Abel Raises Cain (2005)
Directed by Jenny
Abel
Crashcourse
Documentaries, 82 minutes, Not-rated (but totally PG-13)
★★ ½
When Alan Abel died on September 14, 2018, the New York Times obituary was headed:
"Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at
94." The Times was alluding to
an embarrassing moment from its past. In 1980, Abel fed the paper a fake
obituary, complete with the hysterical tidbit that he had died while filming a
vampire film titled Who Will Bite Your
Neck, Dear, When All My Teeth are Gone? To its credit, the Times did use a fact-checker, who was
hoodwinked by the actors Abel hired to portray everyone from the undertaker to
his grieving widow.
When Abel passed for real, some newspapers credited him with
having invented "fake news." That's not true, and it's also
self-serving. Abel was a hoaxster, but a good-natured one whose aim was, in his
words, to give the public "a kick in the intellect." Jenny Abel
documented her father's eccentricities more than a decade ago. As she makes
clear, her childhood was filled with hilarity, but not a lot of money; her dad
refused to cash in on his elaborate pranks and her mother, Jeanne, was his
number one enabler. And what wonderful bamboozles they were.
In 1959, for example, he formed the Society for Indecency to
Naked Animals (SINA), and launched crude staged protests with signs depicting
cows in muumuus and dogs wearing shorts. He kept SINA going for more than a
decade. In 1963, self-proclaimed supporters even picketed the White House. Those
supporters were apparently grammatically challenged, as the conjunction "for"
and the preposition "to" are jokes within a joke that suggested that
SINA was in favor of indecency! As SINA attracted media attention, Abel called
upon a friend to help him script the organization's material: a then unknown
Buck Henry using the pseudonym G. Clifford Prout.
A sampling of other Abel hoaxes included a fake
celebrity lottery winner, the Topless String Quintet, the International Sex
Bowl, and the write-in presidential campaigns of Yetta Bronstein in 1964 and
1968. In taped interviews Yetta—Jeanne in an outrageous Yiddish grandmother
guise—proclaimed: "Vote for Yetta and things will get betta." Aside
from SINA, Abel's most flamboyant pranks were Omar's School for Beggars, a
training course for panhandlers, and the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which
briefly tricked David Duke into accepting an offer to guest conduct! During the
Watergate hearings, Abel struck again and posed as a Beltway insider who
claimed to possess the missing 18 ½ minutes of tape that would incriminate
President Nixon.
Sound outrageous and unbelievable? Maybe not these days. If
there is any solace, it wasn't any better back then. The media ate it up. Abel
appeared on shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Phil Donohue, Jenny Jones, Jerry
Springer, and Morton Downey, Jr. Even news anchors such as Tom Snyder and
Walter Cronkite fell prey. Some were infuriated when they discovered they'd
been had. Isn't it often the case that people get angry with others when their
own laziness is to blame? Abel was often filmed wearing cheesy and obvious
disguises. Worse still, he was on air dozens of times without disguise and under his own name, though he had written
several books about his practical jokes and was known to the media. He got away
with it because journalists often failed to do their homework. Scholars have
written about Watergate's deleterious effects on news-gathering. Abel was indeed
a kick in the intellect but, alas, the joke was on him; sensationalism
triumphed.
You will have noticed I've said little about the
documentary. You can and should watch it on Vimeo to appreciate how Abel was
the P. T. Barnum of the television age. It is, though, a rather crude effort—as
family documentaries often are. It is the only film Jenny Abel ever directed,
and she is among a long line of directors who stumbled because she couldn't get
sufficient distance from her subject. There is a lot of
repetition and her film frequently fragments both chronology and the narrative,
and I don't mean in any arty or hipster fashion. It often feels like the work of
a film school novice. What is good about it, though, is that Jenny Abel had
access to rich archival material and her father's own notes, videotapes, and
presence.
Abel Raises Cain
is ultimately about an eccentric jokester. It is both funny and a sobering
prelude to the age of Trump. If it disturbs you, don't blame Alan Abel. It's
our own damn fault for not paying closer attention.
Rob Weir
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