When I was a kid growing up in NYC, my mom and I would watch The Morton Downey Jr Show. I was around twelve to fifteen years old and loved staying up late. In retrospect, letting me watch this show was not one of my mom’s best parenting moments, but no one is perfect, and she brags, “You got into Harvard two times,” so I suppose she feels that the net results were positive. Time will tell. At any rate, I remember the show’s spectacle, chaos and sensationalism. The Morton Downey Jr. Show was like a hockey game without ice, uniforms, pucks or teams. No one would act like this in real life, but because it was on television, it was entertaining and fun. I did not give much thought to the iconic host. In retrospect, the graphics were as crude and brash as the show.
When I heard about Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie, I jumped at the chance to revisit the show with mom now that I am an adult. Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie is equal parts biographical, anthropological and historical. Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie examines Downey’s patrician and famous upbringing, his failed singing aspirations and his exploitation of politics of the right to finally achieve fame despite his close relationship with the Kennedy family. With fame comes money and women. Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie compares and contrasts Downey’s persona with his initially staid family life, but soon the lines blur and his stable personal life gives way to dissolute womanizing and spending.
Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie also examines the antecedents of radio and television hosts with similar gimmicks and his successors. Downey was not the first or the last of his kind of inflammatory, but he was unique in his willingness to get his hands dirty with his audience and guests. For the most part, his mouth would write checks that his body could cash whereas other than Geraldo Rivera, most FOX news hosts and right wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh would be lost in a confrontation not involving a camera or a microphone. Rivera has knocked out a Nazi/KKK guy in the past. Downey was a strange mash up of right wing politics and The Jerry Springer Show.
Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie also examines why certain audiences, specifically teenage boys from working class New Jersey, flocked to Downey. They fully bought Downey’s bad boy of the right persona and had permission to behave similarly. They were blissfully unaware that his real life was mostly the opposite of his on screen act. Downey was an entertainer of the old school Hollywood era who found a way to publicly draw out well-known rivalries with Al Sharpton and Gloria Allred for mutual benefit.
Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie is particularly germane to today’s America in which reality tv has completely devoured the political world. Downey Jr. is John the Baptist to the Republican’s latest savior, an elite working class phony with no class heralding the end of civility and intelligence in public discourse.