Bernie's Body's Working for the Weekend
A Marxist Approach to Weekend at Bernie's (1989)
Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) – Marxist
Happy Summer, darlings!
As mentioned last week, I have a broken thumb, and currently I am writing on a train, so this week’s review is going to be a little bit shorter for my own ease and comfort. The rest of this month with a brace will also likely be shorter, but I’ll strive for a banger Christmas in July to make up for it!
This week, to kick off summer right, I watched a film that was not about what I thought it was about: Ted Kotcheff’s Weekend at Bernie’s (1989). I don’t really know what I did think the plot was because I knew it was about pretending a corpse was still alive, but I didn’t know it was such a thoughtful allegory for how much we do not need rich businessmen and how they make literally no positive impression on the real world. I was a little concerned when the Review Roulette wheel landed on Marxist as our approach this week, but honestly, it’s one of the more unexpectedly socially driven films I’ve seen in a long time. So, this week we’ll dive into the absurdity of Bernie’s heated pool on the beach and think about the visual metaphors of Bernie’s deteriorating body.
For those unfamiliar, Weekend at Bernie’s is about two young workers fresh from college trying to work their way up the corporate ladder at a life insurance company. Richard (Jonathan Silverman) and Larry (Andrew McCarthy) work tirelessly through evenings and weekends and finally think they’ve caught a break when they find the company has been defrauded of $2 million. When they bring this news to the head of the company, Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser), Bernie invites them to accompany him to his beach house for Labor Day weekend where he secretly intends to have them killed for discovering his embezzlement. Plans change when the mobsters hired for the job decide to kill Bernie instead, leaving Richard and Larry with the problem of enjoying their weekend in a millionaire’s beach house or reporting Bernie’s death to the police. Obviously, they choose vacation – even the stress of pretending a dead man is still alive is less stressful than their day-to-day lives.
I think the allegory is quite direct in the film to begin with but gradually becomes even more so throughout as the slapstick and prop comedy with Bernie’s corpse get more outlandish. For instance, as soon as Rich and Larry discover the body, a “floating party” comes through Bernie’s house. Scores of wealthy partiers who use Bernie for his even grander wealth arrive and even interact verbally and physically with his corpse without realizing he is dead. This scene immediately underscores that while the lower-class Rich and Larry idolized Bernie and desperately wanted to be in his inner circle, the people that were within that circle had no real, human connection with him. Even Bernie’s “woman” had no interest in discerning whether he was dead or alive when she had her way with him in a scene I can only describe as “peak 80s”.
These scenes show how Bernie treated people when he was alive as almost all interactions with him are transactions. One young bikini-clad woman returns his boat keys, finishing their transaction; a man repeatedly tries to buy Bernie’s convertible, raising the price every time Bernie’s lifeless corpse refuses to acknowledge the attempts at negotiation.
His fast-living, cash-splashing, coke-snorting, Gordon Gekko ass 80s persona is alive and well whether he is or not. And I think that’s the real heart of the social critique in the film: businessmen whose job is to profit off of putting a price on human lives are cartoonish, morally vacant creatures who embezzle affection but are wholly incapable of making real human connections. The persona lives on while his body becomes a variety of tools for Rich and Larry, challenging the idea of “human value” for a man who deemed himself worthy of deciding that value for others.
The film dehumanizes Bernie and his whole class of businessmen in those social ways very cleverly by making him and others such caricatures of wealth. Their relationships are completely devoid of any personal connection, perhaps best embodied by one of the funnier lines in the film when a wealthy older man says to Rich’s love interest, Gwen (Catherine Mary Stewart), “Have I ever told you I never liked the name Gwen on you? To me you'll always be Vanessa.” Chef’s kiss.
This dehumanization is even further emphasized by the very direct shift from Bernie’s body as something to be mourned to something to be used. Early on we see the gradual slipping away of the façade of the businessman when the guys learn Bernie wore a toupee, hiding parts of himself to live up to the persona that lives on without him. Then we have a gradually escalating slapstick use of the body with Larry especially manipulating Bernie’s limbs to feign interactions before the body fully becomes a prop, a shield, and a flotation device.
Bernie literally becomes Rich and Larry’s insurance policy about mid-way through the film when they begin to fear for their own lives, and again when they are stranded in the water and use the corpse as a makeshift raft to get back to shore. Bernie is completely stripped of his humanity but still the impenetrable vacancy of his robust social life persists as beachgoers and neighbors still cannot perceive his lifelessness.
I thought this film was a light-hearted 80s comedy in the vein of a Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure vibe, and it is, but I was also pleasantly surprised by how well-conceived the social critiques of the late 80s were while maintaining that light-hearted comedy. So much of our culture dehumanizes lower classes, especially those with the fewest resources and the most marginalized, so it’s a bit refreshing to see it go in the other direction every once in a while. Kotcheff did direct First Blood (1982), though, so maybe that thoughtfulness should have been more expected. All around, great film, great message, billionaires are ruining the world and have no positive impact on any of us at all. Happy summer!