Scots wha hae (5/18/01)
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Freddy Got Fingered. [Tom Green, 2001.]
The notorious premiere of Stravinsky’s
Rite Of Spring in Paris, May 29, 1913, which literally provoked a riot among its audience, created a rather unfortunate historical precedent, in effect raising the bar for subsequent avant-garde debuts: after this spectacularly negative reception, it has always been an unspoken assumption [at least in every Bohemian discussion] that no work of art can be really original or consequential if it doesn’t dismay the uncomprehending bourgeois, outrage the critics, and goad an audience of high-rolling patrons of the arts into ripping off their black ties and storming the stage. Thus naturally after hearing the first reviews of this opus [Ebert “a vomitorium” — the Washington Post “creative bankruptcy”, “an abomination” — Paul Clinton for CNN “quite simply the worst movie ever released by a major studio in Hollywood history”] I knew I would be obligated to attend, to find out whether this is a misunderstood work of genius, an elaborate con perpetrated upon the studio moguls who financed it, or just another piece of shit. Life being more complicated than the rhetorical simplifications we attempt to impose upon it, it turned out to be all three.
Mr. Green introduces himself as a pathetic loser who, in quick succession, leaves home in the Pacific Northwest to seek his fortune in Hollywood as an animator, takes a job in a cheese-sandwich factory [less Chaplin I’m afraid than
Laverne and Shirley], pitches a show unsuccessfully to network executive Anthony Michael Hall, goes home again, broods upon his destiny, builds a skateboarding halfpipe in the driveway, hits upon a wheelchairbound girl rocket scientist [Marisa Coughlan] who likes to have her shins caned, is improbably struck with inspiration, returns to Hollywood, makes a lot of money, and blows it all immediately on an elaborate and inexplicably-motivated revenge upon his father [Rip Torn] which involves an expedition to Pakistan. Other themes include animal porn [Green jerks off a horse, cloaks himself in the skin of a roadkilled deer, and directs an avalanche of elephant spunk — the phrase “a dork like a fire hydrant” does come to mind — upon the very professional Mr. Torn, who may with this gig have carried good sportmanship a couple of tokes over the line], the sexual abuse of children [specifically the eponymous brother Freddy] and their even more dreadful subsequent exploitation by the psychiatric profession, childbirth, and suddenly getting hit by a truck. Meanwhile the auteur comports himself like a retarded eightyearold, and spends most of his screen time whining that his parents don’t understand him. Perhaps he’s been too long on MTV.
The shock value of all this has been [a cough behind the hand] grossly exaggerated: John Waters did it all much better a long time ago, and if we measure, say, the money shot with the elephant against, say, the spectacle of Divine being raped by a giant lobster, it is clear that Mr. Green has fallen short of the mark. — Moreover there is [of course] an entire website devoted exclusively to scenes of women getting whipped in movies; and though one might have groaned when the cute little kid steps into the airplane propellor, this is, in the first place, telegraphed, and in the second place an obvious steal from the original ending to
There’s Something About Mary, in which Ben Stiller while crossing the street to embrace his beloved was supposed to be dismembered by a bus. [The final line in the published screenplay is Mary’s instruction to the crowd: “All right, everyone, let’s fan out and look for the penis!”] — Not only could it have been much worse, if this alone had been the intention it should have been much worse.
The difficulty, rather, is that every time Green gets a good idea — e.g., in the scene in which he sits at the piano with strings attached to his fingers simultaneously playing a song and animating an elaborate mobile sculpture of dangling sausages — something which must recall classic surrealistic exhibitions like the dinner jacket to which Dali sewed eighty shotglasses filled with milk — he immediately spoils it by opening his mouth — and, usually, singing something infantile and obnoxious. But Pee Wee Herman is over; and anyway he did it better.
Furthermore the film is not merely not plotless, but formulaic and uninspired: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. How should this provoke a riot?
Should Mr. Green have another opportunity to write and direct, I would suggest a complete departure from his methods here: he should stay behind the camera, put real talent out in front of it, and throw away that copy of Syd Field’s manual of screenwriting some wellmeaning advisor obviously pressed upon him. — I fancy something like a remake of
Candy, with his girlfriend in the lead; I’d pay to see Drew Barrymore screaming at the hunchback “Give...me....your...hump!” — As might others pay: though I haven’t reviewed the grosses, it cannot bode well that when I went to catch Freddy at a matinee I had the entire theater to myself.
But on balance one must think of the scene midway through these proceedings in which Green, preparing rather ineffectually for a job interview, puts a suit on backwards and dances back and forth in front of a full-length mirror while singing an atonal little ditty about the Backwards Man. — Tom Wolfe in his brilliant analysis of the New York artworld remarked that the Bohemian pose of contempt for the bourgeois resembled a ritual mating dance: that the point in feigning an attitude of superior disdain toward the wealthy patrons of the arts was to attract their attention, as it were by playing hard to get; and that once this attention had been successfully obtained [and one’s reputation made and one’s shows mobbed by the patrons and the press], the pose became superfluous. — As Wittgenstein said, having climbed up our ladder we can kick it away. — But Green already has fortune, celebrity, and one of the principal babes of Hollywood as a trophy girlfriend; why is he going through these motions? to back through the mating dance and throw it all away?
____________The tough go shopping (4/27/01)
