Edward Norton's Primal Fear
In the spring of 1997, Edward Norton strolled into an indie record store with his companion, Courtney Love. Norton was keeping an eye out for titles from certain bands: Berserkr, No Remorse, and Skrewdriver. The speed-metal white- supremacist anthems of such groups had sent an entire generation of racist skinheads into sweaty frenzies throughout Europe and the United States.
Last year, a Detroit-area company sold 50,000 compact discs containing lyrics that advocate white-supremacist beliefs. "Throughout history, music has been used to recruit and unify ultraright movements," explains religious studies professor Carl Raschke of the University of Denver. "The Third Reich couldn't have happened without Hitler's favorite composer, Richard Wagner. For skinheads, White Power music is what binds them." Thus the recruits also turn to Berserkr, known for such disgusting lyrics as "Niggers just hit this side of town, watch my property values go down. Bang, bang, watch them die, watch those niggers drop like flies."
Riffs and rants of this sort were distinctly absent from the sound track of Norton's own life. Sure, he road-tripped from his suburban Maryland cul-de-sac community to thrash around the D.C. hard-core shows of the '80s. And in recent years, he has squired no less than Courtney Love, the empress of alt-rock, known for her feminization of raw grunge. But he had never acquainted himself with anything so dangerous as this sphere of hatred.
Norton needed to hear that kind of headbanging music to fully enter into the world of neo-Nazi Derek Vineyard, the character he would be playing in his upcoming film, American History X. In this searing saga, a young Californian struggles to save himself and his brother from the hateful demimonde of racists. Norton, who was 27 years old at the time of his character research, had just pored over Ingo Hasselbach's Fuhrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi, a confused youth's story of rising through the ranks of East Germany's skinhead movement and eventually abandoning the cause.
Casually, as if requesting just another Sex Pistols or Fugazi release, the soft-spoken Norton asked the record clerk if they carried any Skrewdriver CDs. The clerk gave him a strange, icy stare. "No, we don't," he said sharply.
Outside the store, a slightly bewildered Norton was gently chastised by Love. "You can't go into a record store and ask for that stuff," she explained. "Some stores might have it in the back, but asking for it outright
makes people really uncomfortable." An odd scenario: The button-pushing lead singer of Hole fretting that this decorous '91 Yale University alum was making people "really uncomfortable." But Norton has savvy to spare; the
actor eventually secured the hate-rock CDs through what he slyly calls "indirect routes."
Derek Vineyard of Venice Beach could easily be played as a repulsive, bilious supremacist, but Norton wants movie audiences to arrive at a more complicated understanding of him. Imagine the assignment: Make a skinhead believable by making him somehow, somewhat sympathetic. This could be accomplished only with a daring team of actors and creative minds, whom Norton describes as "people who understood we had the potential to touch the nerve of a very potent reality in contemporary American life, people who are willing to tread into that dangerous territory." The film's team knew that creative projects describing racial hatred always laid themselves open to misinterpretation. "You are taking a shot at doing something for the very best of reasons -- you know, absolutely unimpeachable reasons," Norton says, "but you could still end up offending people."
Norton worries that giving the groups exposure could be perceived as giving them credence. "The importance of these extremist groups shouldn't be overstated," Norton says. "But they're disturbing because their intolerance flies so directly in the face of what this country is supposed to be about. Our nation's founding credo celebrates the potential for diversity, so these types of expressions of violence are intolerable."
The drama confronts racial themes through an exploration of kinship: Derek delves headfirst into the Aryan underworld and witnesses his younger brother, Danny, being lured in as well. Danny gets into trouble at school for his racist outbursts, and a thoughtful teacher forces him into a one-on-one tutorial (the teenager entitles his writing assignment "American History X") that will lead the teen to confront the idiocy of prejudice. The drama is brought to the screen by 45-year-old Tony Kaye, a first-time feature director who has an activist track record with Greenpeace and Partnership for a Drug-Free America; the cause of Romanian orphans; and a soon-to-be-released documentary, G-D, which examines the abortion debate in the U.S. Kaye earned headlines as he combated New Line Cinema in order to win another time extension on his editing deadline. Remarkably, the impatient studio sent Norton himself into an editing bay to help shape a new cut of the film at one point during the impasse. Now New Line is determined to send its own edit out to theaters in October. Already, the studio has screened the rough cut for Amnesty International leaders and won that group's strong endorsement. Ever the activist, Kaye has threatened to dispatch legions of protesters to march under marquees and denounce the studio version as rubbish.
