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Hank & Elvis discuss the oeuvre of Jim Carrey and what makes him the quintessential actor of the end-of-history period.
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Hank & Elvis discuss the oeuvre of Jim Carrey and what makes him the quintessential actor of the end-of-history period.
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The transcription is a conversation about Jim Carrey's filmography and the impact of his movies in the 90s. It discusses how Carrey's performances were comedic and had a deep impact, challenging the notion that comedy cannot be as profound as drama. The conversation also explores the idea that the "Ubermensch" of the 90s was portrayed as being somewhat "retarded" or delayed in their development, contrasting with the action heroes of the 80s. Overall, the discussion delves into the cultural significance of Carrey's films and their exploration of power, fantasy, and the intersection of reality and fantasy. Recording in progress, I think it's Jim Carrey's filmography here, and I don't think you can stop in the 90s because, I mean, how could you leave out Mr. Pulper's Tenguins in 2011, in which Carrey played Thomas Tom Pulper Jr. True. But, Philip Morris was 2009? Yes. Yes man, 2008. So, I think you've got to go at least up to Philip Morris. I haven't seen any of the Sonic the Hedgehog ones. No. Is Dr. Robotnik, aye? Yeah. I feel like, as a commencement phrase, we should say, all righty then. All righty then. All righty then. Let's get started. Let's get started. This is Hank here. Yeah. I feel like Hank's time is right there. It's sort of, in a way, the vanishing mediator of, the bête noire of Carrey's earth. It's like Carrey forged new ground, and then Tom Hanks came and just sort of soaked it up and transformed it into Oscar gold. So, that was the instigator for this discussion of Jim Carrey, in a way, was the realisation that Dumb and Dumber and Forrest Gump came out in the same year. They were the most popular films that year, and they were the highest paid actors, respectively. Yes. Carrey and Hanks. That was an incredible year for Jim Carrey. Incredible year for Western culture, incredible year for Jim Carrey. He filmed three movies that year, A Centura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber. And I think for people of our age, the younger end of middle-aged, that was an impactful moment in our culture. Well, I mean, yeah, 94 was what, the apotheosis of the end of history, really. Just before it all, everything sort of started to actually fall apart, perhaps. Maybe 93 it did. Yeah. Why that year? Well, I think of 93 as the breakout of the Yugoslavian War. So, sort of by then, there was that period from, let's say, 89 to 94, let's say, 95. It may have seemed that a new world was upon Days of Wine and Roses. I mean, somehow, Carrey ends up making three films in a year, which I think is remarkable in and of itself. It says that he took in 550 million at the box office and became the world's first star to be paid a $20 million fee. Was that The Mask? No, that was Cable Guy. So, one thing we discussed doing here was starting off with a couple of draft takes and circling around over the space of an hour or so. Finish up with a take that we're both happy with to write a think piece about. A very short think piece. Yeah. A very short, very middlebrow think piece. We don't want to overburden ourselves too much. We're both busy guys. Don't want to overburden ourselves too much with the university discourse. Yeah. A succinct, punchy, possibly provocative, 500 to 1,000 word take. That's what the people, I think, are here for. They don't want to hear the, you know, they don't want the university. They want something maybe between the hysterical subject, which I'm more than willing to offer, the master's discourse, and maybe something achieving the strange analyst discourse. But that being said, yeah, out with the university, I think. And I think in this way, in a way, starting with Jim Carrey is the way to break out of the university discourse. I mean, who the fuck studies Jim Carrey, really? From what we can see, not many people. Not a well-trodden path as far as academic film studies goes. I mean, do you think part of this is because, you know, people want awards are given to method actors, to actors who embody a certain psychological development of the character and psychological insight. But there's something about Carrey in those early films that's sort of almost all external in a way, you know, which doesn't make for Oscar bait. Now, what's the interior life? Surely, like, this is the thing people go to these movies not to think too much, as opposed to, you know, a nostalgic reflection of, you know, the 1960s and 70s, vis-a-vis Forrest