In their heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Kids in the Hall
took cross-dressing comedy over the threshold of camp into a truly original
comedic art form. It was easy to forget that none of the five Kids was a
woman. Besides Buddy, Thompson contributed a giddy portrayal of Queen
Elizabeth (to whom he bears a stunning likeness) to the group’s repertoire.
In his post-Kids life, Thompson is best known as Brian, Hank Kingsley’s gay
personal assistant, on HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” Salon recently spoke
with Thompson about his stand-up comedy tour, his opinion of a certain gay
sitcom star and the repressed culture that resists Buddy Cole’s
alcohol-soaked wisdom.

You were just in Texas, right? What was that like?

Well, I’ll tell you, that was an education. Houston was very good. San
Antonio was good and bad. I had some great shows; I had some other shows
where half the audience walked out. But my retort to San Antonio was,
“Jeez, it’s as if they’ve never seen a feminine blond boy before, which
means they must never have seen ‘Titanic.’”

It’s interesting to go back into the hinterlands. You realize people
are different. It’s not like the coast. But that’s fine for me. I have a
real warrior mentality. I like to do battle. I like a challenge.

Of all the characters you’ve developed, why have you decided to take
Buddy Cole on the road?

Well, I’m promoting my novel. That serves that purpose. The other thing
is, Buddy Cole had an enormous amount of material that I’d already written
for him, and I’ve continued to write for him ever since the show ended. And
he’s the one character I do that is not just a character, he’s also a
person who’s very self-reflective and he has pretty much an opinion on
everything. So it allows me to range far and wide over the state of the
world. He allows me to say things that other characters are not allowed
to, and he allows me to wade into areas of taboo and somehow
get away with it. You know, some of the things I’m most fascinated by are
things that people can’t really talk about openly, like race and
self-loathing among gay men and sexuality. And I get to be a queen, and
that’s a big relief.

A big relief from what?

Well, it’s a big relief to let all of your feminine qualities reign; it
really is a release. Oddly enough, of all the characters I did in “The Kids
in the Hall,” the most feminine character was a man. Buddy Cole allows me to
access that queen in me. As gay culture has ascended, there’s been this
attempt to masculinize gay men, which I think is quite silly and very
wrong-minded, and I’m hoping that Buddy Cole can slap a little sense into
people. You know, I’d be slapping them with a handbag! But, I mean, come
on — the sissy is the truth. The muscle queen is not. That is a false
construct held up by wires, strings, steroids and the gym. It’s
not real. And if gay men aren’t going to accept the sissy, then they’re
doomed.

How have your characters changed as you’ve gone from a Canadian TV
show to a major motion picture to solo TV gigs?

It’s very difficult to create characters on your own. One of the
greatest things about Kids in the Hall was it was a laboratory. We were
together for 11 years. You had four other people who were constantly
pushing you to go deeper and to be better and constantly criticizing you,
and that’s a very healthy thing in art. So for me it’s been very difficult
to continue to create new characters without the boys. I have created some
new characters, but most of them have just been my older characters. I’m
extending their lives. Because I always intend for my
characters to be with me for life.

The standards in America and the standards in Canada are different.
Canada is more repressed but, oddly, more tolerant. America is a country
that’s got a bit of an identity crisis. America, I think, fancies itself
as a man, a big butch man — Charlton Heston holding a gun for the NRA.
Our [Canada's] symbol is a Mountie, which is a male figure, but it’s a
person without a gun who basically wants to talk to people. Our country
wasn’t
settled by a gunslinger, it was settled by a cop. So Canadians have a very
natural, inbred adherence to authority which in some ways is very analogous
to England, and that totally affects our comic way of looking at the world.

America now is in a place where you have the right to kill people, the
right to fuck your brother’s sister, the right to be 800 pounds, the right
to swear at clerks.
Where I come from, you don’t. There’s much more of a
sense of the body politic. I think in America now this individualism
has gotten out of control. I think it’s a misnomer to think that freedom
is an absolute; it is not. If you want 100 percent freedom, then go live in
the hills with the militia freaks. Because civilization is not about that.

We have such a reluctance to judge people [in America], and I’m a
satirist and that’s what satirists do — they judge. And that’s why I
think our movie ["Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy"] bombed — it was out
and out satire, and America’s more into parody, which is, to me, sort of
the inbred cousin of satire.

I wonder what Jonathan Swift would say about that.

