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"FacebookPinterest\n\nyou remember mike, of course. First came the fearsome 20-year-old powerhouse\u2014the youngest heavyweight champ in history\u2014uncomfortably wrapped at 21 around Head of the Class alum Robin Givens\u2019s dainty pinkie. Was that marriage fun or what? Then came Tyson the convicted rapist (less fun), who wrecked his postprison comeback after three years in stir by turning crazed boxing-ring ear-gnawer (fun for everyone but Evander Holyfield). Now meet the newly reflective talking head at the center of James Toback\u2019s chummy doc Tyson. Who said there are no sixteenth rounds in American lives?\n\nNot that we don\u2019t learn some memorable things from Tyson. Even though the movie consists almost entirely of Hamlet-on-demand soliloquies from its now forty-something protagonist, interrupted only by grubby news and fight footage that reminds us how he got to Elsinore, one reason it attracted considerable buzz at both Cannes and Sundance last year is pretty simple: It\u2019s never boring. Some highlights:\n\n\u0095 In case we doubt his hard-won sensitivity, a choked-up Mike wants us to know better: \u201CWhen I was falsely accused of raping that wretched swine of a woman Desiree Washington, it was the most horrible time of my life.\u201D His fawning filmographer never questions Mike\u2019s claim that he was railroaded. The same goes for his ungentlemanly characterization of his accuser, but maybe the DVD will include an interactive Desiree quiz asking viewers to guess the most horrible time of her life. Or maybe not, since Tyson is one of the movie\u2019s producers.\n\n\u0095 Speaking of Hamlet, Mike\u2014who still lisps like Daffy Duck trapped in Yosemite Sam\u2019s body, you\u2019ll be glad to hear\u2014really savors the way ornate words like skulduggery sound when they come out of his mouth. Too much so, in fact, to lose sleep over what they mean. Life is short and he does bat .500 in his two cracks at that one, so I say more supercali-pugilistic power to him.\n\n\u0095 Mike enjoys taking solo walks on the beach while he remembers things past. Or anyhow, Toback can\u2019t get enough of photographing him plodding along in splendid isolation\u2014his Maori facial tattoo greeting the sunset like a dragonfly\u2019s helipad\u2014as Tyson muses away in voice-over. By the time Toback induces him to mournfully recite from\u2014I swear\u2014Oscar Wilde\u2019s \u201CThe Ballad of Reading Gaol,\u201D you wouldn\u2019t blame the seagulls for ercising nature\u2019s version of changing the channel by bailing for Canada.\n\nNaturally, there are a few tidbits we don\u2019t learn from Tyson, starting with that wretched swine of a woman\u2019s court testimony. We do see Givens\u2019s take on their disastrous marriage, courtesy of clips from the couple\u2019s celebrated joint interview with Baba Wawa as the romance went pffft. \u201CIt\u2019s been pure hell\u2014it\u2019s been worse than anything I could possibly imagine,\u201D says Givens with the eerie poise of a stewardess on Inferno Airlines, her husband looking on with the stunned stare of an unexpectedly crucified Easter Bunny. In hindsight he allows that he kind of wishes he\u2019d spoken up.\n\nBut we don\u2019t even get to hear what Holyfield\u2019s ear tasted like. Given that Mike went in for a second chomp before the ref realized he wasn\u2019t hallucinating and stopped their 1997 bout, \u201Cbetter than day-old sushi\u201D would be my best guess, but dammit\u2014I wanted to know.\n\nyou can\u2019t say tyson doesn\u2019t ask for it. Even so, the grotesque side of his career has always made it suspiciously easy to ridicule him at the level I\u2019ve been indulging so far. The basic tension in his public image is that he\u2019s perceived as simulta-n-eously menacing and absurd, an especially loaded combo in this country when the celeb in question is African-American. Tyson turns him into an art object combined with a noble-primitive martyr, but that\u2019s just the admiring version of the same racial prism. I\u2019ll probably get in trouble for putting it this way, but Toback comes awfully close to idolizing Tyson because he\u2019s a rapist\u2014a virile volcano whose superior male prowess turns any qualms lesser dudes have into so much whimpering, pencil-dicked envy.\n\nFor instance, here\u2019s Tyson on Desiree again: \u201CI may have taken advantage of women before,\u201D he grouses, \u201Cbut I never took advantage of her.\u201D Assuming \u201Ctaking advantage\u201D means forced sex, that\u2019s not exactly reassuring, but Toback clearly thinks it\u2019s all the exculpation his hero needs. Just as bad, when Tyson shares his taste for \u201Cstrong, confident\u201D women he can teach who\u2019s the boss by sexually bullying them\u2014\u201CI love saying no when I\u2019m making love,\u201D he confides, by way of clarifying that his pleasure rather than theirs is the point\u2014the camera sits there as raptly as an awed West Point plebe hearing Patton explain how he outfod the Wehrmacht. It\u2019s also hard not to suspect that Tyson, who in some ways is no fool\u2014his judgment may not be so hot, but that\u2019s not the same thing\u2014is giving Toback the Tyson he knows old Jim dotes on.