Gump. So, possible draft take here is that comedy can be as deep as drama. Definitely. Definitely. And I think this is something that, I was thinking about the screwball comedy, and there's something kind of screwballish about Carrey's performances. You know, they are there almost as, like, pure affect. Bigger than life, presence on screen. So, comedy can be as deep as drama. I think that's a good one to circle back to. Another one we discussed previously was a little idea that the Ubermensch of the 90s was retarded. And I'm not sure if that's the appropriate, maybe there's another word for it, but I suppose the reason to use that word is because it speaks about delay and, kind of, childishness in an adult's body. And it's not overly clinical, because I'm not using it really in a clinical sense. I think there's a cultural understanding of developmental delay that can be thought of about all kinds of different subjects. You know, like the slacker, the stereotypical male slacker who hasn't got his shit together. You know, that person is retarded. And the person with the lack of self-awareness, you know, the Jordan Peterson type, he's retarded because he hasn't caught up to what everybody else thinks about him and knows about him. You know, like the owl of Minerva flaps its wings at dusk, which means, therefore, that history is retarded. Perhaps. Like, we only realize what we're doing until after it's been done. It's delayed. You know, the problem with Forrest Gump is that maybe he's almost beyond retarded, because he's a simpleton, in a way. Because he's, yeah, I mean, he doesn't engage with, I mean, he's there, but to borrow from, like, you know, the famous Zizekian reading, he's a blessedly innocent simpleton with a heart of gold who executes the orders of his superiors undisturbed by any ideological qualms or fanatical devotions. Yeah, I mean, a non-thinking subject, perhaps, can't even be granted that. That's nice. We all know people like that, and Forrest Gump is a good metaphorical stand-in for that kind of everyday person. Is that giving Forrest Gump and Zemeckis and Tom Hanks too much credit? I don't know. But it's obviously an important film, and it resonates with Dumb and Dumber in so many ways. A, it's about retarded heroes of the film, and yeah, B, they both happened at the same time. And the idea of the Ubermensch being retarded, it comes from, if you think about who the Ubermensch of cinema was in the previous decade, from when Dumb and Dumber and Forrest Gump were recorded in films, that was like an action hero, you know? I suppose the big genre of the 80s was the action film, and the big heroes of 80s cinema were big macho guys who in some ways are closer to maybe a traditional understanding of what an Ubermensch is, you know, because their physical strength and their individualism or their intrepidness, their courage, you know, sets them apart from other people and means that they don't have to follow rules that they don't agree with, social norms or hierarchies or whatever. So that was the Ubermensch of the 80s. Perhaps a more traditional notion of an Ubermensch? I mean, a snob could say that they are just dumb guys, just jocks, but I think as a cultural symbol, they were so resonant because they were more than just jocks, they were Ubermensch-ish. But yeah, come the 90s, and Jim Carey was, you know, the biggest star, arguably, of the 90s, playing these characters that resonated with as many people as the action heroes of the 80s resonated with, probably a similar audience as well. Yeah, so I suppose that's where the thought bubble comes from of the Ubermensch as retarded of the 90s. No Jim Carey sort of character I can think of is physically strong apart from the mask, which is him. Everyone remembers the Tommy gun scene in Mask. But yeah, one could almost say that there was a question of like, what to do with power, perhaps, once it didn't have a target anymore. Which is almost the neurotic's lament, you know, but who knows that they're kind of powerless. There's something, I think those films were sort of aware that they were films as well. I think there's something with the great action genre films of the 80s. They're not winking at the camera in the same way that Carey is aware that he's making a film. Complete libidinal investment. Yeah, they're more about fantasy than they are fantasies themselves. I mean, the Mask is very much about fantasy. This is another thing we talked about, a trope in Jim Carey films, is that so many of his films are about a put-upon schlub who has to go through a trial of sorts, has to sort of encounter their fantasy, the reality of their fantasy, and come out the other side. Actually, Emily put it in an interesting way that I thought you would have something to say about. She said that these characters, so