I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.

Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

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“Freud’s ultimate impulse, the reason why he did all his creative work, was to get laid –– which is ultimately a highly creative act.”

That’s a quote from Nick Nolte, pulled from Nick Nolte: No Exit, Tom Thurman’s experimental, quasi-existential documentary on the actor, his inner life, and his somewhat incredible journey from one dubious achievement to another: first PEOPLE Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, then, just ten years later, star of the most mockable celebrity mug shot in recent history. (It’s the latter achievement that seems to give Nolte greater pleasure––the mug shot is prominently displayed in a laugh-out-loud bizarre flash intro on his official website.)

The nature of the quote––its balance between absurdity and plausibility, its revision of history through the lens of impulse––makes it seem like it just as well could have been housed by Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, the other film I saw on my last day of screenings in Cannes. In addition to sharing an interest in the relationship between excess and art, both films offer us stories presented through the eyes of older men of some notoriety, offering dispatches from a space on the dividing line between mainstream celebrity culture and a tangetial space––dirtier, less stable, less a sub-culture than an afterworld.

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I’m running off to the airport shortly and will be away from the computer until Friday afternoon Cannes time, but here’s a quick look at the news coming out of the festival as of Thursday morning:

• Un Conte de Noel, Surveillance, and The Pleasure of Being Robbed have been picked up. The former two were bought by IFC; the latter two deals were all but confirmed before the festival began.
• David Lynch’s production company is putting together ALejandro Jodorowsky’s next film. Described as a “metaphysical spaghetti gangster film,” it’s set to star Nick Nolte, Asia Argento, Marilyn Manson and Udo Kier. Also, Lynch himself will allegedly team with the so-hot-right-now (tee hee) Werner Herzog on My Son, My Son, “a horror-tinged murder drama based on a true story,” set for a “guerrilla-style digital video shoot on Coronado Island” in March.
• People are, apparently, freaking out over Waltz with Bashir, that Israeli animated doc that I wrote about yesterday.