entertainment consumers get lazier and entertainment producers increasingly rely on the obvious.
In the mail yesterday the June 4&11, 2012, edition of The New Yorker arrived, “The Science Fiction Issue.” The table of contents lists new short stories by Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan and Junot Diaz. The table has a subsection titled “Sci-Fi,” with six acclaimed authors from Ray Bradbury to Margaret Atwood. This magazine unlike most these days has no editor’s letter at the front to explain or promote itself.
These “Sci-Fi” pieces are not explained; the reader has to turn to any of them to see it’s a autobiographical essay about the genre, from childhood reading to a writerly self-analysis.
Actually, you have to read two of them to see the relationship, to understand how all six came to be included.
Nothing is spelled out. The reader gets to discover the pattern and figure out the explanation.
Refreshing.
