Napoleon Dynamite was shot and takes place in Preston, Idaho, just about twenty-five miles from where I eat, shit and sleep. I work side to side with the teenagers of Preston High School. One of them is actually in the movie. He doesn't work there anymore; I think I last saw him shortly after the picture premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and I'm afraid that I forgot his name, but I'm fairly sure he's the one to the left in the "hunting wolverines" scene. The locals are quite defensive about it. Some people at work are already quoting lines out of it. One fellow film buff I go to school with pointed out that the film grossed an insane amount of money when it came out in limited release. I looked it up; the picture had a nearly $20,000-per-screen average, more than the two top-grossing films that week, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and The Chronicles of Riddick, combined. He described how a special screening in Salt Lake produced endless lines from out-of-towners from Preston.

Greg Beachem, film critic of the Salt Lake City alternative newspaper Salt Lake City Weekly, gave the film four stars, something he doesn't seem to do very often. He condemns the critics who found it condescending, writing them off as "big city film critics”; he wonders if you have to have grown up here to really get it. He thought it was hilarious, and thought that the director Jared Hess, an alumnus of Brigham Young University's film program, had a real sense of affection for the title character.

Well, actually what Hess does in this movie isn't really condescending to Preston, and it's not really celebrating Preston either. Typical of his rather annoying conciseness and brilliance as a film critic and making this entire review the very definition of "redundant,” Walter Chaw has said all that needs to be said about this movie in one line: "Napoleon Dynamite unravels like Gummo if Harmony Korine played it strictly for laughs." Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Critics have often tried to compare the film to Solondz or Wes Anderson; that works for a little while but eventually we have to come to Harmony Korine's Gummo. Napoleon Dynamite ends up moving far far far beyond Solondz or Anderson and goes into Gummo territory.

The characters are grotesques. Napoleon Dynamite himself has a big head of curly red hair and buck teeth. He wears moon boots. The audience laughs at him from the very first moment he's on the scene. He becomes friends with Pedro, the new kid in the school and the only Latino that we see there. He has more ambition than Napoleon, getting dates before Napoleon does and even running for class president. This isn't quite a virtue; he is only this way because he is stupid. He doesn't understand that running for class president opens him up for mass humiliation. Impressed with Pedro's mustache, Napoleon asks him how long he took to grow it. Pedro responds that it took about two days; he says this casually. Napoleon is always bragging about his skills with the bo staff and how well he can draw. Napoleon is actively trying to delude himself into believing that he is valuable and attractive to others; Pedro genuinely believes that is innately valuable and attractive to others. He's in for a very rude awakening. When he timidly and wetly tells the student body that if you vote him, "your wildest dreams will come true," it's chilling and sort of tragic, whereas Hess seems to intend for it to be simply poignant. Of course your wildest dreams won't come true, they never will, you're fucked.

Pedro is running against the popular, pretty and highly exclusionary Summer, who hates chimichangas and dances to the Backstreet Boys in the skit she puts on after her speech. Her boyfriend routinely torments and jeers Napoleon. When Pedro sees that she is running against him, he begins getting very hot, so hot that he shaves his head. (We see this in flashback, and the shock value of this modest act of body mutilation for the camera is rather disturbing, reminding of the Slayer tattoo and eyebrow shaving in Gummo). Before his speech, he is very nervous and says that he doesn't really have anything to say. He doesn't look like he'll make a very good class president. He'll fold under the pressure. Ah, but Napoleon does a funny dance in place of Pedro's skit, and the auditorium bursts out in applause. Pedro wins the office. MaryAnn Johanson complains of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story that all the characters are strictly stratified to the malevolent, diabolical and freakish bodybuilders or the slobbish "Average Joes.” There is nothing in between. I guess I didn't have that problem with Dodgeball, but I did have that problem with Napoleon Dynamite, which seems to throw harsh reality out the window when it doesn't suit it.

We realize on some level that this classroom election mimics the 1980 presidential election between Jimmy Carter, a righteous incompetent Pedro, and Ronald Reagan, the Antichrist with the heart of ice but with a slick exterior. Pedro is incapable of realizing your wildest dreams. Summer can't understand them, or even more to the point, she doesn't really care. Todd Solondz probably would have had the students in the class realize this; he may have had Summer win, but if he intended Pedro to win he would put this scene at the end of the first act and show how he fucks everything up. When you bet on the underdog, you bet on a loser. This is the sort of idea that Hess doesn't really have the balls to explore.

The mustache is used in the film as a symbol of faux-virility, perhaps even broadened to faux-masculinity. Not only is it possessed by non-sex god Pedro, both Napoleon's sleazy Uncle Rico and his 31-year-old brother Kip sport them. Kip wants to be a cage fighter and so he drags Napoleon to a Tae Kwon Do instructor, who is sporting a 'stache as well! The instructor tries to come off like Mr. Macho but he brags that he is married to what looks like a female bodybuilder. When we meet her in the flesh, she comes off more like a man in drag. Kip spends most of his days in an internet chatroom talking to his girlfriend in Detroit. When we meet her, we're intended to be surprised that she is a ghetto-licious Negress, complete with bee-stung lips and gold jewelry. The pairing of weak wormy men with grotesque domineering women is classic R. Crumb humor. Kip even looks like Crumb. Uncle Rico doesn't have a girlfriend, but he goes door-to-door selling Tupperware and then breast enhancement pills to teenage girls and their mothers. He’s not really a man either, just a copy of a copy of a copy of a man.

