Is It Art or Just Really Bad? ‘Freddy’ Speaks for Itself

Every once in a while, something in our culture forces us to confront the thin line between art and dreck.

People previously have debated the merits of Andy Warhol’s soup cans, Yoko Ono’s screeching and the completely white painting at the center of Yasmina Reza’s acclaimed play “Art.”

Now we have Tom Green’s “Freddy Got Fingered,” the cinematic equivalent of that blank “Art” canvas spattered with various bodily fluids, often nonhuman. Depending on who’s talking, the movie is either one of Hollywood’s all-time travesties or the work of a singular talent.

As is the case with most taboo-testing artists, the tomato tossers make up the majority, pegging “Freddy Got Fingered” as the nadir of a series of wretched gross-out comedies that descend from “Saving Silverman” to “Say It Isn’t So” to “Tomcats” to “Joe Dirt.”

Variety’s Robert Koehler wrote that “Freddy Got Fingered” is “one of the most brutally awful comedies ever to emerge from a major studio.”

Michael Rechtshaffen of the Hollywood Reporter called it “quite possibly the worst comedy ever made. It’s not just bad; it’s jaw-dropping, head-pounding, tumor-inducing, apocalypse-summoning bad.”

Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman gave “Freddy Got Fingered” an F grade and dubbed it “a disaster.”

The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter wrote: “If ever a movie testified to the utter creative bankruptcy of the Hollywood film industry, it is the abomination known as ‘Freddy Got Fingered.’ . . . Green has no skills. He has no gifts. He has no instincts. He has no resources. He knows nothing about story structure, comedy construction, visual humor, jokes, punch lines, satire, parody or any other comic art. He only has his peculiar species of nerve, which evidently some grown-up who should have known better confused with ability.”

Audiences polled by the research firm CinemaScore graded “Freddy Got Fingered” with Cs and Ds, and Fs from the older viewers.

Are you getting the impression that this is a bad movie?

Yet in the venerable New York Times, critic A.O. Scott’s review compares Green to Andy Kaufman and Conceptualist artists Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci and praises him for his uncompromising vision.

“Just as Eminem disarms anyone who bothers to listen to his songs . . . with his verbal wit and rhythmic dexterity, so does Mr. Green stage his gross-outs with a demented but unmistakable integrity,” Scott wrote. “Like it or not, he’s an artist.”

In his Hollywood Confidential column for Reel.com, Jeff Wells called Green an auteur and his movie “a piece of genuine self-expression.”

Lisa Alspector of the Reader also was impressed. “Disgust is certainly one of the strong emotions intended to be wrung from this movie’s audience,” she wrote. “But the earnestness of some of the drama in the only deceptively unsophisticated narrative may be more shocking than any of the gross-outs.”

Granted, positive notices can be dredged up for almost every movie, but here the gulf between detractors and admirers is spectacularly wide. When “Battlefield Earth,” the last contender for the worst-movie-ever crown, was released last spring, you didn’t see anyone making high-minded claims for its artistic integrity.

“With a movie like ‘Battlefield Earth’ that takes itself seriously, it’s easy to spot its terribleness, but comedy is a subjective experience, so it’s in a way harder to get the critical distance from it,” Scott said over the phone.

In other words, if Green is Jerry Lewis, Scott is France.

“I did get one e-mail from a reader that described the movie in language that wouldn’t be suitable for the paper and wanted to know what drugs I was on when I wrote the review,” Scott said. “Several of my film critic friends sort of raised an eyebrow. Other readers have come to my defense.”

“Freddy Got Fingered” certainly doesn’t fall into the category of movies that are so bad that they’re fun to watch. If you don’t enjoy it (and, no, I didn’t), you’re likely to be repelled as Green’s character gropes animals, climbs inside a bloody deer carcass, whips around a newborn baby by an umbilical cord and generally acts mentally deficient in his quest to make his daddy proud.

Still, the New York Times critic sees a clear distinction between “Freddy Got Fingered” and the gross-out comedies that preceded it.

“I think one of the reasons that Tom Green gets such a strong negative reaction is that it’s not just that he’s vulgar or offensive but that he makes you uncomfortable, and I think that makes him a more interesting comedian or artist than those others,” Scott said.

In a sense, Green, who previously starred in a TV special about the removal of his own cancer-ridden testicle, could be seen as a distant cousin of the subject of Kirby Dick’s 1997 documentary “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.” Fatally suffering from cystic fibrosis, performance artist Flanagan engaged in stunts of self-mutilation such as nailing the head of his penis to a board.

Back then, “Sick” was an adults-only, highly uncommercial documentary. Now “Freddy Got Fingered” is an aggressively promoted comedy playing in more than 2,000 theaters nationwide.

Is Green an artist or just a talentless putz?

Who among us can presume to say? But his canvas sure smells bad.