Transcript
Speaker: It's broken, I think
Speaker: Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody to another episode of Death is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History Isles. I almost said welcome to an episode of Freddy Got Fingered, which is of course what we are talking about today. i am Chase here with Sam and this one was of course a ah me pick. you know I don't think that someone from the Imperial Corps would would reach far enough out to finger Freddy. We have. you' I'm thinking of Cecil Rhodes now with his, like, you know the the cartoon of him, like, standing in a big V with his legs over Africa. It's second cartoon with him just, like, a big finger reaching over to Portland.
Speaker: yeah And there's Freddy. Yes. But this is, and I don't think you'd seen it, Sam. No, no. This is directed and written by Tom Green, who is you know I don't know, like super well-remembered now. i'm Certainly by younger generations, probably mostly forgotten, but like a massive, massive, massive comedian in the late 90s into the early 2000s had the Tom Green Show. This is kind of a cult movie that is, I would say, very, very well-remembered by a certain kind of Gen X or elder millennial sort of like absurdist comedy fan, like a guy who really loves skateboards and smoking weed. And it just felt to me as if we had not...
Speaker: touched on that kind of guy perhaps enough. And it felt like Freddie got fingered for all of its perhaps lack of substance is an excellent stand in for a certain kind of like cultural moment that we we have not really explored. So maybe I will just start by asking what you thought of it. And then we can a about what it represents.
Speaker: it's um I think it's a film fundamentally that boomers don't get right. So Roger Ebert in his infinite wisdom wrote, it was like, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. It's not even scraping the barrel, it's below the barrel. This film shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as barrels. Roger Ebert hated it. and i think pretty much Zero out of four stars from Ebert. Zero out of four stars. I think every other critic he saw it at the time just despised it. Presumably most of these critics being because yeah it takes a while to sort of build yourself up as a film critic at a major newspaper. And it came out when? 2001. think was 2001.
Speaker: two thousand and one i get save one It's a brave new piece of Dada star insulting the stodgy old guard of the new York Times. That's that's my take Freddy Got Fingered. No, I mean, in all seriousness, I watched the first 15 minutes, like, very tired after a day of work, and was like, Chase, what did you...
Speaker: Fuck you, Chase. like I don't know. this is What is this? And then I sort of finished it off less tired on a weekend. and um actually like really enjoyed it. was yeah yeah It's funny. It is. It's very funny. it's it's I think I was saying prior to recording this, it's like reading a Joyce novel or a Pynchon novel.
Speaker: In that both of those authors have very, very particular idiosyncratic prose, which you've got to, you've got to like, you know, your bare naked body has got to sort of like descend slowly into the hot bath of Pintonian prose. And, you know, it's annoying, it's a bit, you scold babies. And then eventually, you know, you surround yourself with the water and, you know you float. And I think Freddy Got Fingered is is very similar in that it's its comedy is incredibly idiosyncratic. It's obviously like what Tom Green finds funny, perhaps not what the rest of us might you know ordinarily find funny. But I think once you get past the first 15 minutes um and sort of enter the world of Tom Green, it's... um Yes. Yeah, it's... it's
Speaker: it's It's actually quite charming, and it actually has a real of heart to and it. has a yeah i i think, as as I said on Lesserbox, it's it's kind of really a a film about fathers and a film about sons.
Speaker: Yes, with the inimitable Rip Torn from Dodgeball, most people probably know him as the father. who is basically playing his Patches O'Houlihan character, but as a dad in this movie. I did want to, i think a good way to summarize both what the film is and how it relates to the Boomers, I wanted to read a paragraph or two from Roger Ebert's review.
Speaker: Many years ago, when surrealism was new, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali made Un Chien Andalou, a film so shocking that Buñuel filled his pockets with stones to throw at the audience if it attacked him. Green, whose film is in the surrealist tradition, may want to consider the same tactic.
Speaker: 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." the film is a vomit The film is a vomitorium consisting of 93 minutes of Tom Green doing things that a geek in a carnival sideshow would turn down. Six minutes into the film, his character leaps from his car to wag a horse penis.
