You Can't Hurt Me Not With My Cheese Helmet
April 20, 2021 marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Tom Green's directorial debut Freddy Got Fingered. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is more beloved than ever. Certainly it can't possibly be less beloved than it was on its opening weekend. Typical of the apocalyptic reception was Roger Ebert's review, which included the following paragraph: "This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels." Actually, Ebert's review was not typical. Unlike most critics at the time, he evinced a suspicion that Green might be operating on a different plane than his "gross-out" contemporaries. He wrote that Freddy was "in the surrealist tradition," compared it to Un Chien Andalou, and conceded, "The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny." Ebert's review was among the more upbeat the film received, and he gave it zero stars.
Ebert opened by listing some of the raunchy gags that had appeared in movie comedies in the preceding months: David Spade being covered in excrement in Joe Dirt, supermodels being drowned in excrement in Head Over Heels, a testicle being eaten in Tomcats, etcetera. This was less than three years after There's Something About Mary kickstarted the gross-out boom, and the sight of Tom Green biting an umbilical cord and swinging a newborn baby around like a lasso was seen to be more in the lineage of movies like those than of Luis Buñuel. Twenty years later, I suppose the jury is still out on whether Freddy Got Fingered is widely considered a surrealist masterpiece or even merely funny, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the other comedies Ebert mentioned have been forgotten while Freddy Got Fingered endures. Its recent anniversary has been marked by new interviews with Green published by Decider and The Film Stage, plus a slew of appreciations, including one from Slate that positions the film as a spiritual precursor to Eric Andre's recent, warmly-received Bad Trip.
The first time I saw Freddy Got Fingered was in early 2011 at the dearly departed Toronto Underground Cinema as part of a series in which local critics screened and advocated for critically-despised movies they loved. Freddy was picked by John Semley, who compared it to Tim & Eric, and afterwards he debated the film with Norm Wilner, who hated it. I sensed that the room was basically on Wilner's side, and frankly, so was I. The movie was a lot to take. I've watched Freddy four or five times since then and it has gotten better every time. When I revisited it last week, I laughed out loud from beginning to end. Maybe I've changed, or maybe the world has, but its virtues are clearer to me than ever, and I'd like to try to articulate them.
First, a little more context. Freddy Got Fingered marked the apotheosis of Tom Green's brief superstardom, and heralded its rapid decline. Born in 1971, Green rose to fame in the mid-90s in his native Canada as the host of a public access prank show. I think I first became aware of him when he appeared on Canada's then-biggest talk show, Open Mike with Mike Bullard, and plopped a hunk of roadkill on Bullard's desk (causing the host to flee backstage to vomit). Hollywood came calling, and in 1999 he brought The Tom Green Show to MTV, picking up where Pauly Shore left off as the human embodiment of everything adults thought was wrong with kids today. In 2000 he penetrated the picture business with major supporting roles in two hits, Road Trip and Charlie's Angels. By 2001 he was hosting SNL, engaged to Drew Barrymore, and headlining his first studio feature, which he also co-wrote and directed. A year later he was collecting his five Razzies in person, where, according to a BBC report, "Green concluded his speech with a specially-composed piece of music he played on the harmonica. The organisers had to drag the star off the stage when it became clear his composition was never-ending."
In addition to being part of the "gross-out" wave, Freddy Got Fingered plays in the template of another of the dominant modes of American film comedy circa 2001, which I will call "The Wacky Guy." Like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Son in Law, Rush Hour, The Pest, Tommy Boy, Beverly Hills Ninja, Bean, The Animal, and others, it is a star vehicle in which a manic comedian repeatedly enters dignified settings and makes a mess. It opens with Green skateboarding through a shopping mall, which, along with his style of dress, positions him as a youngish slacker-type in the vein of Adam Sandler, the then-biggest comedy star. Green plays Gord Brody, who at the age of 28 is finally leaving his parents (Julie Hagerty and a ferocious Rip Torn) to move to Los Angeles – ostensibly to work at a cheese factory, but also with the hope of becoming a famous animator. The film puts us on Gord's side when his father happily tells him, "You've finally given up on those stupid doodles." Our sympathy curdles immediately: after being given a new car by his parents, he cruelly lords it over his younger brother, Freddy. "It's because they love me more than they love you," says Gord. This is our hero, and he's not a very nice guy.
The movie really announces itself in its next scene. We get a crane shot of Gord driving on a highway and a map showing his progress from Portland to Hollywood. We hear Gary Numan's "Cars" on the soundtrack. It begins like any driving montage in any movie. But then Gord drives by a stud farm where four farmers are surrounding a horse and putting on gloves. We get a close-up of an enormous horse phallus. Gord screams, slams on the breaks, and then runs onto the farm. He yells, "I wanna try the horsey! I wanna try the horsey!" The Gary Numan music switches abruptly to "Duelling Banjos." Gord grabs the horse phallus and yells, "Oh, this is fun! Look at me, daddy, I'm a farmer! Look at me, daddy, I'm a farmer!" The scene ends. This incident is never referred to again.
