dumb and dumber — a misunderstood manifesto

harry and lloyd are not idiots. they are pioneers. i will die on this hill, possibly soon, possibly tonight, definitely with a spoon in my hand. dumb and dumber is a manifesto disguised as a road movie, and i have been quoting it at strangers since the IKEA bookshelf collapsed in march.

desk on friday. carla took a notebook into the all-hands, which signals she expects to be detained. forty-five minutes, give or take a croissant.

so. “dumb and dumber”. you’ve seen it. or you’ve seen pieces of it on a hotel television in a city you forgot the name of. it has, since 1994, become a kind of cultural noise — a thing people quote at each other when they want to indicate that an event has gotten silly. that is, i would argue, a misreading. that is, in fact, exactly the kind of misreading the film itself is about. the film is not a joke. the film is a manifesto. the film is a manifesto about the dignity of being, in the most plain-language sense, dumb.

dumb and dumber: the 1994 film starring jim carrey and jeff daniels is, on the surface, a comedy about two men driving a small dog-shaped van across the country. on a closer reading, it is a quiet defense of the proposition that two profoundly dumb people, walking confidently through a country that prefers competence, are happier than most of the people who have it together. the haircuts are deliberate.

DUMB AND DUMBER. IS. NOT. A. JOKE. ABOUT. HAIR.

i need that locked into the file before we go any further. people remember the bowl cut. people remember the chipped tooth. people remember the urine in the beer bottles, which, fine, was unforgivable. but the film is, underneath the slapstick, about something that almost no other american film of the 1990s tried to say out loud, which is that being dumb is, in fact, mostly survivable, and occasionally, on the right tuesday, even noble. for the broader category of which this film is the cultural anchor, see the pillar i wrote on dumb at this same desk; this post is the satellite that orbits it.

the film, briefly, in case you saw it on a hotel television

here is the plot, in plain language, with the parts that don’t matter removed. lloyd, played by jim carrey, is a limo driver. harry, played by jeff daniels, is a dog groomer with a van shaped like a dog. lloyd picks up a woman at the airport. she leaves a briefcase behind. lloyd, believing he is doing a good thing, takes the briefcase and decides to return it. he convinces harry to come with him. they drive from rhode island to aspen. things, in the proper road-movie sense, happen.

that is the engine. two men, one decision, a long drive, an entire country between them and the goal. like all good road movies, the destination is decorative. what matters is the road, the conversations in the van, and the fact that lloyd and harry, mile after mile, treat each other with the kind of patient, almost old-fashioned kindness that is, frankly, harder to find in most films starring more obviously intelligent men. they don’t fight about money. they don’t fight about women. they share food. they share their last twenty dollars. they cry on each other’s shoulders in a parking lot. that’s the film. it is, in many places, a platonic love story. but it is real.

why it’s actually a philosophical text

here is the case. the film makes one argument and it makes it consistently for an hour and forty-seven minutes.

the argument is this. most of the smart people in this story are bad. most of the dumb people in this story are good. that is not a coincidence. that is the spine of the film.

the smart people — the woman with the briefcase, the men chasing it, the aspen crowd, the man on the plane who explains, condescendingly, that he is headed somewhere lloyd cannot afford — are each, in their own register, a liar. they manage their bank accounts, they manage their faces in public, but they are, almost without exception, untrustworthy.

by contrast, lloyd and harry have, between them, the financial sense of a wet napkin and the tactical instincts of a houseplant. and yet. they tell the truth. they help strangers. they buy petey, the one-eyed parakeet, and feel real guilt about selling him to a blind kid, even when the joke is real. that is, philosophically, an argument. the argument is: dumbness is not the same as bad faith. the film insists on it. the haircuts are a misdirection. the haircuts are the cape over the magic trick.

the brilliance of the protagonists, which is deliberate

here is the part i want to defend most. lloyd and harry are not played as dumb in the easy way. they are not played as cruel-dumb, or callous-dumb, or willfully-dumb. they are played as earnestly dumb, which is the hardest version to act. it requires the actor to commit, fully, to a worldview that is, by ordinary standards, broken — and to do so without winking. jim carrey, in particular, never winks. jeff daniels, against his own resume, never winks. that is the achievement. they play the dumbness from the inside. they believe lloyd. they believe harry. and so do we.

this is a craft argument with a moral consequence. when you commit to a character’s dumbness without irony, you force the audience to extend that character a grace they would not otherwise offer. you force them to root for two people they would, in real life, probably avoid in a parking lot. that is what almost no comedy of the same era did. it asks for compassion for its dumbest characters, and it earns it, scene by scene, by treating them as people instead of punchlines.

dave, who has watched this film with me three times, says it gets funnier each time. i would say it gets kinder each time. we are arguing about the same thing in different words. dave’s word is the more honest one. mine has more syllables.

lessons i extracted from a single viewing, conducted last wednesday

i rewatched the film last wednesday, in the apartment, on the small television, with a coffee that went cold around the chicago scene. i took notes. the notes are below.

lesson one. kindness costs you almost nothing. lloyd shares his last twenty dollars without flinching. harry drives across a country for a stranger. in the film, this kindness is rewarded — not always with money, but always with something. usually, a friend. the better currency.

lesson two. being misunderstood is survivable. lloyd and harry are misunderstood by every intelligent character in the film, and they survive each misunderstanding because the misunderstanding is not their problem. it is the misunderstander’s problem. a useful distinction. i have, since wednesday, applied it to a small dispute with the man in apartment 4b about the volume of his television, with mixed results.

lesson three. a road trip with the right person is, on balance, more important than the destination. lloyd and harry would, by sensible accounting, have been better off staying home. they are not better off. they are, however, by every other measure, transformed. mom, when i told her i was rewatching the film, said “you and dave should go somewhere”. mothers know. mom is right about most things. cold pizza is breakfast. hot pizza is dinner — i quote that hot take here because it is, in spirit, a lloyd-and-harry position. they would defend it with their fists, in a diner, in a snowstorm.

lesson four. the bowl cut is, on a man over forty, an act of courage. i will not be testing this lesson. but i acknowledge it.

sparky, the kitchen fork who survived the seventh microwave, was on the counter during the rewatch. sparky is, in his quiet way, a lloyd. dumb. loyal. a small heroic arc, by my standards.

verdict — required viewing, with footnotes

carla cruised past the desk. tab flipped. she didn’t look in. small win.

the apartment, by the way, has been quiet all morning. the dvd is still in the player. i have not put it away. i probably won’t, until thursday. that is, also, a kind of love.

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