they start out as a put-upon schlub, then they come to inhabit the real, the reality of their fantasy, I suppose, before coming back to, you know, everyday life. I mean, I agree. I think it's good, because in the sense of Yes, Man, it touches upon the real, that one can say yes, and in a way is always saying yes to everything, even if they're presenting that as a no. But there's something there, ambivalent almost, in the yes of the Yes, Man, which is kind of almost a no to other things, no to his previous life. So yeah, I think that it does, when the mask is worn by the eponymous character, in no way is he hiding away from the world by wearing a mask. In a way, it's a kind of transformative push into the possibility of everything. Yeah, I think that it does touch upon the real, and the real is an explosive point. It's an impossible... where the character almost realizes that they... how often do bankers come up in these characters? The character of, you know, the character in the mask is a banker, Yes, Man is a banker, Laia Laia, of course, a lawyer. The women's show, I can't quite remember. It's like an advertising or something. That situation is, in itself, kind of entwisted and strange, because his real work is as the star of the show. He's totally given over his life without knowing it, to the enjoyment or spectacle of others, in a sense. Robin Williams was considered for the role. He's an insurance salesman. Even better. Yet again, so these characters that are always there as making an offering of stability. Myself and Irene, he plays a cop. Bruce Almighty, he's a TV news guy. He's in the business of determining what is the truth, telling the official story. What is he? I love Philip Morris. He's a con artist. He's a thief. All of these roles are incredibly latent with... Ace Ventura, he's a detective, so he's, again, he's kind of a policeman. The Ace Ventura character is the one who changes the least throughout that entire journey, in a way. He doesn't change at all. That's right. He's completely flat. Yeah, he's a symptom. He's this one-of-a-kind character, but the others are all attendant to a law that's not entirely theirs, which is almost in some sense... Putting Dumb and Dumber to the side a bit, there's a motif here, I think, that the characters that the almost true enigma of Jim Carrey kind of begins with that Ace Ventura character. This sort of creative id figure. Yeah, that's a really good point. That's usually recognized as his breakout film, but as we've just discussed, all of his other characters have more layers than that. In that film, you could see it's pure id, right? It's just the id, and it's completely irrepressible. He's the id, although he's sort of working... He's allied with the law. Then in the next film, you've got The Mask, which is all about the struggle of an ego, of a neurotic, put-upon schlub, Stanley Ipkiss. Yeah, and this kind of, I guess, brings us to maybe a third... I want to come up with a concise argument from this thought that there's this actor, Jim Carrey, and he was in all these different films, written by different people, directed by different people, in a lot of different genres, in a way. I mean, especially after The Truman Show, he branched out into more serious roles, but many of these films all fit into the same earth, I would say, and can be considered as part of a whole. So what is that? He's built this body of work that really tells us something through his performances in many other people's works. Usually, I guess, you would think of a film, you would say the author is like the director, and kind of not disputing that, but what Jim Carrey has done between, say, 1994 and 2009, maybe, I love you, Philip Morris, was do this string of films that, as a whole, really tell us a lot about the world we live in, the kinds of people we are. I love that time period, because I love you, Philip Morris, was the film that made him have to wind everything back. It was too, too controversial, and from what I've read, Carrey's agents and the rest were like, well, you can't. This is going to alienate your base. Intriguing film. I love it how it was followed up by that Yes Man preceded it, considering that the I love you, Philip Morris, that five years later, there was a referendum here, a vote to vote yes, on same-sex marriage. But at that time, in 2009, it was unacceptable. One thing, maybe, that we've been circling around is something about why Jim Carrey is so special, which is that he carved out this body of work over 15 years, working in different films by different people, written by, directed by different people, but his body of work as a performer is like a lot of actors, great actors, are, you know, they're a face, and they're a voice, and they're brilliant, because you know what you're going