Speaker: This is, we discover, a framing device to be matched by a scene later in the film where he sprays his father with elephant semen straight from the source. And that is, to be fair to Roger Ebert, that is an accurate description of the film. that is essentially... how the film works.
Speaker: It's set in Portland. Yes, it is set in Portland. Yeah, it is. And I do want to say, for those who don't know, that is a i do love Roger Ebert for all of his dodginess, because his reference there is to The Geek, which is a carnival sideshow character, most notably sidecased in um Nightmare Alley, which I don't know if you've seen that, Sam. No, I've not seen that, no. It's a wonderful, wonderful movie, a bedmark of American no noir ah remade a couple years ago by Guillermo del Toro of all people, actually. um And the geek in that movie is sort of like the lowest rung on the carnival ladder. It's an alcoholic who they keep plied with just enough whiskey per day to do like, to like crawl around in a pit dealing with the chills, like in the shakes, like just like a carnival sideshow character who's literally just an alcoholic kept like on the edge of life for the entertainment of like passers-by.
Speaker: like So and when Ebert says it's stuff that the geek would turn down, he literally means that a guy who who crawls around a pit for enough alcohol to survive would not do the things in this movie.
Speaker: I mean, it's a very, like, fragmentary, non-linear. I mean, I suppose there is a basic block, which is Tom Green plays Gordon Gordy, who is a 28-year-old man-child wants become a cartoonist slash animator in L.A., but is still living in his parents' basement in Portland. And it's a sort of, you know, a P.D. struggle between father and son. LAUGHTER A King Lear, Shakespearean style. Obviously, King Lear has had problems with his daughters. This is the Duke of Kent, I think, who has problems with his two sons. It's playing on that, maybe. Kafka, I think I mentioned Kafka's letter to my father. These two guys, they really fucking, they hate each other, this dad and this son. And he doesn't believe in the sun's dreams.
Speaker: But the father also loves him more than his actual professional son, Freddy. Because like Freddy is this sort of like nibbish-y character who has a real job at a bank, but is still like pathetic enough where he comes and eats breakfast at his parents' house every morning because he's not making enough money. That's a killer line, is that Gould does point out to Freddy that despite him having a professional job and having moved out,
Speaker: he's just in And the parents clearly like detest Freddy, even though... And Freddy like loves and admires his parents so much so that you know later in the movie, when they're at sort of like therapy to try and get Gord to stop being a man-child, he just blurts out that their father is fingering Freddy, that he's seen him...
Speaker: which in itself is very Tom Green, right? he's He's molesting him in a very specific way. He's not... And the child services people come to the house assuming that Freddy is this, like, child and this... Of course, he's at the house for some reason because he still hangs out there all the time and is, like, watching TV. And they knock on the door and, you know, Freddy comes and is like, what do you want? And they're like, we're looking for a little Freddy. And he's like, oh, I'm Freddy. And they're it's going to be okay. like, your father's not going to...
Speaker: He's like, I'm 25 years old. yeah I'm a 25-year-old man. And they make him get in a car and like take him away to a foster home or something. Like literally an adult. And he's like trying to defend his father, who seems mostly angry about the fact that Gord has lied, not about the fact that Freddy is being taken away. There's just no connection to the Freddy character at all. It's pretty funny. But I do want to point out that one of the most Gen X guys you can be, in my opinion. And I think we see this, frankly, in the revolution in cartooning in the 90s, is wanting to be a cartoon guy who wears short-sleeved collared shirts with abstract designs on them or like little hot dogs or something, right? um Yes, yes. I think of Rocco's modern life as ah another great example. like He's a...
Speaker: ah There's a lot of kind of, they work in a comic book shop or Philbert does in that show. It's it's a Matt Groening. I mean, he's a also this guy, right? From The Simpsons. Like the Gen X slacker who wants to make it as a cartoonist. And they really did make it. um Gord is just sort of like the bottom of the barrel version of that guy. The version of that guy who draws literally a package of, is it bananas being held up by a balloon? like just none of it makes any sense. He's the most extreme version of that.
