by Nathan Rabin
Given Stiller and Apatow’s subsequent ascent to ubiquitous, prolific superstardom, it’s ironic to think that hiring them as director and script doctor/producer transformed a seemingly surefire blockbuster into a risky proposition. In Stiller and Apatow’s hands, the screenplay morphed from a Tommy Boy–style buddy comedy to a more mainstream precursor to Chuck & Buck, a creepy, homoerotic black comedy about a disturbed loner and the sad sack he torments.
For the role of the straight man/Carrey’s foil, the filmmakers chose Matthew Broderick, an actor who has spent the decades since his career-making turn in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off exploring the infinite colors of the schlemiel rainbow. Actually, that’s not fair, as the last few years have found Broderick playing everything from a putz (The Stepford Wives) to a yutz (Marie & Bruce) to a schmendrick (Finding Amanda) to a schmuck (Then She Found Me). The man has range.
Apatow reconceived the story as a dark riff on thrillers like The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, which boldly exposed the furtive menace posed by nannies, temps, cops, and myriad other professions that quietly house sociopaths intent on murdering you and your family. He also turned it into a meta-commentary on the way television warps the human psyche, a recurring motif in Stiller’s films.
In Reality Bites, Stiller plays a man so twisted by working in television that he looks at Winona Ryder’s homemade footage of her and her friends goofing around and sees a Real World–like reality show instead of an avant-garde masterpiece. In Zoolander, Stiller’s sentient mannequin is more or less rendered mentally challenged by prolonged exposure to the fashion industry. In Tropic Thunder, Stiller plays a pompous actor who has been coddled and flattered by the culture of celebrity for so long that he’s unable to delineate between movies and the real world. In Permanent Midnight, he plays novelist/screenwriter Jerry Stahl, a man driven to shooting junk by the indignity of having to put words in Alf’s mouth. So it’s no surprise that Stiller’s dream project has long been Budd Schulberg’s seminal showbiz morality play What Makes Sammy Run?, the archetypal tale of a man who makes it in show business by losing his soul.
So it’s fitting that in The Cable Guy, Stiller once again plays a pathetic show-business figure, a disgraced former child star accused of killing his weak-willed identical twin. Stiller’s dual role amounts to little more than a cameo, but he makes an indelible impression with a minimum of screen time. Playing a combination Menendez brothers, O. J. Simpson, and Todd Bridges, Stiller nails the furrowed-brow expression of intense concentration ubiquitous on the faces of celebrities on trial, a dour look that implicitly conveys, “If I just sit here quietly and look remorseful and serious, we can let these silly homicide charges slide, right, guys?”
The Cable Guy opens, naturally enough, with Broderick’s Steven Kovacs flipping through the vast wasteland of the cable universe. We stumble through one garbled, staticy corner of the television hellscape to another: inane talk shows, My Three Sons, superhero shows, and tabloid coverage of the sibling murder trial. Stiller’s unblinking camera renders the familiar creepy and unnerving. It’s channel surfing as the preoccupation of the damned.
The Cable Guy (his actual name is never revealed) is four hours late, yet he appears enraged when he finally shows up. An unseen Carrey pounds relentlessly on Steven’s door while repeating “Cable guy!” with mounting exasperation. The title character annoys us before his first on-screen appearance.
Steven unwisely takes the advice of his best friend (Jack Black, one of many future superstars in the supporting cast) and offers Carrey’s Cable Guy $50 to hook him up with all the movie channels—even the dirty ones—for free. In doing so, he becomes complicit in his own undoing; that ill-considered nosh on the apple of knowledge leads to Steven’s fall from grace.
Like Christian Bale in American Psycho, Carrey seems to be merely impersonating a human being. He’s empty and vacant on the inside, so he throws himself into playing roles he’s seen on TV: the affable cable guy with an overflowing roster of “preferred customers,” the aggressive jock with the menacing tomahawk jam, the drinking buddy out to get his best pal laid, the love guru who hips Broderick to the aphrodisiac that is Sleepless In Seattle, and the karaoke rock star.
