The Big Bang

(James Toback, USA, 1989)

A key theme and structure in the cinema of James Toback is the encounter – whether of two individuals, or many in a group.

For his most colourful and radical excursion into documentary, Toback decided to stage a party-like happening in The Big Bang: get a remarkable group of disparate people, identified only by their “type” (Actor, Gangster, Humourist, Writer, Survivor, and … Girl!) together, and have them discuss the reasonably surreal question: “Did God create the universe in a cosmic orgasm?”

The film is proudly wayward, incoherent, purely associative: everybody (as always in Toback, whether in fiction or documentary mode) ceaselessly performs themselves, and what they discuss (sex, money, power, violence) perfectly mirrors Toback’s imaginary world as expressed in his movie fictions – as well as offering a glimpse into his own social background and connections.

It’s hit-and-miss, like most parties, but compulsively watchable.

The Big Bang is a genial psychodrama, but it evokes well the kind of wild reality at the heart of what I have elsewhere dubbed the documentary temptation besetting predominantly fiction filmmakers – but this time morphing into a fanciful hybrid that anticipates the weirdest moments of Reality Television in the 21st Century, on American programs like The Hills (2006-2010).

Toback returned to this realm, less boldly and more glibly, in Seduced and Abandoned (2013), his Cannes-set document of himself and Alec Baldwin trying to raise money for an unlikely film project titled Last Tango in Tikrit – roping in a crowd of directors and actors along the way.

With its intriguing mélange of the now thoroughly damned – Roman Polanski, Bernardo Bertolucci, Brett Ratner, with Baldwin himself just managing to hang onto respectability by his fingernails – alongside industry heroes like Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, and holier-than-thou Hollywood crusaders like Jessica Chastain, Seduced and Abandoned makes for truly hair-raising viewing post the #MeToo moment.

In 2025 – with a USA court ruling of 1.7 billion dollars against him for sexual assault charges spanning several decades – Toback has ignominiously strode to the head of that pack of the damned. I do not see a cosmic orgasm in his future.

MORE Toback: Black and White, Two Girls and a Guy

© Adrian Martin July 2014 / April 2019 / July 2025