World's Greatest Dad

Well known as the barking, spasmodic Tourette’s propulsion-unit of a standup comic who found himself deep-sixed in the sorry, unforgiving hinterland of popular 80s D-list comedies like the Police Academy movies and boy-meets-horse debacle Hot to Trot (’88), Bobcat Goldthwait subsequently went on to infamy as the dude who seriously fucked up Jay Leno’s set, made the appalling and awesome Shakes the Clown, and disappeared into the Los Angeles smog, presumably a little pissed off that the corner his career had started off in left him w/ precious little space to back into. Instead of showing up on Celebrity Big Brother or The Surreal Life, like many of his ilk, Goldthwait quietly reemerged in the new millennium as a director of late night comedy shows, and is now releasing his second feature film of the decade, World’s Greatest Dad, a follow up to the criminally underappreciated Stay ('06)(a.k.a. Sleeping Dogs Lie). The two films are of a piece (not just in terms of the fun they both have w/ aberrant sexual practices, either), enacting a dialectical counterpositioning of each other in terms of their divergent approaches to one particular ethical grey zone: the uses and abuses of honesty, its complicated pragmatics, and where and when it may or may not work itself out as a concept applied to practice(s). If the apparent philosophies of the two films contradict one another, this only serves to enhance the business of their ardent comedy of ethology in all its murky indeterminacy, w/ its built-in contradictory schematics and its demands for irreducible situational considerations which need to be endlessly considered, reconsidered, and finally tested, by the narrative business of the films themselves, to see where and when which ethical precepts may or may not apply. In Stay, the protagonist, Amy, is a woman asked repeatedly by her fiancé to reveal her deepest, darkest secret. That her deepest, darkest secret – which happens to be that she gave her dog head as a lark when she was eighteen – is probably something best kept secret from the party in question is proven by virtue of the woebegone revelation’s consequent seismic impact on her life as it ripples destructively out from the epicenter of this now compromised intimacy (the revelation is overheard by her creep of a brother), seriously negatively impacting all of Amy’s relationships. Amy doesn’t want to share the secret w/ her writer boyfriend, he has to keep prodding her to do so, until she does … at the exact wrong moment. Something in Amy makes her feel guilty for withholding, so she relents, but all along she knows that sharing the fact that she once sucked-off a dog – sharing it w/ her boyfriend, of all people – is in no way going to serve anybody’s greater interest. She should have stuck to her guns, and she knew it all along. Likewise, but alternatively, the sad sack protagonist of World’s Greatest Dad, high school poetry teacher and failed writer Lance Clayton (Robin Williams), foments a series of escalating lies he knows deep down he shouldn’t when his son Kyle, a pervert and asshole for whom nobody, including his father, cares much at all, dies of autoerotic asphyxiation whilst jerking off to pics of dad’s girlfriend’s crotch taken surreptitiously under the dinner table w/ his cell phone. (It should be added here that Kyle is, in a brilliant bit of casting, played by puberty-ravaged Daryl Sabara, the adorable wide-eyed moppet from the Spy Kids movies). Overwhelmed by this tragicomic accident, Lance does all he can to make the death look like a suicide, hanging his son up from the chin-up bar in the boy’s own closet, cleaning away the telltale evidence, and finally concocting a tortured and eloquent cri de coeur suicide letter. When the letter gets out, the whole school becomes moved by it, rallying around the now iconic image of the asshole son. Lance’s sort-of girlfriend, the phony and unequivocal art teacher, grows closer. His erstwhile unpopular poetry class begins to fill. Lance, who has always equated the writing success he strives for w/ women, cash, and adulation as opposed to self-realization or artistic transcendence, becomes addicted to his newfound, vicarious popularity, finally taking the bull by the horns and fabricating an entire journal to stand in as his suddenly incandescent son’s life’s work, landing him on a talk show, causing him to be pursued by the publishers who have eluded him all these years (who are even willing to publish one of his novels if they can have the journal), allowing him to meet “Kyle’s favorite,” Bruce Hornsby, and seemingly consolidating once and for all the wandering attentions of the art teacher. (Only Kyle’s one real friend, the even less popular Andrew, is suspicious, observing that the heartbreaking journal features no digressions on “vaginas, anal sex, fisting, felching, or rim jobs”). Just as the library is about to undergo a dedication to Kyle – poised like Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the only portrait we ever see of him, now as ubiquitous as that of the asthmatic Argentine doctor so often is on the clothes of the student body and the walls of the school – Lance, who out of his genuine desire to protect his son and himself, to feel loved and respected by the people in his life, has carried this lie as far as he wants to or is ethically capable of, makes an abrupt about-face and reveals all to the not-so-teeming masses, unburdening himself, at the dedication, of a life’s worth of pent-up stuff never revealed for fear of not being accepted, the disarticulated intensities of a life built on a constant attempt to be judged not wanting in the eyes of others, a life gone nowhere for fear of missteps. The film ends w/ a comically operatic enacting of this metaphorical rebirth as Lance, a one-time member of the college diving team, runs through the school, stripping down to his socks, leaping naked from the highdive into the pool. From the water he rises mirthful and ecstatic, born anew. Where in his previous film, Stay, Goldthwait outlined a particular set of circumstances in which honesty was undermined as a universalizable moral maxim, as it serves no one in the case presented by the film, and was never going to, as Amy knows deep down from the start. In World’s Greatest Dead, Lance also knows the whole time that his web of lies stems from the bad faith and concealment-of-self-for-the-benefit-of-others upon which his whole miserable life is founded and always has been. Paradoxically, he learns a lesson implicitly understood by his son Kyle while he is alive: that a man who depends upon no one else to define himself is inherently free. Indeed, Kyle is the only character in World’s Greatest Dad who isn’t playing a losing game of self-identification managed haphazardly through the relay of the self through the heavily overcoded gaze of the other. When Lance finally comes clean at the library dedication and the principal calls him an “asshole,” Lance thanks him. An asshole is what everybody always thought his son was, and to finally pull down the scrim of deceit (from which Lance comes to be constituted well before his son’s death throws the whole gambit into endgame), and to reveal that it’s okay to be seen as an asshole so long as the truth can prevail and the self be thrown into relief, Lance not only comes full circle, he is also at this very moment able to affirm his son and to embrace him, by embracing the asshole within, in a way that he was never able to do while the boy was alive. World’s Greatest Dad appears to prove the opposite theory to the one proven by Stay, but the two films taken together ultimately prove one theory: that the either/or binary apparatus is not sufficient in matters of ethology; that different conclusions can and will be arrived at by approaching ethical or moral issues from opposing points of origin; that the truth may set you free just as it may doubly imprison. The final lessons are these: that a principle doesn’t hold up until you play it out in a particular theater of operations, and that we always already knew what the right thing to do was in the first place.