9/15/06: Ringmaster (1998)It’s been a mixed week for Jerry Springer. The (allegedly) impending demise of Air America threatens his radio show, but he made a likable debut on
Dancing With The Stars. That’s about as good as it gets for that kind of progressive. Still, let’s take a moment to honor one of the guy’s more neglected contributions to society—specifically, Springer’s turn as his fictional alter-ego in
Ringmaster.
We can understand people wanting to ignore a film based on Jerry Springer’s show.
Ringmaster came out in ’98, and his name already belonged in the “Do Not Use” file of Big Clichés, along with “Viagra,” “Teletubbies,” and “Gap Dresses.” And we’d all been assured by good liberals—and misguided conservatives—that Springer’s daytime show was racist and vicious in its embracing of society’s worst elements.
But covering our eyes led to the dismissal of a surprisingly good movie.
Ringmaster deserved attention just for showcasing Jaime Pressly back when she was a direct-to-video vixen. That was no accident, either. Her co-star is Michael Dudikoff, still best known for his
American Ninja films. At the very least,
Ringmaster proved that Pressly had more talent than the Mirimax Kids that were garnering all the mainstream press.
There’s certainly more plot development than you’d find in an acclaimed indie like 1998’s
Happiness. The film also succeeds where the same year’s
The Opposite of Sex failed: finding true sexiness in tawdriness.
Here’s another fun fact:
Ringmaster is essentially a Woody Allen film. The trashy protagonists of
Ringmaster are working through the same twisted emotions as the ensemble cast in, say, Allen’s
Celebrity—also released in 1998. Except Jerry Springer’s sleazy talk show host isn’t played by Kenneth Branagh, and none of the characters are East Siders running around in tweed. If they were,
Ringmaster would’ve been celebrated as an incisive look at modern-day social mores.
The critics had already adored
Celebrity (and
Happiness) for its improbable worst-case scenarios of the upper class. Those same critics scattered from the light of hard truths about working-class victims of the sexual revolution. To be fair, there are two major differences between Springer's film and a Woody Allen production: The oral sex scenes are far more creative than the one in
Celebrity, and
Ringmaster has black people in it who aren’t playing hookers.
Ringmaster has other improvements over the Allen of ’98. One scene has a mom in front of a mirror, rehearsing her onstage expression for when she’ll find out that her husband is sleeping with her daughter. This says more about modern angst than Allen could ever manage with another psychiatry joke.
And, unlike any Allen film,
Ringmaster ends its self-absorption on a properly horrific note. The mom is buying a drink at a bar for her daughter, who's just announced that she’s pregnant by her stepfather. The two proudly discuss how they’re going to raise the new kid in the family tradition. “I think we done pretty good,” says Mom. The audience goes home and sleeps with the lights on.
Make it your own: In a rare twist,
this one isn’t going for as cheap as we’d imagine—but appropriately cheap enough. You can buy those “Uncensored”
Springer episodes, too, but that just seems exploitive.
