/ 18 July 1997

Paragons of dumb

FILM OF THE WEEK : Johnathan Romney

IN the great debate about cultural dumbing- down, cartoon cretins Beavis and Butt-head are often singled out as Anti-Christs, emblems of all that’s most debased in contemporary pop culture. But at the press preview of their debut movie, the cinema was crammed with more highbrow cultural journalists and zeitgeist critics (Leavis and Barthes-heads, as it were) than would have turned out for a new Godard film.

Quite right, too – Beavis and Butt-head Do America is not only the most entertaining recent release in Britain, but arguably the only one that stands up to intellectual scrutiny.

A mainstay of rock network MTV, Mike Judge’s cartoon series is really a Trojan horse offering MTV viewers a grotesque mirror- image of themselves. Goggle-eyed dorks of indeterminate age, Beavis and Butt-head sit rooted to their sofa, sniggering at heavy metal videos, leering at babes and indulging in the most basic humour. And yet, at heart, they’re merciless satirists, paragons of dumbness who mock dumbness. They deflate not only authority but also the pretensions of pop counter-culture.

To sustain a full-length film, Judge has come up with a premise that turns the series on its head. The boys’ TV set is stolen, so they are obliged to turn their attention for the first time to the outside world.

A hood mistakes them for paid killers and employs them to “do” his wife. They typically assume they’re being offered sex, and eagerly set out on an odyssey into the heart of American naffness. The road-movie tradition is decisively dismantled. Unlike the generations of Beat pilgrims and easy riders whose tracks they follow, B & B learn nothing and see nothing en route.

They fail to notice an imposing natural geyser – they’re too awestruck at the nearby electronic toilets. At a petrified forest, they can’t get over the fact that “wood” is American slang for erection. Blind to all around them, they literally can’t see the trees for the wood.

The boys may be the butt, huh huh, of our laughter, but because they’re so doggedly impervious to ridicule, the joke is really on us. Like it or not, Judge’s heroes are determined to drag the world and us down to their own level. They always have the last word, and that word is invariably “Huh”.