There is tyranny in stupidity

Rating: Null/10 (27 May 1999)

Recently I screened Adam Sandler's THE WATERBOY, and quickly concluded that the movie is completely throwaway, a bland knockoff of Sandler's earlier debacle HAPPY GILMORE. Yet, I see that the movie is setting box-office records, and the high school boys I work with are lauding it as some kind of comedic standard. Am I missing something?
To investigate this possibility, I re-viewed Sandler's first hit, BILLY MADISON, and also HAPPY GILMORE, in which Sandler plays a bellicose dimwit who wants to become a professional hockey player but discovers his slapshot is more effective on the golf course. With a brash temper and an extraordinary long drive of over 400 yards, Happy becomes the star of the current pro golf tour. The premise of the movie (and its single joke) is that while Sandler behaves like a juvenile, precocious jerk, he shakes up the stuffy golf establishment and produces some desirable demographics for the television ratings. Essentially, the sheer spectacle of his rantings is meant as a babbling apologia for nonsense. This is what makes Gilmore the best representation of Sandler's on-screen persona, and so I'd like to briefly discuss HAPPY GILMORE in terms of its implicit cultural impact.
Gilmore joins the tour reluctantly, motivated by the IRS confiscation of his grandmother's house. While she quietly waits at a nursing home, Happy brassily tries to claim enough prize money to buy her house back. We're supposed to laugh at Happy's nonconformity, the way he curses out golf balls when they don't drop. Yet when the movie eventually sentimentalizes Happy's rivalry with a pompous pro named Shooter McGavin, it becomes not anarchic iconography, but just another dumb, predictable sports movie-one that has disturbing cultural implications.
Sandler is the ingratiating performer from "Saturday Night Live" known for his beaming ignorance and babyish vocal inflections. His entire act seems derogatory in a post-modern way, as if he's asking the audience why it wastes its time watching him. Sandler doesn't act, he grins like a moron, yells a lot, and clobbers things. Like Jim Carrey, he views a movie set as the most glorious playground ever. Making a movie allows Sandler to revel in the fact that he can do anything he wants. Unfortunately, what he wants to do is indulge his pathetic junior-high fantasies. HAPPY GILMORE is an exercise in wish-fulfillment for Sandler's lewd and violent creepiness. Sandler wants to punch out hecklers and an alligator? Write it into the script! Sandler wants a scantily-clad girl on his arm? Create a sexy dream sequence!
It's easy to berate and dismiss them for their infantile idiocy, but movies like HAPPY GILMORE and THE WATERBOY don't just tell dumb jokes-they take on a spirit of sophomoric iconoclasm that is insultingly oppressive. Recent brainless travesties, like DUMB AND DUMBER, IN THE ARMY NOW, ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS, and Sandler's own BILLY MADISON, depict a fraudulent mythology of acceptable rage, impatience, and violence. They are tediously bawdy and cartoonishly brutal. Unlike Chris Farley's movies (which share some of their inanity), these ninnyfests make no attempt to appeal to an audience's good nature. Instead, they gleefully wallow in their mean-spirited adolescence, relying on audiences that confuse crassness with craftiness.
These movies skewer intelligence, knowledge, and sincerity in the name of the crude common man. Gilmore becomes the champion of everyone alienated by elitism: it is class warfare led by simpletons. Their revolution consists of revenge; revenge through cruelty and humiliation. Most dismaying is that these movies actually seem to believe in their implication that the sympathetic little man is always a moronic freak. That's a harmful double lie: First, intelligence (or lack thereof) is not a mark of social status. Second, there are no little men-people are all the same size. There is tyranny in stupidity.
The best moment in HAPPY GILMORE comes while Gilmore is participating in the Pepsi Pro-Am. Paired with Bob Barker, an increasingly agitated Happy knocks the game-show legend flat on his back. That's a typical gag in movies like this (abrupt violence as humor), but when Barker rises and proceeds to pummel Gilmore the joke is turned in on itself. Suddenly we're witnessing Sandler's hateful malice backfiring on him, and the movie earns its sole laugh.