Napoleon's love interest of sorts is Deb, who works as a "fashion" photographer. She's played by former child star Tina Majorino; you know her from the never-even-had-a-chance Road Warrior rip-off Waterworld and the bizarre anti-racism tract Corrina Corrina, where she licked a black girl to see if she tasted like chocolate. It's a good pedigree for an actress appearing in Napoleon Dynamite. Majorino still has her baby fat, and Hess underlies this effect by dressing in hot pinks and light watercolors and giving her a sideways ponytail. The character is utterly naive and innocent; she thinks that Napoleon Dynamite is actually up to her level. Deb has a pedophile chic thing going on; I can honestly say with a clean conscience that she is far far more attractive than any of the "popular girls" in the picture. The "popular girls" are strange-looking. Napoleon's initial crush is for the "popular girl" Trisha. Seeing her picture for the first time I was actually unsure which social caste she belonged to. There is something off with her sharp nose and sleepy eyes. Summer, for that matter, looks like she is wearing a blonde wig. These girls look unnatural in a way that Deb doesn't; perhaps it's that whole thing of teenage girls trying to look older than they are. In trying to woo Trisha, Napoleon draws her a portrait that nearly turns her skull triangular with her eyes pushed up into the corners. I think I moaned at the image. It's not as much just a sight gag as a detour into a diseased mindset that finds such portraits attractive and perhaps even erotic.

With LaBute and now Hess, I have to wonder if this repulsion toward sex is a Mormon thing. The religion says that sex is essentially holy within the boundaries of marriage. It's for making children, and making children is among your highest callings. But I think it's actually something that they never talk about, it's something that is just there. In contrast to the LDS view, Catholicism says that sex is essentially evil and marital sex is simply a necessary sanction. Marital sex is OK, but celibacy is the ideal. Why is it then that Catholic filmmakers, and other Christian filmmakers actually, can make it vibrate red with sin, but with Mormon filmmakers like Hess and LaBute they reduce it to the terms of plumbing like Henry in Eraserhead or repressed serial killer Ed Gein?

Hess sees food a lot like he sees sex. We see this from the very beginning; the title cards are plates of food with the words written on with various condiments. After Pedro says that he isn't going to eat his tater tots, Napoleon scoops them up and puts them in a fanny pack that he carries with him. Later as he is eating them in class, one of the jocks kicks it and they squish. The whole sequence seems to be intended as a gross-out. In the heaviest food scene, some chicken farmers try to give Napoleon a lunch as payment for stuffing chickens into their pens. It includes sandwiches with flies buzzing over them, and juice with raw egg yolks dropped into it. One of the farmers pours himself a glass and chugs it down to show that there is nothing wrong with it. Food is thrown in the picture: steaks at Uncle Rico, hash at Napoleon's pet llama. After a while the film develops the pungent smell of dried catsup. I just recently finished talking about gross-out humor in my review of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. Isn't it curious how nothing nauseates us more than our own bodies, and that which we put in and take out? I mentioned that in Dead Alive the grossout humor was practically humanistic, but it can be shocking, ironic, hateful to the audience et cetera. In Napoleon Dynamite it is honestly and harshly nihilistic, anti-human really in a way I was a little unfamiliar with. Napoleon Dynamite is just plain ugly!

The movie is racist, of course. This is unpleasant, but sort of a relief; at last the film is offensive on a wavelength that we can comprehend. One of the jocks picks on one of the nerdier kids, and suddenly a carful of Pedro's "cousins" pulls up. One of the greasers shakes his head at the thug, and the thug skedaddles. The little kids behind me rejoiced and the theater erupted a bit in sheer glee. Yeah, that'll show 'em, heh heh. Ugh. Color me elitist if I don't giggle like a fucking goon when somebody tickles my ivories like that. It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense that Pedro would have a family this hip. Or that he is really the only Latino in all of Preston High. In Salt Lake at least, the Mexican immigrants weren't the outcasts but they weren't into student body politics either. They had their own clique, based of course on the fact that they all spoke Spanish.

Hess' treatment of blacks is even stickier. If Pedro is a ripoff of Speedy Gonzales’ cousin Slowpoke Rodriguez, as has been hilariously suggested to me elseshere, Kip's girlfriend LaFawnda (Christ, why didn't Hess just call her Queen Goldtooth) reminds of Bugs Bunny in drag. The Hispanic characters in the movie are stereotypes, but they have some sort of weight and reality that is denied to the film's sole black character. What does she see in Kip, is she using him, what's the deal? LaFawnda is completely one-dimensional, designed to produce one lame joke again and again, namely that she brings the ghetto to an environment that hasn't even heard of the ghetto. She turns out to be the one that injects the necessary bit of soul into Napoleon so he can do his funny dance and save Pedro's bid for presidency.

