Groundhog Halloween

Thank you to the couple of people hitting this old post last week, for putting my recent movie-watching experience into perspective. Y'see, I watched Groundhog Day in full for the first time in my life, having previously switched channels after half a scene whenever it came on television. Even now I found myself skipping a few minutes when the romantic scenes ground to a crawl. Not my cuppa'. But the other movie I tried watching, Hubie Halloween, I couldn't even finish. Hell, I didn't even get halfway through before skipping to the end to discover, yep, as suspected, they eventually all bow down before the retard and make him mayor or mayor for a day or mayor of Halloween or whatever. Fuck it.

While the two movies themselves are quite different comedies, the main character fills the same niche: everymanish, bumbling, meant to be sympathized with but not quite an audience surrogate. Moreover, both leads pretty much played only their one role, flick after flick, spanning decades. Their niche is quite similar, both in target and scope. And there, in the decline from Bill Murray to Adam Sandler lies another nice example of our cultural nosedive.

If Murray was abrasive, callous and overconfident, he was at least also permitted to be occasionally witty, moderately knowledgeable and fundamentally rational despite his excesses. Groundhog Day did not require him to play the lowest of the low, but merely stipulated room for improvement. No need for such self-improvement in Hubie Halloween, where we're instead made to share in the town's browbeating for mistreating the subhuman retard, because he's such a nice guy. Except he's not. Sandler's character is also abrasive, overconfident, intrusive, insulting, blustering and bumbling (to the even lower levels mandated by the more crass comedy style) but we're meant to side with him because (unlike Phil the weatherman who was functioning below his capacity for mindfulness) Hubie's genuinely the walking advertisement for abortion he appears and incapable of self-improvement... and therefore the entire world somehow has a duty to accomodate him.

 

Being above average but imperfect in '93 got you condemned to purgatory to make you a better yuppie, win the girl and live out your own personal life. Being an epsilon sub-moron now condemns everyone else around you to hand you a wife to fuck and a mayor's sash. This goes beyond mass-media's perpetual glorification of "that immortal ass, the average man" or demonization of the mad scientist, to the very definition of average. We hit that tipping point sometime in the mid-2000s with Leeroy Jenkins, noble champion of non-nerds everywhere. We idolize Gilligan now. Welcome to the Idiocracy.