The Unbearable Lightness of Being Jenny McCarthy

America's sweetheart in a moment of refined subtlety.

On the occasion of the 6^th Annual White Elephant Blogathon, I’ve brought this little electronic soapbox of mine out of hibernation.  Many thanks to Paul Clark for putting this event together, and for realizing that to pay for my sins, I would have to watch the following film.

Sometimes, in my darker moments (or when I’m just plain bored), I like to imagine an alternate reality in which Jenny McCarthy married Tom Green.  Yes, in real life she was fellow funnyman Jim Carrey’s paramour for some four years, a coupling that seemed to be a match made in Hollywood heaven.  But even though both share a love of rubber-faced gurning in their public and screen personas, as Carrey’s career progressed he seemed more and more to be striving for an increasingly pathos-based existence, tempering his manic, Jerry Lewis on crack demeanor in the name of showing off his more dramatic chops.  At heart, Carrey has always been the classic definition of the sad clown; as early as his cover appearance in the November 1999 issue of Vanity Fair, he was lamenting the inherent loneliness of his life, how all of his fame and fortune couldn’t quite salve the scars of a failed marriage and the lack of a soulmate.  That interview was tied in with the promotional tour for Carrey’s Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, so I guess it’s appropriate that he would try to show that, like the notoriously kayfabe-bound Kaufman, there was a loveable child hiding beneath all of the mannered zaniness.

Tom Green, on the other hand, always struck me as McCarthy’s true romantic and artistic counterpart.  If Carrey’s hambone antics were, at heart, a youthful cry for attention, Green’s confrontational gross-out act was a whole-hearted embrace of almost avant garde comedic sensibilities.  Or maybe it’s just because he’s Canadian.  In any case, I was a late convert to Green’s act, but when I was hooked, I was hooked something fierce, culminating in my unabashed fandom of his surreal sole directorial effort Freddy Got Fingered.  (Full disclosure here: Freddy was my submission for this year’s White Elephant pool, so I guess that I’m sorta breaking the rules by talking about it.)

In my alternate reality, McCarthy and Green can manically freestyle a life devoted to epic gross out comedies and Kaufman-esque publicity stunts.  Indeed, Green attempted the latter during his brief courtship and marriage to Drew Barrymore, including a (ahem) botched wedding ceremony at the conclusion of a Saturday Night Live episode.  But like McCarthy and Carrey, Green and Barrymore were always just thiiis much the mismatched pair (hmmm….wonder of Carrey and Barrymore ever considered hooking up…)

And why stop at those bits of performance art?  Can you imagine the genetic offspring that Green and McCarthy would have sired?  The prospect that such children might forever walk the line between being mad geniuses and congenitally annoying gadflys might be somewhat tragic for normal folk.  But for the brood of these two living cartoons?  All part of the ride, jack.

But what the hell does all of this Tom Green-centric fantasizing have to do with this article?  Isn’t there a film attached to this Blogathon assignment?  Well, yeah.  But patience, my friend, patience.

Jenny McCarthy has always existed as a slightly fascinating prospect in the back of my mind.  I can’t honestly say that I’ve spent too much time thinking about her over the last ten years, but examining her fifteen minutes of fame yields some interesting insights into who she is/was and what she represents.  My first realization that McCarthy had captured at least some portion of the cultural zeitgeist came on that fateful day in the summer of 1996 when I laid eyes on her first Rolling Stone cover appearance (pictured above.)  That single image captured the appeal that had shot her into at least the sub-stratosphere in her role as the comic sidekick on MTV’s Singled Out: an aggressive, almost hyper-realized sexuality, mixed with a crass and lowbrow sensibility.  In an era when the ultra-pneumatic Pamela Anderson reigned as America’s dominant sex symbol, McCarthy seemed to provide a refreshing alternative.  Anderson was the ultimate realization of every guy’s airbrushed sexual fantasy, a seething mass of sensuality that was nonetheless strangely antiseptic; McCarthy, on the other hand, subverted this sense of eroticism by always reminding her audience of the down and dirty physical aspects of sex.  For a brief moment, she trumped Anderson by serving as the true American male ideal: the Playboy model who would trade fart jokes with you.

And then…the moment passed.  McCarthy never seemed to latch on to any permanent step on the fame ladder, appearing in bit roles in several films, none of which effectively exploited her comic chops.  The American male psyche moved on to the next set of cultural sexpots and McCarthy was left to create what career she could.

