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Prince’s Purple Haze

By Gary Arnold  July 27, 1984

Prince, a foppish, kinkily suggestive young sheik of the rock music tribes, is surely the most exotic pop culture plant ever nurtured in Minneapolis. In “Purple Rain,” opening today at area theaters, he offers himself as an object of adoration.

Evidently a thinly fictionalized elaboration of the star’s private mythology, the movie drapes a dozen glittery music video production numbers around a maudlin plot depicting the “catharsis” of an egotistic rock idol called The Kid. But it’s catharsis on the cheap; there’s no reason to accept the pretense that the hero has suffered much and changed for the better unless you’re predisposed to get swoony over Prince himself. And that is a difficult proposition for someone of my generation and tastes, since he resembles nothing so much as Donna Summer with a goofy mustache and stirs a nostalgic fondness for James Brown and Little Richard, who used to go through similar motions in a consciously humorous style.

“Purple Rain” celebrates show-business narcissism and drenches it in a kind of cheap-perfume imagery, which owes its basic inspiration to the cliche’s of advertising art. At once the most outrageous vanity spectacle since Barbra Streisand’s revision of “A Star Is Born” and the most lavish music video since “Flashdance,” the film is undeniably for anyone who finds such spectacles a treasure trove of delusion and inadvertent hilarity. No doubt it is otherwise for a viewer in thrall to Prince.

The movie was shot in and around Minneapolis, where Prince makes his curiously provincial but lucrative headquarters, and the cast is evidently recruited largely from colleagues and cronies. For example, The Kid headlines a band called The Revolution, identical with Prince’s real-life (you should excuse the euphemism) group. His delightfully mocking rival, Morris, is played by Morris Day, more or less duplicating the funk-rock act he does with his usual group, The Time, as well as the comedy routine he does with an amusing flunky impersonated by Jerome Benton. The heroine, a dishy groupie called Apollonia, is played by Apollonia Kotero, who appears in an act called Apollonia 6 that originated under Prince’s sponsorship. The act consists of three women singing numbers with subtle titles like “Sex Shooter” while costumed in vintage bordello gear.

When the voluptuous Apollonia wanders into the First Avenue, the nightclub where The Kid and Morris compete every night for public favor, it appears to be a case of passion at first note. The Kid’s selfish tendencies supposedly provoke her to seek a professional alliance with the gleefully lecherous Morris – never a convincing switch, by the way – but she returns even more loyal than before after a climactic family tragedy turns The Kid into a paragon of false humility.

The movie is at its safest when allowing director Albert Magnoli, fresh from an award-winning apprenticeship at the University of Southern California film school, to add a dynamic layer of illustrative gloss to the frequent musical interludes. Bathed in fashion-conscious compositions and reinforced by lavish rock orchestrations, the leads might pass as exploitable objects of erotic contemplation, even though the nature of the interplay takes a repeatedly peculiar turn by displaying Prince as the partner more inclined to take the passive, do-with-me-what-you-will role in moments of clinical intimacy. Ultimately, the movie leaves you convinced that Prince requires a colossal amount of ego-stroking.

When the audio-visual spell is allowed to recede long enough to permit the characters to exchange dialogue, the illusion goes pfffffttt, since it’s absurdly obvious that these untrained, uninflected speaking voices are strictly Amateur Night in Minneapolis. The film should probably carry a disclaimer along the following lines: “Warning: Some sequences may contain dialogue too funny for the context.”

In addition, the sexual presumption and offensiveness built into Prince’s act are softened to a considerable extent by the prissiness of his presence – diminutive and whispery, he’s such a toy of a macho rocker that it may be impossible to take any of his affectations seriously.

It’s pretty astonishing to find a performer of The Kid’s apparent magnitude still living at home – in a basement sanctuary where he’s accustomed to seek refuge from the brawls of his parents. The key to The Kid’s personality is evidently the emotional turmoil he suffers torn between Mom and Dad – or between the Feminine and Masculine, to get ludicrously simple about it, which the movie emphatically does. The parents, played by Olga Karlatos and Clarence Williams III (who actually projects the image of an embittered disillusionment far more impressively than the inane material deserves), remain strangely oblivious to the luminary in their basement, since they’re too busy trading insults and punches. The script, credited to Magnoli and William Blinn, never begins to dramatize the hero’s Freudian conflicts adequately, but it’s perhaps more entertaining to watch such a brazen attempt at schematization.

The hypocrisy of the conception is lavishly exposed during the finale, when the star uses his freshly acquired humility to generate a tidal wave of adoration from his fans. And not only the fans, since even archrival Morris must admit that The Kid has no peer. What should one make of the fact that The Kid’s final response to all this fealty is to playfully spray the audience with a nozzle attachment hooked to his musical instrument? Whatever it means, I guess they’ve asked for nothing better.