Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #121 Crystal Heart (1986)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen. 

Kitaen’s 1986 vehicle Crystal Heart has the curious distinction of being at once hilariously dated and bizarrely timely. It’s essentially a hair-metal take on The Boy in the Plastic Bubble that casts the ferociously dull Lee Curreri as self-distancing champion Christopher Newley. 

The Boy With the Plastic Bubble needed an actor of John Travolta’s magnetism to be anything other than an insultingly ridiculous fantasy. Fame alum and real-life keyboard and production wiz Currieri lacks the magnetism of Joey Travolta, let alone the wildly charismatic star of Grease and Saturday Night Fever. 

The earnest young man and keyboard prodigy has been self-distancing since the day he was born thanks to an advanced case of Bubble Boy disease, a curious make-pretend affliction made famous by John Travolta in the legendary television movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. 

The great thing about Bubble Boy disease is that it’s only as serious as a movie needs it to be at any particular moment. In The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, for example, John Travolta’s character is as strong as a fucking ox and as healthy as they come except that he’d probably die if he left the bubble keeping him alive. 

The same holds true of Crystal Heart’s off-brand bubble boy. He dramatically escapes his gilded prison for the best of all possible reasons—to have sex with a woman who looks like Tawny Kitaen circa 1986—and then exists happily outside his bubble until it’s time for him to die dramatically. 

In 1986, life inside a luxury bubble with cable television, video games, musical instruments, stereo equipment, loving, obscenely rich parents to pay for the latest treatments and most up to date technology and zero chance of getting sick from all of the hideous diseases of the outside world was supposed to seem comfortable but soul-crushing. It’s depicted as a unique torment that all but dooms Christopher to a miserable life of loneliness and isolation, alienation and perpetual suffering. 

From the vantage point of 2020, however, Christopher’s plight looks much different. These days we’re all locked unhappily inside bubbles to protect ourselves but only the luckiest and most privileged among us can afford a life of comfort and luxury like the one Christopher enjoys. Throw in the mind-blowing bubble-fucking Christopher experiences through glass with one of the great beauties of the hair metal era and you have an existence that’s enviable rather than pitiable. 

Oh, and Christopher is also famous for being the bubble boy and a pen pal with Alley Daniels, (Tawny Kitaen), an up and coming rock star and dancer way too impressed with what we are told is Christopher’s wit. 

Alley is introduced swaggering her way through an ENTIRE music video, this time as the star as well as the eye candy, before gushing to her much-older, mustachioed, vaguely sinister European boyfriend/manager/Svengali Jean Claude (Simón Andreu) that Christopher’s letters contain sparkling witticisms like, “My dream is to play for you while you sing. Those androids in your band should be beamed back to Planet 9.” 

Then again, Crystal Heart is so violently divorced from reality that it would not feel particularly out of place if it was revealed that Alley was in a band where everyone else was a robot from outer space. 

Alas, Alley’s cynical, decadently non-American star-maker does not encourage his girlfriend and client to seek out a romantic relationship with a bubble boy for purely egalitarian reasons. Instead, he’s cynically exploiting the publicity from Ashley and Christopher’s relationship to score a front page story in the National Enquirer and with it a plum gig opening for the red-hot fictional rock and roll band The Cats. 

The name of the rock band Ashley wants to open for is mentioned over and over again and at no point did my stupid brain ever see The Cats as anything other than a group of extremely confused felines wandering awkwardly around a concert stage filled with instruments or the subjects of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical rocking out onstage. 

The guileless and ebullient Alley wants to be more than just pen pals with her bubble beau so she stops by his bubble to hang out.  It is, as you might imagine, a bit of an awkward way to meet someone. If I were her, I would have used one of the following ice-breakers with my new friend: 

“Do you come to the bubble I live in often?”

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a bubble like this?” 

"Is there a Mrs. Bubble Boy, a bubble girl, as it were?”

Alley instead asks Christopher if he’s ever been to a recording studio, and he’s all, “Nah, dude, I live in a fucking bubble.”

Sparks fly all the same and Alley decides to kick their relationship up a notch with some hot, hot bubble fucking. The two lovers undress for each other and then grind their naked bodies against the glass separating them in a manner that’s one part hot to ten parts utterly ridiculous. 

Christopher loses his bubble virginity in such an explosive fashion that I would not be surprised if his caretaker had to spend several hours the next day removing an enormous amount of human ejaculate from the glass wall of his bubble. 

The parasites of The National Enquirer descend upon Christopher’s bubble in search of a salacious story and when the “journalist” asks Christopher how he feels about the fact that he can’t actually, you know, physically touch his soulmate, ever, let alone satisfy her sexual needs, Jean Claude leeringly replies that there are PLENTY of men happy to make sure that a beauty like Alley does not spend her nights alone. 

Christopher is understandably pissed. Jean Claude’s cartoonish villainy drives a wedge in his personal and professional relationship with Alley, particularly after the much older man forces himself on her, and then strikes her after she coldly tells him, “Go ahead and fuck me. Just tell me when you’re finished”, a line that seems to belong in an infinitely darker, harsher, less idiotic movie than this preposterous exercise in unhinged musical melodrama. 

Christopher is so angry about the way Jean Claude is mistreating Alley that he takes the radical step of busting out of his bubble so he can make sweet, sweet love to Alley without busting a huge load on the glass in his bubble. 

When Christopher runs away, endangering his life at every turn, the woman who has been looking after him and keeping him alive doesn’t run after him or try to prevent his dangerous to the point of suicidal behavior: she just wishes him good luck.

In Crystal Heart’s third act nobody, but nobody, even asks Christopher if maybe he might want to return to his life inside the bubble for the sake of not dying. 

They’re all just too damned excited that Christopher is living out his dreams by fleeing his prison for the sublime wonders of the outside world and true love. Besides, Christopher is somehow 100 percent healthy outside the bubble until Alley asks him to marry her and it becomes time for him to die dramatically. 

Christopher, you see, is just too damn pure and good to live. Also, he’s a fucking idiot who takes insane risks with his health and absolutely deserves to die due to his irresponsible, suicidal behavior. 

In Kitaen’s big A Star is Born moment, she ends the film onstage at one of her huge rock and roll shows singing a song Christopher wrote for her that, to put things in Walk Hard terms, represents his final masterpiece, one that sums up his entire life. 

Crystal Heart is not A Star Is Born however. Not even the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson version that mostly sucks. And Kitaen, while a sparkling, ebullient presence, does not have the substance or gravity to pull off a scene like that. Then again, neither does Crystal Heart. 

This preposterous exercise in rock and roll mythology at its least self-conscious and self-aware closes with one of my favorite tacky cinematic tropes: the film-ending montage that takes a fond look back at what we’ve just experienced by showing us footage from throughout the film. 

The idea is to highlight what an intense emotional journey we’ve gone through with the film’s characters. Instead this closing bit of cheese just underlines Crystal Heart’s shamelessness and stupidity. 

That said, I enjoyed the hell out of Crystal Heart. It fully realizes the astronomical camp potential of its singularly stupid premise in a way that’s both enjoyable dated and rife with unexpected contemporary resonance.

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