The Manhood Behind the Mustache
by Ada Calhoun
November 2, 2007
Rob Perri is an L.A.-dwelling twenty-eight-year-old filmmaker with some serious nostalgia for the pre-steroids baseball games he watched growing up on Long Island. He especially loved the '86 Mets, a hardscrabble gang of slutty, drug-addled young men led to victory by the Golden Glove-winning, mustachioed first baseman Keith Hernandez.
Perri's twenty-minute, extremely unauthorized documentary/satire I'm Keith Hernandez is a love letter to Keith and his undeniable sex appeal, an alpha-male cockiness seemingly out of date, but, as Perri argues, ripe for a comeback. The over-the-top short uses footage from the famous "Let's Go Mets!" music video, from Hernandez's dreamboat guest spots on Seinfeld, and from '80s baseball games in which the players steal and spit with a suspiciously twitchy, nose-rubbing verve. There's also a porn clip starring either Hernandez or a Hernandez look-alike. "Is that really him?" I asked Perri. "I don't know," he said quickly. Uh-huh.
It doesn't matter. The images of Hernandez or "Hernandez" and the appreciative voice-overs by Perri create a baseball-star fever dream that has an emotional and cultural truth, even if it's half-fantasy. It makes for one of the funniest, smartest movies about baseball in ages. — Ada Calhoun
Are you still a Mets fan?
Yeah. [Their loss this year] was terrible. I still like the Yankees, too, so I was devastated twice. It was sort of a bad, bad post-season.
Yeah, I found it traumatic.
I find it a little bit tough to watch baseball now. I'm not as excited about it as I was when I was a kid in the '80s. Now it's so shiny and jazzed up. I just can't say exactly, but it just looks so different; it seemed so much dirtier and grittier and fun.
Dirtier in every way.
Back in the day of Babe Ruth, there was this hard-drinking, womanizing theme. It was part of the national pastime. It's funny, because baseball is a sexual metaphor and there's an almost homosexual connotation to it, because of the ass-slapping, crotch-grabbing. . .
Tight pants.
Yeah, the tight pants. I don't know if it's that the world has changed, and even President Clinton's sexual exploits are being scrutinized and everyone has a video camera on their person . . . things are skewed. Someone took a picture of Alex Rodriguez outside of a strip club with a girl next to him and you can say anything you want about that situation. Who knows what's going on? I mean, the guy's at a strip club. . . So?
It's not like they're flashing fans in the bullpen, the way some of the '86 Mets did.
Yeah, it seemed so filthy and so interesting to me. They're not these squeaky-clean professionals selling soap and shit. They're just people, you know.
Very sexed-up people. The film plays as a kind of manifesto for a return to that '80s idea of male sexuality. There was this way of being a sexy man in 1986 that doesn't apply now.
Right. I think that has a lot to do with the Magnum, P.I. moustache. You had this burly guy and women were going crazy for that. Now, guys look like girls. They have petite features and they're all skinny, and most of these guy models are gay.
When you grew a mustache during the filming of this movie, how did it change your dating life?
It was really interesting. I attracted a lot of older women. Girls would start to make fun of me at first, but then I would project this confidence, like, "You're just a child and you don't understand." They would immediately switch and find that compelling.
On one hand, I think that macho '80s-style sexuality is really hot. On the other, I wonder if there's a way to have it without all the drugs and alleged date rapes.
I wonder. I'm certainly not for date rape. I can't even say that I'm for crazy alpha-male shit to begin with. I'm just interested in studying it. There are things about Hernandez that I find sort of funny or terrible or whatever, and then there are things where I'm like, Man, I'd like to be a bit more like that.
It's hard not to be jealous of guys who can play a game for a living.
Yeah, and baseball isn't as physically demanding as football or basketball. Hernandez says he played some of his best games when he was hung over.
Booze is certainly more entertaining than steroids.
There's something so much more human about it. Now the players are all taking Ritalin and Dexedrine — focusing drugs — and they're shooting steroids. There's something lame to me about taking the drugs to, like, make more money. I prefer the old, "Yo, let's rail some lines and take a shot and smoke a butt in the dugout." They're just having a good time, partying. It's that high-school craziness where you just want to get drunk and get laid. I suppose now that I'm getting older and I'm coming out of that phase of my life, it was almost like I just wanted to go back to that kind of fun.
So, has Keith seen it?
I don't think so. The thing that worries me is that he would totally hate this film, although I feel it celebrates him. But this is just my perception of who I want him to be, and it's a totally subjective thing. It's what my ten-year-old imagination conjured up about who this person was. And, you know, it's total satire and not who Keith Hernandez really is. So I hope I don't get in too much trouble.
©2007 Ada Calhoun and Nerve.com