I knew there was a reason I liked Michael J. Fox (aside, that is, from his winning smile, his ability to go back in time to turn his loser parents into obnoxious yuppies, and that time when I was trying to cut back on my fossil fuel consumption when he loaned me his hybrid gas-electric lawn mower). It’s ‘cause he tells stories like this one, from his memoir Lucky Man, about the opening night of Doc Hollywood, the movie that re-invented the whole cinematic paradigm for stories about big city doctors who get stranded in eccentric small towns and fall in love with the town beauty and in the process rediscover why they wanted to be doctors in the first place. Fox writes:
On edge and looking forward to nothing less than the complete collapse of my career, I made a poor dinner guest, to put it mildly. I skipped the appetizers and went straight from an extended cocktail hour into several bottles of wine for dinner. By the time the entree was served, I was completely blotto. It wasn’t a fun evening.
Traditionally a charming, mushy kind of drunk (I’m told), my fear and anxiety mixed with all that alcohol made me belligerent. I was staggered not only by the effect of the drinks, but by the reality that at that very moment, in cineplexes across the country, my fate was being decided by strangers. Moviegoers were either buying or not buying a ticket for my film—and my gut told me it was the latter. Unable to vent my spleen on each one of the non-ticket-buyers, I turned on my agent.
“You’re going to fucking call me tomorrow morning, Pete, and you know what you’re gonna fucking say? You’re gonna fucking say, ‘I’m sorry, man’ And then what? I’ll tell you what, I fucking quit. I can’t take this shit anymore.”
The classic thing about Fox, of course, is that he can tell this story and it does nothing – absolutely nothing – to diminish our good opinion of him. You’re like, ‘Aw, isn’t that cute; little Alex P. Keaton got drunk and swore at his agent,’ and then you’re like, ‘And he’s so honest about it. He’s just a real stand-up guy.’
The interesting thing about Fox is that he seems like such an atypical celebrity—he’s Canadian, he’s been married for a long time, he’s got that disease, he actually seems to have written his own memoir—but is in fact possibly the most evolved form of a certain kind of celebrity. The one that we imagine we’d like to be friends with. The good guy.
The great illusion—and this is the essence of the Fox-ian kind of celebrity—is that we have any fucking clue what kind of person Michael J. Fox is. He may in fact be the person he seems to be on TV. He might have a good marriage and be a good father. He might be compassionate and wise and non-judgemental. He might be really grounded and really Canadian.
But for all we know he might also be a complete narcissist. For all of his confessionality in his really quite very candid memoir, for instance, it’s noteworthy that none of it diminishes our good opinion of him. None of it threatens his position in Hollywood or the purity of his public persona. It takes balls to come out as an alcoholic self-absorbed jerk when you’re actually still an alcoholic jerk — all hail Robert Downey, Jr. — but any red-blooded can come out years after the drinking has stopped. It’s our national pastime.
And now that I think about, what have we heard from his wife, Ellen, in the last 20 years, ever since she broke Alex’s heart by flying off to France to go to art school. Why hasn’t he used his Hollywood influence to get her some choice parts? Why is he always the one in the spotlight. Why’s he the one who gets to be the spokesperson for stem cell research? Why does everything Michael J. Fox does end up making Michael J. Fox look like a saint?
The more that I think about it, in fact, the more convinced I become that St. Michael J. Fox is a bit of a monster. Granted, he’s a monster who does a lot of good and makes a lot of people happy — a sort of Shrek type — but I don’t envy his wife and kids. That said, I still want to be friends with him.
Bonus feature. The Brokeback to the Future trailer.
