“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 wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home or play Mortal Kombat with a friend from Vietnam. There’s no end to the possibilities!”
I’ve never understood the backlash against this film – at the time, it just seemed to irk audiences and critics. But I was that hipster who saw it twice in theaters and spent the rest of the decade proselytizing its nutty brilliance. It also remains one of my favorite Jim Carrey performances – a creepy unhinged turn that moves away from the rubberface routines that made him famous. Ben Stiller, after directing his own excellent short-lived skit show and Reality Bites, was in top form as Hollywood’s go-to Gen-X zeitgeist pundit, and he nailed it here.
For my rental dollar, Cable Guy still works as a biting satire of our generation’s particular brand of mass-media obsession.
It’s an impresively dark reflection of latchkey kids raised by television, and serves as a backdoor cautionary tale about the dissociative effects of media addiction. Chip’s borderline sociopathy always reminds me of Frank Cross from Scrooged, but with an extra layer of pathos. He’s the product of his environment, warped by the very thing he worships, and I find that eerily relatable sometimes.
-Pop