Oct 12, 2009
Chris Eigeman
Best known among the general population for a series of Pacific Bell ads, Chris Eigeman spent most of the ’90s perfecting the character of an extremely privileged, hyperarticulate asshole with few redeeming qualities beyond his own sarcastic wit. In Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco and Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, Eigeman spends most of his screentime making fun of others and asserting his own intellectual superiority through a series of quips and twisted and unconvincing moral arguments. In other hands, his characters would be garden-variety rich boys. They are only very rarely sympathetic and usually nothing more than assholes, but Eigeman’s fierce intelligence and immense talent for monologues somehow makes them likable. While these characters rarely change, Eigeman plays them as extremely self-aware dicks who recognize why everyone thinks they’re jerks — they just don’t care and only act more put-upon for having to deal with those who don’t understand them. In the words of Des from The Last Days of Disco: “You know that Shakespearean admonition, ‘To thine own self be true’? … But what if “thine own self” is not so good? What if it’s pretty bad? Would it be better, in that case, not to be true to thine own self?” Behold Chris Eigeman, the Larry David of young intellectuals. – Eric Freeman