With its mix of comedy and tragedy—not to mention a hip muckraking name on the poster in the form of producer Morgan Spurlock—What Would Jesus Buy? offers a holiday-season reminder that spending doesn't necessarily equal giving. Spiced with shocking factoids (there are so many stores in this country that everyone in North and South America and Europe could fit inside of them at one time, more than 15 million Americans may be clinically addicted to shopping, etc.), WWJB? follows Reverend Billy and his Church Of Stop Shopping on their 2005 Christmastime tour across the country, where they ruffled feathers and attempted to open minds in Times Square, the Mall Of America, Disneyland, and beyond. Billy is actually performance artist Bill Talen, but he admits that since debuting the character in the late '90s, he's more or less become the Reverend—one without a specific religious affiliation, of course. In addition to their "church" services inside New York venues, Billy and the gospel choir still hit the road to share their anti-consumerism message, and lately they've been sharing the good news about the new Rob VanAlkemade-directed film. The A.V. Club spoke with Talen as it was hitting theaters.
The A.V. Club: You used to live in San Francisco. Is that where the Reverend Billy character started?
Bill Talen: I started a theater with some friends in Fort Mason called Life On The Water. Mostly I was producing other artists, but once a year I could stage a play that I wrote, and sometimes I was one of the characters in the play. A local man named Sidney Lanier started coming to my stage shows—he took me out to lunch and started arguing that there was something about my writing and delivery when I was onstage, he thought that I should try to develop "a new kind of American preacher." At first my response was, "Forget it, let Saturday Night Live do that." I had been raised by right-wing Christians in the Midwest, Dutch Calvinists, and I just didn't want to go back, even a parody of the Christian world. But Sidney keep feeding me books and taking me to amazing preachers, and I started getting interested in just the instrument as an instrument, as an invented American vocal form. I was always the guy who was producing Spalding Gray, Danny Glover reciting Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg—in our theater, we had great storytellers and monologists, and I worshipped these folks. I became interested in preachers as a sort of monologist, as a kind of artist. And also Sidney said, "Don't be afraid of Jesus, he was never a Christian." [Laughs.] Back to your original question, there were some early sketches of Reverend Billy in San Francisco. There were some attempts at a cable-TV kind of televangelist thing, there was sort of a play with a reverend in it, and I remember one monologue, kind of a 20-minute sermon, but they were early experiments and none of these attempts really worked. I would say the early experimental work came to fruition in Times Square in New York.
AVC: And that was in 1999?
BT: Yeah, it was the late '90s. There were attempts as early as '97—I was already doing some sidewalk preaching, but it was something to learn to do. It was a difficult—preaching outside with crowds of tourists and knowing how to catch their eye, knowing how to put certain shapes of sounds out into the air such that you gather people around you, it took me some time to learn how to do that.
AVC: What felt more important to you initially: the message or the performance?
BT: I was coming from the theater world and I was very let down by it—I didn't feel it was connecting to people's lives. And, of course, the mystery of how do you make a living in that world? When I saw that Rudy Giuliani and the Disney Company were conspiring to arrest people who didn't seem to have money or people of color or small vendors, people who had small, independent shops, [I knew] there was a cultural cleansing going on before my very eyes. I wanted to defend my neighborhood. Reverend Billy hadn't been message-oriented until my own neighborhood was in danger: Here comes Mickey Mouse, here comes The Lion King, and whole blocks are torn down, and anybody that doesn't believably have a credit card is arrested. They are turning Times Square into a supermall, privatizing the sidewalks. People are getting arrested without making any mistake other than that they don't seem to be middle class. That gave me a message. It was at that point that there was a balancing that was necessary between the content and the performance, and they started melding together.
I was preaching in front of the Disney Store and I turned around and went inside the Disney Store, and I discovered the thing that I couldn't find anywhere else. I was asking myself: What happened to theater? Why don't I feel the power in a theater anymore? And that was charged—when I went into the Disney Store and there were hundreds of furry little dolls, little Disney characters waving their arms in the air neurotically, screaming at the customers to buy them, each of them supported by major feature films and theme-park rides, at that point, going in there and demanding dramatic space inside that retail environment, I've been doing it ever since. It's just very powerful.
AVC: So over the years, would you say that the message has become more important than the theatrical, comedy side of things?
BT: We are resisting consumerism. Consumerism is based on labeling, logoing, driving different parts of the world into separating categories. We have found that resisting consumption is something we better communicate to people when they don't exactly know what we are. We suspect that the experience has a chance of being an experience of greater depth when it's not so easy to frame what's going on with a label. And that's why we can't get any money from foundations. [Laughs.] They come into our Fabulous Worship, and if they're a political foundation, they say, "You know what? No, these people are clowns." And then the artistic foundation comes in—they're the people that give good clowns money—and they come in and say, "No, this is political." Then the religious foundations come in and they say, "This isn't spiritual, this is entertainment." So everybody thinks it's something else. The very thing that makes us more powerful, in other parts of our life gives us some real difficulty.
AVC: Which idea came first: the tour or the film?
BT: For several years, we had done smaller tours in Europe and California. I'm not so sure that we would have toured in the wintertime like that. [Laughs.] It just became obvious at some point that a road movie—the journey movie, the search across the landscape for the truth—would be a good vehicle for our film. There are certain parts of the country that carry parts of the story of resisting consumption. When we're in the Chicago area, it's credit cards, and when we're in the Minneapolis area, it's Mall Of America and how supermalls are destroying public space. Before that, in Ohio, we were talking about the hypnosis of children by advertising. We thought we were capable of it because we'd already been touring extensively—but not that extensively. That tour was probably five times the length of any tour we ever attempted.
AVC: Have you done any tours like that since?
BT: I feel like we're on a tour this year, except it's jets and car services. We're working on a new tour—we would like to go down the East Coast to the community groups that are trying to defend the estuaries from being drained, and down to the Immokalee tomato pickers who have done such a great job of opposing or changing McDonald's down in Florida, and then come back west to New Orleans, which is undergoing a severe form of what got my project started: the Disneyfication of Times Square. The devastation of New Orleans has been a chance for mega-corporations to privatize cheaply and move in and dominate the recovering economy. So it's a classic setting for The Church Of Stop Shopping.
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