It seems clear from the prerelease fracas that the postrelease controversies will be even more spirited. And much of that reaction will center on Norton's gift as an actor, which compels viewers to look past the horrors depicted and consider whether a person is born a racist or can be lured into and out of that mind-set. Those acting skills have already been on display in Norton's portrayal of the supposedly schizophrenic teenager in Primal Fear, the unimposing lawyer in The People vs. Larry Flynt, and the boy next door in Woody Allen's musical Everyone Says I Love You.
For his recent role, Norton transmogrified into a muscle-bound skinhead through a steady protein-rich diet. "It wasn't that difficult," he says, picking at a salad, having slimmed down just a few months after filming. Norton sports loose gray slacks, a green bowling shirt, and navy blue Pumas as we sit talking in Red, a Beverly Boulevard eatery in Hollywood. It's early afternoon and he has just awakened, his eyes bloodshot from too little sleep; he's clearly not eager to return to work on his next film later that evening on location near Long Beach. As he scratches his stubble, which sprouts in wiry patches, Norton sounds like any of those rock singers whose offstage speech is soft, betraying a slight sense of embarrassment that they're famous.
Off the set, Norton is undemonstrative, clearly not a type A personality. His deliberate cadence quickens when the topic of Tina Brown arises. Under Brown's aegis, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair had consistently mocked his girlfriend. (Should Brown dare to inhabit the 213 area code in her new role as developer of a new magazine for Miramax, Love has promised to "throw her right the fuck back out.") After the most recent New Yorker jibe in a review of a documentary about Love, Norton sent the magazine a frameable letter, one that had the clarion ring of a debating-club captain in a fit of pique. He chastised critic Daphne Merkin for "her conclusion that Courtney was of more value as an icon of pain and self-destruction than she is as a complex, evolving, and healthy human being -- a conclusion that is sexist, intellectually shallow, and spiritually bankrupt."
Rhetoric in its extreme has filled Norton's mind of late as he has ingested hate tomes and pamphlets and communed with some Southern California skin heads who took him in. At a state prison, Norton became acquainted with white power convicts who imparted their warped wisdom.
Norton is convinced that the most vivid antiheroes are toppled by a fatal flaw -- not overreaching but uncontrollable bouts of blind rage. "I love the idea implicit in those old tragedies," Norton says, "which is that the audience can be saved the pain of the lesson by watching a character they identify with learning a life lesson through a hard fall." Derek is a politicized racist imbued with street smarts, a touch of rock-star charisma, and true compassion for those closest to him. Yet, by allowing anger to dictate his actions, he brings himself and his family crashing down.
"While making the film, I thought, God, I hope we aren't painting hate crimes as something more than they are -- or almost giving [white hate] more credibility as a social force than it deserves," Norton admits. "Then, right on the heels of having a line of thought like that, the very next day in the news there was this report of skinheads in Orange County who had gone into a grocery store and beaten up a bunch of migrant workers and videotaped it." That gave the film's creative team pause. "We immediately went back to the script and replaced a gay-bashing scene with this real account, because it was something that literally happened." Norton adds, "The way Derek kills one of the black guys who attacks his house -- putting his mouth on a curb and stomping on his neck -- that was all material straight out of news clippings."
And there are plenty of these horrors playing out in the headlines, although not always on page one. Since the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, the FBI's domestic counterterrorism budget has nearly tripled, with the addition of 350 new agents. "Another Oklahoma City could happen tomorrow," Robert Blitzer, head of the FBI's terrorism section, noted recently. "There are a lot of people out there with a potential for violence." Among the feds' concerns is that supposedly religion-driven neo-Nazi extremists are conducting a 1,000-day countdown to the millennium, when they believe a liberating "end-time" race war will occur.
Most disturbing of all is that skinheads are making inroads among middle-class teenagers, like those depicted by Norton and 21-year-old Edward Furlong of Terminator 2 fame. The World Church of the Creator, a virulently neo-Nazi group with 33
chapters, recently put up a World Wide Web page aimed at elementary-school children. Under the heading "Creativity for Children!" its colorful, cartoonish graphics look as friendly as Sesame Street characters. In the small type is the site's stated aim:
"To help the younger members of the White Race understand our fight."
The residents of Norton's hometown always prided themselves on their goals for racial harmony -- and their successes. The Norton household in Columbia, Maryland, was an environment tailor-made to nurture talent and ambition. Born into a highly educated and accomplished family, Norton lived with the privileges and obligations that came with being the grandson of James Rouse, the urban-renewal entrepreneur and urban-planning visionary. Rouse essentially invented the shopping mall, the commercial center of his impeccably planned city of Columbia, and then set his sights on reviving America's downtowns through such projects as Boston's Faneuil Hall, Baltimore's Harborplace, and New York's South Street Seaport. Although the suburban development seems antiseptic to those who prefer bright lights and big cities, Columbia has achieved something most cities would envy: a lasting, workable amalgam of rich, poor, middle-class, black, white, Hispanic, and Asian families who live, work, and go to school with one another essentially without incident -- or even awareness that this is unusual. Growing up in Columbia helped Norton believe in the "whole melting pot phenomenon," as he puts it.
