One of the more infamous studio films of the last few decades, Tom Green’s sole directorial effort, Freddy Got Fingered, was almost universally panned upon its 4/20,1 2001 release. While the film was not without one major supporter – A.O. Scott of The New York Times – it was mostly swamped by negative reactions, from film critics – with Roger Ebert famously calling the film a “vomitorium”, quipping that while “the day may come when [it] is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism…the day may never come when it is seen as funny” – and audiences, barely recouping its somewhat mild $14 million budget in its domestic theatrical run. In cult film circles the film has found appreciation as a relic of “so bad it’s good” cinema, but such categorisation feels unjustified as Freddy Got Fingered, like Showgirls before it, doesn’t fit the simple criteria of lovable cinematic disasters; it wasn’t marred by extensive studio interference, it is definitely not a mess, and it’s a fairly accurate representation of Green’s creative intentions.
Freddy Got Fingered is not simply an outrageously offensive attack on good taste, it’s a stake through the heart of Hollywood teen-movie clichés, a shot at the cynical system that churns out that dreck, and a perfect, self-referential port of Tom Green’s irreverent sketch show persona into the feature film format. Simply put, Freddy Got Fingered is far more subversive and intelligent than anyone at the time gave it credit for, with the lack of broad critical re-evaluation stemming from a fear of admission that many writers didn’t get the joke, or didn’t want to, the first time around.
A staple of my teenage iPod Video viewing behaviour, Freddy Got Fingered follows Gordo (Tom Green), a hopeless 28-year-old who leaves home for the first time, acquiring a job, car and girlfriend in the process, and seeks to follow his dream of becoming a famous animator, with an unending stream of poor-taste, gross-out humour supplementing his tale. Numerous reviews which cited it as one of the most offensive trainwrecks ever released had caught my attention, not to mention a natural predisposition for Green’s irreverent, juvenile sense of humour.2 It wasn’t until I grew older that I began to grasp the totality of what Green was going for with Fingered, both biting satire and a self-referential adaptation of Green’s on-screen persona, something echoed in the adaptation of Gregg Turkington’s Neil Hamburger persona in Rick Alverson’s recent Entertainment.
As with Verhoeven’s Showgirls before it, audience preconceptions about Green’s Freddy Got Fingered have forever tainted the way the film is viewed – something that I myself was not immune from. The critical rhetoric that proceeded Showgirls’s release has dictated its history,3 relegating it to some sort of pornographic disasterpiece, overstating its (actually non-existent) exploitative sexual qualities, dismissing its role as satire, and rejecting the idea that star Elizabeth Berkeley had given an intentionally over-the-top, Vegas-esque burlesque performance. The accompanying advertising campaign did the film little to no favours in this regard,4 nor did the fact that the project that includes multiple sequences of Green stimulating the genitalia of large animals. Taking into account Green’s public persona, at once restrained yet also erratic and furious, made it easy to dismiss Green’s autonomy and ignore whatever kind of point he and his collaborators were trying to make. However, while Fingered may be one of the angrier films to come out of the studio system in recent memory – totally understandable considering the brand of broad comedy coming out of Hollywood at the time was overly clichéd and beyond stale, not to mention Green’s recent brush with death through his testicular tumour5 – it is definitely not cruel, or at least not cruel without point.
Although tarnished by the ableist slurs afflicting most late-90s and early-00s teen cinema, whether he’s delivering a baby and cutting its umbilical cord with his teeth, or telling a secretary (played by Drew Barrymore, Tom Green’s then wife) that her boss’s wife had died, Green’s character is consistently the butt of the joke, his insensitivity the gag and his Gordo persona clearly defined as the target. While you could argue that many of Green’s jokes hinge on cruelty, nothing here is overtly mean-spirited, a far cry from Freddy Got Fingered’s teen movie contemporaries. The one exception to the rule is the treatment of Andy (Connor Widdows), a young child who is consistently horrifically injured on camera. These sequences work as a political statement about what you can and can’t do on-screen, a challenge to Hollywood ideology that asserts you shouldn’t injure or kill kids on camera in film. However bad taste it may be, its intentional subversiveness is undeniable, with these slapstick sequences of Andy getting maimed by wine bottles and airplane turbines shocking to the point of uncomfortable laughter.
