The first few minutes of Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered (2001) give one a very clear indication of the kind of film that Green's financiers probably thought they were getting and that Green himself may have believed he was making: a routine man-child comedy about a twenty-eight-year-old adolescent (Green) who wants to become an animator in Hollywood and thereby earn the respect of his father (Rip Torn), who dismisses his drawings as "doodles." Green's character, Gord, is introduced skateboarding through a suburban mall while an irate security guard chases after him so we know he is a rebel, and later there is an obligatory romantic subplot involving a pretty blonde girl. So far so mediocre. But then, about ten minutes into the movie while Gord is driving from Portland to Los Angeles to follow his dream, he spots a horse by the side of the road and immediately pulls over so that he can touch its huge erect penis. (As Roger Ebert observed in his review of the film, it is a measure of Green's concern for formal symmetry that, at the end of the film, Gord masturbates an Indian elephant in order to give his dad his, uh... comeuppance [2001].) Here is a film ostensibly made for a mass audience (and currently streaming on Disney+!) which contains imagery usually reserved for the seedier corners of the internet. I am not going to claim the film is a success on its own terms, or indeed, on any terms whatsoever—the tension between its generic obligations and Green's distinctive brand of animal humour tears the film apart—but its failure is instructive. It also made me laugh quite a bit.

It is worth pausing here to reflect on Green's abbreviated tenure as a Hollywood celebrity, not only because, looking back on it in 2024, it is hard to believe it ever really happened, but also because it helps to clarify the nature of the commercial contradictions that doomed his film. Green first came to my attention in the late 1990s with his eponymous TV show, which originated as a public access program in Ottawa before getting picked up by a national broadcaster in 1997. Green's principal schtick was a sort of guerrilla street theatre, in which he would turn up at a public place and perform acts that most people would not want to look at, much less try for themselves. His signature gag (reprised in Freddy Got Fingered in an end-credit outtake reel) was drinking milk straight from a cow's udders. After the commercial success of There's Something About Mary (Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 1998) and American Pie (Chris and Paul Weitz, 1999) demonstrated the broad appeal of gross-out humour, somebody at MTV had the brilliant idea of buying Green's show and watering it down for the American market. Green moved to the States, married Drew Barrymore (she makes a cameo in Freddy Got Fingered), and was mentioned in a song by Eminem (the song plays over the film's final credits). And then he made this film and it effectively killed his career.

Twenty-three years later, Freddy Got Fingered has acquired the aura of a cautionary tale. In a recent interview, the director Jane Schoenbrun cites it as an example of how not to sustain a career in Hollywood, as if Green had intentionally self-immolated. (Schoenbrun characterizes the film as a "suicide-mission" [Sims 2024].) But in the film, Green is only doing the sort of comedy that made him famous in the first place, albeit here in a strictly fictional context. What the film demonstrates, I think, is that Green's comic sensibility is so radical that it resists the effort to package it in a commodifiable form. There is not one scene in Freddy Got Fingered that "works" in conventional terms because Green's comedy systematically negates the conventions of the man-child comedy. For instance, the genre dictates that the father be a stern authority figure but still soft enough that the ordained father-son reconciliation is both desirable and convincing. Here, however, Torn (who, it must be said, gives a very committed performance) plays the dad as a psychotic redneck prone to verbal and physical outbursts. (In one scene, he intimidates a man with a broken leg by kicking at his cast.) For his part, Gord falsely accuses his father of molesting his brother, Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas, of American Pie). "He fingered him," Gord says holding up an extended index finger, as if the concept required clarification. Soon after, a social worker shows up at the house to take Freddy, who is twenty-five, to a home for molested children. There, the kids wear identical white t-shirts reading "No more secrets," as if they were in a cult, and in one scene, they sit around the TV and watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) in spacey silence. (Are the kids supposed to be sedated?) At the end of the film, Freddy is still in the home and apparently incapable of leaving it, and Gord never retracts the accusation against his father. Instead, both Gord and his dad appear to have forgotten the whole incident, which is about as believable as the idea that dousing a tyrannical father in elephant semen will somehow mellow him out.

