Mr. Sobell turned in a recap of a Miami Vice episode recently, and as I edited it, I went in my mind back to that wonderful time in our culture when Don Johnson went sprinting full speed into the brick wall of a singing career with only the formidable shoulder pads of his cropped pastel blazer to cushion the impact.

I don’t know if any of you saw Heartbeat — the hour-long “music video feature” that went with Don Johnson’s album of the same name — when it first came out. I only saw it myself because…wait, why did I see that? I don’t even remember. I do recall feeling so profoundly embarrassed for everyone involved that I had to watch from behind a pillow, and given that I saw it when it came out, in 1987, meaning that I myself regularly appeared in public with an atrocious perm and Reebok high-tops with different-colored neon laces on each foot, it’s probably a pretty terrible movie.

But for some reason I wanted to see if I’d remembered Heartbeat accurately, so I found the damn thing on eBay and bought it. It arrived Saturday. I watched it today.

Oh my God, you guys.

…OH. MY GOD. YOU GUYS.

Okay, before I catalog the horrors in any more detail, a few words in Don Johnson’s defense. First of all, the “fashion” of the ’80s isn’t his fault. That doesn’t mean I won’t bust on his Z Cavariccis or that ridiculous equipment vest he’s wearing in the first half, but my high-school yearbooks tell a similarly sad story. Second of all, the “music video feature” is exactly that — an extended music video (with nudity…more on that upsetting development later), and I have tried to allow for the fact that the majority of the regulation-length videos of that era made little to no sense, had a pathetic effects budget, and thought nothing of biting Michael Jackson’s ideas.

And finally, we saw a lot of weird-o-rama vanity projects back then. 1987 is, I believe, the same year that brought us The Return of Bruno; Don Johnson had a huge amount of star capital to spend back then, and it is a bit odd that he spent it on a jackelope-type project that wouldn’t get a theatrical release, but if you didn’t know that Don Johnson can’t act, or that Don Johnson can’t sing, or that Don Johnson isn’t a very good onscreen kisser, or that Don Johnson looks effing ridiculous pretending to run a photo shoot or flee incoming bombs, maybe you could, in theory, kind of admire him for trying to do something different.

But you do know those things. What you don’t know, and what I can’t explain to you, is how the Heartbeat project proceeded to completion in spite of sucking a historic amount of ass. If I tried to do a project like Heartbeat, I have to tell you, at some point someone — my brother, Wing, a day player, someone — would sit me down and say, “Sarah, we all support you and it’s great that you think outside the box on stuff like this, but the thing is, this sequence where you sing a country-tinged duet with Willie Nelson while future The Firm instructor and jazzercise-bot Sandahl Bergman pirouettes around an empty nightclub? And it’s all in black-and-white, because she plays your mom, but her hair is colorized, and also she has period-inappropriate earrings on? Yeah…it’s…sure, it’s ‘great,’ in a…in a way, but…it doesn’t make all that much…sense? Because…no, I know she’s supposed to be your mom, but the song doesn’t match the…doesn’t match the scene. So maybe you could use a different song? …Well, actually, how about one where it’s just Willie Nelson singing? Because the thing is that he knows how to sing and you don’t okay there I said it. Also, casting David Carradine as your father is absolutely preposterous and I cannot allow it.”

The whole thing — I call it a “thing” because I don’t know what else to call it, because it’s not a movie and it’s not a video and it’s certainly not a musical (not that it knows that; more on that later also) — is like that, just one scene after another where it’s like reading an Elvis biography, and he’s getting fatter and fatter and deeper and deeper into the barbiturate twilight, and finally Priscilla is like, “Fuck it,” and leaves, and even though you know what happened, that it’s all downhill from there, you find yourself saying out loud, to the page, “Could one person even try to put a stop to this?”