Which brings us to Dirty Love, the 2005 film that she wrote and starred in for director (and then husband) John Asher.  In trying to sell this flick to you, the loyal reader, is it enough to say that not once, but twice during the first half McCarthy, gripped in the throes of existential agony and ecstasy, explodes in a repeated, positively Molly Bloom-like recitation of “Oh My God”?  Or that the scene which predicates her second explosion features a nebbish Woody Allen lookalike at an FHM fashion show nervously vomiting on her ample cleavage, which she then proceeds to violently expose to the leering paparazzi outside (quite possibly the ultimate Jenny McCarthy scene in the way that it mixes eroticism and disgust)?  Or that the morning after an unfortunate Ecstasy (spiked with acid)-fuelled sexual experience with a man and his fish, she is graphically struck with her period smack dab in the middle of the supermarket, a scene that climaxes with McCarthy crouched on the floor in a pool of her menstrual blood (a pool which, in any measure of sanity, would indicate that she is dead and just doesn’t know it)?

This brings us back to Freddy Got Fingered.  For those of you who haven’t experienced this bizarre auterist classic, its highlights include Marisa Coughlan (as Tom Green’s crippled girlfriend) achieving sexual gratification via Green beating her dead legs with a stick, Green impulsively pulling over his car mid-country drive to masturbate a horse who is being readied by its owners for breeding and (in a scene that will surely never be replicated in a mainstream film) Green attacking his father (an always game Rip Torn) by masturbating an elephant in his general direction.

I kept thinking of Freddy during Dirty Love (at title which, when you think about it, also perfectly sums up McCarthy’s appeal), for both films serve as uber-vehicles for their stars’ most primitive impulses, an unleashing of their collective ids onto the viewing space of the unsuspecting audience.  Both actors built their reputation on wild personas that were slightly sanitized for an MTV audience, so both films seem to serve as a dare to those old fans (“You wanna see me be crazy?  You wanna see me be gross?  Here ya go, bud!”). 

But both films also serve as biting critiques of the Hollywood scene.  In his DVD commentary to Freddy (I think I’m the only American to own this film, let alone to have bought it on its release date), Green admits that his underlying motivation for creating this “borderline Dadaist provocation” (as Nathan Rabin later put it) was to satirize the popularity of the gross-out comedies that were then so very much in fashion (and in which Green played a role in Road Trip) by creating the mother of all gross-out flicks.  Similarly, even though Dirty Love is pretty wretched fare, there’s a strong satirical element to McCarthy’s script, as she skewers the hollow feminine expectations that Hollywood sets up for actresses.  Her best friends (including Carmen Electra as a wannabe thug life princess) are stuck adhering to shallow, false personas in an effort to get ahead; the climax of the film includes blonde bimbo with a heart of gold  Kam Heskin excoriating a vapid, overweight mega-budget director for preferring a breast-enhanced floozy over her and for perpetuating those unrealistic expectations.  Indeed, McCarthy’s hyper-gory setpieces serve as an equal provocation to gender stereotypes.  Many a male actor has played around with the boundaries of gross-out humor, only to retain some sense of clout, but McCarthy’s go-for broke approach (even though her prime career was, by this point, kaput) is easier for a male audience to see as going way too far.

(On a side note, McCarthy and John Asher would divorce in the fall of 2005, shortly after this film was released.  Did it ultimately break up their marriage?  Or did it serve as Asher’s strange exploitation of his then bride?  After all, the central plot hook that gets things rolling is McCarthy’s Rebecca seeking revenge on her vapid model ex-boyfriend, who she walks in on while he’s diddling another woman?)

Those unrealistic male expectations are countered by the film’s nerdy hero, whom McCarthy eventually walks off with hand in hand.  And perhaps this is where the real story resides.  For said long-suffering, torch-carrying friend is played by Eddie Kaye Thomas, best known as the pretentious, Stifler’s mom-scoring Paul Finch from the American Pie films (which in some ways represented the cultural apex of the gross-out comedy fad.)  Take a look at the main cast of the Pie films sometime, and gaze in terror at the curse which must have been placed on most of them via their involvement with these films (famously satirized in Jason Biggs’s cameo in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back).  At the time of their release, I remember thinking that Thomas had the potential to fill a solid niche in the filmic universe for years to come; in another alternate universe, he might’ve followed the John Cusack route by cutting his teeth in lowbrow stoner comedies, only to springboard into more mature fare.  But he’s never quite elevated himself above low-budget fare, save for supporting roles in the Harold and Kumar films.

And as the title character in a 2001 mid-budget film directed by a then-popular comedian.

A film called Freddy Got Fingered.