My Year of Flops (10 page)

The $20 million man resolves to “kill the [cathode-ray] babysitter” by destroying the satellite dish and his town's cable feed at the very moment when the verdict from Stiller's sibling homicide trial is being announced. Without the glass teat to suckle on, a couch potato played by Kyle Gass is moved to contemplate the unthinkable: reading a book.

According to a 1996
Los Angeles Times
article on the film, Stiller shot a light and dark version of every scene to give himself more flexibility
regarding the film's tone.
The Cable Guy
consequently has the distinction of being simultaneously too dark and too light. Columbia hired Stiller to give the film some of that
Ben Stiller Show
edge, but not
too
much; it had an investment to protect.
The Cable Guy
is extremely dark for a mainstream comedy, but not the pitch-black, uncompromising comedy it might have been had it been produced independently.

As a latchkey kid neglected by his alcoholic, promiscuous mother, Carrey's Cable Guy didn't see television as escape or entertainment; it was his whole world, a fantasy realm where children are always adorable, apple-cheeked, and well-treated, and murders get solved before the end credits roll. In this respect, the film recalls
Profit,
the exquisitely dark (and short-lived) mid-'90s Fox drama about a charming sociopath who grew up in a box with only the hypnotic glow of television for company. It also recalls my childhood.

Television was so much more than just a way to fill 12 to 16 hours out of every day during my wasted youth. I was addicted to television for the same reason the Cable Guy's younger self was: Its honeyed lies were infinitely preferable to my grim childhood realities as I was growing up in a group home. Like Carrey's pathetic dreamer, I even adopted a fake name gleaned from pop culture. Carrey dubs himself “Chip Douglas” after a character on
My Three Sons.
Upon moving into the group home, I inexplicably decided to call myself “Larry Miller” after the popular stand-up comic/character actor.

The Cable Guy
hits awfully close to home. Maybe that's why I find it such a fascinating, resonant exploration of Stiller's career-long love-hate relationship with pop culture, even if, as a comic thriller, it's neither hilarious nor particularly suspenseful. Someone has to kill the cathode-ray babysitter, after all, and as a literal child of the industry (his parents are the comedy duo of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara), Stiller was uniquely qualified for the job.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success

Fun With Animals Case File #61:
Freddy Got Fingered

Originally Posted August 23, 2007

The notorious 2001 comedy
Freddy Got Fingered
has a reputation as both one of the worst films ever made and a movie so singularly bizarre that it's hard to believe it actually
got
made. Studios exist precisely to keep films this audacious from hitting theaters. I've never seen any of Tom Green's various shows, but I watched
Fingered
with open-mouthed admiration. It's the kind of movie you feel the need to watch again immediately just to make sure you didn't hallucinate it the first time around.

Fingered
casts director and cowriter Green as Gord Brody, a 28-year-old aspiring animator who heads to Hollywood armed with little but a dream, a drawing of a bag of dripping baboon eyeballs attached to a balloon, and a complete lack of social skills. Gord bullies his way into the office of animation executive Mr. Davidson (Anthony Michael Hall) by pretending that the man's wife has died a hideous death, then dresses up as an English bobby and harangues him in a restaurant. Davidson looks at Gord's drawing and issues a stern judgment: “It doesn't make any sense. It's fucking stupid. What you need here is elevation. There has to be something happening here that's actually funny.” It isn't hard to imagine studio executives saying the exact same thing to Green upon receiving the
Fingered
script. Thank God he didn't listen to reason. Or common sense. Or decency.

Did I mention the part where Gord pulls over to the side of the road, sees a giant horse cock, and grasps it lustily? It didn't really have anything to do with anything, but then neither does most of
Freddy Got Fingered
. It's a movie for the YouTube era; just about any 10-minute block functions as a perversely fascinating, surreal mini-movie with an anti-logic all its own.
Fingered
introduces a straightforward plot (dreamer moves to Hollywood to make it as an animator and toils at a cheese-sandwich factory until he gets his chance) solely so it can casually discard it. Gord's Hollywood adventures are largely over in about 15 minutes, at which point the film turns into a black-comic
psychodrama about Gord's hate-hate relationship with his father, Jim (Rip Torn).

Nobody plays drunken, profane, rage-choked authority figures quite like Rip Torn. Torn attacks his role here like he's performing in an avant-garde art movie rather than a gross-out vehicle for a wacky MTV personality. And he's right to do so: Any resemblance between
Freddy Got Fingered
and a conventional studio comedy is purely coincidental.