It’s not that far of a leap, then, to suggest that Gordo’s paraplegic girlfriend Betty (Marisa Coughlan), who overtly embraces her sado-masochistic kinks – to perform copious amounts of oral sex, to be whipped with bamboo on her paralyzed legs and to switch, whipping her dom in return – without judgement or criticism serves as one of the more sex-positive portrayals of non-heteronormative identity in mainstream early ’00s cinema, despite the juvenile manner in which it is presented. An amateur rocket scientist and one of the film’s more fleshed out characters, Betty later rejects Gordo’s preconceived notions about her when he offers her jewels in the film’s final act, subverting the traditional role ascribed to the male/female dynamic in teen movies. Betty is not relegated to bit character and is granted full autonomy over her body and destiny, successful in her attempts to build a rocket powered wheelchair in the face of doubt from her peers, and eventually the catalyst that drives Gordo to success with his cartoons. While there are issues in the way that Betty is used as a tool to advance Gordo’s personal arc, her treatment is a far cry from something like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, where the romantic interest is used a tool to flesh out the film’s lead. Here Betty is given a far more complex identity than Earl‘s Rachel despite far less screen time, and her sidelining in the narrative the product of a narrow focus on one character – Gordo – and his sketch-like escapades rather than intentional and cynical narrative manipulation.
While clearly a product of the gross-out comedy genre resurgence of the mid-late ‘90s that came about with the release of films like There’s Something About Mary and American Pie, Freddy Got Fingered is unique in its avoidance of common, cheap gross-out tactics. This is particularly visible in, well, the lack of flatulence or excrement-centric humour, a teen movie mainstay derived from Pink Flamingos, re-established by the likes of Dogma and Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor and continuing right through Joe Dirt, Head Over Heels, and Along Came Polly onto contemporary flicks like Bridesmaids and Deadpool. There’s something much more creative about taping an umbilical cord to your stomach, or licking a friend’s freshly exposed, broken shinbone than dropping an ADR fart behind a pivotal scene a la Old Dogs, or having women engage in a literal shit battle a la Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
Freddy Got Fingered satirises the aforementioned brand of teen film-making, even down to the its aesthetic choices; to place the totality of the film’s quality on Green’s shoulders is to ignore the excellent work of his collaborators. Co-written by Tom Green Show alumni Derek Harvie, the film was also boasted composer Mike Simpson – who had previously scored Half Baked and Saving Silverman, and would later work on Bring It On and Knocked Up – cinematographer Mark Irwin of There’s Something About Mary and 10 Things I Hate About You fame, and production designer Bob Ziembicki of Boogie Nights and The Wedding Singer, the three of whom work to amplify their general aesthetic modes to the extreme. The joyful silliness of Green’s brand emanates through his original set pieces – the “backwards man” and “scuba” sequences, for instance, are juvenile and hilarious, and would have no place in other “immature” cinema of the ‘90s and ‘00s, a mode of filmmaking that took itself and its frat boy humour far too seriously to feature something so audaciously absurd. Moments like these covertly chip away at the self-seriousness of these sorts of films tarred by misogynistic plotlines about the hunt for sex that made up the majority of the supposedly acceptable teen cinema canon of the late ‘90s, something that saw more overt satire in Not Another Teen Movie. Tom Green wants you to question whether these sequences are really more juvenile than the sort of gross-out comedy that would take pride in omitting them.
