The title of this series, especially where the infamous 2001 train wreck Freddy Got Fingered is concerned, might be a little misleading.
Is Freddy Got Fingered a good movie? Is there any semblance of a case to be made that this film, co-written, directed by, and starring Tom Green at the absolute pinnacle of his MTV talk/prank show, is in fact good?
I guess we’ll find out together.
Even though most of us agree that people should like what they like, and that good and bad are obviously subjective, certain works of art seem to transcend that mentality. Some films are immediately and aggressively despised by almost everyone upon release. It marks one of those rare occasions in which the general public and professional critics almost uniformly agree that a movie is a distinctive degree of terrible.
The 2019 Cats is a good recent example.
Freddy Got Fingered didn’t get the same budget as Cats. At no point do I imagine anyone outside of those who worked on the film expected the movie to do particularly well. Gross-out comedies in this era, which this film essentially qualifies as, were also at something of a pinnacle. American Pie was making money hand over fist. It didn’t seem unreasonable to assume that a 14-million dollar comedy starring a Canadian who got famous for making everyone around him deliriously uncomfortable would make back its budget, probably find some fans, and disappear quietly.
While the film did make back its budget, albeit barely, the critical response, including from audiences, was almost universally negative. Freddy Got Fingered quickly gained notoriety for being one of the worst movies ever released. In the 20 years that have passed since its release in April 2001, it still crops up in many worst of all time lists. It doesn’t have the following of a Showgirls, Mommie Dearest. It didn’t later receive critical acclaim, as has been the case with films like Jennifer’s Body.
When people mention Freddy Got Fingered at all, a movie that wouldn’t even mark the last time Rip Torn showed his 5, 000-year-old naked ass on camera, it is often with a tone of wonderment. Did that movie really exist? Did you really subject yourself to 90 minutes of Tom Green screaming, swinging dead babies around, wearing animal corpses, and masturbating other animals who are at the very least still alive?
No one would actually make that movie, some tell themselves. Let alone release it in a fashion that would allow other people to watch it.
Freddy Got Fingered was the first movie I ever saw on DVD. Not only did I watch and enjoy the movie, which I had also seen in theaters, but I dug through the special features. Because in the early 2000s, even Freddy Got Fingered got director commentary, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and deleted scenes. I watched everything on the disc. At that point, I was desperate to own a DVD player, and I wanted to see for myself if it really was worth bugging my parents.
Apparently, Freddy Got Fingered fully sold me on the potential of this new physical media.
The story within Freddy Got Fingered doesn’t particularly matter. One of the reasons why this movie doesn’t seem to work for people is because it is an absolutely bizarre combination of a traditional narrative story, a 20-something swings big on making his dreams come true, while struggling to find love and hoping for acceptance from his family, and the kind of surrealistic humor Green was famous for. People went to see this expecting the latter, and perhaps some vague notion of the former.
What they were not prepared, and what I loved about the movie then and now, is the mutant offspring that would be created as a result of marrying Green’s weirdness with a basic man-child-centric gross-out comedy. Everything, and I mean everything, is taken to an extreme. Not just occasionally. Not as a means of injecting fresh energy into old ideas. Tom Green set out to ensure every audience expectation would be met with a sense of humor that occasionally feels like actual violence.
So much so, I think the movie is absolutely intended as a parody of the genre it belongs to.
At the very least, Freddy Got Fingered is a parody of filmmaking in of itself. It is the auteur theory taken to a place in which a major studio (20th Century Fox) essentially funded one of the most avant-garde comedies of the past quarter century. Green was clearly not a logical choice to direct a full-length motion picture with a budget of more than ten million dollars. Yet he was given the job, along with being allowed to co-write and star in the project. Someone at 20th Century Fox seemingly thought this would all work out somehow.
And it probably would have been fine in that sense, if Green had either made a documentary in the vein of what he was known for (which is basically what Jackass did) or opted for a safer fictional narrative. Instead, he committed to going as far into madness as possible, making creative decisions that others in his position, even those without any real filmmaking experience, probably wouldn’t make.
