Am I taking it personally?

Well, I'm an old, old man. I didn't hear of a VCR until I was in college. They had one in the basement of the library at the University of South Alabama. I went down there and watched The Rules of the Game and The Magnificent Ambersons and other movies I had only read about in books, which I guess makes me one of those rural Alabama elitists you've heard so much about. We're ruining the country. Now that the authors of The Film Snob's Dictionary are going to wipe me and my kind off the map, I'm going to take one last stand...and if I only get one, it's for Warren Oates.

I always thought Michael Stipe should have written a song about Warren Oates instead of Andy Kaufman. I used to explain it to people in bars.

Nothing against Andy Kaufman. They made that terrible movie about him. It started with Jim Carrey, as Kaufman, coming out and telling the audience that there would be no movie. Here's the problem. We all knew there would be a movie. We had purchased our tickets. The real Andy Kaufman made you wonder. The real Andy Kaufman would have maybe turned the movie into a shot-by-shot remake of Heartbeeps, the one where he plays a gentle robot who learns how to love Bernadette Peters. We would have asked for our money back, and that's the way he would have wanted it. The real Andy Kaufman only worked when the audience wasn't let in on the joke. Now we're all so super-smart that we understand there is no joke.

If Andy Kaufman were around and trying to break into showbiz today, Conan O'Brien's audience would know he was yanking their chain from the moment he opened his mouth. They would reward him with that ritualized whooping and hooting that has replaced actually laughing.

The audience has learned to parody itself.

When we watched Goodfellas, we flinched at the squish of the kitchen knife entering the belly of the half-corpse in the trunk. By the time of Casino, we were so sophisticated that we giggled when Joe Pesci crushed a man's skull in a vise. I went to see Hitchcock's The Wrong Man at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Some smart-ass got up beforehand and explained that it wasn't very good, that we'd be better off viewing it as "camp." So everybody snickered at Vera Miles's per- formance of a lifetime. Why, we hadn't laughed so hard since Dumb and Dumber -- or, I should say, the time the symphony conductor made that cute pun on Mahler. After all, we were people who had gone to a museumto see a movie.

All of this is Andy Kaufman's fault.

Remember how square, how innocent, we used to be? We were sad when movie characters had nervous breakdowns. It made us sick when Travis Bickle shot that guy's fingers off, or when Divine ate dog mess. We didn't know if Kaufman was for real or not, which is why he was so great, and why his comedy worked.

But finally, Andy Kaufman won. He conquered comedy. He vanquished performance. He murdered entertainment. That great, strange feeling you had the first time you saw him can never be recaptured, because eventually he educated you and made you too smart. You bit the apple. The scales fell from your eyes.

Who can bring us back to Paradise? Who can purge us of our sins? Who can put us right? Who can remind us what humans were like, back when there were humans? Who can turn us into an audience, rather than a bunch of actors playing the part of an audience?

Only Warren Oates. Warren Oates will give you the willies, and there is no theory that can explain him away, or tell you what you're feeling, or how you're supposed to feel, when you're watching him work. Warren Oates transforms the most ironic, knowing docent into an utter square.

That's why Michael Stipe should have written a song about him. But Warren Oates will never get a song, which is why he should have one. He doesn't even rate an entry in The Film Snob's Dictionary.

The canonical works -- the ones everyone writes about when they write about Oates (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) -- are so weird that you know the rest of the catalog will contain some truly deep perversions. But my first memory of Oates comes from a G-rated family film, the musical version of Tom Sawyer presented by Reader's Digest in 1973. In some ways, it's the deepest perversion of all.

I was ten years old, and I went to see Tom Sawyer on multiple occasions, mainly because I realized for the first time in my life that it would be funto be trapped with Jodie Foster in a cave. But Warren Oates as Muff Potter wigged me out. I could tell the movie was signaling me to open up a soft spot for good old Muff, but I just wanted to scream at Tom and Huck to get away from him. He scared me worse than Injun Joe.