Here's another thing that is curious: Napoleon Dynamite is rather poor. His family seems to get everything from Deseret Industries, including a top-loading VCR. Uncle Rico takes him shopping in a discount store and he tries to get a fun pack of snacks. In front of Summer, who is clerking, Uncle Rico says that they can't afford it and he should put it back. While he's at it he should get some diapers for him and his brother. Summer chuckles to herself. Yeah, but why is she working in the discount store? I have got to wonder, doesn't anybody in this movie work at Information Alliance? The surface elements and the humor of Napoleon Dynamite beg comparison to Harmony Korine's Gummo, but so does the source material really. Preston, Idaho comes off as every bit the wasteland that Xenia, Ohio does in Gummo. Why is it that Xenia is ready to lynch Harmony Korine if he ever steps into town, but Preston lines up to suck Jared Hess off? The response to Napoleon Dynamite seems to prove that Preston is a town of human refuse.

(Let's address that question as to if Hess condescending to the people in his movie or if he feels affection towards them. Well, applying this question to similar filmmakers you realize that the movie wouldn't have been made if he didn't have affection for them. And it probably wouldn't have been made if he didn't see them as subjects for the movies. A severe problem with people who cry out "sexist,” "racist," or in this particular case "classist” is that any art form, almost by definition, cannot help but reduce these people to narrowly defined icons. Making movies about human beings, especially a subset of human beings, there can't help but be a degree of both condescension and affection. I at least try to stay in that mindset and not play the liberal outrage game too often. I don't know if that sounds glib, but for me at least that answers the question definitively.)

You know, I have to wonder, have people actually seen Gummo? It's curious in that it is one of those films that you can actually find in pretty much any Blockbuster, Hollywood Video or Hastings, but it hasn't informed any film aesthetic; it hasn't quite become the cult item you would expect from it. It's too popular too be obscure, but not popular enough to leave a lasting mark. The audience that I saw Napoleon Dynamite with probably hadn't seen Gummo. I doubt that they saw Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread or Todd Browning's Freaks and I doubt they have heard the name Diane Arbus before, or know anything about John Waters’ early work or the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey features. But I'm not sure they have even seen or internalized Children of the Corn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Deliverance. Maybe even Michael Moore's Roger and Me with the appearance of the “Rabbit Lady.” Even more importantly, I'm not sure that Hess has seen these pictures. There is something here that is icky, really really icky. I couldn't put my finger on it before, but I think it has something to do with doing hicksploitation when you are utterly naive about hicksploitation. I'm disturbed by the fact that the film was made by a BYU alumnus; that seems to be a tipoff somehow that Hess learned technique but he never learned to be an artist. In an interview, Hess claims to have no real influence. He says that he loves the Coen Brothers, and the movie Rad, and he says that he thinks Wes Anderson is a really great director. But he didn't try to mimic anybody; his only muse was his own experience. Am I such a product of auteur cinema after the "Brat Generation" that I consider having a diverse background in watching film to be a pre-requisite to making them? Korine said that he worked hard not to reference other movies, but he had always been up front with his influences: Godard, Herzog and Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter were primary. And he had anti-influences also; he hated Trainspotting and Sling Blade. Anderson was influenced by Louis Malle and Orson Welles. Solondz was anti-influenced by American Beauty, Woody Allen and "The Wonder Years.” Influences and anti-influences are something essential.

Mind you, it's not pointing and laughing that is the problem really; it's that the film never evolves beyond that. There is no horror, no anger, no real sense of melancholy or outrage to the picture. It's some softened Mormon boy's tour of the trailer park; it's incapable of producing the revulsion that Gummo did. I think it's actually far more nihilistic and unpleasant than Gummo really, because again just like Chaw said, Hess plays it only for laughs. That the picture is well-made, and in many key ways works and has some sort of impact, isn't praiseworthy as much as cause for concern. I like Napoleon Dynamite better than Red Dragon, I suppose you can say. It's far thornier and far more interesting. But I have the same problem with Hess as I do with Brett Ratner. He's a four-year-old with a shotgun, a filmmaker capable of producing films of great visceral power but who has no moral compass or intelligence as an artist. One of the greatest fears that I have for the cinema is that the film school system will produce filmmakers like this. And audiences and critics will mistake momentum and style (a step above mere competence to be sure) for perspective. Ratner is probably a lost cause; he's too toned in to providing what he believes the audience wants. As Hess is more or less fresh out of film school and Napoleon Dynamite was an independent production and one he obviously put a lot of heart into, I somehow have more hope for him. He needs to see more movies, lots and lots and lots more movies. He has to figure out what it is he likes about the good ones, and more importantly what he hates about the bad ones. A few healthy anti-influences would probably fix Napoleon Dynamite good. He should definitely see Gummo. If he hates it, then we'll certainly be getting somewhere. If he doesn't end up making an emotionally complex hicksploitation picture, maybe he'll make a genuinely humanistic one.