Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 3, 1998 | by Rex Roberts

What happens when an `elitist' takes a ride on the low road of American popular culture?

To quote the hacks hyping humorist Joe Queenan's new book, Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon (Hyperion, 194 pp): "At the age of 45, Joe Queenan -- the notorious journalist best known for his mercilessly funny attacks on Hollywood and its stars -- was growing tired of his elite lifestyle."

The stalwart media soldiers churning out this promotional drivel sadly decline to elucidate Queenan's elite lifestyle, other than to note that he lives in Westchester County in New York. Does he lounge all day in his backyard next to a swimming pool trimmed with Italian marble? Does he kick back at Balthazar with Tina Brown and Harold Evans? Does he hold season tickets to Knicks games?

Queenan is hardly more forthcoming in the book itself. "Reading the New Republic every week had turned into an irksome chore," he explains in the introduction. "Seeing Placido Domingo at the Met had become a big yawn. Endless dinner conversations with friends about the camera angles in Jean de Florette and the use of incongruous terms such as `force majeure' in Coen Brothers films had lost their appeal."

The critic concludes that he suffers from cultural fatigue -- "burgeoning ennui," in his words -- and he sees but one solution to this enervating privilege. "I would throw off the mask of the urbane sophisticate and plunge headfirst into the culture of the masses, setting aside my haughty pretensions and drowning myself in the hurly-burly world of the hoi polloi."

Queenan, a weekly columnist for TV Guide and contributing editor of GQ, presumably has his tongue firmly in cheek for this high-concept romp through pop culture. After all, what are TV Guide and GQ if not doilies for the armchairs of middle America? It's not as though Queenan were slaving away at Cigar Aficionado or some other ersatz upscale slick. He may pretend to have grown tired of discussing refined ways to spit out a full-bodied burgundy during wine tastings, but he's earning a good living cranking out copy for audiences who appreciate the retropostmodern treacle of Ally McBeal.

Let that go. Red Lobster is often funny, although Queenan's shtick consists of one joke: Wouldn't it be a hoot if some wise guy took 18 months of his life to attend schmaltzy Broadway musicals, schlocky Vegas shows, schmucky rock concerts, while eating at preposterous restaurants such as the Olive Garden and Planet Hollywood, reading novels by Joan Collins and Robin Cook, watching videos such as Body Chemistry IV and Halloween V and listening to CDs by Kenny G?

If the set-up seems contrived, so do most of the chapters. One compares the work of Billy Joel and Phil Collins to determine the worst rocker of all time; another chronicles the author's hasty sojourn to Branson, Mo., a town he labels "Bad Nashville," where thousands of geriatrics bus in daily to hear Barbara Mandrell perform a rap version of "You Are My Sunshine"; still another chapter takes us gambling in Atlantic City -- the only time, it seems, that Queenan actually speaks with people who take these proletarian recreations seriously.

To his credit, Queenan knows that his fusillades against such easy targets won't carry the day, so he invents a plot that has him falling ever deeper into the morass of American culture -- as the book progresses, he begins to want to listen to John Tesh, to need a fix of Walker, Texas Ranger, to crave a sequel to The Bridges of Madison County. At one point, he attends a taping of Geraldo (admirably admitting he was there to write his column for TV Guide); to his horror, Rivera shakes his hand. "No sooner had our palms locked than I felt an electric jolt race through my nervous system," writes Queenan. "Right then and there, I could feel the dark power of Satan coursing through my veins."

Queenan's publicists are correct when they describe him (euphemistically, of course) as a bully. He's the type of writer who finds it amusing to light cigarettes in a nonsmoking area to see how people react (who needs it), or to reveal out loud surprise endings in crowded movie houses. "I am, and always have been, a prick," he concedes in Red Lobster. Yet there's something endearing about a man who has the wit to describe Michael Bolton as "Mandy Patinkin squared" and who, however grudgingly, gives a tip of the Queenan hat to that "Nubian Chevy Chase," Whoopie Goldberg.

"Whoopie threw me a curve with her performance," Queenan writes about her stint on Broadway in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. "For the first time in recent memory she was cast in the right role, as a clownish ringmaster, a lovable jerk. The role played to her strengths. She mugged. She did outrageous double takes. She ad-libbed. She teased latecomers. She sold the merchandise. Naturally, she overstayed her welcome at the end by browbeating the audience into contributing to her favorite charity (AIDS, what else?), fulfilling the contemporary celebrity's sacred mission of never failing to remind people from rural Ohio that it is Los Angelenos, not itinerant Buckeyes, who occupy the moral high ground in this country. But as a performer, she was an absolute peach."