Trent Harris: The Beaver Trilogy
Though Gary’s life boasts its share of muscle cars, cheerleaders, and high school coaches, his engaging idiosyncrasies offset these commonplaces: stenciled on the driver’s side window of his coupe is Farrah Fawcett’s profile. The townspeople clearly admire his cross-dressing impersonations, and when he’s preparing for the talent show, Gary gets his makeup done in a mortuary. This stirring scene kicks off the movie’s meditation on celebrity. While the mortician’s assistant transforms him into his alter ego, “Olivia Newton-Dawn,” Gary explains his love of performing. Like many people, he longs to be famous but is confined by his meager talents. What distinguishes him is his touching self-awareness: he declares his voice “a gift from God” but seems sadly aware that this talent show is the closest he’ll get to fame. Making the most of it, he dons a blond wig and platform boots and belts out a falsetto rendition of “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.”
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Harris’s 1985 rewrite, The Orkly Kid, exacerbates the mistakes of the second version: a hollow caricature of small-town life, it tells a coming-of-age tale about the battle between Huff and his redneck neighbors, who are threatened by his individuality. Crispin Glover’s wild-eyed Huff is everything Gary longed to be: talented and bold. His cross-dressing performance completes his alienation: his ashamed mother flees the auditorium, his only friend abandons him, the school principal brands him a disgrace. After an abortive suicide attempt, Huff speeds off into the desert, heading for a town big enough to meet his ambitions. The whole thing is so formulaic it’s like an after-school special. Nor are Harris’s remakes successful satires: to satirize something, you have to point out the original’s absurdities. But Harris’s re-creations are themselves absurd, leaving you longing for the authenticity of the documentary.