The result is a movie in which a 25-year-old man named Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is alleged to be the victim of child molestation, taken his from home, and put in a foster care specifically for children who have been molested. Why? Because Tom Green’s Gordon Brody, Freddy’s brother, told a family therapist that their faither (Rip Torn, in what might be one of the most enjoyable unhinged performances of his extraordinary career) fingered him. Everyone takes this very, very seriously.
This isn’t even the main thread of the film, which is really about Gordon and his dad trying to work some stuff out, as Gordon also tries to make it as an animator. The title of the movie is merely a subplot which exists just long enough for Freddy to be dumped at a care facility in which children watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre under very little supervision.
Some people call that lazy. I call that a decision made by a man who wanted to plunge an opportunity to make a big studio big budget commercial comedy into absolutely chaos. The surrealism of Freddy Got Fingered is just the beginning. From how other characters respond to Gordon, to how romantic and family comedy tropes are skinned alive, as opposed to being simply mocked, Freddy Got Fingered is the kind of movie cinephiles wish more American filmmakers would do.
That doesn’t mean you have to like it, admire its all-or-nothing approach to burning Hollywood to the ground in its own small way, or even find humor in such scenes as Gordon delivering against her will a woman’s baby in the most horrifying way imaginable. What I would argue for those who hate this movie is that the world is more interesting, which extends to art, when you can do something like combine directing a commercial comedy film with some of the most endearingly pure, perhaps even naïve, punk rock sensibilities I’ve ever seen anyone bring to cinema.
It doesn’t create a cohesive, or traditionally enjoyable experience for the viewer, but it would be fun to see more movies with this kind of budget and cast (including Julie Hagerty, the delightful Marisa Coughlan) Anthony Michael Hall, and a brief, absolutely deranged cameo by Green’s then-fiancé Drew Barrymore) being made. I don’t even have to imagine liking even half of these theoretical movies to wish this were true.
Outside of all of that, I love the vicious strangeness and absolute pitch-black humor of Freddy Got Fingered. I like the movie veering wildly between a world that is basically the same as this one, and then a world in which a man funnels the verbal and emotional abuse he receives from his father into a deeply unsetting cartoon. I love that Freddy Got Fingered takes the scene in which Gordon delivers the baby at the hospital, and then proceeds to have a very emotional moment suddenly and quite sincerely.
That doesn’t last very long, but nothing really does in this movie. Freddy Got Fingered is a blur of sequences and deranged personalities. The movie is so genuinely unpredictable at times, combined with nightmarishly compelling chemistry between Green and Rip Torn, all you can really do is see how things unfold. A lot of what this movie throws at you continues to strike me as funny for its complete lack of logic or aspirations to do what we think movies should do.
There is also something to be said for the relationship between Gordon and his dad. That these two even have a relationship at the end of the movie, and that this in of itself is somehow believable, is one of its many strange accomplishments. Watching these two play off one another, with Rip Torn being an actor notable for being able to work opposite anyone, is one of the movie’s best executed premises and sources for comedic material.
However, even those moments have the energy of a movie that knows it will only get once chance to do whatever the hell its creators want.
It runs that chance into oblivion, dooming Green’s career in film, but it’s an extraordinary ride along the way.
Freddy Got Fingered is one of the most grotesque films ever made. I find that in of itself funny. Outside of the film’s characters and running jokes, many of which just appeal to the part of me that laughs at weird shit, I just think about this wonderful piece of definitive outsider art simply existing, slipping into the mainstream to make everyone either angry or just uncomfortable, and I’m glad to be alive.
Aren’t masterpieces supposed to elevate the very spirit which defines what it means to be human?
What more do you need than a man screaming under the claustrophobic weight of his wretched American dream, as well as thousands upon thousands of slices of yellow American cheese?
Honestly.
