Read Online My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin - Free Book Online Page B

several
Ben Stiller Show
cast members in small roles, steals the scene as their “serving wench,” a dispirited slacker whose commitment to historical authenticity doesn’t extend to taking out her nose ring or washing off a thick coat of Goth makeup.
    For Carrey’s character, life is role-playing; since he doesn’t have an authentic self, he inhabits roles he’s seen other people play. Carrey the actor began his career as an impressionist. What are impressionists, ultimately, if not people who subvert their own identities to inhabit the voices, personalities, and affectations of famous people?
The Cable Guy
takes Carrey’s persona into thrillingly dark places: He’s playing his usual exemplar of comic aggression, but the repellent neediness and desperation at its core defies sentiment.
    The Cable Guy’s incursions into Steven’s personal life become increasingly unhinged. When Steven’s ex-girlfriend (Leslie Mann, later to become Apatow’s real-life wife) goes on a date with a slick-talking smoothie (Owen Wilson), the Cable Guy, whose wardrobe seems stuck somewhere in the mid-’70s, viciously beats his pal’s romantic rival in the men’s bathroom. He pushes Steven past his breaking point, humiliating him in front of his parents and his ex during a game of “porno password” and getting him arrested. These events lead to a climactic conflict in a giant satellite dish, during which the Cable Guy delivers a painful speech in which all of his character’s subtext spills embarrassingly to the surface, as he bemoans a childhood in which he learned the facts of life from
The Facts Of Life.
    The $20 million man resolves to “kill the [cathode-ray] babysitter” by destroying the satellite dish and his town’s cable feed at the very moment when the verdict from Stiller’s sibling homicide trial is being announced. Without the glass teat to suckle on, a couch potato played by Kyle Gass is moved to contemplate the unthinkable: reading a book.
    According to a 1996
Los Angeles Times
article on the film, Stiller shot a light and dark version of every scene to give himself more flexibilityregarding the film’s tone.
The Cable Guy
consequently has the distinction of being simultaneously too dark and too light. Columbia hired Stiller to give the film some of that
Ben Stiller Show
edge, but not
too
much; it had an investment to protect.
The Cable Guy
is extremely dark for a mainstream comedy, but not the pitch-black, uncompromising comedy it might have been had it been produced independently.
    As a latchkey kid neglected by his alcoholic, promiscuous mother, Carrey’s Cable Guy didn’t see television as escape or entertainment; it was his whole world, a fantasy realm where children are always adorable, apple-cheeked, and well-treated, and murders get solved before the end credits roll. In this respect, the film recalls
Profit,
the exquisitely dark (and short-lived) mid-’90s Fox drama about a charming sociopath who grew up in a box with only the hypnotic glow of television for company. It also recalls my childhood.
    Television was so much more than just a way to fill 12 to 16 hours out of every day during my wasted youth. I was addicted to television for the same reason the Cable Guy’s younger self was: Its honeyed lies were infinitely preferable to my grim childhood realities as I was growing up in a group home. Like Carrey’s pathetic dreamer, I even adopted a fake name gleaned from pop culture. Carrey dubs himself “Chip Douglas” after a character on
My Three Sons.
Upon moving into the group home, I inexplicably decided to call myself “Larry Miller” after the popular stand-up comic/character actor.
    The Cable Guy
hits awfully close to home. Maybe that’s why I find it such a fascinating, resonant exploration of Stiller’s career-long love-hate relationship with pop culture, even if, as a comic thriller,