Silver Screen Fiend is Patton Oswalt’s answer to Permanent Midnight. It’s a cautionary tale for film buffs– or anyone geeked out on anything outside of real life. While it may not feature stories of Oswalt sleeping under park benches, it certainly provokes self-examination for anyone who starts losing sight of reality when they confuse it with a movie screen.
Fans of Oswalt’s dark, sarcastic, and endlessly pop culture-referencing stand-up comedy will no doubt appreciate Fiend. It is an improvement on his previous book-writing endeavor, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. While that effort contained much to love, it was also a bit rambling and unfocused. It resembled more of a series of long-winded (though typically hilarious) stand-up routine outtakes than it did a collection of works worthy to be released as one volume. Oswalt’s writing in Fiend is more disciplined and direct, though still not perfect, as it sometimes lacks the necessary emotional resonance to become truly involving or rewarding.
Like any successful addiction story, Oswalt’s detailing of his compulsivity and his downward spiral is the true draw of Silver Screen Fiend. His obsessive records of all the films he watched from 1995-1999 can be exhausting, but they’re also necessary to fully appreciate Oswalt’s self-awareness (in hindsight, of course), which dominates the tone of the book. He candidly recalls racing across Los Angeles at dangerous speeds to make last-minute double features on multiple occasions. He loses friends for his obnoxious inability to talk about anything but his current tastes in cinema. Most tellingly, he recounts a time when he made his then-girlfriend walk alone to her car late at night in Hollywood so he could finish the film he was watching without disruption.
The primary flaw to Silver Screen Fiend is that Oswalt, unfortunately, still has the tendency to write like a stand-up. He gets to the punchline of his anecdotes and often ends his retellings too abruptly afterwards. Many of his accounts are crying for more detail about how far down the well of addiction Oswalt’s obsessive geekiness took him. There is also little insight provided into the personal flaws that took him there in the first place (though, as fans already know, that information is readily available in much of his stand-up).
So it’s not exactly The Basketball Diaries. What makes Silver Screen Fiend an overall success is that it, like Patton Oswalt’s comedy in general, is fully aware of just how nerdy it is. The book should be required reading for any film buff as a cautionary tale to remember real life when one catches themself falling into the vortex of endless, and eventually joyless, movie-watching.
GRADE: B+
