Talk Radio is a misanthropic tragedy, following Bogosian’s slide into an abyss of spite and self-loathing. Bogosian has lost the ability to love or to relate to anything or anyone except in cynicism, bitterness and pain. As someone who finally realizes that he has nothing left but his contempt, he is a “fallen” man. The horror of his situation and the source of his contradictory behavior at times, is that he is aware of his own fall but cannot stop it. In the final broadcast, he is straining for some connection, something to almost “save” him, but when this presents itself, he must attack and humiliate it – it is as though he can no longer help himself. At one point he chose this manner of communication, but now he feels as though he has no choice. His inability to reconcile his hostility and his self-loathing is the flaw which ultimately tears him apart psychologically, and as funny as the broadcasts are, they are a psychodramatic ordeal. There is thus an underlying desperation to his vitriol, a yearning for an ultimately elusive salvation, making for a highly ironic ending. Bogosian thus emerges as a tortured figure, complex and flawed but most importantly, a paradox: a man driven to contempt by an inner rage that may originate in woeful self-disaffection, his realization that perhaps he cannot love. Yet there are moments which suggest his conscience, idealism and even his need to care: perhaps he cares too much.
Oliver Stone directing
The mastery of Talk Radio is that this bitter misanthropy is also savagely hilarious, making this an uncompromising comedy of despair. Heavy irony is the order here, and the increasing cruelty of Bogosian’s outbursts betrays the pitying contempt which saturates a film perpetually dark in both theme and look. Life outside the radio station offers little for Bogosian and the film clearly establishes just how dependent he is on the torments of his job as a provocateur – a dependence that is decidedly masochistic. Yet there is another irony in that America truly responds to this kind of program and this kind of radio persona – what begins thus as a rather personal “show” and statement is seized upon, exploited and capitalized on, so that Bogosian is perhaps fated to become just another commodity in the American “entertainment” market-place – thus his is a most ironic martyrdom. The man who will not compromise is perhaps a necessary voice of confrontation – the provocateur as catalyst for social change – and in that sense the film has mythic as well as social resonance probing the identity lurking behind a disembodied voice. Yet it is Bogosian’s metaphorical fall from grace, his status as martyr of the damned that makes for the most powerfully tragic-comic ironies. Hence, this film remains director Oliver Stone’s most provocative, personally confrontative work and its relative neglect is a strange oversight. read more