The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is a Goofy, Campy Delight. It's Just Too Bad About the Virulent Sexism!
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I hope that you are all sitting down because I have a confession to make. I like Andrew “Dice” Clay. I am a fan. I don’t ironically like Andrew “Dice” Clay. I’m not just a fan of him as a character actor: I enjoy his whole shtick. That’s why I’ve spent a lot of the last three and a half decades saying things in what I will very much concede is an extremely annoying Andrew “Dice” Clay voice.
Why? Because it’s fun. It’s fun to talk like Andrew “Dice” Clay. His cadences and rhythms are infectious and irresistible. In that respect he’s what I call a Cadence Comedian, because, as with other Cadence Comedians like Jackie Mason and Brody Stevens, his cadence is so important and so weirdly hypnotic that it almost doesn’t matter what he says. Clay doesn’t need actual jokes to get laughs.
It has taken me a long time to admit to myself, the internet and the world at large that I like Andrew “Dice” Clay. It has been a long, strange journey that began some time in the late 1980s, when the worst children in my high school were all BIG Dice fans.
Clay may or may not have created his Diceman character as an ironic goof, a parody of over-the-top Italian machismo but as tends to be the case his Neanderthal fans didn’t seem to grasp the irony, the satire or the role-playing.
Instead they embraced Dice unironically, as a fantasy figure who said what they would never dream of saying, on account of it being racist and screamingly misogynistic and liable to get them in trouble.
The Diceman’s fans lived vicariously through him, through his swagger, his cockiness, his unshakable belief in himself.
I held Clay’s fans against him. I don’t want to be harsh or generalize but they’re all scum and I wish a righteous rain would wash them all off this dirty and irredeemable ball of mud spinning madly through the cosmos we call planet Earth.
That, honestly, is perhaps a little harsh but Dice’s fans do seem to have locked in on the virulent misogyny in Dice’s shtick and angrily demanded more: more bigotry, more sexism and more toxic masculinity.
So Clay gave them more and became very rich and famous in the process but when the narrow window for him to break through into the mainstream as a major movie star opened he engaged in ruinous self-sabotage.
A performer whose core demographic were twelve-year-old boys and men with the minds and mentalities of twelve year old boys found himself very publicly banned from Saturday Night Live after a disastrous hosting gig. Even more ruinously, he got booted from MTV.
Clay foolishly handicapped himself by refusing to soften his shtick for the masses when there was tens of millions of dollars and lasting worldwide fame hanging in the balance.
He was rude, raw, uncensored and consequently not welcome back at some of the most powerful entities in pop culture.
I should say right now that while I like the essence of Andrew :”Dice’ Clay there is a lot about him that I did not like and I still do not like.
I’m not too “Woke” to admit that I fundamentally like Andrew “Dice” Clay but I wil also readily concede that I am deeply troubled by his sexism and homophobia and caveman sensibility where sex and race and sexuality are concerned.
Then again sexism is so central to Clay’s persona that saying that you like his would-be star-making vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane except for all of its virulent sexism is like saying that you dig Birth of a Nation except for the racist parts.
Sexism is hard-wired into The Adventures of Ford Fairline, which takes the casual and not so casual sexism of hair metal, where groupies who looked more or less exactly like the musicians they were pursuing, were treated like disposable sex objects to be used and then cavalierly tossed aside.
It also takes its ideas about gender and sex from Andrew “Dice” Clay’s stand-up, which similarly treated women as disposable sex objects to be used and then cavalierly tossed aside.
Sex is everywhere in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane but it is most often being thrown in the direction of the title character, a private dick who is a sex machine to all the chicks.
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is an adaptation of a series of stories that Rex Weiner wrote for the New York Rocker and LA Weekly about the eponymous gumshoe working within the world of rock.
The stories pre-date the rise of hair metal but the vulgarity and Neanderthal machismo of the hair metal scene perfectly suit Clay’s vulgar aesthetic.
