While a huge range of films screened at Hobnobben this past weekend – and I had the privilege of seeing many of them – instead of writing short pieces on each of the films I saw, I thought I would pick two favorites. These films were not only great on their own, but also emblematic of what made the festival as a whole so fantastic.
For starters, they both happen to be directed by women. This was not a conscious effort on my part – it just so happens these two were my favorites from the fest – but it was a conscious effort on the part of Hobnobben to include a diverse array of filmmakers. Needless to say, it paid off. So with no further fanfare, some thoughts on one of my favorite films from Hobnobben 2016. (I’ll be back here tomorrow talking about the other one)
In the early 1920s, a doctor by the name of John Romulus Brinkley pioneered an
impotence cure for men by transplanting goat testicles to, ahem, assist the ineffective organs which the men already possessed. Shockingly, this seemed to cure scores of men, who began to swear by Brinkley’s unorthodox medicine. And this is hardly the strangest part of this wonderfully strange film.
Directed by Penny Lane (Our Nixon), NUTS! uses archival footage and audio, animation, interviews with historians, and Brinkley’s authorized biography to tell the strange tale of his meteoric rise. After pioneering the goat testicle cure, Brinkley establishes a hospital where the procedures are performed, and sets up a radio station there to dish out medical advice to his thousands of devotees across the U.S. Along the way, he struggles against the medical establishment seeking to keep his cheap and simple cures quiet, gets elected Governor of Kansas on a write-in campaign, gets that same election stolen from him, and goes on to establish a million watt radio station in Mexico that would broadcast all across North America. His life is the very picture of American dreamy exceptionalism. Except it isn’t.
For its first half, the film tells Brinkley’s story using excerpt from the biography commissioned by the man himself. The book is presented in a Wes Anderson style – placed on a black background, turned by an anonymous hand. As the story unfolds, it becomes more and more obvious to the viewer that a great deal of what she is seeing has to be false. The film traffics in a certain weird-history-that-you-won’t-believe-you-didn’t-know-about, but there is weird history, and then there is fake history. Brinkley is exposed in a dramatized, animated courtroom sequence (for each chapter of the story, the animation style progresses from Fleischer-esque cartoonism, to grotesque realism, to surrealist nightmare) which unravels the elaborate fiction presented by Brinkley in both his biography and the first half of the film.
I would say that none of this constitutes a spoiler because the pleasure of the film is in how Brinkley is slowly revealed and then unraveled. The sheer magnitude of his con – which led to the invention of the infomercial and the sound truck among other things – is staggering, but somehow less enraging for how impressive his commitment to it was.
Lane tells the story with an empathic eye for both Brinkley and the people he conned. One sequence shows the animated Brinkley-ites fidgeting nervously in their courtroom seats as it becomes clear that, during the Depression no less, these people were fooled into lining the pockets of this man month after month in exchange for a bottle of blue water. But as we come to understand the plight of the conned – desperate, having exhausted traditional medicine in hopes of a cure for whatever ails them – we stop laughing at them and realize they aren’t stupid or backwards, but merely people looking for something to believe in, looking for a savior, in their darkest hour. And despite Brinkley’s depravity, the film acknowledges the many legitimate accomplishments of his life that helped shape the 20th century, even as that were fueled and funded by his central lie. A card at the end of the film notes that his border radio station in Mexico became the home of pioneering rock and roll DJ Wolfman Jack after Brinkley’s passing. But the fallout of his exposure is reckoned with as well. Brinkley died at 56 and left his wife and son to sort through the mountains of debt and lawsuits Brinkley’s scheme incurred. This, coupled with the burden of their beloved J.R.’s dubious legacy, leads the film to darker places by the end.
NUTS! is interesting for both the story it tells and the unorthodox way in which it tells it, but it is also wildly entertaining. The completely absurd goat testicle cure is the source of a great many jokes, as is the wily way Brinkley defies his accusers time and time again – coming back bigger and stronger. And as I watched this film centered around a larger than life conman who captivated a large swath of the nation, I could not help but ruminate on modern-day parallels. Brinkley was, above all else, a consummate salesman in that he had nothing to sell – and he made a fortune off of it. He had a bizarre magnetism which pulled some in, and repulsed others. His intellectual and moral poverty was obvious to many in his field, but he was able to easily write them off as part of an oppressive establishment which sought to suppress his ideas. He was a phony in every sense of the word, wielding a fake medical degree from a fake school and offering a fake cure with a fake surgery and later a fake potion whose supposed qualities bordered on the magical. Yet for decades, people in homes across this country hung on his every word simply because they desired more than anything for it to be true. J.R. Brinkley knew the fastest way to sell a product or get elected was to tell people what they wanted to hear.
This film captivated me through the wit and ambition with which it told this lost chapter from the last century. I went into it not sure what I was in for. I did not expect a tragi-comedy of Shakespearian proportions, but that’s precisely what I ended up with. Not having the same gifts as John Brinkley, I’m not sure I could come up with a better summation of what makes Hobnobben so exciting and essential than that.
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