It’s undeniable that the film’s self-aware, over-the-top dialogue, which fills normal, everyday situations with vulgarity takes a dig at the ultra-polished, pun-laden alternate world speak of teens in Freddy Got Fingered’s contemporaries. Rip Torn’s turn as Gordo’s simultaneously insanely aggressive and overly affectionate father Jim Brody is an inspired piece of writing, taking the bifurcated personality tropes of teen movie dads to their logical extremes. Similarly, Green’s Gordo ramps the unaware self-centredness of teen movie leads – a by-product of lazy writing and a disinterest in self-reflection – to the maximum, an insanely problematic (in just about every sense of the word) protagonist that we find likable due to the way that the relationship between audience and protagonist functions in Western literature, a canon which sees us rooting ourselves in our lead’s narrative success. The film additionally hits on all the plot beats of coming-of-age tales in ridiculous fashion, from leaving home the first time, to getting your first job, to a ridiculous Moby-scored, slo-mo shot, headphones on sequence of “the world has rejected me and now I must find my own way” ridiculousness.
Green slots numerous references and callbacks to his cable television program The Tom Green Show into Freddy Got Fingered, explaining a number of the film’s weirder, more random moments. Gordo’s supposed “cartoons” – little more than absurdist static images with Gordo providing voice-over explanation – are a throwback to the “animation” segments on his show, as is the segment in which Gordo gets “inside the animal”. Additionally, the whole idea of a “cheese sandwich” factory, the site of the film’s infamous “DING, DONG” gag, comes from The Tom Green Show. This fact was lost on critics (and much of the film’s audience), much like the willfully ignorant criticism surrounding Entertainment’s Comedian and Gregg Turkington’s Neil Hamburger persona. While some may not enjoy these gags,6 they are certainly not as left-field or abstract as they first appear.
Unfortunately, these points have – for the most part – been lost in the mainstream rhetoric that surrounds Fingered, in both critical and fan circles alike. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its defenders – a quick look online will turn up numerous articles praising its “lol, so wacky”-ness – rather, that the rhetoric surrounding the film centres more on the personality ascribed to it by mainstream criticism at the time of its release, rather than a deeper engagement with the film’s subversive content or Tom Green’s intentions. Of particular note among the eventual dissenters was the aforementioned Roger Ebert, who partially retracted his initial comments about Freddy Got Fingered the following year while trashing another Green vehicle, Stealing Harvard, stating that “for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie” and that “anyone with [Green’s] nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing”. From a man who clearly sits far outside Green’s target audience, with a reputation for standing firm on his judgement, this is somewhat of a major victory, especially considering that Freddy Got Fingered is by no means a major film, never spring-boarding Green onto future success with other cinematic properties.
This retraction fascinatingly mirrors Ebert’s re-evaluation of Martin Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy, another film funded by Freddy Got Fingered‘s producer Arnon Milchan, who was a staunch defender of Green’s final product – in fact, Milchan and other studio executives, enjoyed the initial director’s cut turned in by Green so much that they met it with a standing ovation. Green’s director’s cut never hit the cinemas after it tested poorly with audiences who took offense to the film’s dark humour – Freddy Got Fingered was initially more menacing, particularly in the treatment of Andy, whose limbs were strewn across the screen in Green’s initial cut7 – had issues with the film’s heavier soundtrack, and (as is usually the case) the film’s pacing. Green okayed these cuts and there was no bad blood between him and the studio, nor his producers when the film eventually hit theatres. Barely making back its budget theatrically, the film became a slow-burn financial success once it was released on DVD.
Hopefully Freddy Got Fingered will see legitimate re-evaluation in the mainstream eventually, breaking the shackles of the “so bad its good” cult film circuit. 15 years after its initial release, it has certainly stood the test of time in its irreverence, a far more watchable relic of ‘90s-’00s gross-out cinema than its contemporaries, perhaps due to its lack of maliciousness and strong strain of self-awareness. It’d be disingenuous to suggest it’s a perfect film – it’s certainly weighed down by problems – but it’s one of my favourite films nonetheless. Next time you load up Freddy Got Fingered, give Green his due, he pranked the studio system into making this epic display of poor taste and got bitten hard for it – while it’s little consolation to admit he was onto something, well, he was onto something nonetheless.