Does that scene sound funny to you? It has no setup, no buildup, and no punchline. Most of the "gross-out" comedies of the era render their grotesqueries to look at least a little artificial and thus digestible, but this horse instrument is plainly real, and decidedly un-photogenic. This scene goes against almost every "rule" of comedy. Dear reader, I have laughed out loud every time I've seen it. Why? Theorizing comedy can be deadly, but nevertheless, I'm reminded of an interview I saw with Norm Macdonald where he talked of his hatred of double entendres and his project of removing all the "cleverness" from his jokes as anchorman of SNL's "Weekend Update." There's something about a Macdonald joke like "Kenny G has a Christmas album out this year. Hey, happy birthday, Jesus! Hope you like crap!" that hits me on a gut level, and the same can be said of Green's rigorously un-clever comedy. Also: one rule of comedy that the horse scene doesn't break is that comedy depends on surprise.
The rest of the movie is a series of surreal and/or gruesome set pieces, loosely structured around Gord's quest to become an animator and his troubled relationship with his father, and tied together with dream logic. In one scene, Gord puts a suit on backwards and repeats into the mirror, "I'm the backwards man, the backwards man…" In another, he creates a pulley system that dangles sausages on strings that rise and fall when he plays a keyboard. Other scenes wallow in the abject, like when a friend (Harlan Williams) breaks his leg and Gord gratuitously licks the exposed bone, or the aforementioned scene with the umbilical cord. In a rare positive review, A.O. Scott observed that the film is childish, but "forsakes the muddy field of infantile narcissism for the fertile, frightening ground of middle childhood. It's less about the dangers and pleasures of the unchained id than the giddy anarchy of the unbound imagination." Certain of Green's comic ideas, like a subplot about child abuse and a running gag in which a small child is brutally maimed, feel like the ideas of a kid who is just old enough to understand what taboos are but not quite old enough to have developed judgment and a capacity for empathy. This may not be your idea of a good time, but I sometimes wish I could easily recapture the sheer unselfconsciousness I brought to creative projects in my adolescence, and I find it thrilling to engage with the work of someone who can.
It's easy to get on Green's wavelength if you're an adolescent. I was in the sixth grade when Freddy Got Fingered was released, so I didn't know a lot of people who were allowed to see it, but I did hear the big lines from the TV ads ("Daddy would you like some sausage?"; "You can't hurt me! Not with my cheese helmet!") parroted a lot on the schoolyard. Adults have typically had a harder time. I'd like to quote from one more negative review that, like Ebert's, evinces at least some comprehension of Green's project. In the Toronto Star, Geoff Pevere wrote of Freddy: "You could say the obvious, i.e., that it's not funny and therefore a bad comedy, but it's part of the distinctly post-funny comedic strategy of this movie […] that whatever little humour it offers comes from the fact that it isn't funny. Thus the challenge. If, for Green's couch-cynic rec room constituency, something is funny in direct proportion to how unfunny one assumes most other people will find it, how do you evaluate it? Could this be the dead end to which Green's brand of anti-entertaining suburban situationalism has brought us – the point where something is good because it sucks?"
Comedy is, of course, subjective. Freddy Got Fingered makes me laugh, so on the issue of whether or not it is funny, Pevere and I simply part company. But "funny" is ideological, and I think Pevere was correct to sense that part of the film's appeal is that it purposely doesn't "work," and that its ideal audience is people who feel alienated from "normal" comedy. Nathan Rabin's influential 2007 reappraisal for The A.V. Club called the film "a $15 million prank at the studio's expense," and central to most other revisionist takes is this idea that Green used his flash of stardom to get away with something. The film has a sense of free-flowing disrespect towards the institution of a Hollywood movie, and of a Hollywood studio comedy in particular. From the Pevere review and others of its vintage I sense the implication that by disrespecting the form, Green was disrespecting the audience that goes to see those movies. I think the more correct and rewarding approach is to feel not disrespected by Green, but complicit in his prank.
What is the critique that Freddy Got Fingered is lodging against Hollywood studio comedies of its era? That they are formulaic and lazy; that their protagonists are bad people that we are manipulated into liking; that their sentimentality is hollow; that they are overly "safe"; that they are "gross" but not honest. Green responds with a comedy in which actions do not have consequences; where characters commit unspeakable evils; where the sentimentality is purposely unconvincing; and where the "gross-out" stuff if given no tinsel of socially redeeming value. He looks at his contemporaries and asks: Why poop but not blood? Why a set of cartoonishly large dog balls (as in the following year's Van Wilder) but not a real horse cock? He ends the film with a crowd scene in which an extra holds a sign that says, "WHEN THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE GOING TO END?"
Freddy Got Fingered wants to destruct the form, but has no interest in building anything new in its place. I think I bristled at Green's ethos when I first saw it in 2011, but without getting too pretentious, I think it helps to have had one's faith in society's institutions irreparably damaged to appreciate a movie like this. And if destruction for destruction's sake is a limited project, so too, in a different way, is careerism for careerism's sake. Tom Green could have delivered a movie like Road Trip and continued his ascendancy, but as another bearded truth-teller noted, what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? In an early scene that carries a faint whiff of Chaplin's Modern Times, Gord suffers through a soul-crushing job on assembly line at a cheese sandwich factory. Tired of going through the motions, he suddenly hops onto the conveyor belt, wields a gigantic sausage over his crotch, and yells, "LOOK AT ME! I'M SEXY! I'M A SEXY BOY! DING DONG! DING DONG!" Any kid can understand why this scene is not only funny, but also cathartic and righteous. Adults who have spent enough time in this horrible capitalist society of ours can too, if they allow themselves.
You Can't Hurt Me Not With My Cheese Helmet
Source: https://willsloanesq.wordpress.com/2021/04/28/to-freddy-on-his-20th-birthday/