This Week In Retro: Freddy Got Fingered (Patreon)

4-20-2001: Tom Green unloads his id on American movie screens

by Diamond Feit

[CONTENT WARNING: this week's column includes descriptions of bodily functions and organs of a sexual nature]

I’m something of a cinephile in that I adore watching and thinking about movies far more than any other medium. I love video games (I wouldn’t be writing these columns if I didn’t) but movies, man, movies are pure sorcery. Hundreds of people spending millions of dollars to craft a series of photographs that, when strung together at precisely the right speed, make you believe you’re seeing real people do real things.

A recent recording session for the Cinema Oblivia podcast got me thinking about motion picture genres which aren't popular anymore. Movie-making is costly and risky, two adjectives rich people hate, so no matter how popular a film might be upon release, certain kinds of films fall out of favor with the guys who write the checks. Usually this comes after a famous flop, sometimes it results from changing tastes, but whatever the reasons there are entire catalogs of movies that studios no longer produce.

This week, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Freddy Got Fingered, a movie helmed by then-red-hot TV comedian Tom Green. Green had his own low-budget comedy program on Canadian television in the late 90s which earned him a slot on MTV. The US show, which debuted in 1999 and liberally rebroadcast bits from his Canadian work, was an immediate hit. Green became a household name, appearing in movies and commercials alike, and two years later we got a comedy that no one expected...or wanted.

As is my wont, I must set the stage for this release by turning the clock back to the 1980s. After the cinema revolution of the 70s, and along with the rise of home video and cable television, lots of 80s movies found a second life (and a wider audience) from VHS rentals and late-night TV airings. Gory horror movies benefited tremendously from this phenomenon, but another beneficiary was the raunchy comedy genre; goofy movies often loaded with coarse language, nudity, and gross-out gags which couldn’t normally air on TV. Comedies like National Lampoon's Animal House, Caddyshack, and Porky's were already box-office hits, but then became legendary thanks to uncensored cable channels and kids’ sleepover parties.

By the late 1990s, things had changed. The decade saw a shift towards "edgy" material, as even broadcast television shows began to push the boundaries of what was acceptable to air on public airwaves. This in turn led to even more extreme content on cable TV (which was increasingly featuring original programming like South Park rather than settling for reruns) as well as in motion pictures. There's Something About Mary, American Pie, and Scary Movie all made explicit on-screen references to ejaculation yet still enjoyed wide audience appeal. South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, a musical movie adaptation of the hit TV show, featured graphic (cartoon) violence, near-constant profanity from its juvenile cast of characters, and even included a scene with a giant, sentient clitoris.

Freddy Got Fingered followed in the wake of all these films when it debuted in American cinemas on April 20, 2001. Tom Green co-writes, directs, and stars in the film as Gord, a 28-year-old aspiring animator who lives at home. He moves to Los Angeles to pursue his dream, but when his work fails to impress a studio head, he moves back home, despondent. There's family tension with his father (played by Rip Torn) who sees Gord as a failure, a label Gord struggles to overcome. However, Gord's behavior is often outrageous, leading to frequent physical confrontations and numerous injuries to those around him. Ultimately, he uses his personal conflict as material for an animated show, which gets him a million dollar check and mends his fractured relationship with his father.

The above passage is a G-rated summary of Freddy Got Fingered, but that's not how moviegoers remember it. Tom Green was already known for his confrontational style of humor, often featuring segments on his television show where he drew ire from real people in public. Freddy Got Fingered is not Borat; everyone on screen is a paid performer and the action is entirely scripted. However, Green managed to confront the audience by making his on-screen persona a complete psychotic.

During the course of Freddy Got Fingered, Gord alternates wildly from quiet self-pity to fits of screaming. He chews with his mouth open. He laughs at things that aren't funny. He goads his friend Darren into skateboarding at night; when he suffers a gruesome compound fracture, Gord licks the protruding bones from Darren's leg. Visiting him in the hospital, Gord argues with a pregnant woman and promptly decides to deliver her baby himself, cutting the cord with his teeth.

I haven't gotten to the wildest moments of Freddy Got Fingered, namely the animal handjobs—yes, plural. One of Tom Green's most famous bits on television was milking a cow with his mouth, knowing full well it looked sexual and playing it for laughs. He does this as Gord on film, but he also pulls over his car to manually masturbate a horse on a stud farm. This occurs in the first minutes of the film, before Gord sinks into any despair or malaise. His only apparent motivation is to satisfy his own curiosity.

During the climax of the film (pun intended), Gord is fleeing from his rightfully-angry father when he happens upon an elephant in a tent. Without hesitation, he grabs the animal's penis and jerks it off to completion, blasting his father with what must be gallons of (fake?) semen. My son happened to be in the room when I watched this scene and he, bless his innocence, laughed at what he thought was "milk." Someday he'll learn the truth; I can only hope he's still laughing then.

Freddy Got Fingered is disgusting. This was, by all accounts, intentional. In a promotional interview timed with the film's original release, Tom Green proudly called his work "the stupidest, most disgusting movie you’ve ever seen." Despite his rising star status, Freddy Got Fingered crashed and burned at the box office. It opened in fifth place behind the third Crocodile Dundee movie and never recovered. Critics eviscerated the film as gruesome and humorless; Roger Ebert wrote: "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."

Even before the box office returns made it an official bomb, Green was quoted as saying "We just killed the gross-out genre." Hollywood being Hollywood, no trend stays dead forever, but Green certainly slammed the brakes on what had been an ever-escalating game of one-upmanship. As he put it in a recent retrospective on his magnum opus, "It was my attempt to mock the traditional studio comedy by pushing the gross-out genre way beyond what you were seeing in the really popular movies coming out around that time."

During my rewatch of Freddy Got Fingered for its 20th anniversary, the actual themes stuck out to me more than the extreme nature of the antics. Gord struggles with his desire to be creative versus societal pressure to succeed financially, and that is #relatable. When I turned 28, I wasn't living at home but I hadn't yet graduated from college and I had plenty of reasons to doubt myself. Even years later, after getting my degree and moving to Japan, I have struggled with my identity and career. None of these concerns inspired me to sexually stimulate any wild mammals, but everyone copes with life in their own way.

Revisiting the film in 2021 did little to diminish my fondness for Tom Green and his personal brand of humor. There are certainly elements that do not hold up, particularly the language Rip Torn uses in anger on screen (although Roger Ebert also uses one of the same slurs in his review—it was a different time). I can understand why viewers, then and now, might not like it, but when I see Green play the keyboard and sing about sausages while also eating sausages via an advanced pulley system, I laugh everytime.

In a world where everyone has access to streaming media and the days of the blockbuster film may be waning, it is quaint to recall a time when one particularly filthy movie shocked an industry. The closest analog I can think of post-Freddy is the general reaction to The Human Centipede, although being a horror film that carried an expectation of graphic violence.

Freddy Got Fingered rode a wave of gross-out comedies but sank too low, dragging the genre down with it. Green pivoted back to television and today seems to embrace his own thing, traveling the country and sharing whatever catches his interest on his surprisingly chill YouTube channel. Judging by that 20th anniversary interview linked above, he is pleased with where his "ridiculous and strange" movie ended up in the history books: "It’s more fun now, to find it as something you think no one’s heard of," Green says, "It’s being viewed the way it was intended to be viewed all along." You made history, sir, you should be proud.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.