\n\nThe thing is, when it comes to concocting fragrant blends of manly Shinola and calling them cologne, Toback\u2019s movies have been giving new meanings to \u201Cshovel-ready\u201D for decades, from his psychosexual thicket of a directorial debut, 1978\u2019s Fingers\u2014which starred Harvey Keitel as a jumpy white dude with problems, but creamed all over Jim Brown as an impassive black stud too kingly to have any\u2014all the way to 2004\u2019s justly neglected When Will I Be Loved. Not only has he been down this road before; he\u2019s been down it with Tyson, who\u2019s clearly in no position to be choosy about his boosters. The most memorable scene in 1999\u2019s schematic (see title) but incoherent (see movie) Black and White was Tyson\u2019s cameo as himself at a party where he was purringly hit on by both Brooke Shields, playing a tantalized cinema verit\u00E9 filmmaker, and Robert Downey Jr., as her closeted husband.\n\nConfronting Shields afterward, a distraught RDJ voiced what I\u2019m glumly positive is Toback\u2019s idea of every woman\u2019s secret: \u201CYou want a big black man, not a little stingy queen.\u201D Note that the opposite of \u201Cblack\u201D here isn\u2019t white but gay. Then recognize how, up against a brain like Toback\u2019s, you\u2019d be wasting your breath if you tried to protest that more than a few varieties of masculinity exist between those two\u2014false, at least if RuPaul\u2019s any example\u2014extremes.\n\nSince Toback is nonetheless one of \u201Cthe erudites\u201D\u2014Tyson\u2019s own inventive term for intellectuals\u2014he presumably knows at some level that his obsessively sexualized race fetishism is as maggoty as any phlegm a Klansman could cough up. But that may just encourage him to exult even more in putting his non-p.c. id on display. The unpleasant fact is that he\u2019s never been capable of photographing black people as if they\u2019re human beings, let alone judging them as such. In all his films, this one included, they\u2019re exotic talismans, meaningful not for who they are but for what they represent\u2014that is, what he\u2019s projecting onto them. To him, Tyson\u2019s whole allure is patently the same sexy, smoldering Otherness that Jim Brown\u2019s badass regality stood for in Fingers thirty-odd years ago. But in this day and age, you really wish somebody had told him to put a sock in it\u2014or anyhow, on it.\n\nThe rancid side of the director\u2019s fascination shows in how unmistakably he gets off on extended footage of Tyson\u2019s notorious press-conference meltdown before his 2002 bout with Lennox Lewis. \u201CI\u2019ll fuck you in your ass, you punk white boy!\u201D Mike bellows at, presumably, a reporter, adding a new dimension to the Tyson of vanilla America\u2019s nightmares. \u201CYou can\u2019t last two minutes in my world, bitch!\u201D What\u2019s telltale here is the lack of context, since Toback doesn\u2019t give us a clue what or who provoked him\u2014and for maybe the only time in the movie, we don\u2019t get to hear Mike\u2019s account of what was going on in his head back then, either. In other words, at his most unhinged\u2014and in a way, vulnerable\u2014he isn\u2019t being explained. He\u2019s being exhibited.  \n\nRevealingly, the movie isn\u2019t even interested in telling us much about, ahem, boxing\u2014Tyson\u2019s major claim to fame, not to mention the only thing he\u2019s ever been good at. Toback lingers mawkishly over Mike\u2019s recollections of his first trainer, Cus D\u2019Amato, but if you don\u2019t already know what a legend D\u2019Amato was in boxing circles\u2014the mentor who turned both Floyd Patterson and Jos\u00E9 Torres into champions, something the movie doesn\u2019t fill us in on\u2014he\u2019s just a kindly old duffer who made teenage Mike feel valued. Later, Tyson vents about that \u201Cpiece of shit\u201D Don King, and while not many people would dissent from his opinion of boxing\u2019s answer to Eraserhead, it might have been nice to have some reminder of MT\u2019s particular beef with him. (Answer: True to form, the promoter allegedly cheated him out of big money, triggering a lawsuit from Tyson that ended up awarding him $14 million in damages.)\n\nNeither does Tyson give you any sense of the sport\u2019s larger psychological and sociological dramas, the way When We Were Kings did and HBO\u2019s Thrilla in Manila also does. While this ace new documentary about Muhammad Ali\u2019s climactic match versus Joe Frazier reconstructs their epic 1970s rivalry from Frazier\u2019s point of view, Thrilla finds room for other perspectives, ranging from Ali\u2019s fight doctor\u2019s to, so help me, Imelda Marcos\u2019s. We get a lot of fascinating inside dope on the many public and private agendas in play, too\u2014from the uses that hosting a high-profile prizefight has for a dictatorship and the ugly racial politics that informed Ali\u2019s Frazier-baiting to the finale\u2019s unnerving revelation of how deep Frazier\u2019s grudge against his nemesis runs even now.\n\nThe contrast with Tyson\u2019s soapbox soap opera couldn\u2019t be greater. While you could say filmmaker and subject deserve each other and leave it at that, I\u2019m not so sure. Granting that Tyson\u2019s a willing participant, which puts him one up on Desiree Washington, he\u2019s being used anyway\u2014even though I\u2019ll probably get in trouble all over again by saying that one word for Toback\u2019s preening presentation of him is proprietary. If that relationship rings any bells with Tyson, he\u2019s not the only African-American who\u2019s heard them before.\n\ntom carson is a gq correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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