Edward's father, a prominent environmental activist and former federal prosecutor, is now director of public policy at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. His mother, Robin, taught at the local high school and worked for a civic trust before she died in March 1997 of brain cancer at the age of 54. "My parents are lifetime lovers and supporters of the arts and theater and film," Norton says. "My uncles are musicians and painters and all kinds of stuff. I grew up in an environment in which the arts were a regular part of our lives."
Ever since Norton saw Sir Ian McKellen perform his famous Shakespearean monologues, he has regarded acting as not just a route to fame but a means to challenge the minds of an audience. He started out at Yale as an astronomy major but quickly discovered that physics was "gonna be a hurdle too difficult to vault." So he majored in history, became fluent in Japanese, and performed in such campus plays as Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Allen's Don't Drink the Water. Not until 1993 -- two years after he graduated -- did he decide to become a full-time actor. Norton tried writing scripts and appeared in off-off-Broadway plays. He also put in hours at the Enterprise Foundation, a group founded by his grandparents to fund low-income housing. His big break as an actor came in 1995, when he lied during an audition for the Aaron Stampler character in Primal Fear; Norton claimed to hail from the same part of Appalachian Kentucky as the author had chosen for Stampler's home.
The inside of Norton's modest Los Angeles ranch home looks like a careless college student's quarters, where everything has its place in a misplaced sort of way. The furniture looks used and unloved, and even the beautiful Persian carpet is grungy at the edges. In his study, bookshelves are stocked with works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Halprin, Joseph Conrad, and J.D. Salinger. The paperback Salingers seem most emblematic of Norton, who could create a wholly believable celluloid version of Holden Caulfield.
Maggie, a stray tabby with white paws, meows with all the melancholy of her melodramatic namesake in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. "I came home one day, and the cat just walked into the house," Norton explains. "It was all flea-ridden and hungry, so I cooked a hot dog in the microwave, took the cat to a vet, and it's never left." He lives in a modest home, and modesty is Norton's calling card. His Los Angeles friends -- like Drew Barrymore and Matt Damon -- attest that he's a competent electric-guitar player, a fact that he flatly denies. As we catalog the artists he admires -- Woody Allen and Rainer Maria Rilke -- Norton fiddles with a silver slide-guitar holder as if it were his version of a cigarette, occasionally pushing it through his tousled hair. He fidgets when talking about himself and becomes electrified when discussing Nazism or NAFTA or generational politics.
He is careful to issue only measured political proclamations, as any child of baby boomers has learned to do. "I don't feel comfortable making any broad statements about the state of extreme politics in America," Norton declares. "But I do think American History X is an attempt to explore the specific sort of tragedy of lives dominated and destroyed by anger and hate."
The actor likes sliding into the skin of sincere outsiders, complicated antiheroes in the Marlon Brando tradition. It's as if he were bored with his own Ivy League white-bread heritage and wishes he could be somebody else more authentically interesting than himself. Sure, the poker ace called Worm, whom Norton plays in Rounders, is a liar and a cheat, but Worm is authentic. "I had the makeup artists make a tattoo of the ace of spades on my wrist because that's Worm's whole philosophy in life: Always keep an ace up your sleeve," Norton explains. The irrepressibly deviant Worm lures his old poker pal Mike (played by Damon) back into New York's secret poker clubs to help pay off a debt. "Worm has accepted who he is, and he knows that Mike needs to embrace the fact that he is a poker player at heart," Norton says. (Message from the Holden Caulfield of Norton's stacks: Phonies, reform!) To prepare, Damon and Norton ventured into the backroom poker joints of Manhattan, fascinated by the mind games.
Where does this quest for authenticity come from? Ask any leading demographer, and you'll learn that American culture is in the midst of a generational transition; baby boomers, now fully empowered in the workforce, have abandoned many of the lofty ideals that they instilled in their children. And boomers, who control much of the media coverage of U.S. society, exhibit "dismissive disdain" toward all things they sneeringly dub Generation X. "They've given us this sort of slacker image," Norton complains. "They've deconstructed us as these oversimplified, angst-ridden, aimless, hesitant, negative figures, and I think it's condescending ... and underestimates the depth of our despair." He admits amusement when they "get all pissy because they can't understand us."