The casting agent, for instance. Doesn’t the average casting agent have a responsibility not to cast Lori Singer in any role that requires the expression of an emotion? “I just got those drops at the eye doctor and it’s giving me a headache” is not “acting.” Okay, a lot of Lori’s job here is just to stare reproachfully at Don, but even “reproach” is too tall an order for Lori Singer.

Maybe the casting agent had strict orders not to show Don up in the acting department, which would explain a lot. It would explain why the girl who plays Giancarlo Esposito’s sister is apparently laughing during a gang beatdown, for instance. The gang is, for the record, beating her down. Yeah, maybe she’s giggling because she thinks it’s a tickle-fight, or because her dress is what would happen if Richard Simmons had a girls’ clothing line, or because she’s getting jumped by two guys dressed as policemen in a Falco video and five girls who look like Drag Menudo (yes, I know Menudo themselves looked kind of like Drag Menudo, but there are mustaches and pink zebra-striped shirts and it’s all very confusing, so just bear with me), but I think she’s giggling because she’s a bad actress. She’s pretty, but her idea of Method is to skip a lot.

With that said, even Kate Winslet is going to have problems keeping a straight face faced with blocking as ridiculous as Heartbeat‘s. The…um, thing opens with Don in a jeep on his way into the interior of a Latin American country (…probably; it looks like a vacant lot in Edison, New Jersey, but anyway), trying to look simultaneously hard-bitten and worried (…probably; it’s more of an “I just farted in the elevator” face, but anyway), and we’re to understand that Don is Extremely Brave And Committed To His Crahhhhhhft because of the squealing guitars and pounding drum machines.

OF DANGER.

Right, so: Don runs around like an extra in West Side Story for a while with his fake-looking camera, he and a Mystery Girl exchange a smoldering look, and then we go to slo-mo right before a bombing raid (…yes), and Don does a lot of acrobatic high-school-musical somersaulting in order to avoid falling ordnance that seriously comes nowhere even close to him, and then he dashes out of a…well? To save a child who is hiding underneath a…Pinto? And then he hurls himself and the moppet into the well again and gets…injured? And then he’s an operating room that is the same set as the end of 2001, having halluci-flashbacks to his…fashion photog career?

Now Don is trying to act “weak and disoriented.” Don is not doing very well with this task, although he’s hitting “inebriated clown at a child’s birthday party” right on the sweet spot. Don does even worse with “feign confusion at the appearance of Mystery Girl”; Don should have no problem here, since Mystery Girl looks exactly like Princess Stephanie and is wearing a jumpsuit she probably knocked Pat Benatar down to get, and she’s backing and filling all over the set and she’s wearing a chador and all these extras come lurching in and it’s Lawrence Of Arabia All-Skate, and then…

My notes here read “Paul Shaffer Godspell.” I can’t really explain it, but: yeah, kind of.

And now Don is striding importantly down the set of the photo shoot, attended by no fewer than three dozen note-taking flunkies. James Cameron didn’t have this much support staff on Titanic, and that guy sank a boat. And had dialogue.

Then some smash cuts, then the Von Goatee Family Singers show up, Don is filming the fight instead of helping Giancarlo’s Sister, Don gets beaten up by the touring production of Singin’ In The Rain…oh, also, Don has started singing on the soundtrack. Don is “singing” in the same way that Don is usually “acting,” in that Don is obviously making an effort of some sort; it just isn’t having much discernible effect. The musical arrangement, of this song and pretty much every other song in the…um, thing, is the kind of utterly ordinary pappy pop the individual members of ’70s supergroups usually horked up in the ’80s, limp, generic, overdressed with saxophone, the auditory equivalent of a chain restaurant’s Caesar salad, you can practically smell Glenn Frey in the shitty apartment he had to get in Reseda after his wife took everything in the divorce, sitting in his one shitty chrome-and-black-vinyl chair, drinking shitty scotch, thinking that he should start doing sit-ups, yeah, tomorrow he’ll start doing sit-ups. [slurp] Tomorrow…

Don is singing something about packing bags and silent screams. Pantomime that we can probably blame on an acting class Don took ten years prior, and then bored everyone to death with for like three months blathering on and on about how he’d really gotten in touch with using his whole body. Lori Singer in stirrup pants. Karaoke video has better production values than Heartbeat, for real.

