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Mike Tyson, The More He Talks, The Less You Understand Him
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way for Mike Tyson this summer.
What he can no longer do in the ring, he was set to do on movie screens. He’s got a cameo at the piano singing Phil Collins “Something in the Air” in “The Hangover,” a new raunch comedy coming out next week. And James Toback’s “Tyson” –one of the best sports documentaries to come along in quite a while – opens this week in the Amherst Theatre.
What happened on Monday, though, is not the comeback of a huge and deeply ambiguous figure in American culture but another horrible event in a strangely tumultuous and star-crossed life –the death from a freakish household accident of his 4-year-old daughter Exodus, found tangled up Monday in a cord hanging from a treadmill.
Who foresees such danger from that kind of gym equipment? After the terrible, tragic fate of that 4-year-old, probably everyone with little ones and a treadmill will now.
In the meantime, it’s a tragic continuing plotline running alongside Toback’s film, which is genuinely revelatory about the ferocious (a favorite Tyson word) ex-champ without having any real conviction about what in God’s name he’s all about.
In this strange case, it’s the film’s essential flaw that makes it good. Toback just can’t get Tyson into clear focus, but heaven knows he tries hard. And that’s good enough to make the film absolutely riveting.
He doesn’t really know what Tyson is made of, in part, because Tyson himself doesn’t. But then, it’s Toback’s exceptional film that makes Tyson’s delusions so apparent. The film is largely in Tyson’s words. It’s like a long illustrated and probing interview that gets more complex the deeper it goes until it finally hits a wall of metaphysical unknowability.
You can’t overstate Tyson’s initial shock effect on the boxing world.
That initial string of early KO’s—in particular, his savage, swarming KO of poor Trevor Berbick (shown in the film, along with most of Tyson’s major fights) — wasn’t quite like anything boxing people had ever seen. He seemed to have Ali’s speed, and Sonny Liston’s power, if not necessarily Joe Louis’ or Rocky Marciano’s. But in addition, he had a killer instinct you could see nakedly in almost every KO.
“Tyson” wastes no time getting to what you may not know already about this astounding figure in American sports. He had lung problems, says Iron Mike now, which is why he says in the film “thank God my fights didn’t last long.”
He came from a “horrific, gruesome” neighborhood — again, these are his words and far from those you expect to be coming out of an ex-heavyweight champ’s autobiographical musings. What has animated his life, he says, is “I’m just afraid of being tested that way again and being physically humiliated on the streets again.”
Note that.
It’s a theme in Mike Tyson’s rendition of Mike Tyson — fear as the prime motivator for jaw-dropping savagery and hostility. He’ll explain famous vicious outbursts at reporters that way. And fight strategies too.
And I don’t believe a word of it. I think he does, though. And, no doubt, acres of therapy and analysis have confirmed it in his head as his own book of Genesis, but I think it’s simpler and more frightening than that. I think some people are genuinely violent in the world and are expertly honed — as Tyson was by the great manager Cus D’Amato — to be in the ring what Burgess Meredith might have called “a wrecking machine.” I don’t think Tyson always knows the difference between what you’re allowed to do in the world and what you’re not.
It’s not because he lacks brains, clearly. The big shock for many in this film is going to be how articulate and self-probing he can be.
It’s just that his public life has left his most brutal self so overpraised that he can’t keep it from intruding into places where it doesn’t begin to belong.
Something not quite right happened with Desiree Washington, about whom he now speaks with open and naked hatred. Whatever it was, he wound up doing time for **** because of it.
Something happened in his marriage to Robin Givens, too, that made her claim to fear him on TV while sitting two inches away from him on a Barbara Walters dish-fest.
With such mega-monied athletes, accusations of gold-digging are never far away. Nor can they ever be completely dismissed. But it seems to me Tyson’s life and training have left the animal within so much closer than it is, even with other fighters.
He likes it like that, just as do people like Toback, an interesting if overrated filmmaker known for devotedly chronicling the adventures of the Ychromosome in the 20th century (previous friends and/or subjects have included actor/football star Jim Brown and Warren Beatty).
Toback’s full of it, I think, but then so has been much of Tyson’s world. And Toback really does want to get him into some kind of focus for us — all of him, the Pupil of D’Amato as well as the guy who bit Evander Holyfield’s ear and was so weirdly beaten by Buster Douglas.
You see the fights — that devastating swarming attack, those Godzilla uppercuts. And you hear his psychobabble along with his genuine introspection and insight.
“Once I get into the ring,” he says, “I’m a god. No one can beat me.”
It proved to be as untrue in the ring as out.