In the film’s funniest sequence, the Cable Guy takes Steven to his favorite restaurant, a medieval theme eatery where he seems to know the beats of every line better than the dinner theater’s cast. Janeane Garafalo, one of several Ben Stiller Show cast members in small roles, steals the scene as their “serving wench,” a dispirited slacker whose commitment to historical authenticity doesn’t extend to taking out her nose ring or washing off a thick coat of Goth makeup.
For Carrey’s character, life is role-playing; since he doesn’t have an authentic self, he inhabits roles he’s seen other people play. Carrey the actor began his career as an impressionist. What are impressionists, ultimately, if not people who subvert their own identities to inhabit the voices, personalities, and affectations of famous people? The Cable Guy takes Carrey’s persona into thrillingly dark places: He’s playing his usual exemplar of comic aggression, but the repellent neediness and desperation at its core defies sentiment.
The Cable Guy’s incursions into Steven’s personal life become increasingly unhinged. When Steven’s ex-girlfriend (Leslie Mann, later to become Apatow’s real-life wife) goes on a date with a slick-talking smoothie (Owen Wilson), the Cable Guy, whose wardrobe seems stuck somewhere in the mid-’70s, viciously beats his pal’s romantic rival in the men’s bathroom. He pushes Steven past his breaking point, humiliating him in front of his parents and his ex during a game of “porno password” and getting him arrested. These events lead to a climactic conflict in a giant satellite dish, during which the Cable Guy delivers a painful speech in which all of his character’s subtext spills embarrassingly to the surface, as he bemoans a childhood in which he learned the facts of life from The Facts Of Life.
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.
The last and perhaps most potent weapon in the counterculture’s arsenal was the ripe sexuality of sexy hippie chicks, Manic Pixie Dream Girls whose spacey smiles and lithe young bodies promised to liberate brooding depressives from the grim realities of the workaday world. In I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and darker squares-meet-the-counterculture films like Save The Tiger and Joe, hippie Eves lead establishment Adams into a
world of sex and toking. Skidoo, having already traumatized audiences with the image of Carol Channing in her underwear, thankfully gives protagonist Jackie Gleason a spiritual awakening instead of a sexual one. Nobody wanted to see Gleason’s flabby Irish belly slapping angrily against some stoned little minx, including Gleason himself.
The more you know about the brilliant, mercurial, wildly controversial Otto Preminger—scion of one of Austria-Hungary’s most prominent families and one of the most feared figures in American film—the more poignant Skidoo becomes. In a strange way, Preminger lived the movie; he dropped acid, collaborated with scruffy, long-haired countercultural types, and tried his damnedest to plug into the spirit of open-mindedness sweeping the country.
A successful director, producer, and part-time comic book villain—he played Mr. Freeze in the ’60s TV Batman—Preminger wasn’t about to throw it all away to live in a VW van and follow the Grateful Dead, but he clearly admired the hippie mind-set and the Black Panthers’ brash rebelliousness. (Preminger’s flirtation with Black Power is cruelly, though cleverly, chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s classic article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”) But casting off the shackles of the establishment and embracing hippiedom isn’t as easy as it seems.
It’s no surprise that Preminger couldn’t convincingly connect with the hippie mentality in spite of the best intentions. The film’s cast reflected the violent conflict between Preminger’s jones for capturing youth culture and his old-school aesthetic. To make the ultimate hippie acid film, Preminger apparently scoured the nursing homes of Hollywood to find the perfect cast for his suspiciously geriatric cinematic love-in. I suspect he posted flyers inscribed with the following words in retirement home rec rooms:
Otto “Moonbeam Sunshower” Preminger is looking for spunky senior citizens for supporting roles in ultimate hippie freakfest. Experience in campy superhero television shows and/or Judy Garland movies a plus; letters of reference from grandchildren welcome.