In a way, Oates did get his song. He sang it in the movie. He even danced a little. Muff's big number has a certain melodic similarity to "High Hopes," but an obverse message. Sample lyrics: Sooner or later, just like a potater, we're planted in our grave and That ol' grim reaper will soon be leapin' on you.

They don't make kids' movies like that anymore. As he declaims his fatalistic credo (which the film implicitly endorses by having Tom warble along), Muff fishes hidden booze bottles out of various slimy hidey-holes. For a grand finale, he falls in the horrible gray river and grins with his shovel mouth exactly like an infant that has just crapped his pants; he lies there beaming in his own filth as the camera refuses to look away. Oates's Muff Potter is a big, dirty baby, an obscene stain among the scrubbed pink cheeks, chocolate-layer cakes, ribbons, paddleboats, and drippy ballads.

Not that the film is completely bowdlerized -- the stabbing of Doc Robinson is viscerally staged and edited (you don't see it, but you really feel it) and when Muff wakes up with the bloody knife in his hand, the lost, sick look on Oates's face would fit just as well in Bring Me the Head (which, in fact, contains a remarkably similar scene of Oates being knocked unconscious while robbing a grave).

After the graveyard, the Muff Potter role devolves into a series of reaction shots, but Oates refuses to be cowed. He raises the B-roll cutaway into an art form, improvising a virtuosic set of variations on man as overgrown, helpless child. During the trial for his life, his wet, baby eyes shine with raw, gentle confusion or flash with masochistic amusement. When Tom and Huck appear alive at their own funeral, Oates shifts from hurt to baffled to giddy to full-on nuts as quickly as any toddler. Then he really goes for it. He leaps out of his pew with such a sudden, psychotic immediacy that you think anything could happen. Muff could start speaking in tongues, or strap on a jetpack and fly away, or stab Aunt Polly in the throat. It's like Keith Moon invading a lute recital. You're kind of afraid Oates is going to come out of the movie and bite you. I haven't seen a mouth like his since Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot, or Jerry Lewis in anything.

Of course, Oates, who was born in Depoy, Kentucky, in 1928, is not primarily known as a comic of Lewis-like elasticity. Melissa Holbrook Pierson, in a well-known essay, "Warren Oates, 1928-1982," has written definitively about the grimy existentialist antihero he played so well. (The same year he was a homely, hyperactive Muff Potter, Oates played a blissed-out version of the title role in Dillinger. He was even handsome in it, because, I think, he acted handsome. That's how good he was, the way they say that Peter Sellers, who couldn't sing a note in real life, could muster a fine baritone if he had to play an opera star.)

I wouldn't want to try to improve on Pierson's observations. In her essay, brief, lyrical, and sharp, she has written the song that I wanted from Stipe. Besides, Oates's work with Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman has been pretty thoroughly picked apart. It is worth noting, however, that one of his most acclaimed roles, as G.T.O. in Hellman's Blacktop, is heartbreakingly comic, combining the neediness of Lewis, the loneliness of Chaplin, and the desperate logorrhea of Groucho Marx. But it's just as instructive to watch him as a supporting player in big, traditional comedies. Stravinsky declared that the imagination works best when caged. The same goes for Warren Oates, trapped in some thankless day job working background on a Hollywood farce, sewing a coat of many colors out of the scraps of celluloid tossed his way.

Spielberg's crazy 1979 mess 1941 boasts a whole zoo of character actors doing their best in such cramped confines. The dream cast includes John Belushi, Slim Pickens, Elisha Cook, Jr., Christopher Lee, and Toshiro Mifune, to barely skim the list.

As for Oates, Spielberg criminally bathes that face in shadows, hides those eyes behind big round specs that show only glints of reflected light.