Oh! You’ve said the right word! I want “Buddy Babylon” to be compared
to Swift. All I’m looking for in a review is one word: Swiftian. Then I
will be so happy. That is a very big model for me. The book is a
picaresque kind of journey. I’m not saying it’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” but
there are certain elements of it that are analogous. I mean, when Jonathan
Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” about eating the Irish, people wanted to
kill him, because people didn’t understand. In my career, people have
wanted to hurt me and hold me down because they mistake content for intent.
And you just have to ignore it.

Looking back now on the Kids, how does it fit into the comic
landscape of other shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “In Living Color,”
“Mad TV”?

I think of it as music — “The Kids in the Hall” was Sonic Youth. We sort
of affected the whole scene, but we never got the kind of attention of a
Nirvana. I think people came along and took our ideas and became bigger
with them. But I think we laid a lot of those seeds.

How would you compare the gay comedy of “Ellen” to Buddy
Cole?

Oh. OK. I get in a lot of trouble over this.

That’s good. Trouble’s good.

Yeah, trouble’s good. Trouble, trouble, trouble in River City! Buddy
Cole’s comedy is not driven by an agenda. It’s not activism, it’s comedy.
Buddy Cole, number one, is about the joke. “Ellen” became about
empowerment. And the only empowerment in Buddy Cole is the empowerment of
talent and the empowerment of a great story. You look at Buddy Cole and
he’s not what you would call a paragon of virtue. Buddy Cole is not
somebody you hold up and say, “This is what we should all be.” I didn’t
create Buddy Cole or any of my work to make people feel better about being
gay.

He’s just sort of stumbling through it in a haze.

Absolutely. He’s human. If there is empowerment, it comes through
laughter. I think I have a good metaphor: My work turns over the rock and
looks at the worms and the maggots underneath. Ellen’s [DeGeneres] show
turned over the rock and pretended there were candies underneath. A lot of
that kind of work, to me, ignores the ugliness. I’m sort of a pariah
because I try to tell the truth, and historically, people aren’t always
really interested in the truth. Not to shit on Ellen. I think she’s
hilarious. But I really do think the show got caught up in activism and
became hijacked by those — I don’t even know how to describe those people
– by the fascists.

Who are you talking about?

GLAAD [The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation].

They so wanted a leader that they picked her, do you think?

She didn’t have the chops. Ellen was a physical comedian. I saw her
live before, she reduced me to helpless laughter, but at the end of the
show, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about her. That’s fine.
Everybody has their own muse to serve. And I think it was ill-advised for
her to try to serve this muse. Her muse is Lucy, not Lenny Bruce.

Who’s your muse?

My muse would be Lenny Bruce — and Lucy. I look at things sometimes
and I go, “That’s ugly,” and I just have to say it. Whereas, I think other
people will stop themselves because they think it will hurt the cause. My
cause is me. My cause is comedy. It makes me sound really selfish, but
artists are selfish by nature. Art is selfish, it is dictatorial. It is
not politically correct. It is not inclusive. It is not democratic. Art
is a bitch riding a horse all night and then putting her away wet. That’s
the beauty and the ugliness of it. You have to accept that when you do it,
you’re going to be misunderstood.

“The New Age,” which opened and closed in two weeks during the fall of
1994, is one of the most original American movies of recent years. But what
is it? Technically, it’s a comedy of manners, though more often than not,
you’re likely to find the laughter sticking in your throat. This is a movie
in which a character planning suicide decides that wearing summer pastels
would be less obvious than wearing black, that washing the poison down with
margaritas would be preferable to champagne. Tolkin’s take on the chic
Angelenos who live on the periphery of the entertainment and arts worlds
and indulge in new-age gurus and rituals is often satirical, but
Tolkin refuses to make us comfortable by providing satire’s usual distance.
His is not Woody Allen’s view of spacey L.A. It’s closer to the films about
upper-class Europeans that were so popular with art house audiences in the
early ’60s.

Films like “La Dolce Vita” and the ennui-fests that were Michelangelo Antonioni’s
follow-ups to “L’Avventura” lured audiences with the promise of a decadence
they pretended to condemn. It was the Cecil B. DeMille approach — moralism
as a shill for sex and gaudy excess — wrapped in bloodless European chic.
The look of “The New Age,” shot by John Campbell, is cool, spotless,
inhumanly beautiful. Peter and Katherine’s house, with its Ed Ruscha
paintings and rows of CDs so neat they might have been aligned using a
carpenter’s level, looks defiantly unlived in. They’re right at home there.
Tolkin shows us all the pretenses of affluent Los Angeles (and he has its customs and styles
and details down cold — ice cold), but he doesn’t allow us the luxury of
condemning this world as empty or inhuman. Peter and Katherine aren’t
Antonioni’s Eurozombies. Drawn to spiritualism, Katherine is always seeking
answers to the big questions. (Peter calls her “the mystic in the family.”)
Tolkin, a novelist as well as a screenwriter and director, is one of the
few genuine moralists working today. His latest novel, “Among the Dead,” was
the closest anyone has come to Flannery O’Connor, and his first film, “The
Rapture,” was a completely serious vision of the Day of Judgment.