Speaker: X-Ray Cat, I think, is the initial first character. He can only see through wood. that's like, he And he goes to this... ah key The movie starts with him going down to LA to like try and make his career work. He gets a job in a cheese sandwich factory, which is... you know like That's the job. um And he decides he's going to disguise himself as a guy bringing sort of a letter carrier of some kind, a messenger, to go to the cartoonists' headquarters, where for some reason, of course, we have, um i think it's Drew Barrymore plays his like assistant. I think Tom Green and Drew Barrymore were married for the year that this film was made. ah That explains a lot. Yes, indeed. They were 2001, 2002. So exact. I was like, what is she doing here? also had the same question. was like, you started in Magnolia. What the fuck?
Speaker: Well, she is in Skipped Parts, another movie I've mentioned several times where she just plays the sort of sexual fantasy of the main character for some reason. But... um you know Basically, he decides to lie and say that them the head of the cartoon agency's, TV agency's wife has died. And so he runs into a restaurant dressed as like a British policeman, as a Bobby. And it's just like he's like, I'm looking for whatever this guy's name is. And he's like, my favorite part. is that the TV exec takes him seriously as a police officer. He's like, what is it, officer? like What do you have to tell me? even though He's literally dressed like he's in the Metro Police in London from 1935, making sure people are are adequately shielded during the Blitz. like it's The whole thing is nuts. um
Speaker: But the point is, the guy does eventually you know look through his cartoons and And I think this is very important. Gen X cartoons are known for their sort of like their absurdity. You know, Rocko's Modern Life, are Real Monsters, The Simpsons, all of these, you know, ah something like Cow and Chicken or i Am Weasel. I'm sure these are all like opaque to you. Ed, Ed, and Eddie. Oh, yeah. Ed, Ed, and Eddie. Like all of these. talk What's all about the dog? The weird one about the dogs. Courage the Cowardly Dog? Yes, yes, and yes. Like all of these very absurd kind of cartoons that are are kind of transgressive, you know, classic Gen X shock stuff.
Speaker: But the joke here is that Tom Green's guy is so, sort of such a man-child that he can't even make... like an actual show. Like what he ends up coming up with is called Zebras in America. And it's about a family of zebras who moves the United States and speak from Africa and experiences culture shock. But you get to them and they're just zebra centaurs. Like you're expecting the whole time that it's going to be the clay you know, like anthropomorphic zebras or whatever. But no, they're just he's just taking the idea of a centaur and giving them stripes. that's That's it. That's all he's come up with. Or the cat who sees through only wooden doors. And he's like, no, but if there's like a crime, like they could see it happening.
Speaker: Like that's, you know, they could see it. And the guy's like, these doodles are pretty good, but there's no story here. There's nothing, you know, like it's, it's absurdity at its fullest sort of extent. The plot has been erased. He's just, he's, he's the incapable version of the Gen X cartoonist. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah i was a man he is yeah I wonder about the horse incident to start of the film as well. Because isn't the famous, the famously a man died. it was like a much commented upon by teenage boys in the UK when was growing up. Like a man died yeah after having sex with a horse. Yes. I think that happened in Portland. That happened in Portland, no?
Speaker: Or Oregon, at least. Let's be honest. it It sounds like it would. No disrespect to the Oregon listeners, but it would make sense. Yeah. So I was just wondering if that was a callback, the completely unexplained... Why he's just like... so i Yeah, we I mean, this should be pretty obvious, but the movie is extremely disgusting. I mean, in as as was said in the Roger Ebert review, there's also a point...
Speaker: where he is told by that executive to get inside the characters, the animals, and he finds Roadkill, deer on the side of the road, and he decides he's going to literally get inside it and run around, only for him to be hit by a... Wear it skin.
