Despite his outlandish persona, hardly anybody remembers Morton Downey Jr. anymore. Say the name today, and you’ll get the conversational equivalent of a tumbleweed (or the assumption you’re talking about Iron Man). Has he really been completely forgotten? Or is it possible that his particular brand of egregious grandstanding has become so ubiquitous that it has not vanished but seeped deeply into the fabric of American popular culture? We may have left the man behind, but we’re stuck with his antics forever.
“Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie” traces the startling connect-the-dots between Mort, as he fans called him, and conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, the glut of fame-hungry reality television stars, and an obsession with what may be our most distinctive national character, the loud-mouthed quack.
With a face straight out of a Chuck Jones cartoon, Mort was born to be on television. Modeled after Joe Pyne, the 1950s and ’60s conservative talk show host with a wooden leg who would berate his guests, especially if they were hippies, the “Morton Downey Jr. Show” premiered on October 19, 1987. “Certain things really burn my buns,” the host muttered angrily to open the show, exhaling from one of the cigarettes he would chain smoke throughout each episode. The audience — predominantly white, male suburban meatheads — screamed in the background and mugged for the camera. Tom Shales, then television critic for the Washington Post, famously referred to Mort’s fans as a “hockey audience,” but the scene, with its public-access production qualities and reckless endangerment, resembles something more akin to a professional wrestling match, or small-scale Roman Coliseum housed in somebody’s dimly lit basement in Secaucus, New Jersey, where the show was filmed. Chairs were frequently broken and punches were thrown regularly. Mort would often physically remove guests who he didn’t agree with from the stage.
Was Mort a genius, presenting political commentary as a circus? Or was he truly out of his mind, a lunatic breaking down in front of a live audience? “Evocateur” thankfully doesn’t force an agenda on its viewers, but it gives us plenty of material to form our own opinions. While Pat Buchanan, interviewed in the film, may see Mort as an essential predecessor to the Fox News monolith of talking heads, there is plenty of evidence that the talk show host was a hollow fame-hungry shell who would have done anything for attention. If his quick ascension, and even quicker downfall — which included an embrace of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, complete with an unfortunate album — was calculated, as some believe, at some point Mort lost control of the dividing line between performance and reality.
There’s no denying that it’s fun to watch Mort scream, spit, and throw tantrums. But “Evocateur,” ultimately, is a sad and familiar tale, the Icarus myth for the modern television age. The last decade of Mort’s life, when the persona starts to cave in, is hard to watch, worse because you can see it coming from a mile away. The rise and fall is a story we all know, but that doesn’t mean we should not pay attention. Morton Downey Jr. may have been a lot of things, many of them horrible, but based on what has come in his wake, it’s hard to say he didn’t tap into acidic political discourse that was bubbling under the surface. Roger Ailes, after all, has since built an empire around the vitriolic celebrity TV host.
No matter if you’re disgusted by his buffoonish character or turned on by his provocative nature, Mort was a pioneer who ushered a wave of political commentary as theater. His life was lived like a long, slow motion car crash that’s impossible to stop. As another raspy-voiced man once said, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.
“Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie” is in theaters now.