1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 40: Kingpin

I wonder if, when they made The Big Lebowski (1998), the Coen Brothers deliberately set out to one-up the Farrelly Brothers.

Nice comedy, I imagine the Coens saying. But here’s where Kingpin goes wrong.

A bowling movie should be about the LOOK of the sport.

Balls.

Pins.

Wood.

Those props deserve to be lavishly displayed.

Kingpin’s visual treatment of them is perfunctory.

Well – the Farrellies might reply – your own bowling movie isn’t really a BOWLING movie.

It has no sense of sporting drama.

WE showcase the slow tumbling of the pins.

The satisfying sound of the strike.

The agony of the 7–10 split.

Why aren’t THOSE things front-and-center in The Big Lebowski?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Not that the Farrellies are bowling purists. Kingpin takes the slum-sport formula of movies like The Hustler and The Color of Money and lampoons it.

Bowling, not billiards. Otherwise, the elements are the same.

The general squalor.

A down-and-out virtuoso (Woody Harrelson).

The dame (Vanessa Angel).

The virtuoso’s pupil (Randy Quaid).

But Kingpin has a wild card: the pupil is a nice, strapping Amish farmer who is forced to hide his bowling from the disapproving community. This is what makes Kingpin original.

Other stuff – e.g., Bill Murray’s performance as Harrelson’s over-the-top nemesis – is funny, but it’s been done before.

And yes, it’s funny but unoriginal that the Harrelson character is a bowler with a maimed hand. 1996 was a good year for that sort of thing. Happy Gilmore and Shine are two other movies in which a precocious young man is mentored by an older virtuoso with a maimed hand.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Anyway, what’s wrong with a little recycling? The Farrellies even recycle their own material. There’s a confrontation at a roadside diner that is pretty similar to a scene from Dumb and Dumber. That’s OK: in both movies, it works.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Some viewers might take offense at the movie’s portrayal of the Amish. I think Kingpin is a pretty good satire of other cinematic portrayals of the Amish. Two of the funniest scenes – the milking scene and the barn-raising scene – are sly digs at Witness.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I wish to conclude by praising Vanessa Angel. I don’t remember seeing her in anything else, but here she holds her own against Harrelson, Murray, and Quaid. You can watch those guys in plenty of other movies. Kingpin is Angel’s movie.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 39: Beavis and Butt-head do America

Beavis and Butt-head lie on the ground, in the desert. They’ve had many adventures. Now, they are dying of thirst.

“The sun sucks,” says Butt-head.

His life flashes before his eyes.

Beavis and Butt-head, one year old, sit on the couch, watching TV …

Beavis and Butt-head, two years old, sit on the couch, watching TV …

And so on, until age 15.

“My life was cool,” says Butt-head.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Beavis remembers even farther back, to his spermhood. He recalls how he penetrated the egg.

“I scored,” he says.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

These are their life-quests. They want to watch TV, and they want to score. But they are so stupid, they can’t always figure out whether, in the present moment, they are or are not watching TV, or scoring or failing to score.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Harold and Kumar, in a different movie, are questing to eat White Castle hamburgers. They, too, have fantastical adventures in pursuit of a mundane goal.

But they are not so unintelligent. Nor does their goal of eating White Castle hamburgers dominate their lives; it’s more like an irresistible momentary urge. We understand Harold and Kumar well enough.

In Dumb and Dumber, the questers, Lloyd and Harry, are formidably stupid. Their imbecilities are so terrible that, perversely, they seem downright brilliant.

But there is no unifying principle that explains the stupidity of Lloyd and Harry. It is just a brute fact about them. Their minds are freakish to us.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Beavis and Butt-head are just as stupid as Lloyd and Harry; but, like Harold and Kumar, they are familiar to us. Indeed, they are utterly predictable. They are governed by a few basic drives and habits that we all have – and only by those drives and habits. Arguably, it’s the dominance of these things that makes Beavis and Butt-head so stupid.

They aren’t totally witless, but their wit is of the most rudimentary sort, fueled by scatological and sexual association (and nothing else).

So, when they travel to Butte, Montana, and to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, they are greatly amused, because BUTTE looks like BUTT and the petrified forest has lots of WOOD.

Viewers who have themselves ventured into this reductivist mindset, or who’ve known young men who’ve done so, will be amused to see how amused Beavis and Butt-head are made by these puns.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Of course, real teenaged boys are more complex than Beavis and Butt-head. Perhaps Beavis and Butt-head are meant to embody just one or two features of ordinary psychology, magnified to hyperbolic and exclusionary extremes, rather in the style of Borges’s “memorious” Funes. Or perhaps it is better to think of Beavis and Butt-head as Don Quijote – not good-hearted, of course, but governed by a similarly erroneous and rather narrow conception of the world. They dream. They hallucinate. They mistake a kindly old woman for a Las Vegas party girl, a chauffer for a blind man, confession booths for toilets. (In each case, light is traded for darkness.) Beavis slips in and out of the persona of his bizarre alter-ego, Cornholio. Toward the end of the movie, in a single lucid moment, he senses the futility of his quest. “We’re never going to score!” he says in an impassioned speech. “We’re never going to score!”

In their TV show, Beavis and Butt-head are critics: they mock the various aspects of mainstream culture that the show wishes to satirize. The movie, however, turns its critical gaze upon Beavis and Butt-head themselves. Yes, the world around them is mad; but there is just as little sanity in Beavis and Butt-head. Their contempt for the world leaves them ill-equipped to function in it. Nor is there any quixotic idealism in them. They have their desires; those desires are frustrated. That is all.

Judge not, that ye not be judged.