Tolkin sympathizes with Katherine’s quest even as he sees that it doesn’t
fit in with the level of hipness she wants to project. (When Peter notices
a talisman she has on, a gift from her guru, she dismisses it as “just, you
know, some hippie thing.”) Judy Davis is better than anyone at translating
neurosis into high style: whenever she speaks here, you can hear the nerves
– drawn as tight as the rubber bands on a toy guitar — straining behind
the even tones she’s struggling to maintain. The performance is a marvel of
sustained tenseness. Behind Katherine’s smile, on the rare occasions it
appears, is the expectation that the ax is about to fall.

That happens in one neat, murderous stroke when, her store failing,
Katherine runs into a friend (played by Patricia Heaton as someone
perfectly comfortable with her own venomousness) who explains why she
hasn’t invited Katherine and Peter to a party: “It’s just that, you know
these days … it makes us nervous … somebody else’s troubles. I just
need to be honest with you about that,” she concludes, as if honesty
absolves the cruelty. One of the key images in “The New Age” is Davis’
face, her expressions as she tries to maintain her social disguise even
after it no longer has any purpose.

The movie’s full horror, though, lies in Peter Weller’s hollow cheeks and
sepulchral handsomeness. It’s the face of someone being sucked dry from the
inside. Weller has always been a cold, precise actor; part of him refuses
to come alive. Peter is shallow, manipulative, with a killingly casual
willingness to seize any advantage. When his father (Adam West — yes,
that Adam West, and he’s brilliant) tries on an expensive red sports
jacket in front of his young girlfriend, Peter doesn’t hesitate to show how
much better it looks on him. After his credit card is turned down — “a
collect call from reality,” his father says — he glibly pulls out another
and ripostes, “You know what I say to reality? I say, reverse the charges.”
The utter confidence of Weller’s smile at that moment is a hardened version
of what Jean-Luc Godard showed us in the ’60s, the look of someone willingly turning
himself into an advertisement.

The integrity of “The New Age” is that Tolkin makes us feel the dread in
the fall of this superficial man. Peter trades away his last sliver of
humanity as easily as Katherine trashes the files from her defunct
business. Peter’s arrogance is a natural reflex. Answering a call from a
telephone salesman, he taunts, “Are you proud of yourself? Is this what you
wanted to be when you grew up?” The whole movie is arranged to answer the
question Peter asks when he hangs up the phone: “Who are these people?”

The willingness to go further than we expect is what defines Michael
Tolkin’s work. George Cukor once praised the “offhand candor” of Philip
Barry’s plays — the way Barry initially seduces you with
his sophistication, leaving you unprepared for the moments of devastating
honesty that follow. Tolkin goes beyond candor into the truly shocking. I
can’t think of any other filmmaker who is simultaneously so adept at
high-style comedy and so ruthless. The world of “The New Age” may seem as
empty as Peter and Katherine’s home once it’s been stripped of art and
furniture, but no space can ever be truly empty to Tolkin as long as it’s
populated by people — any kind of people. He mixes pitiless judgment with
chill compassion in a way that brings you closer than you ever imagined you
could get to people most of us are unlikely to ever meet. “The New Age”
plays like Noel Coward reimagined for ’90s L.A., with ice water, rather than
champagne, coursing through its elegant veins.

In a brief question-and-answer session after the announcement, Microsoft’s chairman was asked to explain the sudden reversal of the company’s hard-fought stance in its battle with government antitrust lawyers.

“That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard!” Gates shouted at the questioner. Then, after a pause in which his body seemed to convulse, he apologized — and proceeded to suggest that Microsoft executives’ sense of judgment may have been impaired by years of overwork and sleep deprivation.

“I think we just burned out,” he added.

Gates announced a number of other new Microsoft initiatives to accompany the antitrust settlement.

On May 1, Microsoft — taking a page from the playbook of its rival Netscape — will publicly release the source code to Windows 95, Windows NT and a beta of Windows 98, as well as Microsoft Office 97, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh, Microsoft Money and Microsoft Bob. From that date onward, software developers will be free to adapt and modify the programs’ code any way they like.

“We decided we’re never going to fix all the bugs in all our products no matter how many revs we do — it’s just never going to happen, unless every developer in the world has a chance to contribute. So it’s time to open the kimono and let the party begin,” Gates declared.