The play between Belushi and Oates (as a Kurtz-like character) is sexual in structure. Oates begins with his resonant, nasal bass rumble, one step removed from Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade. As he and Belushi massage each other's paranoia, Oates's timbre reaches an excitable middle range. The one benefit of Spielberg's approach is that, deprived of his remarkable face, we are tuned into the virtuosity of Oates's voice, as it reaches a frantic crescendo as discordant and American as anything in Charles Ives. He escalates from there, rising to an insane high- pitched nonverbal climax, somethinglike yangyangyangyangyang, when he's begging Belushi to squeeze off a few rounds of his turret-mounted machine guns. Belushi acquiesces, and the two great screen anarchists scream at each other with pure joy and release at the sight and sound of the big, blazing weapons. At least for a moment, the film roars to life with the demonic cataracts of testosterone that appear to have been its only reason for existing.

But this is no environment for free-range character actors, doomed for extinction from the moment Spielberg's dad bought him a camera. To see them in their natural habitat you need to turn back the clock to 1975, and Thomas McGuane's 92 in the Shade. Oates is joined by an all-star roster of cranks, a cranks' hall of fame, including Peter Fonda, Harry Dean Stanton, Burgess Meredith, Elizabeth Ashley, and William Hickey, all of whom are given room to breathe. To see Elizabeth Ashley twirling a baton in her nightie is to witness the last flowering of the species.

Is 92 in the Shade a comedy? That depends on whether Warren Oates shoots Fonda at the end, as he talks about doing all the way through. I'm not going to give it away. But whether it's ultimately a tragedy or not, 92 is crammed with funny scenes and gratifyingly bizarre performances, the best of which belongs to Oates.

This is a strangely measured, internalized Oates, his Hamlet in reverse, a monster of indecision whose constant refrain is "Why did I do that?" He acts, yes, and impulsively (stabbing a buddy with a large hook, for example, or randomly tossing his dinner into the dirt), but never without instant remorse.

McGuane's script gives Oates his finest soliloquies outside of Blacktop: The first a story of how he once killed a man who was dressed as a moth, then a dream of what it would be like to become Arnold Palmer's caddy by day and do nothing but jerk off by night. "It'll be a simple life, but it'll be complete," he murmurs. His delivery is as dry and dangerous as brush in a drought. As usual, you feel that Oates could take off in any direction without warning, but this time all the grinning and aching are on the inside, and his calm recitation of absurdities (the man he killed, he says, "made a wet spot so big you couldn't jump over it in track shoes") produces nervous laughter but no relief. He never lets you off the hook.

By the time of the Bill Murray service comedy Stripes (1981), Oates's face has turned into a beautiful piece of spoiled fruit (he would be dead a year later, at age fifty-three), and his comic center has moved upward. The mouth still does its share of the work, a crazy-quilt of twitches and curdled half-smiles, but Oates's Sergeant Hulka is built around the pain in his eyes.

Here Oates plays straight man to Murray, John Candy, and Harold Ramis. His curse is that he's smarter than them, he's the smartest character in the movie, and he understands the irony, coolness, and bullshit that the youngsters believe they're sailing over his head. A more ordinary straight man -- a Bud Abbott -- would be too dull, pissed-off, or smug to truly care, but Oates allows slivers of their smirky foolishness to get under his skin like splinters of bamboo, and his eyes grow bright with the torture and resignation. His only rival at the unbelieving double take is Oliver Hardy, whose screen character always lacked the brains that give Hulka his poignancy.

Beginning with Groundhog Day, Murray's acting has sometimes taken on the defeated intelligence and wounded romanticism of Oates at his best. Watching Stripes as a non-teenager, I find it hard to understand the overweening contempt that Murray's character develops for the sergeant during basic training...unless it's the dismay we all feel when looking into the future, that day not far from now when the ol' grim reaper will see to it that our smart, spoofy exteriors rot away, finding us as broken, exposed, and abandoned as Warren Oates.

If we're lucky.

-- From The Oxford American