Freddy Got Fingered

Sir, please, this is a fancy restaurant. This is a fancy restaurant! Rip Torn The greatest vanity project: you don’t even understand what he’s exactly vain about. Maybe that he has the opportunity to act out these familiar, supposedly invigorating filmic formulae for an audience? A perfect lesson about the world where everything is given to you… you’re entitled about it, you think you’re righteous in your solipsistic actions, and you construct stakes: you construct tropey, amorphous, and artificial drama out of it. You emphasize, narrativize, and conceal your own failings even when nobody may care or mind so that the payoff can feel even more fulfilling. Maybe he’s even saying that tropes and tropiness themselves arise from this ruthlessly subjective style of film—the generic, easygoing, gross-out comedy… that this style, when taken to its most extreme, is nothing more than an procedural film that affirms a predictable and infallible case, nothing but an affirmation of the self-fulfilling prophecies constructed around people who have everything. Kantian Tom Green. This film is like a siren for the min-maxing/biohacking era, in both its crudeness and its capacity to thrust itself forward solely on the back of dis- and misunderstandings between people. The whole skeleton/plot/overlay of the film—not including Green’s transgressive way of enacting the cliched events of the film—is processed through this utterly unserious lens called vanity. Everything must reach uber-lows and uber-highs to feel anything. But it doesn’t work, it can’t work. The One Guy Who Gets Hurt In Every Comedy can’t feasibly get hurt for laughs like that irl, it’d be bloody and awkward, every time. But MAN if that kid’s initial trip and fall into Gord’s car doesn’t make me laugh hysterically… what a weird, contradictory, and kinda dangerous truth that is. This film is about cinema, really, and how life can only exist parallel to cinema’s world (or as a representation of it, whether artful, solipsistic, or whatever). If I had to pick a team in the popular discourse of this film between: ironic enjoyment, surrealist masterpiece, and total abject shlock… I think I’d call this a surrealist masterpiece lol.