Speaker: Yeah, like literally wearing his skin like he's, you know, Ben Stiller in um Tropic Thunder or something. And um just like running around until he's hit by a tractor trailer. And then he just goes, oh, I didn't expect that to happen. Like, as with all these Gen X things, it's basically a cartoon in the form of a live action movie. right. Yes. And I think there are these two central, perhaps most memorable bits of the where the premise is that he sort of fundamentally doesn't understand the real valence of language. Yes. Like he, has this kind of almost like so sort of autistic savant. God,
Speaker: type character. Yes. He doesn't quite understand yeah the sort of idiomatic nature of language. So there's this producer telling him to get inside the animals and then his his girlfriend later on telling him that perhaps ah was ah listening to music and eating some food while, you know, before drawing would relax him. And he's like, I only have two hands. what's his girlfriend called again? I'm not quite sure, but... ah Betty.
Speaker: Yeah. He's like, Betty, I only have two hands. am I supposed to do all of that? And she's like, what? And then obviously he cuts to him. playing the piano, drawing with like a so a pencil rigged to a wire, and then like feeding himself hot dogs on pieces string. Because he fundamentally doesn't understand... like He can't like conceptualize language as like something sequential?
Speaker: Or in any way metaphorical, and he's singing, Daddy, would you like some sausage? Daddy, would you like some sausage? As he like goes about doing this, he's... you know And yeah, that that scene, I think, is one of the most sort of iconic. the The other one...
Speaker: it is sort of sweet in its way, is he meets Betty, who is flipping a little creamer cup. She's like a doctor or something, or a nurse. I think she's like a receptionist, no? I she's a medical receptionist. Oh, she's receptionist, yeah. She works at the hospital.
Speaker: um And she, he finds out, is is um in a wheelchair. And I'm laughing because there's a scene where he's talking to his like friend or something and he's saying that he's not sure about this. And he's like, oh, I understand. You just hate the disabled. Like, it's fine. You know you just you just hate handicapped people. And he's like, no, no, no, no. um But of course, it turns out he's like, you know, kind of...
Speaker: Unsure about this relationship, but he goes and it inverts the dynamic of what would normally happen, which is you have to romance the woman, blah, blah, blah. You know, the classic, like, I don't know, sexually revved up man who needs to set aside his desires to romance the woman or whatever. But instead, he's like, well, I think maybe we should go out on a couple dates. And she just wants him to cane her legs because this sexually arouses her that she can then perform oral sex on him. And this is how every date they go on goes. And he's like increasingly uncomfortable with this.
Speaker: And you know I think that's another example of how... Tom Green, yes, is a very singular guy, but you can see this throughout a lot of Gen X humor, which is this desire to inhabit, but also invert tropes. like You also see this a lot with the now a little remembered South Park guys comedies they made early in their South Park days, like Orgasmo and Basketball.
Speaker: both of which are kind of absurdist comedies that use a very basic comedy plot structure that kind of takes you through the normal points of, you know, I don't know, we've got rising action, we've got a denouement, we've got, you know, all of these things, the inciting incident, whatever, your classic, like, pre-modernist, you know, way of designing um the the plot of a of a novel or of a of a play. And it inhabits those and kind of takes them seriously and kind of destroys them from the inside out.
Speaker: Like, it it wants to remain strung along and wants to hit those beats, but it wants to infect those beats with this, like, a virus of Gen X absurdity that will devour them and kind of leave them the totally, like, just just petrified, you know, kind of just destroyed. Yeah.
Speaker: like And her whole goal is to have a rocket-propelled wheelchair, yeah which is played in the movie as like, reach for your dreams. You know, anyone can do it if they put their mind to it. You know, Freddie, don't give up. yeah ah It's got a little bit of the TV thing, too, going on. Like, we often see we see her on TV designing, you know, as a kind of local interest piece, almost from, like, 24-hour party people where reporters interviewing her on her rocket chair. Yeah.
Speaker: Things like this, yeah. But it's also just like, absurdly, but like the the father and the son are just like constantly violent, just like smashing each other into things.
Speaker: Well, yeah, there's a scene where the father, so Freddy has to move back in because he fails in his quest to be a cartoonist. He quits the cheese sandwich factory job. Well, he kind of fails, but he's also like told, he he client quite literally takes the animation productions ah guy's advice, which is kind of maybe you should quit your shitty cheese job, man.