Director Renny Harlin transforms Los Angeles into a Day-Glo adolescent fantasy world of sex, sin, violence and rock and roll.
It’s a scuzzy ecosystem the anti-hero knows from all the angles. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane doles out information about Ford’s previous life stingily because they want to promote the idea that he’s pretty much Andrew “Dice” Clay with a detective’s license and different name and delving into his past as a publicist would take the character in non-Dice-friendly directions.
That’s unfortunate. I would love for the movie to engage with the world of rock and roll beyond its oft-stated contention that it’s full of groupies who are super hot and super easy to sleep with.
The catalyst for the film’s action is the death of hair metal degenerate and The Black Plague frontman Bobby Black (Vince Neil) during a show. Then shock jock Johnny Crunch (Gilbert Gottfried), an old friend of Ford’s, hires him to find an ethereal groupie named Zuzu Petals (Maddie Corman).
Booty time, Booty Time
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is never funnier than when Gottfried’s abrasive radio superstar is giving him shit and calling him Chevy Nova and Samurai Sazuki. I would have loved twenty more minutes of Gottfried roasting his old buddy but Gottfried gets fried on air and Ford finds himself investigating two deaths and a disappearance.
Ford is a rock and roll detective but he’s also a ladies man so I suppose it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that his arc almost eerily replicates that of the hero of the poorly received 2000 Tim Meadows vehicle The Ladies Man, which I just wrote about for my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
In both cases the hero happily has sex with pretty much everyone in the world before realizing that his dream girl was right beside him all along in the form of a sexy coworker/employee who is solid, smart, professional, dependable and also sexy.
In The Ladies Man the perfect woman is Leon Phelps’ loyal, long-suffering producer. In The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Dice’s soulmate is his assistant Jazz (Lauren Holly), a hyper-competent sidekick who is just about the only one woman in the film other than a mysterious older woman played by Priscilla Presley who is not a blatant sex object.
Ford Fairlane interacts with a broad cross-section of colorful characters. He gives audiences permission to like a crazy new fad called “rap” when he tells a rapper played by Tone Loc of his art form, “You know I dig the new stuff. It’s phenomenal!” with a lack of conviction that betrays that he definitely isn’t familiar with the new stuff, and if he did hear it he most assuredly would not dig it.
To make the crazed misogynist and sex addict a softer, more sympathetic character they give him an additional sidekick in the form of an orphan played by Brandon Call who follows him around like a lost puppy, ostensibly in order to have him find his long lost father.
The central mystery at the heart of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is anti-climactic, some deeply dated nonsense about a record executive played by Wayne Newton (in a role David Bowie at the very least took a meeting about playing) bootlegging CDs of his own artists.
It’s all just a glitzy excuse for attitude, swagger, stunt casting up the wazoo and style, style, style. It’s ironic that MTV banned Dice, to the point where a video for the Billy Idol smash “Cradle of Love” with clips from the movie was replaced by one with a whole lot of T&A because The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is the most MTV movie possible.
Looking like a music video somehow became a criticism somewhere along the way but some movies should feel like 90 minute long music videos. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is one such movie and it sure does look like a 100 minute music video that doubles as an extended advertisement for the comedy of its star.
Since I dig Clay’s cadences, rhythms and tics but do not always care for what he has to say I’ve decided to create an idealized “Woke” version of the Dice Man called Andrew “Nice” Clay, whose idea of a naughty nursery rhyme is “Hickory dickory dock/Transphobia and institutionalized racism have got to stop!”
I was so intrigued by the film’s weird, weirdly seductive world that I am going to buy a book collecting all the Ford Fairlane stories to see just how much they had to be Dice-ified before hitting the big screen.
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane falls apart in its third act but I can now add it to Last Action Hero, Nothing But Trouble, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate on my ever growing list of movies that the whole world seemed to hate, including my younger self, but that I have come to appreciate and enjoy.
Within reason.
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