Don is still singing, only now he’s all in white, with a white piano in the background. The scene is one of many ideas (by which I mean all of them, really) that should have remained an idea instead of facing execution, because I believe the concept here is that Don is mourning the breakup of his relationship with Lori Singer; he looks pretty happy in these chintzily soft-focused flashbacks, although that tank top is too large for him and I’d like it if he manscaped that pit hair just a little. But in the present day of the…whatever it is, he’s singing away in his cater-waiter outfit: “You can’t take awaaaaaay your memoreeeeeeee.” You can, however, take a polygraph test at the Federal Bureau of Constipation…if your name is Don Johnson.

And then in the next scene Don is scarfing down a container of Metamucil.

Just kidding! That would rock. Unfortunately, he’s sitting at the world’s fugliest dinette set with Lori Singer. Oh, wait, now he’s straining at stool again. Laughing…trying to poo. Caressing Lori’s face with a meaty paw…trying to poo. The director couldn’t have had a word with Don at any point, here? Asked for a black piano? Told him to try to keep his eyes open during the chorus? Given him a bowl of cabbage, a roll of Charmin, and the afternoon off? Because this isn’t affecting; it isn’t even boring. It’s hysterical. Also: what’s with the dinette set, seriously? If Don is such a big-shot man of all camera trades and lives in such an awesome industrial loft, why is he letting Bob Barker pick out his furniture?

Who let Don roll a pair of dream-sequence dice that have women’s faces superimposed on them? Who signed off on the spin-the-bottle flashback idea? Did they look for a larger cliché than that one, but fail?

Oh, pardon me. The Automatic Lyrics Generator just spat out a piece called “Love Roulette,” in which love is dangerous when you gamble with your heart, and Don is singing that song now. That explains the dice. Explains, but does not excuse.

The next series of sequences is kind of muddled in my notes, because Don’s singing is so flat here, I had trouble concentrating, but the gist is that Giancarlo’s Sister gets all cut up by Drag Menudo, and Don and Giancarlo bond over that in the hospital waiting room, I think, and then Luis goddamn Guzman — who to his credit looks disgusted with himself, as he should — blows up a VW bus, and then we get arty black-and-white commentary on drive-bys, and then…okay, this really happened. Really. You ready? Okay. Giancarlo renounces the gang life by slamming his do-rag down and storming away from Luis. Don is smiling proudly, so 1) apparently he’s taking credit for this reversal about which nobody cares because we have no damn idea what is going on, and 2) Giancarlo is obviously doomed.

Yep. Cue the Sharks, who materialize on a neighboring rooftop and pump Giancarlo full of lead, obviously, so that Don can yell, “Noooooooooooooooo!”, in slow motion, and sob and wail with Giancarlo’s lifeless bloody body in his arms, obviously. And then there’s a dissolve using dripping blood. OBVIOUSLY.

This is smurfy enough on its own. Someone close to the production should have cut that entire sequence; if Don wasn’t trying to hear that, at least one of those elements could have gotten chopped. I vote for the blood dissolve, but Don’s unconvincing “Noooooooooooooo!” is a close second. “I barked my shin…nooo…ooo…ooow?”

But it gets worse, because evidently, Don announced that an iconoclast like his cameraman character wouldn’t mourn his friend’s death in a traditional manner, ohhhh no. Instead, Don would express his sadness by standing on a pier, wearing black leather and doing a crappy imitation of Bob Seger, because what better way to honor Giancarlo’s memory than by caterwauling a bar-band song over footage of his funeral? Why bother with little bagatelles like “crying” when you can cut straight to a nightmare sequence in which the camera tilts crazily to indicate that Don is off balance, lost in this hellish dreamscape?!

