The Notorious 1985 Gary Coleman Vehicle Playing With Fire is the Avenging Disco Godfather of Message Movies About Teen Arsonists
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I’ve been writing a column about failure for seventeen years now. I have been doing this forever! I am a wizened veteran of the bad movie world. I love being part of this curious community.
There are disasters that seemingly everyone knows about, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and then there are obscurities that begin in the bad movie world and spread out to the general public.
As a lover and historian of enjoyably terrible motion pictures, I keep abreast of important developments in the field.
A few days ago, for example, I read somewhere about how an infamous 1985 Gary Coleman vehicle called Playing With Fire had finally made its YouTube debut, to the delight of trash lovers everywhere.
When I saw that a can’t-miss proposition like Playing With Fire was now available for public consumption/dissection/celebration, I prayed a little prayer to the bad movie Gods that I’d have an excuse to watch and write about it.
The bad movie gods must have been listening because a day or two later, a kind soul requested it for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, the column where I write about movies you choose in exchange for a modest sum of money.
How could a Gary Coleman message movie about the dangers of lighting up—and I’m not talking a doobie!—not be a load of laffs?
Playing With Fire is notable as well for being a directorial effort of Ivan Nagy, a sketchy Hollywood character best known for his role in the Heidi Fleiss scandal, and stars in Yaphet Kotto and Cicely Tyson, two of the greatest actors of the past sixty years, as well as Ron O’Neal.
That’s right: this laughably abysmal exercise in boob tube fear-mongering somehow nabbed the services of two legitimately great actors and Superfly for a movie where Gary Coleman finally breaks bad.
Coleman stars in the cleverly titled Playing With Fire as David Phillips. He’s an upper-middle-class child of divorce who deals with the usual problems in an unusual way.
The wicked firestarter invariably responds to the never-ending gauntlet of humiliations, major and minor, that constitute life by setting things ablaze.
Throughout the television movie, Coleman sports a dour expression that silently but unmistakably conveys, “Man, life sucks” and then, “I better start a fire!”
The “life sucks” part, I understand. Objectively, life does suck. I do not, however, understand how “I better start a fire” emerges organically from that observation. If anything, life sucks much worse if you go around starting fires.
Being a prolific, revenge-based arsonist like Coleman’s pyromaniac makes you a danger to yourself, your family, friends, and pets. It also makes you a fucking asshole.
Throughout Playing With Fire, David responds to frustration by starting a fire where he can be seen. Someone comes out and asks David if he started the fire, and he mumbles an unconvincing denial and then runs away.
Unlike Billy Joel, David did start the fire—he started a whole bunch of them. Like Buster Poindexter, David likes it hot, hot, hot.
In a related development, David has difficulty holding onto friends. Between his bitterness and depression and all the fires, he is very unpleasant to be around. Coleman is gloriously out of his league playing a teen creep addicted to the sweet, sweet high of watching flames climb ever higher as the intoxicating smell of ashes fills your lungs.
Coleman’s heel turn as an angst-ridden young man who is metaphorically playing with fire by literally playing with fire is hilariously unconvincing. The world wasn’t ready for a dark and gritty Gary Coleman. Joe Biden? Yes. Hell yes. Dark Brandon was more popular than regular Joe at the end. The world did not need Gary Coleman to shake up his image by playing an arsonist who stares lovingly and longingly at the matches, lighters, gas cans, and other tools of his obsession.
It’s not unlike how Psycho II finds Norman Bates out on probation after that whole unpleasantness with Marion Crane and working as a cook in a diner. He consequently stares at various cutlery with an expression that says, “I know it’s not the intended use, but this would make for a really good stabbing knife!”
Every time David feels bummed, he takes it out on inanimate objects, although when we’re first introduced to his unfortunate habit, he’s terrorizing a dog with a lighter.
Conventional wisdom holds that nothing turns audiences against a character or film quite like being cruel to a cute dog. To be fair to Playing With Fire, David doesn’t have any redeeming facets.
There’s no part of him that’s not terrible.
Playing With Fire is rooted in the cheapest kind of dimestore psychology. When the diminutive pyromaniac isn’t picked for basketball, he retaliates by setting a trash can on fire.
He’s quietly, sullenly apoplectic that his parents have split when he thinks that they have a sacred obligation to stay together forever for his sake. Playing With Fire lazily explains David’s crime spree as a response to his family splitting up. The not-so-subtle implication seems to be that if mom and dad could work out their differences, their sensitive son would stop with the fires.
David’s dad, being a terrible judge of character, gives his son a check for his mother’s child support, which he, of course, sets on fire. David’s fires have a way of spreading, as fires do, but he’s too addicted to sick thrills to care.
David’s Beavis-like love of fire attracts the attention of his school and psychiatrists, but when they’re called in, they go on the offensive. They take great umbrage at people criticizing their parenting skills just because their son constantly gets a crazed expression and then begins blazing.
Kotto steals the film as a firefighter who ascertains early on that David is no garden-variety mixed-up kid or juvenile delinquent; he is a straight-up menace to society. He knows that unless he intervenes, the little bastard will start something that will make the Chicago Fire look modest by comparison.
Part of what makes Playing With Fire such a strange, unpalatable experience is that it contains elements that feel artful and real, like Kotto’s nicely textured performance as a tough-but-kind mentor who sees the danger in David but also the good in him.
It’s a real performance that finds truth in a movie whose central plot is hilariously preposterous and wildly over-the-top. This is the Reefer Madness of anti-arson message movies. Its good intentions go up in flames due to Coleman’s wonderfully terrible lead turn.
If Playing With Fire was designed to showcase Coleman’s gifts as a heavyweight dramatic actor it’s the world’s most pronounced failure.
Kotto’s tough but fair fireman tells David that the reason that people start fires and also abuse drugs and alcohol is because they long for attention. He apparently labors under the misconception that the only people drink alcohol, beyond, you know, it being widely accepted, even embraced and celebrated, is to attract attention by partaking in a legal, socially sanctioned activity enjoyed by most adults.
I can vouch from firsthand experience that the reason that people drink and use drugs is because it feels good, at least at the beginning, there’s peer pressure, and booze and pills are both habit-forming and addictive.
When I was having my nightly post-Five O’Clock screwdriver and smoking pot to help me sleep, it wasn’t because I wanted attention and wanted the world to know what I was up to.
Sadly, Coleman never got to use his signature “I REALLY want to start a fire” expression in future projects. He would never portray another arsonist. Some say that he was so heartbroken that he died young of a broken heart. Those people are correct.
Playing With Fire occupies a place of pride in the great pantheon of wonderfully terrible movies in the TV division, as the Avenging Disco Godfather of television message movies about out-of-control teen arsonists.
That’s not just high praise; it’s the highest accolades a sublime stinker like this could possibly attain.
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