Billy Madison (1995)
Director: Tamra Davis
Had I seen this before: Yes
I recently watched The 400 Blows, François Truffaut's 1959 semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film, widely considered to be among the most masterful works ever to ever emerge from the nation of France. It's a quietly devastating portrait of a young man struggling in cold, uncaring circumstances in mid-century Paris. It is also, relevantly, about what school can and--more poignantly--can not provide to such children. I spent a long time afterward thinking about cycles of parental neglect and indifference and how difficult it can be to overcome one's own traumas in order to address the emotional needs of those dependent on you, as well as the brutal injustice of the carceral state, particularly with regard to juvenile offenders. Anyway, I just...wanted you to know that.
I also very much wanted the librarian to know that as I silently handed her the empty DVD case for the 1995 Adam Sandler vehicle Billy Madison so that she could retrieve the disc for me from behind the circulation desk. This is because I desperately want all librarians to think that I am an intelligent person with sophisticated taste, and not an individual whose brain, upon selecting "Back to School" as the next blog theme, immediately and fully against my will filled in the following lyrics:
Back to school, back to school
To prove to Dad that I'm not a fool
I got my lunch packed up
My boots tied tight
I hope I don't get in a fight
Back to school, back to school...
William Madison is not a hero for our times. He is the purest distillation of the failson. His entire being radiates societal privilege and dynastic decay. He is rich, white, and so abrasively straight that we are first introduced to him yelling maniacally through a drunken haze about it being "nudie magazine day." If you are a woman but have the audacity to not be young, hot, and blonde, he will view you as a grotesquerie. If you are a service worker just trying to get through your day he will almost certainly make it harder. His favorite word and general concept is "shit." He brings inexplicable chaos to every interaction. He drinks so heavily that he has intense, recurring hallucinations involving a giant penguin. The invisible penguin is his nemesis.
Through some combination of stupidity and laziness (ratio unclear), we are to understand that in his youth, Mr. Madison failed to complete a single grade of school on his own merits. Rather, his wealthy father paid for his scholastic "achievements" every step of the way. Now, with that same father considering the future of his company and legacy, he looks upon his progeny and despairs. The solution? Using the same money and power that maneuvered him through the public education system in the first place, arrange to put this man-child back into academic circulation so that he can attempt to pass grades 1-12 and prove that he is worthy of inheriting a multi-million dollar business with 61,000 employees, despite having never done anything in his 27 years that was not in service of his own most puerile desires.
I must reiterate at this point that Billy is the protagonist of this film.
This is something I understood and accepted with little to no friction at age 14, in the winter of my freshman year of high school. Is this because I felt intuitively that Sandler was simply the next step in a line stretching back though The Three Stooges and (more generously) The Marx Brothers and beyond--a tradition of bringing anarchic silliness to ruffle the feathers of the stuffy, the formal, the snobbish? Is it because my unformed adolescent brain was pleased to see an SNL star let loose on a big screen budget, no different from Wayne's World a couple of years earlier? Is it because this is simply what mainstream comedy looked like in the mid-90s and in my hunger for the form I found and cherished the small parts of it that worked and accepted that all the rest was a necessary nuisance, or more insidiously, an accurate reflection of the American social order? (Sidebar: I have a theory that the stereotype of men finding women "mysterious" or "unpredictable" stems from the fact that they are not inundated throughout their lives with books, movies, television, and visual arts created by and bearing the perspective of women, whereas in my own life I feel that men have been explaining themselves to me, loudly and interminably, at every level, from the idiotic to the sublime, since birth, and therefore I do not find them particularly enigmatic. Enjoying movies has often meant finding a way to relate to ridiculous, often sexist male characters.) I suspect it was some swirling, messy combination of all of these factors.
The difficultly I encounter now is that this deeply amenable teen still lives somewhere inside of me and although I sternly forbid her from finding it hilarious when Adam Sandler whips dodgeballs as hard as he can at small children, she ignores me. "Please," I beg her, turning her attention to the part on the IMDb trivia page where it says the editor had to cut away quickly after each hit so that he didn't show the children crying, "what's wrong with you?" And she stops laughing out loud but I can tell she's doing the thing where you're trying to keep it together in church or something, all pursed lips and eyes down.
Friends, bloggers, internetpeople: I come to examine Sandler, not to praise him. I am not standing before you this day to defend the Happy Madison enterprise...much. I will say that a lot of people seem to enjoy working with Adam Sandler on project after project and I have never caught wind of any disquieting rumors about him--a low bar! Absolutely. Is my inner 14-year-old far too eager to be charmed by the fact that he's been married to the same woman for a long time and recently credited her as Great Looking Flight Attendant in one of his movies? Definitely! But in these dark times, sometimes doofiness with a distinct absence of malice is a comfort, even when the trappings of the era are a problem. For me, there is a kind of rambunctious warmth that emanates from Sandler that saves a lot of scenes in this appallingly-premised movie from being wholly unwatchable. There's a strong "heeeeey I'm just goofing with ya" good-naturedness keeping even the stupidest gags from tasting completely sour.
It did seem worth asking a current 13-year-old whether the experience of watching this was, on the whole, pleasant or unpleasant. Mine shrugged and said "It didn't hurt my soul or anything but some parts poked it a little." And then immediately launched into the movie's most lasting legacy, the academic decathlon judge's response to Billy's longform answer on the Industrial Revolution. Because...that part is still funny.
Line I repeated quietly to myself spent all of ninth grade saying back and forth with my friends: "Stop looking at me, swan."
Is it under two hours: Yes, good grief, imagine if it wasn't
In conclusion: Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
French Onion Soup from Serious Eats and Chocolate Pudding from The Kitchn
"Billy, eat your soup. It's good soup." In the film, Billy loudly slurps what looks to be one of many courses, a clear consommé of some type, as his father's business partners look on in confusion and dismay. But I am not in a place right now to be making an elaborate, multi-course meal in service of a movie in which it is clearly and unnecessarily established that the villain's testicles are weird-looking. So for me, the soup is the meal, and I put extra stuff in it.
Up next: A generational touchstone (not my generation, I have no generation)
