Sherry Chandler

Is Johnny Depp Kentucky’s post-Andy-Kaufman Warren Oates?

And what, you may ask – right after you ask Who Cares? – compels me to ask such an arcane question?

Why, the new Oxford American is in, of course.

Spring 2006. It’s a best-of-the-south issue, and includes a longish “Ode to Warren Oates” by Jack Pendarvis.

And what does Andy Kaufman have to do with it? I kept asking myself that question as Mr. Pendarvis spent the first page of a three-page article on explaining how Kaufman had made Americans too hip to enjoy being an audience:

…Andy Kaufman won. He conquered comedy. He vanquished performance. He murdered entertainment. That great, strange feeling you had the first time you saw him can never be recaptured, because eventually he educated you and made you smart. You bit the apple. The scales fell from your eyes.

“If,” Mr. Pendarvis says earlier, “Andy Kaufman were around and trying to break into showbiz today, Conan O’Brien’s audience would know he was yanking their chain from the moment he opened his mouth.”

Still wondering what’s the point, I flip the page and find the perfectly executed turn:

Who can bring us back to Paradise? Who can purge us of our sins? Who can put us right? Who can remind us what humans were like, back when there were humans? Who can turn us into an audience, rather than a bunch of actors playing the part of an audience?

Only Warren Oates.

Warren Oates will give you the willies, and there is no theory that can explain him away, or tell you what you’re feeling, or how you’re supposed to feel when you’re watching him work. Warren Oates transforms the most ironic, knowing docent into an utter square.

There follows an ode to Mr. Oates’s performances in everything from Tom Sawyer to Stripes, with odd things like 92 in the Shade and 1941 in between.

In discussing both the latter, Pendarvis points out that Spielberg movies are “…no environment for free-range character actors, doomed for extinction from the moment Spielberg’s dad bought him a camera.” And in discussing Stripes, he likens Bill Murray’s later performances to “…the defeated intelligence and wounded romanticism of Oates at his best.” Maybe that is why I admire his performance in Lost in Translation so much.

I never really got Andy Kaufman, though I did enjoy his Latka character on Taxi. Maybe I was too old or too earnest and humorless. Or maybe it’s just because we were living in a grad-student apartment in the Hyde Park section of Chicago at the time and didn’t always have a working television, so I really didn’t see much of Andy Kaufman.

Nevertheless, I still need Warren Oates, whose performances always lit up any scene. Oates was born in Depoy, Kentucky (in the famous Paradise of Muhlenberg County) in 1928. He died in 1982. Pendarvis talks of the way he used his eyes, his mouth, and his voice – which is what led me to my question about that other Kentuckian who can work through irony to make us all an audience again.

And my Netflix queue swells again.

Other highlights of this issue include Bobbie Ann Mason’s “An Ode to a Strange Procession,” and William Caverlee’s consideration of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as the best Southern short story ever. After reading that article, I may have a better understanding of what’s going on in that story, which has always disturbed and puzzled me. Also Hal Crowther’s eulogy of Anne Braden, the Subversive Southerner from Louisville who died in March. Oh, and in all the riches, I nearly missed Kirby Gann’s “An Ode to a Slick Politico,” viz., our own governor Ernie Fletcher, he of the “lustrous hair swept back in one great wing over a toned forehead and extraordinarily bright teeth.” Selected articles are available free online.

BTW, Wikipedia is looking for some one to write them an article about Depoy, Kentucky.