Speaker: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah. That's another- Focus on your heart. That's another example of that linguistic dimension. You're right. And he goes back and the dad's like, what what's he doing in there? She's been in there for an hour. And he goes in and of course, Tom Green is in a scuba suit pretending that the soap in the shower is treasure. And the dad comes in and like throws him out of the shower and starts like beating him and then throws the soap into the toilet. And then Gord like puts his head in there and is like, I found the treasure, daddy. I found the treasure. and Rip Torn's like, I'm going to kill you. It's very, yeah, it's very much movie about... The backwards man as well. Yeah, there's Which is like, it's almost like a Marguerite painting or something. Yes, it really is. Stealing from the surrealist...
Speaker: Yeah, it's just, jesus I am the backwards man. i can do backwards better than anyone can. Yeah, like... And he's literally in his father's suit. Like, he's dressed up backwards so that the front of the suit is facing behind and he's like in the back of the suit facing forwards. And he's walking backwards the entire time. He's like, Daddy, I have your suit. I'm wearing your suit, Daddy.
Speaker: Well, that's another... that There is kind of a little bit of a social commentary scene where... So the dad works for some kind of like... it It's a blue-collar job, whatever it is. He has like a truck that he goes around in and everything. It's like a tree service or something like this. And um there's a scene where, of course, because this kind of movie, the parents, Betty...
Speaker: Gord and then this family who lives across the street who their only role is to sort of be this like leave it to beaver family where the son is constantly being like hit by Gord in different ways. Like not on purpose, but like he'll run up to the car and get hit with the car door like a football get thrown and hit him in the face.
Speaker: And they're all of course at the same fancy restaurant the same night. And Gord is trying to impress Betty, he's told his dad he has a, quote, fancy computer job. That's the way that he describes it. And so he's put on the same suit from his dad and stolen his dad's cell phone and has it in a briefcase where, or even before this, on the date, he's like, Betty,
Speaker: Betty, going to tell you about my job. And she's like, oh, okay. And he's like, he takes out all these charts and he's pointing at a pie graph. And he just goes, this is okay. when it's you want to buy when it's ah you want to You want to buy when it's low you want to sell when it's high. See here, this one is high. This one is low. And he's not even pointing at a line graph. He's pointing at a pie chart. she's just And he's pretending to take this call.
Speaker: And I guess in his understanding, like the way that like a stockbroker talks is just by screaming. So he's just on the phone. that There's no one on the phone at all. And he's just screaming like, I told you to wire me $50,000 into my account. You lost me this much. He's just like screaming. And of course, this alerts the entire restaurant to what's going on. His dad comes over and is like, you don't even have a fancy computer job, do you?
Speaker: That's my suit. That's my cell phone. you know And then they literally get into a physical altercation in the restaurant that ends with Tom Green jumping on the bar and shooting like soda guns at everyone. And and it's it's about this like...
Speaker: performance of professionalism. You know what I mean? like it's It's the slacker demonstrating what they see as the kind of, like I don't know, um the Tenoch character in 10 years in Ito Mama Tambien, what he will be doing when he gets out of school. And ah it it, I think, tells us quite a bit about how that kind of like Gen X slacker thinks about these things because what is it? It's a performance. Like all you actually do as a stockbroker is get on the phone and yell at people and somehow money comes out of this. Like there's no actual, like you buy, it's, what is what is stocks? Oh, it's buying low and selling high. And there might be all of these like graphs. But I think there are something,
Speaker: particularly Gen X about that understanding, which is, it's it's okay, it's a sort of half-truth or a half-understanding that's used for comedic effect, but it's also like quite close to the truth in the sense that do imagine that ah you could kind of be a stockbroker in 2001. He was just kind of like, sell, buy low, sell high. Just buy the stocks when they're down and sell them when they're up. And you could just be like, whereas now, obviously, in 2026, you've got to have 15 different internships. and like so there's some truth to that.
