Why Adam Sandler is smarter than America

I promised myself I wouldn’t write an article about a movie I hadn’t seen, so I had to hold out after my “friends” quickly left and finish the last hour of Adam Sandler’s “Jack and Jill” alone. I felt uncomfortable the whole time, with one hand poised over the spacebar in case any of my neighbors stopped by. They’d ask why I was watching my laptop with my back to a wall in the far corner of the room and I’d mumble something about “personal time.” When I was eventually caught I felt really embarrassed—but not for me, I was just doing research. I felt really embarrassed for those who had part of their paychecks swindled out of their pockets for barely 90 minutes of fart jokes and commercials.

I’ll start off small. For those who don’t know, Adam Sandler got famous in the late 1990s by writing and starring in the relative masterpieces of “Billy Madison,” “Happy Gilmore” and various “Saturday Night Live” sketches. He has now taken to producing high budget, low production value “movies” such as “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” and, of course, “Jack and Jill.” You can form your own opinions, but my 9-year-old self was rolling on the floor during “Billy Madison.”

“Jack and Jill” is both shameless and genius. The scenes get tired of themselves after a few seconds, ending in a fart joke or someone getting injured and then dissolving to reform as another medium shot of Adam Sandler scraping the bottom of a barrel. The movie is rated PG, so I just wrote the diarrhea off as something “kids these days” are into, but that doesn’t explain an extremely racist Hispanic gardener. It all makes much more sense after you realize Adam wasn’t trying to make a good movie—even a little bit.

He was trying to make a cheap movie, and wherever the film wasn’t artful, it sure was cheap. If Jack and Jill are speaking face to face, which happens less than you may think, there will be a shot of just the one who is speaking, keeping the other off screen. Apparently, the costs of the special effects necessary to pull off Adam Sandler talking to Adam Sandler in lipstick and a wig weren’t in the budget, except for a handful of shots. Interspersed among the most product placement I have ever seen were two actual guy-looking-straight-into-the-camera commercials for Royal Caribbean and Dunkin’ Donuts. This cost cutting may seem odd considering the budget is reported to be around 79 million dollars. Where did this money go if not toward making the movie? It went to Adam Sandler and his cast.

Good for Adam Sandler. If the road to financial success is a marathon, Sandler sprinted the first few miles and is now coasting—and making millions—while he waits for everyone to catch up. He made a product as cheaply as he could, with low production value being further subsidized by blatant advertisements. He then paid a few of his friends to be in the movie, as well as big names like Al Pacino, who has also clearly subscribed to coasting on his previous successes. He then filled a bathtub with over 20 million dollars and took a bath you couldn’t afford.

I’m sure many people would look down on Adam Sandler for degrading a serious art form. They may even look down on David Letterman for enthusiastically urging his viewers to see the film, a statement no doubt influenced by CBS (the company that signs his checks) having a stake in the success of the film. I’d only look down on them if they didn’t know exactly what they were doing. Adam Sandler wasn’t trying to make a good movie, he was trying to make money. America allows for such freedoms, and what’s more American than making money?

The film opens and closes with clips of sets of twins talking touchingly about being twins in a world accustomed to singular birth normalcy. The scenes are strange given the rest of the movie, but then I remembered something I learned from my two-class stint as a psych minor my freshman year. People, for the most part, remember the beginning and end of a sequence but forget the middle. The movie greets you and sees you go with an indication of deep messages about sibling love, something amiss in the rest of the movie. Just as we buy jewelry to show love, and Dos Equis to be interesting, America loves the obvious message. Someone once said “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” The obvious message here is that Adam Sandler plays this game particularly well.

Travis Smith is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Thursday.