June 14, 1996

THE CABLE GUY was, somehow, a divisive movie. It’s such a good idea: what if you slipped the guy hooking up your cable some extra money to give you the pay channels for free, and then he felt entitled to be your friend, and you couldn’t get rid of him? And what if he was an over-the-top goofball Jim Carrey but it played out like a SINGLE WHITE FEMALE or CAPE FEAR type suspense thriller? It’s very funny, but directed like a real thriller by Ben Stiller (following his debut REALITY BITES), so it turns out it wasn’t what most of society expected or desired from Carrey after his run of ACE VENTURA, THE MASK, DUMB AND DUMBER, BATMAN FOREVER and ACE VENTURA 2. We’ll get into that a little more later, but for now, fuck ‘em. They were wrong, obviously.

Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick, WARGAMES, THE LION KING) is newly separated from his girlfriend Robin (Leslie Mann, LAST MAN STANDING), having freaked her out by proposing. So he has a new apartment and needs the cable hooked up and it’s his buddy Rick (Jack Black, WATERWORLD) who suggests bribing the guy, which is not really Steven’s way, but he does it anyway. Great idea, Rick.

The cable guy says his name is Ernie “Chip” Douglas, acts like he’s caressing a nipple when he finds the “sweet spot” to drill into the wall, intuits that Steven is dealing with a breakup, likes to say “I’m just messin with ya” and “I’m just jerkin yer chain,” and pressures him into hanging out the next day. Then he brings him to sit on top of the city’s satellite dish, the place where he goes to think, to talk about the future of cable and internet.

Next thing you know Chip is showing up where Steven and friends play basketball, being overly aggressive and shattering the backboard. He sets up a giant TV and stereo system in Steven’s house without permission, invites people over for karaoke, and after Steven hooks up with a nice woman from the party (Misa Koprova, “Lyndon Receptionist,” JUNIOR), Chip says “Don’t worry, it’s my treat.” If you know what he means. Steven is wise enough to try to draw the line there, but it continues to escalate. There are disguises, attacks, a framing for a crime, a network of people he’s given free cable to who he uses to make Steven seem crazy. And like a true thriller it culminates with a stormy night time showdown on the satellite dish.

I watched this more than once in the ‘90s, but this time it had been a while and I thought maybe it was gonna be a problem for me that Carrey plays it so cartoonish. Arguably he’s toned down from Ace Ventura or The Riddler, but at all times he’s doing an extreme voice, face, posture, movements. He does a lisp, an underbite, a dance where every part of his body seems to move independently. There is nothing real about the performance. So I tried to picture what it would be like if it was played even straighter and cast with a normal thriller villain actor like, you know, James Remar let’s say, if he hadn’t been busy filming THE PHANTOM. Or Eric Roberts if he hadn’t been busy cameoing as Eric Roberts in this movie.

Eric Roberts bringing you to Medieval Times and talking old timey to annoyed waitress Janeane Garafalo would be pretty funny. But I was quickly won over to Carrey’s approach, because the beauty of it is that every single other actor does play the reality of it. Even Jack Black plays his role straight, as the friend who sees he’s losing Steven to this weirdo and gets protective. It’s Broderick’s responses to this bizarre individual entering his life that make it work. Especially the fact that he keeps trying to be nice about it, feels bad that he doesn’t want to be his friend, doesn’t want to be in some kind of dramatic conflict. He mercifully doesn’t keep blowing his top for comedic purposes – it takes quite a bit to break him.

Actually, I bet I would hate BATMAN FOREVER 5-10% less if Matthew Broderick was always there looking uncomfortable about Carrey’s obnoxious performance. Give me that as a special edition.

You know how comedies don’t necessarily prioritize craftsmanship? Not the case here. Cinematographer Robert Brinkmann (KANDYLAND, U2: RATTLE AND HUM) gives it an overcast, foreboding look, and they went and got John Ottman (THE USUAL SUSPECTS) to do the score. Admittedly he doesn’t do his normal thing, he goes a little Danny-Elfman-ish at times. But it’s never a comedy score. The most notable parts are when it weaves into songs Chip is singing or humming. I think that happens three times, always effective.

It’s not a problem but I think the alternative rock soundtrack feels a little inappropriate – it seems too cool for either of the main characters. I guess we do establish that Steven was going to go to a (Soundgarden?) concert with Rick but flaked out. Maybe he really is into Jerry Cantrell, Porno For Pyros, the Toadies, Cracker and Silverchair.

The song “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” by Primitive Radio Gods was from an album that came out the week after the movie, and the song reached #1 on the alternative charts, so there is at least one commercial success that can be partly attributed to THE CABLE GUY. “Hey Man Nice Shot” by Filter is a diabolically appropriate song choice for the basketball scene because the title is a pun about Chip’s slam dunk but originally referred to R. Budd Dwyer committing suicide on live TV. The album does not feature White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human” (though this was the first of many movies to use it) but it does have a little bit of dialogue from the movie, Carrey’s performance of “Somebody to Love” from the karaoke scene, and an Ottman piece called “This Concludes Our Broadcast Day.”

Hey, you know who probly loved that CD? Elijah Wood’s character from FLIPPER.

