In February of 1994, Jim Carrey was still a D-list celebrity known primarily for his recurring characters from In Living Color. One of those characters, Vera de Milo, was a buffoonish female body builder who chewed mouthfuls of steroid pills, spoke with a deep, raspy lisp, and whinnied like a horse for some reason (I assume this was an allusion to the fact that many body building steroids were derived from steroids given to racehorses). The humor behind the character was a slapstick blend of mockery and ridicule. Male characters in each sketch were repulsed by her overtly sexual advances. Vera's bikini top was often stripped from her, revealing Jim Carrey's bare male chest. There was no subtext or social commentary, no layers or comedic depth to the presentation of the character. The laughs came from the cruelty. Look at this freak and laugh. Isn't she disgusting?
By the end of 1994, Jim Carrey had starred in three films in that one year that grossed nearly a billion dollars in total. Audiences went wild for his brand of comedy. Schools across the country were full of kids repeating his catch phrases past all boundaries of tolerability. Jim Carrey had left his mark on the cultural landscape. And it all started with his film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
Based on my introduction, it's probably pretty obvious where this is going.
The climax of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is this. Ace Ventura, our hero, has solved the case of the stolen Miami Dolphins mascot by figuring out that the police chief in charge of the police investigation into the theft, our villain, has undergone male to female gender transition to hide the fact that she was previously a male football player on the Miami Dolphins team and wanted to take revenge for the shame she felt after a failed play in the Super Bowl ten years earlier. Ace, our hero, publicly outs the police chief, our villain, as being transgender, to the disbelief of the crowd of police officers surrounding them. Ace, our hero, then strips the police chief, our villain, of her outer clothes, revealing a feminine physique and underwear. The surrounding police officers, still in disbelief of what Ace, our hero, has told them, are now aroused at the sight of her body which has been revealed by this sexual assault by Ace, our hero. Ace, our hero, makes one more attempt to convince the officers that they have been deceived. He spins the police chief around, exposing her buttocks to the crowd of officers who can see her penis and testicles pressing against her underwear in what is supposed to represent genital tucking, a painful process of using tape to move the penis and testicles out of the front view of a transgender woman's body, but is portrayed in an unrealistic and exaggerated manner for increased comedic effect. Ace, our hero, makes a joke that her tucked genitals look like a bad case of hemorrhoids.
Chaos erupts.
An outbreak of revulsion, spitting, moans, and screams explodes across the screen as Ace, our hero, struts around heroically. Rapper Tone Loc, who plays one of the police officers, begins scraping his tongue with his fingers for some reason. The kidnapped dolphin splashes about to let us know that he, too, is totally grossed-out. The theme song from the Crying Game plays over the commotion. Audiences loved it. They roared with laughter from theater to theater.
As a teenager in the 90s, watching movies like Ace Ventura on VHS repeatedly with your friends was a cultural practice. Watching movies at home on a VCR was one of the primary means of socializing with friends and peers. It was how you learned to be a part of society. You laughed together. You bonded over saying the movie lines with each other. The movies became part of your collective personality. This scene from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and so many other scenes from other movies and TV shows, implanted the belief in all of us that if you stepped outside of the established, rigid, binary gender order, you could expect to be, at best, publicly shamed and humiliated. The transgender police chief was not subjected to sexual assault and degradation for any of the crimes she committed. She was assaulted and degraded because she was transgender. And everyone around me loved it. And I hated myself.
"You couldn't get away with making a movie like that today," is something you will see and hear from right-wing personalities and social media bots which may or may not be real people (it's hard to tell any more so I just assume they're all bots now because I'm a sucker who still wants desperately to believe that people are mostly still good and not soulless monsters). Even though I love the implied complete disrespect to the Daily Wire's attempts at movie making, they are, in fact, not only making movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, they're making them with explicit intent to persecute transgender people. I want to save this topic for another post, but if you want to do some homework, look up reviews of the Daily Wire's attempt at comedy called Lady Ballers.
Cruelty lies just past the point where the human ability to care ends. Cruelty carries an intention of harming another human being with a desire to see suffering, as if pain is a transferrable commodity that can be taken off of oneself and placed upon another, leaving the high of laughter in its place. It's very much like a drug in that way. It's very easy to get addicted to it. It's also dangerously difficult to admit that you have a problem. I think we'd all be better off if everyone just did heroin instead.
Comments
Post a Comment