Barry Champlain, the main character of 1988’s “Talk Radio,” a talk radio DJ based in Dallas, waxes poetic about American corruption in little arias of outrage, and sometimes a caller who’s obviously suffering will bring out his humanity for a minute, but his default mode is scorched-earth combativeness. It would be misleading to call him a “provocateur,” because the word is elegant and Barry is not, and because Barry doesn’t provoke; he attacks. And he continues attacking even after his adversary is defeated. Sometimes when a caller tries to take a piece out of him, Barry will not just verbally beat them down but cut off their audio feed without telling the audience he’s done so and then rip into them for another few seconds, which makes it seem as if the person that used to be on the other end of the phone line was stunned into silence by his words. He’s a virtuoso of rage, and that’s more than enough to make him a local star and get a national radio syndicate interested in picking up the show.
The problem is that Barry can’t turn the rage off. He directs it at his coworkers, his supervisors, his romantic partners, and himself. The movie doesn’t come right out and say that there is an element of karmic payback in what happens to him, emotionally as well as physically, but as the film unreels, you definitely feel as if Barry is filling the minds of the film audience, not just his radio audience or the people in his own life, with toxic negativity, and it can’t continue forever. I know a lot of people who gave this movie a try but had to turn it off because Barry was just too much. I get it. Even when you agree with him, he’s miserable and angry. Exciting, too, but not in a healthy way.
Star Eric Bogosian created Barry Champlain for the stage in a same-named play that debuted on Broadway in the late 1980s, where it was seen by film producer Ed Pressman. Pressman called one of his regular collaborators, director Oliver Stone, who’d had a three-film winning streak with “Salvador,” “Platoon” and “Wall Street” but had recently been told that his next movie, the antiwar drama “Born on the Fourth of July,” would be delayed eighth months while his star Tom Cruise finished making “Rain Man” with Dustin Hoffman. Stone filled his schedule gap with “Talk Radio” and combined Bogosian’s play with elements from the nonfiction book “Talked to Death,” about the murder of Alan Berg, a Denver-based, Jewish talk radio host with progressive politics, by a member of a neo-Nazi terrorist group. Everything about the movie feels unstable and potentially explosive, so much so that when Barry launches into his most paranoid and unhinged monologue yet, cursing the world itself and attacking his listeners for listening to him, and the main set seems to rotate slowly around Barry, it’s as if somebody is winding up a timer attached to a bomb.
Although Stone didn’t create the character, Barry is a consummate Oliver Stone hero, a creature of nearly mythological force, shouting prophecies and curses at a burning world. This aspect of Barry’s story is why I became obsessed with “Talk Radio” 36 years ago after seeing it in a Dallas theater. He was an antihero in the tradition of so many ‘70s film protagonists: somebody you weren’t supposed to like, but to find interesting, even when he was at his most loathsome. The parts of the movie that I didn’t like and that frankly didn’t think was necessary or interesting were the flashbacks to Barry’s rise to success and the corresponding disintegration of his relationship with his wife Ellen (Ellen Greene), which is tied together with a subplot about Barry swallowing his pride over destroying the relationship and asking her to come to Dallas and counsel him the weekend before the show is supposed to go national. Ellen’s eagerness to dive right back into the old dynamic and keep throwing Barry life preservers whenever he gets too deep into his anger didn’t seem plausible to me, and when Ellen called into the show in the present-day part of the story, throwing a life preserver to a man drowning in a sea of his own bile, I think I might’ve rolled my eyes, because it seemed like it might’ve been a male fantasy: he used and abused her at every stage, and I never saw anything I recognized as real love flowing from Barry to Ellen, only from Ellen to Barry.
Did you already figure out that I was 19 when I saw “Talk Radio” for the first time and had yet to begin my first long relationship with a woman? Well, that’s why I didn’t get it. Stone gets criticized for being less interested in female characters than male ones, and having a misogynistic streak; setting aside the particulars of why I think this is complicated and not entirely fair or unfair, I don’t think it applies to “Talk Radio” at all. It’s observing a thing that’s real.
There are a lot of guys like Barry who take their partners for granted or just plain use them (probably some women, too) and there are absolutely a lot of female partners of dynamic/abrasive men who spend a lot of their life carrying a fire extinguisher under one arm just in case their man suddenly starts trying to burn something down. (Sometimes you see a relationship like that where the genders have been flipped. My mother and stepfather, for instance.)
The Barry-Ellen relationship rings progressively more true to me the older I get and the more experience I have as a significant other, and, frankly, as a human being who has spent a lot of time observing other people’s relationships and getting to the point where I can spot codependency from the other side of a room before the couple have even introduced themselves. Barry and Ellen are codependent in a complicated and real way. That’s why they don’t struggle before slipping into old patterns. At one point, Ellen calls into Barry’s show and lies down on a black table in an unused studio as if she’s waiting for a lover to walk in and get busy with her. It’s a touch theatrical–not a complaint, just an observation–and I wonder if that’s why I thought it was reductive or silly. It’s probably closer to a kind of expressionism, like the kind you see in the staging of plays or dance numbers, where people pose in a way that embodies an idea or metaphor.
This is a brilliant movie, one that not only gets better and richer the more often I revisit it, but that’s filled with truths about the human condition, not just the media or America or sociology or history. You can see yourself represented in it, whether it’s as Barry, Ellen, another character at the radio station, or one of Barry’s listeners, who love him even when they hate him, and the reverse, and spend way too much time wondering if he’ll save or destroy himself, or if that’s out of their hands, and Barry’s.