Speaker: Well, it's because it's it's a it's a it's a market. It's a kind post-Reaganomics, like Clinton era market. Well, now i in this period, I guess. Bush, I suppose, just about. Yeah, maybe Bush, but it's all the same thing, right? Like, it it is that moment of anti-politics where it's just like, oh, okay, like, I guess they kind of have it under control. And then Enron happens and the dot-com bubble happens. It's like, oh, maybe they don't. And then 2008 happens. i'm Like, oh, they really don't have it under control.
Speaker: But yeah, he's... I mean, i think that's the central conceit of the film that doesn't make sense today, right? Is that is the kind of just like, get a job. yeah get Get a goddamn job. It's like, obviously, like... Yeah, it's like... Now... Yeah, Rip Torn clearly believes like you could just sweep outside of like the local newspaper and like Gord could go be like a, don't know, like a local interest journalist in Portland if he really wanted to or be the cartoonist at the newspaper. You're silly doodles.
Speaker: Yeah. then importantly, yeah he will eventually get money. He does sell his show. Of course, he only sells it because his dad chases him into the room where the TV executive is. And he's like,
Speaker: That guy's a character. like you've got And then what does he do with the $1 million dollars that he gets? Oh, it's beautiful. Squander it immediately in various ways. yeah But I think that's like quite great. mean, it's like the true artist, right? is' like I think there's these stories about Lucian Freud, the painter, how like whenever he sold a painting for like £2 million, he'd just immediately lose it at the horse races. He just like didn't...
Speaker: That couldn't work if he had any money in the bank. and like I feel like there's something kind of like, yeah, avant-garde about Tom Green. just spin like There's no instinct towards ah accumulation or investment in this film. Oh, no, no. The whole point is that, yeah, you can only be an artist if you're actually...
Speaker: like Because i think he recognizes the thing he is selling is so absurd. like He makes zebras in America, this like stupid show about zebras coming to the United States, that like of course you would spend it that way. And secondarily, that like the money is itself just ah it's meaningless. like it's It's this authenticity thing we've talked about before where it's like, well, if you actually cared about money, you wouldn't be able to be an artist in the first place. And so, of course, what does he spend his money on?
Speaker: But he he buys just a case full of jewels for Betty that she has in no way asked Brought you jewels, Betty. Because again, it's like, what do rich people buy? How do you show your love? It's just jewels. It's not specific jewels. It's not diamonds in particular. It's just a chest full of jewels. Like he's a 19th century aristocrat who's like extracting from the new world and just like has them as an investment in a chest somewhere or is like setting them into like a cameo. Right? And then the the rest of it is spent...
Speaker: Because early in the movie, I think his dad tells him that he should just like go to Pakistan and milk goats for a living or something like this. No, no. He says that if you were born in Pakistan, you'd be throwing footballs at four. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, because it's like you know basically the like you know finish your meal, there are hungry children in China sort of thing. um And so, of course, again, taking this literally as some like desire on his father's part to visit Pakistan, he pays to have the entire house relocated to Pakistan, which is what leads to the scene of him spraying his father with elephant semen in a barn in Pakistan. they Somewhere in that is it the Kandahar Desert or something. It's the desert between Rajasthan and Sindh.
Speaker: And it's very Simpsons mole man driving Edgar Allan Poe's birthplace like on the back of a of a tractor trailer. Whereas, oh no, you've done it again. and then he just crashes the tractor trailer. Yeah, so his father is, we should say, ah Gordon who like equips himself with like Navy SEALs style like infiltration special ops equipment. Yeah. And infiltrates his dad's house. So prior to any of this happening in him, so in the cartoon, and his father's wife, the mother, divorces the father. She doesn't initially believe Gordon's claim that Freddy's got fingered. Well, she's sort of ambiguous. Oh, forgot about this. Yeah. And then...
Speaker: In another one of these very funny semi-autistic moments of the father not understanding language or literalizing metaphor, Gord basically goes, fuck you, to his dad. And then he goes, well, all right then, and then pulls down his trousers and goes, fuck me. And he's like wriggling his ass. And he pulls his bed down.
