As a conservative, I am all in favor of political incorrectness
and think that it should be encouraged at every opportunity. As a
libertarian, I believe that free speech must mean the freedom to
give offense — though I also believe in the sort of
gentlemanliness that was once defined as the property of the man
who never gives offense unintentionally. Moreover, even
though it seems obvious to me that there are far worthier targets
of the satirist’s vitriol than either “developmentally challenged”
or just plain stupid people — neither of which, after all, can
help it — I do not find the use of the word “retarded” or “retard”
intrinsically offensive. Neither, for that matter, am I bothered by
“crippled,” though I know this puts me several jumps behind the
socially progressive in the race for perfect sensitivity and the
ultimate euphemism that will put an end to offensiveness
altogether.
For all these reasons, I don’t mind reporting that the funniest
thing about Ben Stiller’s movie, Tropic Thunder — I had
almost written the only funny thing about it — is the
politically incorrect part about “Simple Jack,” the movie that
supposedly all but ruined the acting career of Tugg Speedman (Mr.
Stiller). In case you haven’t been keeping up to date with the
latest causes of the outrage industry, the movie has given rise to
calls for a boycott on account of its use of the word “retard” and
its general invitation to laugh at the mentally handicapped. It has
also anticipated criticism on account of Robert Downey Junior’s
portrayal of Kirk Lazarus, an Australian method actor who has
donned black-face to portray a black man — “I’m the dude playing a
dude disguised as another dude,” he says — but the movie seems to
have been given a pass on that one.
It might just be worth pointing out that, as is so often the
case when such cries are heard from the advocates of sensitivity
and inoffensiveness, they (mostly) result from a misreading of the
movie. It is certainly not the retarded who are Mr. Stiller’s main
target here, but rather the artistic pretensions of Hollywood, the
vanity of its thespian elite and the bogus compassion-chic of a
culture which equates the cheap emotion to be wrung from a
portrayal of the mentally sub-normal with cinematic greatness. That
having been said, however, there are two or three moments in the
movie where it is not Mr. Stiller’s Tugg Speedman who is the butt
of the satire but his cruel caricature of Simple Jack — who,
fortunately, is not a real person but Hollywood’s comically
inadequate idea of tragic innocence.
Most of the outrage has been directed at the following bit of
dialogue between his character — as Tugg — and Mr. Downey’s, who
shows a similarly comical over-earnestness about his craft by
insisting on staying in character as the black soldier in Vietnam
he is portraying. “I don’t break character until the DVD
commentary,” he tells his admiring fellow actors. “Everybody knows
you never do a full retard,” says Lazarus then, in character as the
supposedly pop-culturally savvy ghetto-denizen.
“What do you mean?” asks Speedman apprehensively, still stunned
by the blow his reputation has suffered from Simple
Jack.
“Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man. Look retarded,
act retarded: not retarded. Count toothpicks to your cards.
Autistic, sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, Forrest
Gump? Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he
charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That
ain’t retarded. You went full retard, man. Never go full
retard.”
The only thing worse than Speedman’s full retard, he goes on to
note, was Sean Penn’s in I Am Sam, so that bit of
gratuitous film criticism is another reason for the satire — as it
is certainly a legitimate target. But the offense-takers
concentrate on that word “retard” which, one of them has said,
amounts to “hate-speech.” With such power conferred upon it by the
censors and boycotters and linguistic prohibitionists, it may well
become so, too, but in this context you would have to try awfully
hard not to see it reflecting more on the intelligence of Kirk
Lazarus and Tugg Speedman than it does on that of Simple Jack. Like
the movie itself, Lazarus is inviting us to laugh at the mental
handicap of movie actors, as in this moment of confidential chat
between the same two characters.
“There were times while I was playing Jack where I felt —
retarded. Like, really retarded.”
“Moronical?”
“Yeah!”
“An Imbecile?”
“Yeah!”
“Like the dumbest m*********** that ever lived?”
“When I was playing the character…”
Well, nobody’s outraged on behalf of the wounded feelings of
Hollywood’s darlings. And a good thing too! Take away both
self-important thesps and stupid people as satirical
targets and you would scarcely have any satirical targets left. As
it is, it’s hard to imagine the film’s real life objects of
ridicule — if there are any apart from Sean Penn — recognizing
themselves in their portrayal here. Or anyone else’s recognizing
them either. Even Tom Cruise’s ludicrously over-the-top studio head
— which is way too heavy-handed either for cutting humor
or for the cameo it is supposed to be — is too generic and will
remind audiences rather of similar characters in other movies than
of anyone real.
That’s the problem with the movie as a whole. This is a picture
about a bunch of none-too-bright actors who suddenly find that what
they think is a movie is real life. Sounds like a good idea for a
movie. And it worked a treat in Galaxy Quest. But it
doesn’t take long for us to recognize that real life isn’t real but
a movie as well. Once the dispensable British director (Steve
Coogan) is comically taken out of the picture (Oh, sorry! Spoiler,
er, alert. Sort of), there are no deaths or serious injuries,
either among the actors or, so far as we can tell, among the drug
gang of which they find themselves the prisoners while on location
in Southeast Asia — in spite of thousands of rounds of automatic
weapons fire and a number of large explosions. It’s all just a
movie after all, where nothing is really at stake. To me, that
means that there is a certain insipidity about it even in its
funniest parts. Like most Hollywood satires, it just isn’t mean
enough.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie and
culture critic. His new book, Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political
Culture, is published by Encounter Books, as is his previous
book, Honor: A History.
