Freddy Got Fingered (2001, Tom Green) (Patreon)

0/100

Second viewing, last seen months after its original theatrical release, at the urging of several friends who insisted that critics who'd deemed it one of the worst movies ever made were humorless stuffed shirts.

"There actually has to be something that happens that's actually funny. What the fuck is happening here?"—Anthony Michael Hall as Dave Davidson, Freddy Got Fingered

The following is a by-no-means-exhaustive list of things that Tom Green—and some of my friends, and quite likely many of you—find funny that I, for whatever reason, do not find even a tiny little bit funny:

• Tom Green.

• A horse's penis.

• Tom Green excitedly playing with a horse's penis.

• Tom Green pretending that a huge sausage is his own penis and waving it around while standing on a conveyor belt yelling "I'm a sexy boy! Ding dong! Ding dong!"

• Tom Green.

• Misinterpreting "get inside the animals" (mentally) as a suggestion to skin a dead deer and prance around wearing its head and bloody fur.

• Compound fractures.

• Tom Green licking a compound fracture.

• Tom Green biting through a woman's umbilical cord and then swinging the newborn infant over his head by said cord.

• Tom Green.

• Women who never stop giggling and are obsessed with giving Tom Green's character a blowjob.

• Paraplegics who are sexually aroused by having someone cane the part of their body that has no sensation.

• Tom Green taking a shower in full scuba gear.

• Tom Green repeating phrases like "fingers crossed" over and over using a sillier voice and more exaggerated gesture each time.

• Tom Green.

• Tom Green wearing a business suit backwards and singing an improvised song about being the Backwards Man.

• Tom Green badly playing a keyboard while wearing steaks on his head and eating sausages controlled by an elaborately useless pulley system attached to all ten fingers.

• Random screaming and bellowing. (I don't even really enjoy this in Coen Brothers films. A little in Raising Arizona, maybe.)

• False accusations of child molestation.

• The use of "finger" as a verb.

• Rip Torn responding to "fuck you" by pulling his pants down and inviting the person to literally fuck him.

• Tom Green putting a green pepper in one nostril.

• Running gags involving an innocent child experiencing severe facial injury.

• Pakistan.

• Elephant jizz. (See also Grimsby.)

• Tom Green.

If you chortled your way through that rundown and consider it a first-rate summary of why Freddy Got Fingered is an absurdist riot...well, I won't say "more power to you," lest you utilize said power to get another Tom Green film made, but I accept that we don't share the same sense of humor. (Works both ways—there are folks out there who sit stony-faced through State and Main, apparently. French Exit, too, though I'm starting to see some support there.) I can only report honestly that none of it made me so much as crack a smile, either 20 years ago or last night. Not surprising, really, since I generally don't enjoy aggressively infantile personae (cf. Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell; jury's still out on vintage Jerry Lewis, which I've seen none of, believe it or not) and have always been repelled by gross-out gags. (One of my earliest memories of a comedy disconnect is not laughing at Belushi's "I'm a zit. Get it?" in Animal House, which I first saw when I was probably 11 or 12 years old and barely knew what a zit was.) I do, however, often crack up at sheer nonsense, and it's possible that truly bizarro stuff like "Daddy, would you like some sausage?" might have landed for me if I didn't find Green such a black hole of amusement. Unrestrained id as it might be expressed by a 12-year-old boy who thinks "I'm a zit" is the most hilarious thing he's ever seen could hardly be more off-putting to me.

Back in 2001, there was some spirited argument about the film on the nerd group. Here's my initial response, replying to a friend who, after seeing my "F," said he couldn't believe I hadn't at least laughed at Zebras in America. (Bear in mind that a lot of us employed a goofy prose style that was inspired by Vern but evolved into its own thing.) 

Zebras in America was by far the funniest thing in the movie, and it was still kind of lame. I do not get Green's sense of humor in my opinion. He is kind of like early Steve Martin with the non sequiturish anti-humor, only without the incongruity of the dapper clothes and white hair and ability to play the banjo and whatnot. And even early Steve Martin didn't really work in movies, witness The Jerk. Add the gross-out stuff and infantilism that I pretty much never care for and you have the least hilarious dude on the planet from my perspective. Ha ha, he's got steak hanging from his ears! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Also I am annoyed that everyone is giving this movie props for being "personal" and "unique" and for "busting taboos" as if those things were per se admirable. I mean Ed Wood was "personal" and "unique" and while we may enjoy his movies in an MST3K kind of way we do not mistake them for actual cinematic excellence (unless we are J.Ro or some other critic who fetishizes personal expression and originality). And busting taboos is the easiest thing in the world—you don't have to be talented, you just have to be fearless. Buffalo ’66 comes from a similar psychological place and is approximately I would say 600,000 times the movie Freddy is on account of Gallo understands how to transform his pain into art (not to mention how to use a movie camera). The scene where Ben Gazzara lip-synchs to a recording sung by Gallo's dad is more disturbing and poignant by far than the entirety of Freddy.

Actually after watching this movie with gaping jaw I am convinced that all those pro votes and encomiums were part of a Skander-inspired April Fool's gag designed to trick me into seeing one of the worst movies ever made. Good one buds. You got me.

As was often the case back then (nostalgic sigh), this was followed by some pretty stimulating discussion. I'm gonna cut-and-paste the entirety of another post I made (responding to several different people), since I can't really improve on what I said. Only marvel that I somehow had the time to say it while working a full-time job.