Speaker: And then the mom. Sort of happens upon it out of context. And obviously this confirms ah Gordon's sort of accusation. She's like well, obviously he is an incestuous beautiful. and And then like, Gord sort of has this heart-to-heart moment with her where he goes, you know, you used to go and like follow your sexual desires. like And it's like, go and sleep with as many Greek com men as possible. no it goes... ego I would have sex with basketball players, with Greeks, with men who are from Greece.
Speaker: um And later, of course, the mom is in bed with Shaquille O'Neal, which reveals the basketball player part. Well, not the Greek part. No, no. It's a very odd choice of ethnicity. I get it. I'm like, has Tom Green been reading it like like Freud and like a penis, right? Like... um In the sense of the mother, it's very odd, yeah. It's very all this like Freudian kind of stuff going on. Well, yeah, it's also that the idea that a son's advice to his mother is like, go sow your wild oats, basically. Like, we've defeated this this overbearing paternal figure. and now, like, there's a scene earlier on where Gord comes home after being in LA and they're eating roast beef that looks like meatloaf and Gord won't eat it. He takes out a chicken sandwich and he's like, I will eat chicken sandwich. And he's like,
Speaker: No, you will not eat chicken sandwich at my house, you know, whatever. and And, you know, basically he destroys the chicken sandwich, blah, blah, blah. So the dead is this kind of like overbearing figure. So you kind of, this is what I mean about like still using the bare bones outlines of a normal plot. Like,
Speaker: there are still these kind of like stock images and characters that come through. It's a little bit like Canterbury Tales in that way. Like, yeah I'm going to give you a series of relatable tropes, but I'm going to do insane sort of like transgressive things to them. um And so the mom does go out and sleeps with Shaquille O'Neal.
Speaker: And if anything, what's weird is that's the breakup of the family, right? Like on the one hand, Gord seems to want that. On the other hand, he brings his father to Pakistan because he sees this as like an act of like love and reunion where they can come together through this like kind of vacation that they're taking this place he imagines. his His dad wakes up in the house, which has been transferred to Pakistan. And he's like put on like a pillar, which Gord is like, Gord is dragging this house on a pillar in like a kind of like horse and carton.
Speaker: Yeah, but but that's, again, his, like, misunderstanding. He's just like, oh, yes, well, a dad wants to go to Pakistan, so let's do this is how you do that. You know, easy come, easy go, right? I've got the jewels. I've got the house of Pakistan. like And I think if we want to, like, and and I will say to listeners, you know, this is a goofy movie that we just kind of wanted to cover some basic themes, so our apologies for it being short. But if I had to summarize, it it is the perfect example of this sort of, like, the ideal version of the slacker, like the strongest version, not the...
Speaker: Linklater version we got was Slacker, or even the Big Lebowski version, which is a different kind of utopian Slackerism. This is like... the true version of the guy who is actually an outsider, who could never really be an insider, where it's not even like a kind of self-imposed slackerdom that comes from a i don't know, just like an impetus within the self. This is like he is cut off by a certain literalization from society that simultaneously is what makes him the perfect artist for the moment because he is authentic. He cannot escape that authenticity. He's almost like condemned to authenticity. But...
Speaker: That's also what makes him the ideal who can make the absurd cartoon. He can, like, basically never negate his his selfhood in any sort of strategic way to, like, advance himself. No.
Speaker: But he happens to live in a moment in history where that is what is going to be plucked up and allows you to get a million dollars, which is what happened to Matt Groening and all of these guys. But unlike Matt Groening or someone like this, he is so genuinely cut off that he's just going to spend it on jewels and transporting house to Pakistan. And that's it. Fuck you. There's nothing else for him. There's no further place for him to go.
Speaker: So... We should say that there's a kind of cathartic resolution, right? Like, okay, he spends his money in an absolutely absurd literalist manner. But that the film is the sort of perfect circle or an Ouroboros, right? In the sense that it starts off with the father sort of ushering his son. The bird is flying the nest.