to get when you go and see their film, and you grow close to them, you feel close to them, because they have perfected this face, whereas Jim Carrey's face is made of rubber, and you don't know what you're going to get, but what he shows you consistently, through the roles he chose to do, and the way he did them, was something, yeah, very insightful about people in the time that we live in. So I think you're getting to the idea of Carrey's idiolect, this idea of the recurring elements of his performance, his rubbery face, you know, his, I've read it as like annoying insincerity to his performance. You do feel that, it wouldn't be too easy to say that he's breaking the fourth wall, or like winking at the camera, but it is something, there's something going on here. Well, because a lot of comedians do that, they wink at the camera, and they break the fourth wall, and a lot of comedians put together a great body of work as well, but yeah, what he does is interesting. It skirts the line between comedy and drama, I think, because of that, the depth of the meaning that comes out of the body of work, like it may be isolated on its own, you know, if he'd just done Ace Ventura, and then a bunch of his crappier films, then this wouldn't be true. But in the context of that body of the really strong work that he did, it's something more than just, you know, you could compare him to Harpo Marx, you know, yeah, with his physical comedy. And Harpo Marx is a genius, you know, Kramer, a genius, a physical comedy. But what they did is very different, and it doesn't skirt the line between drama and comedy in the same way, because I suppose Kerry engages so much with the narratives that come from the movies that he's in. And the irony, the beautiful irony of the mask, is that, you know, Kerry has a rubbery face, and he wears a rubbery mask, almost to give, like, okay, on one level, yes, let's highlight, like a director's like highlighting Kerry's rubbery face, let's all focus on, you know, but no, in a way it gives us, it sort of fortifies the idea that the mask is the face for Jim Carrey, you know. Yeah. I think who you've got to really compare him to is Adam Sandler, because they're contemporaries, and they have a similar stature, a similar volume of work, they've had similar, you know, meanderings in their career between just B, C, D, Z grade shit, and really blockbuster stuff that has mass appeal, and then really highbrow stuff, you know, high, in inverted commas, you know, like, he did, Adam Sandler did the P.T. Anderson film, Love, which, got to be funny if that came out the same year as Eternal Sunshine. When did it come out? Late 2000, 1999, maybe? 2002, yeah, so a bit closer, two years before Eternal Sunshine. So, yeah, I mean, I think you've got to compare those two actors. Actually, in some way, I think that looking through his filmography, Carrey is TV. Like, he's not cinema in the way that, say, other actors would be. Like, he's kind of like, not to say degrade him to, like, a TV actor who made it on the big screen, but there's something about his, you know, his entire commitment that is, and his love of TV. I mean, his characters, like Truman Show, okay, Cable Guy, Man on the Moon, like, these are all figures that, you know, are TV. These are all, like, centered around the medium of television. I would have to disagree, and I think that those examples that you gave are all films that are very critical of the role that TV plays. I think you could argue about Truman Show that maybe one of the main points that that movie makes is that TV is evil and a malign force in our culture, one of the most malign forces in our culture. And I don't think you could have a Jim Carrey, an actor of that stature, a career of that magnitude in a, you know, in a post cinema, you know, in the current time. I mean, Adam Sandler's done pretty well branching into Netflix with his Netflix contract, although most of those films, I believe, are pretty shit. But, you know, it's quite notable that Carrey's career has tailed off as the TV age. So, I definitely think, I mean, if you think about the 90s, the mid 90s, like, you know, that was, the 90s were, like, a really great decade for cinema, I think. Yeah. And I think he stood astride that whole period in a real, kind of, golden age. He was one of the greats. I'd say that 99 was pretty much the greatest year of Hollywood prior to probably 1939. You know, there was something that happened in 99. You know, we had The Matrix. We had, like, all these films by Club. But leading up to that, you have these Carrey films. I mean, I think, I agree with you, it's a nefarious force. Yes, Truman Show. Yes, Cable Guy. But in a way, Chip Douglas wouldn't have been Chip Douglas unless he had grown up in the incubator of television. So, Chip Douglas