Jose Saca – Freddy Got Fingered (Twelfth Post)

“The movie's comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant. Some of these -- the ''backwards man'' bit, the sausage-piano concert and the fake cell phone in the restaurant scene -- might have qualified for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts if MTV and studio money hadn't been forthcoming and may show up some day at the Museum of Modern Art.”

- The New York Times film critic A.O Scott, in his review of Freddy Got Fingered

Freddy Got Fingered is a comedy film directed by and starring Tom Green. It was released in 2001.

The film casts Green as Gord, an animator from Oregon who decides to pursue his dream of becoming a star animator by moving to Los Angeles. The trip fails, he moves back in with his parents, and the film becomes a strange meditation, if you will, on the bond between a black sheep son and an overbearing, angry father.

The film was released off the heels of the then popular The Tom Green Show on MTV. The show was gleefully crazy, staring Green as a host who would play pranks and mean reality based stunts on his friends, family, and unsuspecting strangers. The cruelty inflicted on his parents and on his friend Glenn Humplik were of particular note, in particular, a prank where Green drives and strands Humplik on the streets of New York with next to nothing. Mean-spirited, yes, but also fucking hilarious.

20^th Century Fox, looking to capitalize on Green’s success (it go to the point where Green couldn’t do pranks on unsuspecting strangers since too many people were now familiar with him and his show), decided to give him a chance at replicating the show’s success to the big screen.

The end result, Freedy Got Fingered, accompanied by intense promotion and even an MTV special dedicated solely to the film (a DVD bonus), was a critical and box-office failure. The brand of humor Green practiced on television was successful because it was short (a half hour with a weirdo, laugh, change channel), that it translated unsuccessfully to what audiences anticipated in feature films (more on that point later).

The following analysis will discuss how a star-led vehicle can flounder if the star in question is given total creative control, with the fickleness of today’s star system also being a key point I’ll touch upon as an example of a studio trying to capitalize on an unorthodox comedian’s short-lasting stardom.

Green’s film works as an attack on good taste, yet it also harbors a brainier core. It parodies the small-town guy moving to a big city with dreams of success story, itself an institution, and jars audience expectations by inserting random, crazy asides that play like a cross between Duck Soup and David Lynch—anarchic, hysterical, frightening, and ultimately unbelievable. In one particular scene, Gord, while driving to California, stops his car after spotting a horse being stimulated and prepared for mating in a stud farm. He proceeds to bolt out his car, run towards the horse, grab its aroused penis, and masturbates the now-aroused member for no apparent reason whatsoever.

The interspersion of the familiar with the bizarre is rampant throughout the film, as if Green were giving the finger to the rigid formal components of films that follow standard three-act structure with little to no obstruction from the creator. The clearest example of this is in the scene where Green, after showing a series of incomprehensible drawings to animation mogul Dave Davidson (well-played by Anthony Michael Hall), Gord, driving back to his house, spots a dead moose and, remembering Mr. Davidson’s advise (“Get inside the [characters]”), proceeds to gut the dead animal, yank its skin off, slip inside the animal’s skin, run around the open highway terrain for a few seconds, before getting hit by a truck that launches him back like a projectile. Gord gets up, drenched in animal blood, laughing as if stoned, unscathed by the experience. All this occurs while sappy non-diegetic folk music plays in the background. In another scene, a kid runs up to Gord’s car, calling out his name, and trips over himself and land on his face. A close up on the kid’s bleeding face, crying, cuts to an extreme close up of gravy soaked roast beef being served for dinner.

Such a blend of anarchic Dada with comedic lightheartedness did not go well with mainstream film audiences. 20^th Century Fox thought it could capitalize on the success of Green’s show and his wild humor by giving carte blanche on this project. The film’s commercial and critical failure is an example of the fickleness of today’s star system, where society at large is up to its neck in celebrities. The success of Paris Hilton for showing up at parties and not wearing panties is one of many examples, as this generation glorifies said persons as heroes in an age of extreme mass consumption.

Hence, it’s no surprise that the same people Green catered for turned their backs on him at the time of this film’s release. People like Green were and still are disposable since the next trend or flavor of the month is bound to waltz into the public’s consciousness in no time. Especially nowadays, with the advent of YouTube, all it takes is the simple click of a mouse to see the latest public fascination.

His comedic unorthodoxy made it hard for studios to capitalize on a certain fan culture or community for this film. The people who watched his show were young, yet they ranged from college kids to geeky middle-schoolers such as me at that time. The difficulty to find an appropriate niche for Green to advertise himself toward led to what I believe was the ultimate failure of Tom Green as a film star.

All of which is unfortunate, since Green had a finished product of deranged genius bordering on outsider art with this film.