15 Minutes
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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For the record, I enjoyed it just as much the second time, though it held up better as entertainment than as satire. Part of the reason may be that satire, even more than action, demands clarity and purity of purpose. By the time this movie gets to the homestretch, its attempt to combine a vitriolic anger at the media and the rabble-rousing, vigilantelike efforts of the fire marshal to defeat the villain is more than schizophrenic; by this point, the left hand barely seems to know what the right hand is doing.
One could argue that the simplifications in 15 Minutes about ruthless TV producers and unethical lawyers aren’t much different, but you don’t have to be a liberal to find these caricatures fairly believable or their real-life counterparts fairly sickening. And even though the Russian videographer might be viewed as a Gump with a foreign accent, he and the even creepier Czech killer, both recent immigrants, are embodiments of our own worst impulses and tendencies, monsters whose excesses stem directly from their observations of us. Theoretically we couldn’t laugh at Gump without recognizing something of him in ourselves, and we’d be inclined to be affectionately indulgent about his foibles. Any laughter provoked by the Russian stooge is bound to be more troubled, because Oleg is clearly a kind of Frankenstein monster our culture has created and his innocence is far more dangerous.
Herzfeld winds up getting his own hands just as dirty as those of his four villains–and he dirties us in the process, though he doesn’t make it easy for us to overlook his or our duplicity. That’s what I like about 15 Minutes. It expands Warhol’s witticism to say, more or less, “In the future, everyone will be a world-famous psycho killer for 15 minutes, and everyone will also be a world-famous psycho killer’s victim for roughly the same amount of time. In this future democracy of fame and attention, where equal employment opportunities rule, trying to distinguish between stars and fans, cynical media perpetrators and gullible spectators, predators and victims, will be pointless.” Which is precisely my idea of satire.