is a product of TV. He's a, in a way, TV was his, you know, stepfather, his father, you know. And the Matthew Broderick character, who's the put-upon schlub that appears in so many of Jim Carrey's films, it's not played by Jim Carrey in this one, his encounter with the real, or however we're going to frame it, you know, that trial that he goes on, begins because he asked for the free cable. He asked for access to all of the channels, thinking that that's going to be what, you know, that's going to improve his life, having all of these channels, being able to watch all the movies, have all the pornography, and all of that, that that's going to make him happy. And what that fantasy is engendered as is Chip, and it turns into a complete nightmare. And at the end of that film, it's actually a very similar ending to Truman Show, because at the end of the film, you know what? It's actually an inversion of the Truman Show, because, or maybe Truman Show is an inversion of it, because Truman Show came two years later. At the end of The Cable Guy, Chip Douglas sacrifices himself to destroy the, no, he's trying to destroy himself, but he ends up destroying the satellite dish accidentally. And what it means is that the cable TV audience in that city all lose their connection, and they all start reading books, and talking to each other. No, they have basically the O.J. Simpson trial, which ends obsessively throughout, cut at the moment of verdict. And that's where Ben Stiller plays the guy on the stand. Twins. He plays twins. Yeah, yeah. And that's a beautiful thing too, because in so many of Jim Carrey's films, that trial, the schlub before the trial, and then the schlub during the trial, it's like two aspects of the one person. And in this film, that person is played by two separate people, but as if to underscore that, well, this is really about one person exploring different sides of themselves. You've got that twin character in the trial. And I have to say, going back just a step to The Cable Guy, Matthew Broderick plays this character who is offered everything for free. You mentioned all the shows, all the pornography, he gets it all for free. So he actually gets what he really wants. There's a moment there where he wakes up after that incredible somebody to love scene, and in the bed with the woman, he presumably has sex with her, he has a great night, he wakes up to realize that The Cable Guy has paid for her, because she's a sex worker. And you know, you'll owe me one next time. Yeah. It's a story about, oh God, this is what happens if you get what you want. And it's like, Matthew Broderick is the architect. You imagine his life is planned out and stable, and The Cable Guy is just like, he comes in and messes everything up. But really, he's kind of in a way like the genie character, I guess, and gives him all that he desires. And then he doesn't want it anymore. Which is something that happens throughout the Carey films. It definitely happens in The Mask. Yeah, The Mask is, you can see why Slavoj either jokingly or seriously says it's his favorite film. Because, yeah, at the end of it, he literally takes off his mask and he throws it in the river. And then his hapless friend goes, I want to do that. Or go on that ride. Yeah. In a sense, what I feel like we have with Carey is this sort of like, folding in of what it means to be. There's something here that's approaching like Man on the Moon, like the idea of the real thing, how difficult it is to be the real thing. And then when he is the real thing, with Man on the Moon, when he plays Kaufman, Andy Kaufman, he basically has the breakdown in real life as well. Like it's too much for him to be Kaufman. So you have their kind of circuit of desire. You can totally see why Kaufman was a hero because he does all of these characters that, um, you've got Andy Kaufman, you know, it's Andy Kaufman. He's a very schlubby looking guy. But he somehow in his performance, he becomes something. Someone teleported from another dimension. Yeah, I think with that point you made about the folding of Truman Show and Cable Guy, it sort of involves the destruction of television itself. Both of those films involve destruction of like the seriality of TV. Like the Cable Guy, the end of the sort of, you know, the murder trial that everyone else is watching. And the Truman Show, there's a cut, like the program ends. But it ends kind of bitterly with those security guards right at the end. They're like, what's on next? What's on next, exactly. I think there's something there. Yeah, yeah, for sure. In the Truman Show, I think the main character is the audience, really. And you don't see that much of them. You see a bit of them. But they pop up throughout the film. And Truman is really their trial. They're encountering that