I have a habit when writing. The moment I become stuck, I look back over what I've written to the point at which I became stuck. Usually what I've already written tells me what to write next.
Every now and then, though, what I've already written screams at me to stop. "This isn't amusing," I say to myself as I reread my work. "It isn't clever." Sometimes I have to confess that if I weren't me, I would be angry at myself for having written such nonsense. There's no point in continuing the essay or the article or the letter or the whatever-it-is at that point. It's time to wad the thing up and throw it away and start over.
Rob Schneider demonstrated incredible will power by finishing the script for Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. If at any point he had paused to look over what he had written, he would certainly have abandoned this wrongheaded and humorless project.
As in any recent movie featuring a Saturday Night Live alum, our story presents us with a goofy-but-lovable protagonist (Rob Schneider) in the title role. In this case, through a series of hackneyed farcical developments, ultra-loser (but nice guy) Deuce Bigalow ends up established in the mansion of an ultra-studly gigolo.
This sets up two motifs that are repeated throughout the movie for no good reason other than that Schneider seems to think he can dupe the audience into thinking they're funny. The first is that the studly gigolo is going to kill Deuce if anything in his lovely seaside home is damaged in his absence. The second is that gigolos (at least when they're Deuce) prefer to be called man-wh@res.
The stud threatens Deuce with a crossbow (twice), an axe, and a series of phone calls in the course of the film. Schneider's hope seems to be that by the time he gets around to the fifth or sixth threat, the audience will have forgotten that the first one wasn't particularly funny.
And the inverted language of male prostitution (featuring such clever terms as man-wh@re, he-pimp, male-madame, and he-b*tch) will be employed witlessly throughout the film as a way of killing time.
Can you guess what happens to Deuce while he's housesitting for the ultra-studly (and very violent) gigolo?
That's right: He breaks something--a very expensive fish tank. In order to replace the tank, he has no alternative but to start answering the ultra-stud's business line and become a man-wh@re himself.
Here the film descends into everything Walt Disney ever wanted for America: putrid and humorless blandness with sound effects and music that are meant to remind us that what's happening on the screen is funny.
Of course it's funny! What's not funny about a guy falling into water over and over again? And what's not funny about men pushing plungers into toilets? Toilets are so funny, in fact, that it's not enough to have Deuce Bigalow involved in two plunger scenes. No, we have to have his father work as a men's room attendant so that when Deuce wants to have a serious heart-to-heart with his old man, the conversation can be punctuated by flatulence.
In his work as an aquarium cleaner, Deuce Bigalow spends his days covered in slime and coming into more contact with human feces than you might expect. But don't worry about him as a gigalow. He is made to dress up like a German tourist, and he is required to do a clumsy impression of an erotic dance with a lamp. But he is never demeaned, never tainted by actually having sex for money. He falls in love with the only client of his that he has sex with.
And he returns the money.
So you see, everything's okay. But maybe you didn't see. Since this isn't a film that actually expects the viewer to pay attention, it concludes with a court scene in which the morality that it has been clubbing us over the head with for more than an hour is rearticulated verbally by the judge. In a literal court of law, Deuce exonerates himself of the accusation of prostitution by proving that he did not ever have sex for money.
And that's the lesson, boys and girls: Don't have sex for money.
Thanks, but I didn't watch the film for vocational counselling. I watched in order to be entertained. I wasn't.
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