The power and the delusion of being Mike Tyson, though, remain absorbing to watch.
What he can no longer do in the ring, he was set to do on movie screens. He’s got a cameo at the piano singing Phil Collins “Something in the Air” in “The Hangover,” a new raunch comedy coming out next week. And James Toback’s “Tyson” –one of the best sports documentaries to come along in quite a while – opens this week in the Amherst Theatre.
What happened on Monday, though, is not the comeback of a huge and deeply ambiguous figure in American culture but another horrible event in a strangely tumultuous and star-crossed life –the death from a freakish household accident of his 4-year-old daughter Exodus, found tangled up Monday in a cord hanging from a treadmill.
Who foresees such danger from that kind of gym equipment? After the terrible, tragic fate of that 4-year-old, probably everyone with little ones and a treadmill will now.
In the meantime, it’s a tragic continuing plotline running alongside Toback’s film, which is genuinely revelatory about the ferocious (a favorite Tyson word) ex-champ without having any real conviction about what in God’s name he’s all about.
In this strange case, it’s the film’s essential flaw that makes it good. Toback just can’t get Tyson into clear focus, but heaven knows he tries hard. And that’s good enough to make the film absolutely riveting.
He doesn’t really know what Tyson is made of, in part, because Tyson himself doesn’t. But then, it’s Toback’s exceptional film that makes Tyson’s delusions so apparent. The film is largely in Tyson’s words. It’s like a long illustrated and probing interview that gets more complex the deeper it goes until it finally hits a wall of metaphysical unknowability.
You can’t overstate Tyson’s initial shock effect on the boxing world.
That initial string of early KO’s—in particular, his savage, swarming KO of poor Trevor Berbick (shown in the film, along with most of Tyson’s major fights) — wasn’t quite like anything boxing people had ever seen. He seemed to have Ali’s speed, and Sonny Liston’s power, if not necessarily Joe Louis’ or Rocky Marciano’s. But in addition, he had a killer instinct you could see nakedly in almost every KO.
“Tyson” wastes no time getting to what you may not know already about this astounding figure in American sports. He had lung problems, says Iron Mike now, which is why he says in the film “thank God my fights didn’t last long.”
He came from a “horrific, gruesome” neighborhood — again, these are his words and far from those you expect to be coming out of an ex-heavyweight champ’s autobiographical musings. What has animated his life, he says, is “I’m just afraid of being tested that way again and being physically humiliated on the streets again.”
Note that.
It’s a theme in Mike Tyson’s rendition of Mike Tyson — fear as the prime motivator for jaw-dropping savagery and hostility. He’ll explain famous vicious outbursts at reporters that way. And fight strategies too.
And I don’t believe a word of it. I think he does, though. And, no doubt, acres of therapy and analysis have confirmed it in his head as his own book of Genesis, but I think it’s simpler and more frightening than that. I think some people are genuinely violent in the world and are expertly honed — as Tyson was by the great manager Cus D’Amato — to be in the ring what Burgess Meredith might have called “a wrecking machine.” I don’t think Tyson always knows the difference between what you’re allowed to do in the world and what you’re not.
It’s not because he lacks brains, clearly. The big shock for many in this film is going to be how articulate and self-probing he can be.
It’s just that his public life has left his most brutal self so overpraised that he can’t keep it from intruding into places where it doesn’t begin to belong.
Something not quite right happened with Desiree Washington, about whom he now speaks with open and naked hatred. Whatever it was, he wound up doing time for **** because of it.
Something happened in his marriage to Robin Givens, too, that made her claim to fear him on TV while sitting two inches away from him on a Barbara Walters dish-fest.
With such mega-monied athletes, accusations of gold-digging are never far away. Nor can they ever be completely dismissed. But it seems to me Tyson’s life and training have left the animal within so much closer than it is, even with other fighters.
He likes it like that, just as do people like Toback, an interesting if overrated filmmaker known for devotedly chronicling the adventures of the Ychromosome in the 20th century (previous friends and/or subjects have included actor/football star Jim Brown and Warren Beatty).
Toback’s full of it, I think, but then so has been much of Tyson’s world. And Toback really does want to get him into some kind of focus for us — all of him, the Pupil of D’Amato as well as the guy who bit Evander Holyfield’s ear and was so weirdly beaten by Buster Douglas.
You see the fights — that devastating swarming attack, those Godzilla uppercuts. And you hear his psychobabble along with his genuine introspection and insight.
“Once I get into the ring,” he says, “I’m a god. No one can beat me.”
It proved to be as untrue in the ring as out.
The power and the delusion of being Mike Tyson, though, remain absorbing to watch.