The Napoleon Complex

Unless there’s some dark chapter in hotpress history they’ve been covering up for years, like say, An Osmond Family Commemorative Edition, then Jon Heder, star of the very buzzy Napoleon Dynamite, may be the first celebrity Mormon to ever grace these here pages.

I can’t tell you how weird that is. Not because I have any grievances with the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints per se. It’s just slightly difficult reconciling Mr. Heder – a cool kid in scruff denim lounging around London’s Mandarin Hotel at a 160 degree angle – with the nice young gentlemen in shiny shoes that get trapped on my doorstep when I’m trying to weasel out of laundry duties. Or it would be if he didn’t say ‘gosh’ quite so much.
“Oh gosh, I’ve done the whole shiny shoes thing,” says the 26 year-old, “I’m practising, so we have to. But I did my stint in Japan. It’s mainly Buddhist but there are a few of us over there. It was pretty interesting.”
Bizarrely, Jon’s newfound status as a hipper-than-thou campus movie icon has been attained, at least indirectly, because of his religious background. While studying film (and later animation) at his church’s pre-eminent seat of learning, Utah’s Brigham Young University, he agreed to star in classmate Jared Hess’ short film about an uber-dork with a ginger classic Keegan perm. The film, Peluca, made sufficient splash to enable Jared and his co-writer wife, Jerusha, to fund a feature resurrecting the same hapless, pigmentally-retarded character, with Mr. Heder once again assuming the role.
Set in the director’s hometown of Preston, Idaho – a place where polyester apparently goes to die – the film, Napoleon Dynamite, is so blighted with moonboots, aviator shades, Burt Reynolds-moustaches, side-pony-tails, bling, puffball sleeves and all manner of Great Historical Sartorial Disasters, it could be mistaken for a fabulously ironic and unfeasibly fashionable shoot. Amidst such embarrassing coming-of-age flotsam, Napoleon Dynamite’s titular anti-hero sets the standard in clueless geekdom. Quite an achievement when one considers his dune-buggy racing Grandma (Sandy Martin), his creepy, failed-jock uncle, Rico (Jon Gries), the temperamental family llama and Napoleon’s chat-room addicted, still-at-home, 32-year old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell).
Jon’s Napoleon, though, is exceptionally, er, exceptional. His leisure pursuits include sitting around doodling made-up mythological creatures that might – if one were being insanely generous – be dismissed as outsider art, playing tetherball (that well known sport of kings), interpretive dance and listening to Jamiroquai. And that’s about as cool as he gets. Defensive, dweebish, none-too-bright and incapable of speaking in anything other than an adenoid-heavy drawl, Napoleon is the very embodiment of adolescent awkwardness.
His teen tortures combine to form a loopy episodic plot involving his equally oddball family and only friends (a fuzz-tached Mexican kid and a misfit girl with a photography habit). Hijacking many set-pieces from the last-year-at-high-school classics – the election for class president, bullying, isolation and the inevitable prom – Napoleon Dynamite subverts the geek versus jock canon with improbably kitsch deadpan charm. Put more simply, no, he doesn’t get the prom-queen.
“He’s cool in his own way,” explains Jon, who helped develop Napoleon’s character for the big screen. “There’s a little bit of me in there. The way he says ‘sweet’ and ‘dang’ and ‘gosh’ a lot. I ad-libbed a couple of those. But me and Jared mainly drew on our younger brothers. You know that thing when you ask your teenage brother something and he just tells you shut up? That’s Napoleon. He’s one of these outsiders that you might have sat beside at school, but never noticed because he’s always drawing something. I actually did Napoleon’s drawings myself and because I’m an animation graduate I had to work really hard to draw that badly. I’m especially proud of the dragon with its elbows coming out of its shoulders. It took hours to create something that crap.”
Despite the films rather humble origins, Napoleon Dynamite was snapped up by Fox Searchlight during the first weekend of the Sundance festival for $3million. It’s easy to understand their eagerness. An eminently marketable quirk-fest, Napoleon bears many tribal markings of indiedom – that fuzzy lo-fi world of outsider narratives, quirks and autobiography. There’s something of Wes Anderson’s eccentric characterisation, Todd Solondz’s freak radar minus the horror and while we’re insisting on the photo-fit thing – this being a hotbed of people with dusty NME stacks – a subverted scatterbrained Pretty In Pink – with Gummo casting.
Like the actor himself, it’s not exactly what one would expect from Brigham Young’s finest, but then neither is anything by Neil LaBute. Though sweet and dorky, the film’s comic underpinnings are rooted in the director’s dementedly contradictory feelings toward his weird geographical origins – you know, that uniquely misty-eyed, affectionate hatred one can only feel about whatever small town or cul de sac that spawned you. Still, the good people of Preston were happy to help out in whatever self-deprecating ways they could.
“It was really cool there,” Jon says of his Mr. Hess’s hometown, “I mean, they put the cast and crew up and everybody was excited because it’s not exactly a prime movie location. The only real problems we had were scenes with the cow. We were on this tight 23-day shoot and the cow decided she wasn’t ready to show up. The llama was a better actor even if he did spit at you.”
Despite the best efforts of bovine divas, Napoleon Dynamite wrapped on schedule and has improbably gone on to conquer students and hipsters everywhere. Released on over one thousand screens in the US, the Napoleon cult has inspired catchphrases (mainly ‘dang’ and ‘gosh’) and loyalty cards whereby repeat viewings can score you a replica of the hero’s scary sub-normal artworks. There’s even talk of a television spin-off. Will Jon once again be donning moonboots and a bad perm for the occasion?
“Well, I have been offered other scripts,” he tells me, “but they’re all for really dorky parts so I don’t mind either way because I’ve always got animation and I’d ultimately love to be involved with something like The Triplets Of Belleville. If Jared is on board for the TV show then I’d totally do it because I completely trust him. But the perm is difficult to deal with.”
The re-growth or the maintenance?
“Well, the re-growth was terrible. I went through that after the first short. After the movie though I got it permed straight, and I gotta tell you that was worse. It was like having straw growing out of your head. But what can I do? I’m not a crew-cut person.”
Gosh, I don’t suppose he is.

Napoleon Dynamite is released December 10th