Inktober Day 23- Ace
Let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart. And no, this is not because Ace is such a damn hard word to come up with anything interesting. Ok, ok, fine yes, that is the exact reason. WHATEVER, you got me, are you happy now? GOOD.
Ok, enough hostility for now.
What I want to talk about is a film that was pretty much universally loved throughout my childhood by myself, my family (not counting my very conservative parents), my friends, and a lot of the general public.
This film, of course, is Ace Ventura.
Let me begin by saying that, for much of my childhood and adolescence, Jim Carrey was basically God when it came to comedy. His ability to melt his face into cartoonish caricatures and fully embody whatever character he was playing never failed to make me laugh. Films like Dumb & Dumber, Liar Liar, and The Mask are still pretty endlessly quotable today. I was a kid when all those movies came out, so it makes a ton of sense why I loved them. I was a huge fan of cartoons and animation in general growing up, and Carrey has always basically been a walkin’ talkin’ cartoon.
We will not be exploring his late stage weirdness of the last few years, filled with political paintings (that hearken back to old counterculture comic art) and not great film choices. Whatever you do, do not watch 2016's Dark Crimes, unless you want to hear a bad Polish accent from the man. Also, the film is hot garbage.
Carrey was the king of 90’s comedy, and eventually showed us his dramatic chops with films such as The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
A lot of his movies from that time have aged fairly well but, as I’m sure you can figure out, Ace Ventura has decidedly not. The jokes, for the most part, still remain funny in a way that only Carrey can deliver them. His physical comedy is such a big part of these films, and he fully personified this goofy-haired idiot pet detective named Ace Ventura.
The thing about Ace Ventura that has soured with time should be fairly obvious, if you’ve seen the film. I’ll spare you the plot summary, so we’ll jump straight to the ending, where (spoiler alert) the antagonist turns out to be…trans (gasp!).
This trope of using LGBTQ characters in place of real villains was one of the absolute worst cliches of film for decades. The exact same year that Ace Ventura came out, The Naked Gun 33 1/3 featured a throwaway joke that pretty much exactly mirrored when Ace found out that the antagonist he kissed was trans. Legendary director Brian de Palma famously used this trope in Dressed to Kill, all the way back in 1980, when Michael Caine played a trans serial killer. One of my all time favorite movies, Silence of the Lambs, suffers from a similar situation with Buffalo Bill. Clearly, this stereotype was everywhere.
It has probably been ten years or more since I’ve watched Ace Ventura from start to finish, and a big part of that is because I know what’s coming. I know exactly how gross it will feel hearing all of the lazy jokes that we’ve heard in films for fifty plus years.
I don’t necessarily feel any real need to go back and watch it again, and I can thank my childhood self, since I probably watched this movie around thirty times growing up. It was a staple of my childhood and, because of that, I can still quote most of the film. Lines like “I have exorciiiiiiiiiised the demon!” and the Scottish-tinged “Ah just cahn’t do it captain! Ah don’t have the power!” will forever be seared into my brain, and there’s just nothing that can be done about that.
I’ll just allow my treasure trove of dumb film quotes to satiate my appetite for Ace Ventura, instead of feeling icky and watching it all over again.
Bizarrely, I still feel a sort of kinship with this film and others like it, since I’d seen it so many times at such a formative time in my life. But would I show it to someone who knew nothing about it? Absolutely not.
I’m not exactly sure where I was going with this essay, but I’ve enjoyed writing it, and I am SO relieved that this trope is basically over and done with, as far as I can tell.
I’m glad that writers can now move on to a different hacky trope to draw inspiration from.
I still love Jim Carrey, and I’m always rooting for the guy.
END
(sorry this wasn’t a story)
