LINK July 1996

Darke at the Cinema

Amputees are in vogue at the moment in big Hollywood comedies. Apart from the obvious example of the lower limb amputee 'Nam Vet' in Forrest Gump (Gump's best mate in the film) we have recently had two more comedies that feature upper limb amputees: Kingpin and Happy Gilmour. The first is a film about Ten Pin Bowling and the latter is a golfing comedy (not that I ever found golf funny; boring, yes).

In Kingpin we have Woody Harrelson (of Cheers fame) as a new king of the bowling alley until he looses his arm and turns to drink. His life as a failure (his surname, in a touch of comic genius, is used by the others as a by-word for all that implies pathetic failure in the world of the American Dream) is marked by one bad-joke after another; with possibly the most gross joke about sex and a bowel evacuation - at the same time - ever made as the epitome of life as an arm-amputee failed ex-bowling champ. I loved it!

Happy Gilmour, on the other hand, has the amputee as secondary to the main character; Happy, the name of the central character, is a ice hockey player who cannot skate but has an incredibly powerful shot and needs money to get his granny out of debt: he takes up golf. His swing is magnificent but his putting is awful so he takes the advice of a one armed ex-golfing pro called Chubby. Chubby has had one arm bitten off by an alligator whilst looking for his ball in the water on the golf course. Chubby's prosthesis is mangled, glued together and re-mangled and no end of comic references made about it through out the film.

The difference between the two movies is that Kingpin is excellent and Happy Gilmour is a little weak in both aspects of comedy and the treatment living life as an amputee. Whereas Kingpin goes all out to be in bad taste the central character is real - for the world he inhabits - whereas in Happy Gilmour the joke is the prosthesis; not life itself, as in Kingpin. The comedy in Kingpin is gross, but funny, because it is the comedy of life; Kingpin is about the American Dream and how one lives in it as someone marginalised with a disability.

Kingpin is laughing at life (if it happens to us its tragedy, if it happens to someone else its comedy); because life is funny. Happy Gilmour is not about the comedy of life but the comedy of seeing the disabled as comic fodder; it is personal rather than about everyone at the same time. It does not contextualise disability but marginalise it by having it as the root of the comedy and not life. That Chubby gets killed (by the a dead alligator!) whereas Woody Harrelson's character gets the girl, rich and makes a comeback also helped Kingpin seem up-beat and better film.

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