Pauly Shore was the early 90s. Not representative or symbolic of them – he was them. For several years, he went from MTV’s most chillin’ VJ to Hollywood’s own prophet of slack. If you needed someone to embody post-80s aimlessness dressed as radical self-expression, The Weasel was your guy.
For the uninitiated, Son in Law (1993) finds Pauly Shore playing Crawl, basically Stoney from Encino Man with a college RA certificate, following farm nug Rebecca (Carla Gugino) home for Thanksgiving.
Disney was again trying to bottle whatever Shore had and sell it to middle America. In fact, Son in Law plays out like the 90’s invading a part of the world that had stopped marking the passage of time decades earlier.
The whole film works on Shore’s singular wavelength – that specific frequency where Valley speak meets rock and roll stoner philosophy meets genuine sweetness and vulnerability. He had his own way of speaking, and his own visual language. His Crawl isn’t out to change the trad farm folk; he just wants to be himself and have them accept his groove. It’s an attempted assimilation in reverse, where the normies adapt to the freaks – which was kind of our whole ‘tude back then.
In ’93, Shore was still riding high. Hollywood was still betting on slacker comedies, MTV still dominated youth culture, and The Weasel still had more movies in the pipeline. Nobody knew Bio-Dome would crater so hard it would take this whole persona with it. That Clueless would evolve teen comedies toward self-aware sophistication. That by ’97, the mainstream would figure out how to repackage counterculture into something less Butthole Surfers and more… Goo Goo Dolls.
The Weasel would keep on weaselin’ for a few more years, but Son in Law caught him at his sweet spot, when his frequency and pop culture were perfectly aligned. It was electric.
-Pop