Obviously we’d had our share of movies that thought they were blowing the lid off of the dark truth of modern media. NATURAL BORN KILLERS was before this, for example. But I like it here as gimmicky theming: of course if there’s a movie about an evil cable guy he has to be obsessed with old TV shows, use sitcom character names for aliases, hum the score to a famous Star Trek episode, etc. When Steven is flipping through channels we glimpse The Jerry Springer Show and Ricki Lake (infamous daytime talk shows of the era) so when we also see half a second of UFC it definitely means it was a symbol of how bad things were getting. (I don’t think Stiller knew the league would grow into respectability over decades but then turn fascist along with the American government. Weird!) We also see a bit of PLAY MISTY FOR ME to get us in the stalker mood.

A major concern of that type of satire at the time was “tabloid TV” and its coverage the O.J.Simpson trial. Obviously with the Menendez Brothers murder case in mind, THE CABLE GUY follows the fictional case of an ex-child star (Ben Stiller, HIGHWAY TO HELL) who murdered his twin (Ben Stiller, EMPIRE OF THE SUN) and tried to blame it on “Asian gangs.” We follow the trial through deadpan CourtTV segments with Rikki Klieman and MTV News flashes with Tabitha Soren.

In a certain sense this aspect is dated, since celebrity worship, true crime, reality TV, all of these things are way more insane now than they were then. In fact they took on human form as our current president. But what struck me as interesting about this movie for this moment is that we have all this talk about a “male loneliness epidemic,” allegedly a current phenomenon. But isn’t that exactly what this thirty year old movie is about? He has TV to blame instead of the internet, but “Chip” is an awkward dude with some unhealthy ideas based on his media intake, and who badly wants a friend. Don’t you want somebody to love? Don’t you need somebody to love?

A sad irony is that Chip makes a speech (twice!) where he says, “The future is now! Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone and computer. You’ll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, or watch female mud wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam. There’s no end to the possibilities!” All of this is true. We had so much hope for it. But it wasn’t all it was made out to be.

THE CABLE GUY seems like a no-brainer: Carrey was hugely popular, this was a better and hipper movie than he’d been known for, it must’ve arrived as the pretty well-liked movie it’s remembered as, right? Actually, people took offense to it. Although THE PHANTOM was out of place for not even trying to be dark, you will remember that this was also a decade when grown adults could stand in front of you with a straight face and fret that something was “too dark.” The BATMAN RETURNS phenomenon. At the time, and for some time after, my conversations about it were usually me making an argument for why it was good.

There were a few positive reviews, but surprisingly it was not one of the movies that Roger Ebert seemed to appreciate more than others. He complains that he was just getting to a point where he could almost appreciate what Carrey was doing, and now all the sudden he changed what he was doing. “Maybe it would have worked better if the cable guy had become a real friend to Steven, devising love strategies and Machiavellian schemes to win back Robin and thwart her other suitors,” he writes in the final paragraph of his review. Counterpoint: Maybe not.

I suppose the jokes cause more discomfort than what was common at the time, but our cringe comedy technology has gotten so much more robust in the years since that it almost seems embarrassing that this was too much for the mainstream. What a bunch of wusses. On a commentary track recorded a decade-plus later, Carrey says, “They talk about it as if it was like a murderously dark thing, but I think it’s just funny, and the need of the character is hilarious.”

There was also a major armchair bean counter angle to the movie’s rejection. The big news story about it was that Carrey had been paid $20 million, a record and precedent setter for other stars. What were they thinking, paying him so much for a movie that is only aimed at a large audience and not the biggest possible audience? What if it doesn’t do well? Money will be lost! This is financially irresponsible. How could they do this to us with their bottomless well of money that they got from us!?

You might make fun of me for saying that, but in fact it didn’t make back that much more than double its budget, so it might not have even been profitable if not for the video sales and cable and everything. Utterly reckless. Somebody could have been hurt!

It would be funny though if this had been a big hit and they made it a series like THE STEPFATHER, where he shows up in other cities with other TV-based names and tries again.

The other big story I remember reading about in Entertainment Weekly or whatever was that it was first planned as a Chris Farley vehicle. That does sound kind of funny. And I remember producer Judd Apatow reportedly changing the tone in rewrites, though Lou Holtz, Jr. received sole credit from the WGA. Apatow actually wanted to direct, which was unacceptable to Sony, but they were okay with Stiller, who he’d worked with on The Ben Stiller Show.

On that same commentary track Stiller says, “I think alot of the issues with the movie are about the context of the movie, because it was being made as sort of this mainstream summer hopefully comedic blockbuster type movie and really we’re making this sort of strange, dark, pseudo-sexual tale of two men who become obsessed with each other.” That’s why it’s the perfect comedy for Slam Evil Summer, the season when the world was too preoccupied with exploding buildings to properly appreciate slightly off-kilter movies. But their day would come. The future is now.

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Tie-ins: There was a novelization by Harriet Grey

Problematic datedness: Unfortunately there are hints of transphobia (opening with a Jerry Springer Show clip about someone’s girlfriend saying “I’m really a man” as an example of 1996 outrageousness) and homophobia (Steven being terrified when Chip visits him in prison and puts his nipple against the glass, causing another inmate to make eyes at him). Luckily these are mild for the time and I honestly believe everybody involved learned better.