"I taped it for fun": a requiem for Freddy Got Fingered

When Hermann Nitsch does this, it's "art", but when Tom Green does it, it's "the worst movie ever made." 

Freddy Got Fingered was released in 2001, but it also marked the culmination of Tom Green's brief moment of mega-stardom, which began in the twilight of the '90s with The Tom Green Show. It was also pre-9/11, so it was still basically the '90s. (Trying to imagine a post-9/11 Freddy Got Fingered is impossible.)

Freddy garnered almost universally negative reviews, with New York Times critic A.O. Scott as one of the few holdouts. The film chronicles the misadventures of an aspiring animator named Gord (Green), and his fraught relationship with his disapproving father (Rip Torn). For Gord, the path to success is long, and littered with horse dicks, blowjobs, and cheese sandwiches.

In a mostly negative review, Roger Ebert conceded that maybe he just didn't get it, and that one day the film would be viewed as a "milestone of neo-surrealism." Freddy Got Fingered won 5 Razzies, and when onstage at the awards ceremony "Green began to play the harmonica and did not stop until he was physically dragged off."

Pictured: a winner.

Here's what some of the critics had to say:

"If ever a movie testified to the utter creative bankruptcy of the Hollywood film industry, it is the abomination known as Freddy Got Fingered." (Stephen Hunter, Washington Post)

"Tragically awful." (Wesley Morris, San Francisco Chronicle)

"Nothing onscreen is abused quite so savagely as the audience itself." (Susan Wloszczyna, USA Today)

"A movie so unrelentingly gross, disgusting and imbecilic that one mourns for the state of humanity while watching it." (Steven Rosen, Denver Post)

"Many years ago, when surrealism was new, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali made 'Un Chien Andalou,' a film so shocking that Bunuel filled his pockets with stones to throw at the audience if it attacked him. Green, whose film is in the surrealist tradition, may want to consider the same tactic. 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." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

"Bet your boots it's a Le Baron. Good car. Convertible."

The day Ebert prophesied may have come at last. The Wikipedia page for Freddy Got Fingered now has a section for "Resurgence", which refers to how this initially reviled opus has won cult status thanks to a sensibility that some consider avant-garde or akin to performance art.

Nathin Rabin of the A.V. Club (who coined the phrase "manic pixie dream girl" in his review of the treacly Cameron Crowe pantload Elizabethtown) neatly summed up Freddy's exceptionalism in a fantastically on-point review:

Studios exist precisely to keep films this audacious, original, and transgressive from ever hitting theaters. I've never seen so much as a single episode of any of Tom Green's various shows, but I watched Fingered with open-mouthed admiration. It's the kind of movie you feel the need to watch again immediately just to make sure you didn't hallucinate the entire thing the first time around.

...I think it helps to see Fingered less as a conventional comedy than as a borderline Dadaist provocation, a $15 million prank at the studio's expense. Fingered didn't invent the gross-out comedy, but it elevated it to unprecedented heights of depravity. It might have killed Green's career, but oh what a way to go.

If a toilet can be a fountain, why not an underwater cave?

And Ebert found himself haunted by the film's dazzling audacity:

But the thing is, I remember Freddy Got Fingered more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn't have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.

Chris Rock is a confirmed fan, and no doubt others will come out of the closet eventually. But you don't have to look far to find evidence of Freddy's influence; the heirs to its deranged brand of humor are everywhere. It could be argued that shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Wonder Showzen, and just about the entire lineup of Adult Swim original content since Freddy owes a significant debt to Green's over-the-top, absurdist aesthetic.

You know "Zebras in America" would fit in perfectly between "Beat Kids" and "Winobot".

Vadim Rizov makes exactly this point in a spirited article for IFC.com (IFC!):

“Fingered” would probably do at least a little better if it were released today. For one thing, the animated show Green’s character/stand-in Gord creates (“Zebras In America”) is full of the kind of deliberately abrasive non sequiturs and were-they-stoned? moments that typify the “Adult Swim” line-up; the idea of someone having a show like that now isn’t far-fetched at all.

And even if you hate all of those shows (as plenty of people do), there's actually a lot more to Freddy than meets the eye. As Rizov smartly notes, beneath the film's jizz-stained surface is a "nakedly sincere" story about growing up, following your dreams, and yearning for parental approval.Or maybe all the horse dicks are cover for an even more disturbing Freudian subtext, as this article from Cinema de Merde suggests.

Either way, there's a lot more to the film than the juvenile gross-outs that many viewers dismiss it for. It's like Breaking Away (swap bikes for doodles, and both are comedies about eccentric heroes following their improbable dreams despite the discouragement of a disappointed father) as directed by Luis Buñuel, with funnier jokes.

"I'm sick of symmetry."

In a featurette on the film's DVD, Rip Torn—with an absolutely straight face—even calls Green the best director he's ever worked with.

And Torn is not exactly an actor known for his easygoing manner with directors; when outraged by his direction on the set of Maidstone, he hit Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer, while Mailer's children screamed for mercy. (Perhaps this was karmic retribution for Mailer headbutting Gore Vidal.)