Speaker: He buys him. Is it a Camaro? I don't... Oh, the car. It might be... Yeah, something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, do you have Lebaron? Do you have a Lebaron? Yeah, to his brother. Yeah, to his brother. yeah um ah Obviously, and his his his father kind of has this like weird sort of monotic, monotone sort of ah imperative, which is just, Proud. Proud. And then obviously, so you get this the start and then obviously everything falls apart.
Speaker: They enter conflict. He takes them to Pakistan and they enter this kind of strange sort of deer hunter. Escaved in Pakistan, for lack of a better term. Where they're like captured by, I don't know, like a proto-Taliban or, I don't know like Balastro-Stani separatists. And they're kidnapped, but they kind of make friends with ah their kidnappers in a kind of Stockholm syndrome kind of way. And they're sort of playing Russian roulette around the table and they they bond.
Speaker: Yeah, they finally bond by being removed from Western society. That is actually the point at which they can bond, is a return to the tribal roots of the Oedipus complex or something like that. Yeah, there's a moment where they're both face down in the sand, Gene, and he's just going to go, all I wanted to do was make you proud, Daddy.
Speaker: And he looks over with tears. He's like, proud. Proud, yes. it's It's very sweet. And of course, the very ending of the movie, and again, this is part of this inversion, is they come back on like the kind of flight that brings back like ah like a coffin from Vietnam or something, except they're like heroes. And they they come back, and very famously, one of the signs at the end says, when the fuck is this movie going to end? Yeah.
Speaker: And so it can't, it can't not do a little kind of fourth wall break type stuff at the very close of the film. um Just to make sure that, you know, you remember that this is a sort of absurdist postmodern Gen X comedy that never, that never allows you to get the last laugh on it. You know?
Speaker: um And I think that's that is kind of what makes it special. It's like the perfect version of this thing that I think we all intuit about Gen X, we all kind of know, but that gives us this special brand that at this point has kind of died off and been erased by a a millennial humor. like i don't I don't know that we really get popular comedies that contain this level of self-referential kind of...
Speaker: I was going to say, I mean, i think the only millennial comedy that really reaches it is possibly Come Town. And I was interested to see when I looked at Freddy Got Fingered on Letterboxd that Adam Friedland had written ah a short review, which was just a masterpiece. Five stars, I'm sure. Yeah, for the five stars, um a masterpiece. and surprisinging Unsurprising, unsurprising. I think like there's a Nick Mullen bit about him just like torturing a girlfriend on a road trip by like endlessly singing in theyre like ah like an over an eight hour, like road trips, singing in the loop. I'm the kind of guy that fucks his mom and dad Yeah. I'm the kind of guy that fucks his mom and dad. Which again, it seems like it's like directly cribbed from a Tom Green. Oh yeah. No, no question at all. And, and he is, you know, it's funny. There is an echo too, in that the Tom Green show, which is what he, i don't know if that's what initially made him famous or not, but probably that the basic conceit of that show would be taken over by the Eric Andre show, which is kind of a staple of millennial absurdist humor. Like there is a line here through maybe something like Tim and Eric and,
Speaker: Eric Andre and things of maybe to some extent Hannibal Buress. But as I said, we would keep it short and sweet. Unfortunately, as I need to go to a, I guess, a marital shower, as i was explaining to Sam, I suppose now for reasons of gender parity, it's no longer just the bridal shower. So looking forward to that, but my wife will kill me if we're too late. So I will simply say thank you all for listening. Please consider subscribing, especially at a paid tier so that we can really get that revved up with some of the rewards. Email us at deathphotopod at gmail.com leave, you know, maybe some Freddie Got Finger type stuff in the comments. Leave us a voice note in an email that just says, Daddy, would you like some sausage or something like that? You know? Tom Green, if you're out there, come on. I would love to talk to Tom Green. Not that, you know, ah you have any reason to, but, you know, you like little absurdity. What's more absurd than being on this podcast? We've also had, you know, a professor at an Ivy League institution and ah a British equivalent in Anton Yeager. So come on down, Tom. So with that, thanks, everybody. i Have a wonderful, going to say weekend.
Speaker: This should come out on Sunday. Bye-bye.
