My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin

into the psychology of failure. Halfhearted defenses are offered. Actors are praised. Claims are made that criticsand audiences misunderstood his project and its aims. There are weary concessions of friction and ultimately critical and commercial failure. In the most poignant part of the interview, Altman concedes that guests intermittently come over to the Altmansion and want to watch
O.C. And Stiggs,
sometimes to laugh with it and sometimes to laugh at it.
    Altman argues that audiences and
National Lampoon
wanted Robert Altman’s
Porky’s
and were flummoxed when he delivered a satire of teen schlock instead. I think
O.C. And Stiggs
is a satire, but less of teen sex comedies than of the things that always enraged Altman: consumerism, hypocrisy, racism, and the general self-absorption of well-fed Caucasians. Altman occasionally comes off like the misanthropic cheap-shot artist his critics accused him of being—like all ’80s teen sex comedies, this one seems to think homosexuality is inherently hilarious—but behind the snark lies principled contempt toward the complacency and sun-baked decadence of the Reagan ’80s.
    Adapted from recurring characters in
National Lampoon, O.C. And Stiggs
centers on a pair of bored, wildly codependent teens whose sole mission in life is to bedevil the Schwabs, a wealthy family led by Randall Schwab (Paul Dooley), an insurance kingpin whose hilariously stiff commercial concedes that his company simply won’t tolerate such abominations as “drinking” or “the continent of Africa.” The eponymous wisenheimers wage a campaign of psychological warfare against Randall for doing wrong by “Gramps” Ogilvie (Ray Walston), the crusty ex-cop granddad of either O.C. or Stiggs (damned if I can tell the difference). They call Africa on Randall’s dime. They sabotage his daughter’s wedding by getting his son, Randall Jr. (Jon Cryer), to go nuts with a machine gun.
    Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry play the eponymous mischief makers with the smirking superiority of people forever enjoying a private joke at the world’s expense. Like the Van Wilders and Ferris Buellers to follow, they put invisible air quotes around everything they say and do. Yet in their own snotty way, they’re out to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They’re simultaneously smug assholes and righteous avengers.
    In the film’s climax, the boys invite a wide cross-section of Arizona’s housing-free population to party at the Schwab house. As things get increasingly out of control, the title characters call in Dennis Hopper’s deranged veteran Sponson—a buddy of the boys and co-conspirator in their mischief brigade—to fly in with his helicopter and bring a little Vietnam to Casa De Schwab. As the veteran and his buddy fly over a pool-festooned suburban wasteland, they’re at a loss for which gaudy nouveau-riche house to invade. “They all look the same!” Sponson marvels in horror as he surveys one Stepford home after another, in a sly commentary on suburban conformity that rings even truer today.
    All the while, a television broadcasts the inane natterings of H. Ross Perot–like demagogue Hal Phillip Walker. Introduced in Altman’s 1975 masterpiece
Nashville,
he riveted the nation in that film with questions like, “Have you stood on a high and windy hill and heard the acorns drop and roll?” and “Have you walked in the valley beside the brook, walked alone and remembered?” And perhaps most trenchantly, “Does Christmas smell like oranges to you?”
    So when Hopper, playing a gonzo caricature of himself in full-on wild-eyed hippie-freak mode, invades the Schwabs, it’s
Apocalypse Now
colliding with
Nashville
in a suburban Arizona bomb shelter in the mid-’80s. It’s Robert Altman prankishly making one of his most reviled films into an unwitting, half-assed sequel to one of