At the same time, Microsoft announced, all of its 5,000 temp workers will be offered full-time staff jobs with the company, including a full benefits package and stock options. “We’ve been very bottom-line oriented in the past, but the truth is, there’s always room in the Microsoft family for a few more heads,” said Gates. Meanwhile, Microsoft will also shut down its efforts to fight software piracy and renounce all of its patents.

While Microsoft has made much in recent weeks of its plans to turn its home page into a new all-purpose “portal” to the Web known as Start.com, Gates today said that those plans have been ditched. Instead, Microsoft will revamp the project as Stop.com — a Web site advocating coffee breaks, massages, sensory deprivation tanks and other relaxation techniques. The company will no longer use the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” as its theme song; instead, it will adopt the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love.”

“Our slogan used to be ‘Windows Everywhere,’ but now it might better be described as ‘Windows Nowhere.’ We’ve learned that to strive to be everywhere at once is, truly, to wind up no place at all,” Gates explained. “We were so busy asking, ‘Where do you want to go today?’ that we never left any time to just be somewhere.”

In other Microsoft announcements during the bombshell-filled day, Steve Ballmer, the company’s legendarily competitive executive vice president, said he would leave Microsoft to join the New Life Monastery in Taos, N.M., where he plans to take up baking and eschatology.

Meanwhile, Gates said he would take a leave of absence from Microsoft to finish his B.A. at Harvard and expand his recent diary in Slate magazine to book length.

The company’s chief financial officer, Greg Maffei, warned that together, these moves would result in a catastrophic decline in earnings for Microsoft in every foreseeable future quarter: “We’re going to take a big, big hit, no question about it.”

However, Wall Street shrugged off the forecasts, and Microsoft stock rose 8 and 7/8ths today to close at a new high of 104.

Here are a few of the most memorable scenes from what could have been “The Really Big Picture.”

The Boarding Sequence

“The Really Big Picture” opens with a bang — the longest one-take tracking shot in film history. We can only marvel as Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane, Sandra Bullock, Jason Patric, Willem Dafoe, Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Harrison Ford, Glenn Close, Gary Oldman, John Cusak, George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, Alicia Silverstone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Uma Thurman, John Travolta, Peter Fonda, Patrick Stewart and Mel Gibson take what feels like an interminably long time to board the Titanic. They’re all as happy as clams because they don’t know that they’re going to be ripped apart by velociraptors, bludgeoned on the head by escaped convicts, abducted and experimented on by aliens and drowned pathetically in the icy waters of the Atlantic.

On the other side of the Titanic, we see a group of convicts in high-security cages — Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, Ving Rhames and Steve Buscemi — being secretly loaded onto the ship. A jittery Buscemi hears a deep rumbling that sounds peculiarly like a T-Rex trapped in some heavily reinforced hold far below. No one else believes him. We know that they are very, very wrong.

Best Poolside Scene

As in any Hollywood blockbuster, there are a few moments of light-hearted fun before the hard-core action really kicks in. After the midnight buffet, Uma Thurman, Alicia Silverstone, Sandra Bullock, Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz and Patrick Stewart all get drunk out of their minds and impulsively go skinny-dipping in the pool. What they don’t realize is that Mel Gibson, George Clooney, Bill Paxton, Gary Oldman and Leonardo DiCaprio have decided to pull a prank on them by stealing their discarded clothes and throwing them over the side of the Titanic. Fortunately — in a brilliant comedic moment — Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts and an alien shaped like a T-Bone steak are standing on a lower deck and manage to catch most of the clothing before it hits the icy water.

Most Impressive Special Effects

In a big picture like this, it’s hard to pick and choose what wows the audience most. Is it when Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones — the Men in Black — pry open John Travolta’s face and discover that they were wrong in thinking there was a tiny alien inside? Perhaps the most impressive and elaborately choreographed sequence occurs when the velociraptors invade the ship’s storeroom. In an incredible display of the film’s devotion to historical detail, they greedily consume the 75,000 pounds of fresh meat, 35,000 fresh eggs, 40 tons of potatoes, 1,000 bottles of wine and 15,000 bottles of ale and stout the Titanic took with her on her maiden voyage. Batman and Robin and Glenn Close’s subsequent battle with a flock of drunken, vomitacious velociraptors pales in comparison.

The Big Climax

Of course, all hell breaks loose at the end. Sandra Bullock is bravely manning the helm, attempting to steer the vessel away from an oncoming iceberg that Arnold Schwarzenegger, aka Mr. Freeze, has vowed will destroy Nicolas Cage, who for some reason he hates. The T-Rex is busily chomping on computer-generated crowds of screaming passengers up by the stern funnel.