fantasy, and it's their fantasy of Truman escaping. But after they've been through that trial, they don't grow at all. They haven't grown at all. And that's because TV has killed their ability to go on that journey. And I think this is why I would argue against scary TV, because the argument there is, cinema can actually, you can walk out of a movie and go, wow, I see things differently now. Whereas you watch a TV show, and you might watch this huge arc on a reality TV show, or some reality TV shows are great. That alone show is amazing in terms of the arc. The arcs that the characters go on, and the development you see them go through. But then you turn it off, and you're still, what have you learned? Except maybe how to set a trap to catch a mouth. You haven't actually grown as a person. You're in the same place that you were. So yeah, I would definitely say part of his idiolect, it's inherently cinematic, and it embodies the virtues of cinema as an art form, compared with TV. I think an element of TV that is somehow lost now, like in the era of masterpiece television, like since The Sopranos, basically, HBO, where there was a show on once a week, and if you missed it, you missed the whole thing. I think in a sense, there is a kind of, I wouldn't say it's nostalgia, but it's coming to that, like a great cinematic figure. We've talked about a number of takes that we could focus on. I think all of the stuff we've talked about can be used to support, but I think a good take for us to focus on is that cinema is better than TV. Maybe that is part of the central meaning of Kerry's idiolect. Oh, I agree. That's one take, and I think a really hot take for me, there's a hot take here, is that Kerry enjoys acting as a performer. He's enjoying himself, enjoying being enjoyed. This is part of the humor, I think, of these creations. Now, it's sort of over-the-topness of what goes on. I can imagine Kerry enjoying this performance if he happened to stumble across an actor just like him, doing exactly what he's doing. You compare him to say, I don't know, Tom Hanks. Can I imagine Tom Hanks sitting down and enjoying the performance of Forrest Gump? No. Yeah, there's something there. Brando? No. Whereas Kerry, you do feel that he innately understands what his audience really wants, which is what he wants. You're like, he's with you in cinema, in a way, laughing at himself as a performer. I think that goes to this, which is not vaudeville. It's almost like it adds a sort of, yeah, a live drama to it, a live spectacle. He's enjoying being chipped in The Cable Guy, making mischief. Here's another take for you. What do you think about this? Jim Carrey was the greatest actor of the End of History period. I'm there with that. Yeah, because Kerry knew that there was something simulated going on with nature of performance, his performance, and also contemporary culture as it's doing. I think that's our take. I think that captures everything that we've been talking about, why he's so great, why he stands out from the crowd, because he stands out from the crowd in his time and place. I like this. We can write it up and we can send it to the Bunga boys and say, because I think that their work on the End of History has definitely been inspiring to both of us. I think they make a strong argument that the End of History thesis is a meaningful one and that we're currently living in a time where we need to come to terms with what that means, because we're moving beyond that. We really need to take account now of the time that was before the time that we're in now. Maybe that's the headline, Kerry was the greatest actor of the End of History. Absolutely. I think as opposed to with the issue of the Ubermensch, I look this up, Nietzsche and laughter, Nietzsche saw laughter as an opportunity to express contempt, basically, because Nietzsche's an arsehole and Jim Carrey's not using laughter to express contempt. This is not what his game is about. It's something better than that and more complex, I believe. My timer is ticking down now and my wife and baby are holed up in the other room, very kindly making space for us to do this recording. Maybe we should cut it short there and offline we'll decide who's going to take the lead on writing this think piece. And yeah, we'll work on putting this together over the next few weeks and putting it up online and then we'll come up with another topic. We'll do it all again. I like it a lot, to quote Kerry. Which one's that from? I like it a lot. It's from Dumb and Dumber. I like it a lot. Where he gets his tongue stuck to the pole on the ski lift. I like it a lot. I like it a lot. I like it a lot. I like it a lot. Okay, I'll see you later, Elvis. See ya, Jamaica. Till next time, bye. Oh, bye.
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