Some artists are just so damn talented that you want to hate them but simply can’t. This is no new revelation, but the feeling of getting gut-punched by someone’s ability – even someone who you’ve always admired – never goes away (I’m sure you all feel the same when you read one of my reviews). With Silver Screen Fiend, his second memoir after Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Patton Oswalt proves that he absolutely belongs in this pantheon. It’s not enough for him to be one of the funniest men on the planet – his bit about Black Angus is one of the most hilarious three minutes you’ll ever hear – but he’s also one of the most thoughtful, and even lyrical. Parts of Silver Screen Fiend, about Oswalt’s addiction to filmgoing, are downright poetic, and it’s truly a joy and a thrill to read.
Oswalt (who just played a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall, because fuck it, why stop at being excellent at just one thing?) has never shied away from his love of film. It’s infiltrated his standup routines for years, even if the crowd might not understand why a casually dropped reference to Klaus Kinski is funny, or why ESPN was so crazy to hire producer Robert Evans as a spokesman. Okay, I need to stop with the examples, or this review will turn into 500 words of me repeating Patton Oswalt routines verbatim. (Not that part of me wouldn’t enjoy that.)
A lot of Silver Screen Fiend revolves around Oswalt returning to LA’s famed New Beverly theater night after night, ritualistically checking screenings off on a checklist made up of five film encyclopedias. But that’s the template for a much simpler, more self-indulgent book, where the author rattles off film after film, saying “This one was good, that one was bad.” Silver Screen Fiend is subtitled Learning About Life From an Addiction to Film, and it treats itself as an addiction memoir.
And for no reason save for the fact that these are the five volumes in front of me as I sit cross-legged on my living room floor, I decided that part of My Training will be to see how many titles I can star, date and place-name in these books. These five books. At the time, I’m thinking “How many in one year?”
Oswalt’s self-effacing, conversational style of writing means that his book never goes to the same dark places as, say, Nikki Sixx’s The Heroin Diaries or Johnny Cash’s Man in Black, but the toll that his addiction took on his life is nevertheless important. He was let go from a writing gig on MADtv, he alienated friends, he performed less frequently…but he never stopped loving the junk, as it were. (Speaking of junk, it took seeing The Phantom Menace twice in one week to snap Oswalt back to reality.)
Silver Screen Fiend succeeds because of how funny, and honest, and truthful, and…well, it just succeeds, period. I didn’t want this book to end, which is one of the kindest criticisms you can level at anything, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that Patton Oswalt got “clean,” so to speak, but if he ever relapses, at least we know we’re going to get another great book out of it.
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