The convicts, led by John Malkovich, have broken loose of their holding cell and are in the luxurious ballroom battling Harrison Ford, who plays the American president, and Jeff Goldblum, who feels he should be doing something about the T-Rex. Meanwhile, the aliens, tipped off by a psychic warning from their mothership, are shoving past crowds of women and children and leaping into the lifeboats. Despite the best efforts of a couple dozen or so of our heroes, there is nothing that can be done to save the Titanic from its doom.

The ship, along with a surprised-looking T-Rex, a live orchestra and some of the most famous faces in Hollywood, disappears into the icy, black waters. George Clooney is the last to go when the Bat-dinghy springs a leak. The only survivor is Peter Fonda, in an Oscar-worthy performance as a stoic Florida beekeeper. The spitting image of his father as he impassively watches the entire cast of “Con Air” get shredded by the propellers, Peter realizes that his interest in bees is symbolic of something and that he really should reconcile with his children. A single tear trickles down his face. As the 45-minute-long credit sequence starts to roll, we get a sinking feeling that the dinosaurs, the aliens and the A-list stars will all be back — in next summer’s trillion-dollar sequel.

Build Your Own School It is estimated that $500 billion is needed to
repair the nation’s schools. POTUS should call on schoolchildren across
the
country to rebuild their own schools. After all, don’t they still teach
shop? Principals could even provide class credit for time spent
repairing
schools. (Suggested supplementary reading: “Self Reliance,” by Henry
Thoreau.)

Clothes Do Make the Man At the volunteer conference, we noticed
that many corporations that support volunteerism provide employees with
T-shirts that bear such slogans as “AT&T Cares.” That gave us an idea.
When
corporations fire workers, they should provide them with a new suit of
clothes. This will help those who are dismissed go on job
interviews. Labor Department studies show that when someone wears new
clothes, he or she has an enhanced sense of confidence. So, by providing
downsized employees with a new suit, corporations can help them find a
new
job. Mandatory clothing retrofitting is unlikely to pass Congress.
Instead,
the president should use the bully pulpit to persuade corporate America
to
provide job-interview-friendly clothing to the downsized.

Pro Bono Life Saving While it may not have been apparent during
the debates over health-care reform, many doctors are civic-minded.
POTUS
should call on them to offer one free medical treatment a week to an
individual who could not afford it. A psychiatrist would provide a free
hour of counseling to a suicidal patient. A kidney transplant specialist
would perform one free operation — on a child of course — who has been
waiting for a new organ. In a related move, POTUS should press drug
companies to donate recently expired drugs to financially troubled
hospitals and moderate-income citizens. According to FDA records, when
most
drugs expire, their potency is still above 95 percent. Our thinking:
Isn’t
it better to give someone a drug working at 95 percent than nothing at
all?

We Can All Get Along POTUS wants to “heal the breech.” Part of
the racial problem in this country (according to Vernon Jordan) is that
white people and black people rarely socialize together. They do not
know
one another. To address this, POTUS should propose a tax credit for
inter-racial socializing. If you go out for dinner, go to the movies or
go
bowling with someone of a different race, you can deduct 50 percent of
the
money spent on the activity. We see this as a social policy equivalent
of
High Occupancy Vehicle “diamond” lanes. OMB estimates the cost, assuming
we
exclude spectator sports like basketball, will be less than a $1.5
billion
over five years.

Sharing the Shelter Roughly 10 million Americans are on
welfare. Another 10 million Americans have more than one home. The math
is
undeniable. POTUS should call on multiple-home owners to open up their
vacation houses to the less well-off on a sort of time-share basis. This
can be promoted as a cultural exchange between income-variated
Americans.
(One proposed name: the “Movin’ On Up” program.)

End Campaign Contribution Dependency As We Know It We think we
have found a way to address the widespread impression that big companies
have a “special relationship” with candidates based purely on dollars.
POTUS should call for a voluntary system in which funders can only
contribute if they also volunteer to do mundane campaign work. Give a
$1,000, and you have to stuff 1,000 envelopes. Or have
your employees make 5,000 calls for a $5,000 donation. (We are
still developing an appropriate formula of activity-per-dollar.)
Imagine,
for example, Dwayne Andreas going door-to-door with campaign leaflets!
That
would lessen the gap between the “little people” who canvas
neighborhoods
at all hours of the day and night and the elite group that achieves
influence only through money. (Suggested slogan: “Donating to democracy
is a
privilege. You have to work for it.”)