Quoth Wazowski:

Again, doesn't this depend on the critic or viewer's definition of cinematic excellence?

Obviously. But I guess I kind of object to definitions that judge the artist's intentions as much as (or frequently more than) the results of those intentions. (WARNING: What follows is basically a rehash of the Great Ambition Debate.) For example:

Ed Wood's best films (Plan 9 and Glen or Glenda) are moving and fascinating, in ways their maker intended (attempts at expressing a marginal viewpoint, out of step with dominant American attitudes at the time) and other ways he probably didn't.

Here you praise Wood not for his artistry, but because you admire what he's trying to do, viz. express a marginal viewpoint—as if expressing a marginal viewpoint weren't something that could be done either well or poorly. Similarly, people keep marveling about how personal Freddy Got Fingered is, as if being personally expressive automatically makes something a great work of art. Uh, no. If that were true, the world's museums would be stuffed to the rafters with childrens' fingerpainting experiments. Craft fucking matters. Let me say that again: CRAFT FUCKING MATTERS. Some of the lamest poetry ever written is also some of the most heartfelt. It's still bad poetry. And it's entirely possible for Freddy Got Fingered to be utterly unique, deeply personal and arrestingly transgressive and still be head-clutchingly awful.

Now, I've seen some reasonable defenses of the film's merits (including your own in the post to which I'm responding), so I'm not claiming that the people who enjoyed it are deluded. Certainly there's no arguing with someone who found it funny. If Jeff thinks a dude with steaks hanging from his ears is a laff riot, hey, next round's on me man. But calling the film "personal" and "original" is merely descriptive, whereas folks are using those adjectives as if they were qualitative. Bzzt.

It's like Green doesn't know where he is from minute to minute.

See, to me that is not a recommendation. I don't want to see art made by people who don't know where they are from minute to minute, nor from someone whose id "genuinely seems to be out of his control," as Steve admiringly (!) says. Call me kooky, but I think control is an asset for an artist. Look at David Lynch: We're getting what feels like almost a direct link to his unconscious, but he clearly knows what the hell he's doing. That I can get down with. If I just want to see some head case wrestling unselfconsciously with his demons, I know where Bellevue is.

Regina added:

And how many fearless people have you met? They are not that common. I would submit that that is because flouting convention is not, in fact, easy.

Deciding to do it in the face of resistance and possible consequences is the hard part. That I acknowledge, and I can admire the attempt in the abstract (as opposed to admiring the execution of said attempt). But actually doing it is a snap. You just identify the taboo and then disregard it. You could train wombats to do it if you worked at it for a few months.

And now Skander:

Take the scene where Freddy is watching TV with the other kids at the Institute for Sexually Abused Children(!). That in itself is just kind of startling. But the kicker is Green gives Freddy a long white beard. I mean Freddy has been there for like a few days and he has a long white beard. That is just funny bud, I am sorry.

Not to be nitpicky, but doesn't Freddy have the long white beard after Gord and his Dad have been in Pakistan for like 18 months? I would check this out except I already donned my protective latex gloves and returned the DVD to Kim's.

I am disappointed that you do not realize this film is superior to just a plain old crappy comedy like Beverly Hills Ninja.

More admirable in the abstract I will give you. Superior, no. I did actually chuckle one time during Beverly Hills Ninja. I believe it was when Chris Farley was supposed to do something ninjalike only it all went wrong on account of he is a big fat guy.

To be fair, there is one joke in Freddy Got Fingered that I do at least recognize as humor, even if I'd give it maybe 2/10 (which ain't enough for smile-cracking). Not Zebras in America, which I just found irritating this time, mostly due to Green's falsetto. It's when Gord goes to apply for another job toward the end and walks past a Help Wanted sign that reads "Must have experience with cheese sandwiches." That's at least theoretically funny to me. As opposed to, say, Gord spending $750K to transport his dad's bedroom and bathroom to Pakistan, based on Dad having once made some disdainful remark about what Gord's life would be like had he been born there—a feeble "callback" that seems designed primarily to get Gord within range of an elephant dick. 

Still, there's a difference between merely hating a movie and giving it zero points on the needlessly precise 100-point scale. Something about Green's whole attitude here just rubs me the wrong way. I don't  feel "outrage," exactly—it's all pretty harmless—but there's a sense of resentment that I've rarely experienced watching other films. The third time that the neighbor kid takes a projectile to the face, I stopped to wonder why I find that running gag obnoxiously distasteful yet laugh my ass off in Bad Santa when Willie beats the living shit out of some teenagers who've been bullying Thurman Merman. (Just the name "Thurman Merman" is funnier to me than anything in this film.) I think it's because Zwigoff doesn't revel in the child's innocence or pain. It's shocking and subversive, but the comedy isn't rooted in the cruelty; we're not being prodded to find it funnier precisely because the injury is undeserved, nor to enjoy the kid's realistic screams of agony. Hell, even Green's title is a juvenile provocation: The movie isn't remotely about Freddy, and the "subplot" involving the false abuse allegation is a throwaway bit that gets forgotten until the last few minutes. Green just thinks Freddy Got Fingered is a hilarious phrase to stick on posters and billboards. If disagreeing makes me a humorless stuffed shirt, oh well. I can console myself watching Bad Santa or Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or Sleeping Dogs Lie, and feel no guilt whatsoever about desiring my transgressive cinema with a side order of wit and/or skill. 

At least Green has yet to make another feature that I'd no doubt be obligated to sit through. He's a one-shit wonder.