Gord's rampaging id recalls such beloved man-children as Pee-wee Herman and
Wayne's World
's Wayne Campbell. But where Pee-wee and Wayne represent guileless childhood innocence, Green represents childhood's dark side. To get back at his dad, Gord convinces a psychiatrist that Jim habitually molests Gord's straight-arrow younger brother (Eddie Kaye Thomas), who is subsequently placed in the Institute for Sexually Molested Children, even though he's clearly in his mid-20s.

Sprinkled throughout
Fingered
are gross-out setpieces executed with brazen fearlessness: Gord delivers a baby, then chews through the umbilical cord and swings the newborn around like a lasso. Gord takes Davidson's advice that he needs to “get inside” his animal characters by slicing open a dead moose and running around with it on top of him. In an especially queasy sequence, Gord's father drunkenly pulls down his pants and tauntingly dares his son to sodomize him. In my favorite scene, Gord delivers his big speech to his wheelchair-bound love interest, Betty (Marisa Coughlan), while “When A Man Loves A Woman” wails on the soundtrack and the deafening roar of a nearby helicopter threatens to drown him out. In moments like this, the film has more in common with early Jean-Luc Godard movies than gross-out Farrelly brothers knockoffs.

Did I mention all the gratuitous horse cocks? You'd have to hunt down bestiality porn to find so many throbbing horse cocks, or to see a grown man fondle the genitalia of large mammals so flagrantly. Watching
Fingered,
I wondered what the studio notes to Green must have been like: “Do you have to have so many giant animal cocks?
Doesn't the first giant animal cock get the point across? And wouldn't the lead character be more sympathetic if he didn't falsely accuse his father of incestuous child molestation? And the part where Betty is called a ‘retard slut' … isn't that potentially off-putting to women in the coveted 18-to-35 demographic?”

In my line of work, it's rare and wondrous to witness the emergence of a dazzlingly original comic voice. I experienced that sensation watching
Freddy Got Fingered.
If you were to give a talented but deeply disturbed 12-year-old money to make a movie, I suspect it'd be a lot like this one. I've never seen anything like it. Green's directorial debut has balls of such unprecedented size and grandeur that they should be mounted and displayed at the Smithsonian.

I think it helps to see
Fingered
less as a conventional comedy than as a borderline Dadaist provocation, a $15 million prank at the studio's expense. It didn't invent the gross-out comedy, but it elevated it to unprecedented heights of depravity. Sure, it seems to have killed Green's film career, but oh, what a way to go.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success

Hippified Book-Exclusive Case File: Skidoo

The secret dream of the '60s counterculture was that the sexual and psychotropic revolutions rocking the free world would free squares and hippies alike. That quixotic hope resonates throughout the cinema of the late '60s and early '70s, a hippified belief that if the Man would just drop acid or indulge in a pot brownie or two, his consciousness would undergo a glorious transformation. He would morph instantly from Richard Nixon to Wavy Gravy. Millennia of guilt, shame, and repression (or as I call them, the Holy Trinity of the Jewish male psyche) would melt away, leaving only an ecstatic puddle of bliss. That myopic belief in the power of drugs to engender radical,
dramatic spiritual growth is ever present in movies like
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
and countless lesser works, like Otto Preminger's notorious, strangely fascinating 1968 debacle
Skidoo.

The hippie dream promised a utopian paradise of open minds, plentiful mood alterers, copious nudity, a universal ban on the harshing of mellows, and government-imposed universal body painting. To middle-aged heterosexual men, it suggested something even more mind-blowing: guilt-free casual sex with nubile, obscenely flexible young women who'd been freed from guilt, self-consciousness, and inhibitions.

The counterculture boasted three potent cultural hydrogen bombs—pot, acid, and sexy hippie chicks of easy virtue—in its bid to seduce squares into grooviness. There was the deplorable practice of smoking marijuana, a consciousness-expander infinitely more powerful and mellow inducing than the Man's scotch, but burdened with none of the debilitating side effects—no hangovers, no addiction, no withdrawal, no DTs or hallucinations.

It's difficult to understand the '60s without dropping acid at least once. The first time I dropped acid—at a punk-rock show at my college co-op, appropriately enough—I suddenly understood, on an almost cellular level, the hippie fantasy of a revolution in consciousness that would free inhabitants of the prison of self from their dark, corrupt, fragmented realm, and usher in a brave new world where everyone was connected. During that initial rush, I felt a deep spiritual communion with gutter punks whose stench and sounds could be detected several area codes away. Then I came down and realized we were just a bunch of fucked-up kids taking drugs.