Nobody thought that sequence looked like a piece of shit? Even on paper it’s a piece of shit! “Well, the idea is that everyone is frozen like during the end credits of Police Squad, and I run around and look scared, and then a child points a gun at me, because it’s really crazy that a kid would have a gun, right? Like, intense topsy-turvy world, right?” “Don.” “So then we put an acid-yellow wash over everything, and I do a little this, and here, and like that, like Fiddler, and then –” “…Don.” “And then I’m Mr. Magoo, and I have diarrhea and can’t find the men’s!” And the correct response to this is, “Okay, Don, sounds fab”?

No! The correct response to this is, “Don, you are extremely high on many many drugs.” Better yet, the correct response is, “Don, here’s the thing. You can do that scene, or you can do the scene in which you are now an old man, but you don’t have any old-man makeup on because you’re too vain — you only have that wig you stole from Lou Ferrigno’s dressing room, and some werewolf contact lenses which…actually we’re not sure what those do, but anyway, you can have the old-man-reminisces thing where everyone from the whole video so far is having a picnic together and Giancarlo and Luis Guzman are playing touch football with your younger self? And then your soul leaves your body and starts staring at your body Really Hard? Or you can do this weird movement-class thing. But: not both.”

But nobody said that. Nobody said, “Don, this is extremely stupid, please don’t do it.” Nobody taught Don to dance, oh no. They just sat idly by while he used the same series of “turn to the camera, remove hands from pockets, hold out hands as if handing over a full punch bowl, clench fists and squinch eyes shut to relive a painful memory or bowel movement, punch the air” blocking moves over and over again. They let Duckie dress him in a sparkly tuxedo, and they let him shoot an interminable sex scene with both Lori Singer and Mystery Girl (not at the same time…thank God), intercut with footage of Dweezil Zappa trying not to laugh in Don’s face, like, did Dweezil break curfew so many times that Frank had to ground him by making him work on Heartbeat? Him and Moon?

And the sex scene…there is so much happening onscreen at any given moment, and it is all bad, all of it, bad bad bad. Don doesn’t even get naked, for starters; nakedness is implied, but you don’t even see his ass, so it doesn’t count. Boo.

This is what you do see — and, alas, hear. Again: not joking. Okay? Okay.

Don doing the indescribably painful kung pao chicken dance on the set of the video. Dweezil plays a green guitar.

Don attacking Lori’s lips like they’re corn on the cob.

Unintentionally realistic sex-awkwardness as Don accidentally traps Lori’s arms underneath her and she doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

Don does The Punchbowl.

Don snacks on Lori’s nose, Lori looks bored.

Don mixes it up with The Hustle.

Lori’s boobs.

Some kind of woman-astride position that looks super-uncomf for everyone involved, including the saxophone, which is wailing in terror, and the DP, who has to shoot in a candle-lit outhouse for some weird reason and is seriously considering killing himself and then going to law school.

Don chowing on Mystery Girl’s nipple.

Candles.

Don doing push-ups on top of Mystery Girl.

Kung PAO!

A drop of sweat going into someone’s butt crack I HATE YOU DON JOHNSON.

Don sitting on the edge of the bed, looking constipated; Lori, also looking constipated; she found out he cheated on her? He’s impotent? They both have clothes on — what’s happening?

Whatever, moving on, Don is now bugging all the way out to sea while wearing this Asian-inspired pajama/tuxedo contraption with tight pleated pants, like, walking around the set just yelling into random corners about how he’s looking for a heartbeat, like he’s going to find a heartbeat behind the drum set ohhhhh shit key change! Aaaaand Punchbowl! Kung PAO! Bridge! Dweezil! Don is yelling as hard as he can and there’s another key change Don is flipping his shit in D-major “WAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLT!” back-bend kung PAO! Kung PAO! Fire! Kung PAO! Mystery Girl! Bombs! Lori! Kung PAO! Fade to black! Wedding-video credits!

Exhausting! Horrible! Worth every penny! Rent it today!

August 7, 2006

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