But what makes the film radically unpalatable to a mainstream audience is its attitude towards meat, which recalls the work of performance artist and experimental filmmaker Carolee Schneemann. In Schneemann's most famous performance, "Meat Joy" (1964), a group of nearly-nude dancers rolled around in wet paint and toyed with raw meat on the floor of a gallery. As Ara Osterweil writes, "Schneemann used the meaty body... to represent the profound relations of analogy between subjects, whether they were male or female, animal or human, or alive or dead" (2014: 136). Likewise, Freddy Got Fingered insists upon the radical equivalence of human and animal flesh. Ultimately, the film suggests, we are all just meat. (This is also one of the implications of Hooper's film, which was very loosely inspired by the crimes of Ed Gein; the difference is that Hooper recoils from this idea rather than celebrating it.) It is appropriate then that Gord's cartoon characters, whom he models after the members of his own family, are half-human, half-zebra. What is more, the film emphasizes the continuity of living and dead, first in a scene where Gord resuscitates a newborn baby that is not breathing by swinging it around by its umbilical cord—one is reminded here of the question posed by Dušan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1974): "Is there life after birth?"—and later, in the romantic subplot involving Gord and a hospital receptionist, Betty (Marisa Coughlin), who is paralyzed from the waist down and gets turned on when Gord whacks her lifeless legs with a bamboo stick. (When Gord gets carried away and hits her on the face, Betty shouts at him, "It's not my face that's paralyzed!") This subplot also demonstrates the limitations of Green's vision (as well as his casual disregard for narrative logic: why does Betty get turned on by Gord caning her where she is incapable of feeling it?). The only form of sexual pleasure Green is capable of imagining for a paralyzed woman is the sensation of having a man's penis and balls in her mouth and tasting his semen or having him ejaculate on her.

Nevertheless, Betty's desire to taste Gord's flesh and fluids is emblematic of an epistemology that is radically empirical. For Green, knowing the world means knowing it through all of one's senses. This is why Gord has to touch the horse's penis rather than just looking at it, and why, when his friend, Darren (Harland Williams), breaks his leg while skateboarding, Gord licks the open wound as if performing cunnilingus. The latter scene calls to mind Stanley Cavell's observation, in an essay on Sweet Movie, that "the way to assess the state of the world is to find out how it tastes... which means both to find out how it tastes to you and how it tastes you..., to find out whether you and the world are disgusting to one another" (1979: 318). Moreover, if Cavell is correct that one discovers adulthood through disgust (ibid.), it is significant that Gord's arrested development goes hand-in-hand with—or, rather, is understood to be identical with—a conspicuous lack of disgust, particularly regarding the flesh of other animals. No less significant is the choice of working in a cheese sandwich factory to represent the sort of practical job that Gord's father approves of for his son. The cheese sandwiches figure the sort of processed, mass-produced, and above all, meatless food that one eats without really tasting. This, the film implies, is what we should be disgusted by, and not, for instance, Gord chewing through an umbilical cord. In other words, the film implies that entering adulthood means erecting a psychic barrier between oneself and the world, and the most radical aspect of Green's comedy is to reveal our real interrelation with other meaty animals.

Thus, the comedy in Freddy Got Fingered is of a very different cast than that in There's Something About Mary and American Pie, where the characters are basically normal people desperately trying to avoid social embarrassment. In the latter film, when Eugene Levy's character walks in on his son sharing an intimate moment with an apple pie, not only is the son embarrassed to be caught but the father is in turn embarrassed for his son. In other words, what is funny about this scene is not what the son does with the apple pie or even that his father sees it but how the latter reacts to what he sees. (Levy's performance here is a masterpiece of comic acting.) On the other hand, Gord seems incapable of being embarrassed by anything. In one scene, Gord tries to convince Betty that he is a successful investor by taking her to an elegant restaurant and berating an imaginary employee while holding a cell phone from the 1980s. But when Gord's father (who thinks he is working nights) sees him in the restaurant, he flies into a rage and exposes the charade. However, it is not clear that Betty is ever taken in by Gord's ruse and she does not seem to care very much when the truth is revealed, so the episode is simply forgotten. The film's funniest moments, like Gord licking Darren's open wound, arise not from the discomfort of the characters in the story (Darren's attitude towards being licked is somewhat ambiguous) but rather from the discomfort felt by the spectator when Gord's desire to get close to another animal contravenes an ingrained social taboo. Hence, the significance of the film's title: the movie suggests the only way to really know another animal is to literally get inside of them or to put them inside of you.

Works Cited

Cavell, Stanley. "On Makavejev on Bergman." Critical Inquiry 6, no. 2 (1979): 305-330.

Ebert, Roger. "Freddy Got Fingered." Chicago Sun-Times, April 20, 2001. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/freddy-got-fingered-2001 (accessed May 9, 2024).

Osterweil, Ara. Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

Sims, David. "How Do You Make a Genuinely Weird Mainstream Movie?" The Atlantic, May 3, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/05/i-saw-the-tv-glow-jane-schoenbrun-interview/678273 (accessed May 9, 2024).

Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August 2024 canadian cinema   comedy   cult comedy   rip torn   tom green