If a label must be applied to the "children of television," who grew up bombarded by "endless information" and twisted by "media oversensationalism," Norton says he prefers the "Whatever Generation." This is a group with little patience for ideology, since they grew up under parents who came to discard their agendas for social equality, preferring more individual goals. "The baby boomers radically underestimate the difference between the world they grew up in and the world we grew up in," he says. While Norton admires certain movies from the 1960s -- he mentions The Graduate and Dr. Strangelove -- he has had it with Rolling Stone magazine, which he deems "the ultimate curmudgeonly, establishment baby-boomer magazine that has nothing to say about what's really going on in young America today."
Whatevers are hesitant to embrace just about anything, willing to keep options open, fearful of the limitations, the messiness of commitment -- whether to an ideal, an institution, or even another individual. "There is a reason that kids in my generation did heroin instead of coke -- everybody wanted to check out," Norton maintains. "The hesitancy in my generation is just apparent in all kinds of ways. We're taking much longer to get married. We're very hesitant about plunging into things because everything moves so fast. It seems like a protracted adolescence, but it's a very adult skepticism. My hope is that it proves to be healthy, which cynicism is not."
Norton says all this in his dressing-room trailer on the set of his next movie project, Fight Club, in a vacant lot across from the Union 76 refinery in the grimy L.A. harbor. The stench outside clarifies what Jack London meant when he declared, "This is the twentieth century, and we stink of gasoline." In a few minutes he has to rehearse a comic boxing scene with fellow actor Brad Pitt. Fight Club is based on a 1996 novel by Portland, Oregon, author Chuck Palahniuk; the book is one of Norton's favorites, and one he considers a Whatever Generation classic. It's a surrealist manifesto against the sameness of everything, the franchising of culture, the texturelessness of modern life, the numbness of consumerism gone haywire, and the hollowness of pursuing a career. The Fight Club grows into a large, anarchistic group that holds anti-modernity protests, including bombings of financial buildings.
The location set is littered with rental trucks, from which cords and cameras and trunks are unloaded. A buffet is available for the crew in an old warehouse turned dining hall, where Cremora powder gets dumped into Styrofoam cups of lukewarm coffee, fuel for a long night's work. Above the bustle looms a broken yellow-and-red neon sign that reads TOPLESS, high above the weeds that spring up through the asphalt. The lot chosen for this scene once belonged to a dingy L.A. strip club where dancers dreamed that their curvy assets were tickets to celluloid glory in the Hollywood Promised Land. As if on a painted back drop, a red sun dips into the smog-enshrouded hills where countless calm communities sit like forlorn glowing toadstools, under which bored teen agers might just be learning to hate.
Norton and Pitt shadow-punch each other dozens of times to prove their vitality, and I recall that Norton mentioned earlier that he and Courtney Love had ringside seats for the infamous heavyweight bout between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield. Tyson was trying to recapture the title but clearly felt that the deck was stacked against him. "I could see Tyson in the first round when he thought he had been head-butted," Norton recalled. "He kept looking over his shoulder at the referee and sort of gesticulating, like, Come on, are you going to call it? I said something to my girlfriend like, 'He thinks he didn't get a call,' or something like that. And you could see him go back into the corner and just resign himself to a fatalistic outcome, like, They're never going to let me win, so I'm just going to tear it up. Then he bit Holyfield's ear off. It felt sad at that moment -- very fatalistic and self-destructive."
Norton is learning to think and juke and pose like a boxer, but he still evinces a Woody Allenesque vulnerability, a resigned sadness that makes one wonder what Charlie Chaplin may have thought about when he watched the Hollywood sunset between takes. Like Allen and Chaplin before they achieved fame, for the moment he is the Whatever Generation's Little Tramp, still a believer that art matters more than celebrity. But he also believes that complaining is a universal nuisance that undermines the serenity essential for endurance. And that convinces you: As an actor, Edward Norton will endure.
Hollywood Online's Movie Talk section [broken links] has sound clips from interviews with actors. One of clips of Edward Norton is him describing why he was not satisfied with this article (under American History X heading).
Here are his comments on the article:
"This guy Doug Brinkley whose a terrific historian. He's down at the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans and he knows all this stuff about extreme politics. He set out to write this piece using the film as a jumping off point for talking about extreme politics, which thrilled me since 'cause that sounded like a substantive discussion and appropriate to George. But I don't even know what they were doing. But they go and they turned it into what books are on my living room shelf. What a waste of an opportunity.. and described my very expensive Persian rugs as ratty. [a laugh] I was really depressed.
Go to Audio clips and hear the clip for yourself
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