Ineptitude is its
own punishment
I don’t go to a lot of Adam Sandler movies. I don’t think I’ve ever paid theater prices to see one, in fact. I like tasteless humor as much as the next guy, but it seems to me Sandler always plays a smug, obnoxious frat-boy type and I just don’t find that all that funny.
I certainly won’t be going to see his latest, “Jack and Jill,” in which Sandler plays his own twin sister. The reviews have been almost uniformly savage. On www.rottentomatoes.com, a popular website that aggregates movie reviews, it only got a 4 percent rating, meaning that’s the proportion of reviewers that actually liked it.
When I was reading some reviews, several mentioned the director, Dennis Dugan. I’ve never seen a favorable review of a movie he directed; most, in fact, get pilloried. Dugan, who got his start as a character actor, has directed 13 theatrical movies. His rottentomatoes.com average rating is 22. His highest was 59 percent for Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore” (there are several Sandler movies in there). His lowest before “Jack and Jill” was his first, “Problem Child,” which got a whopping 7 percent. That movie came out in 1990 and there are critics who still say every theater it showed in should’ve been fumigated.
That got me wondering how a guy that consistently makes awful movies keeps working as a director. No doubt, a lot of it has to do with his friendship with Sandler; like him or not, you have to admit that his flicks make money. And Hollywood is the world capital of “not what you know, but who you know,” so as long as he’s in good odor with Sandler Dugan won’t be Dumpster-diving for dinner.
Still, given Dugan’s track record, nobody’s going to accuse him of being a competent director.
The difference between him and most other incompetents is that when he fails, as he apparently does often, his ineptitude is on display for all the world (or at least that portion of it that buys movie tickets). Ineptitude is far from rare, but in most cases we see it on a one-to-one basis. Generally, when somebody screws up your world through sheer lack of talent, they do it in front of you, maybe your significant other and nobody else. Screwing up is rarely a public performance.
Often as not, ineptitude is a function of simple lack of intelligence. If there’s one thing that life has taught me, it’s that people do worse things because they’re stupid than they do because they’re bad people. A truly inept person usually is pretty clueless. It’s the kind of thing that would be amusing, were it not happening to you.
I’m particularly fond of customer service workers who have the people skills of a desk lamp. They often cover their ineptitude with arrogance, which is the very definition of adding insult to injury. I try to be nice to customer service workers, but every once in a while I run into one who propels me into frothing-at-the-mouth, counter-pounding rage. It’s cathartic, but stressful.
Sometimes, ineptitude is a systemic problem. When I was a telephone operator for the deaf, I helped place a lot of customer support calls. I once handled a call where the poor woman who made it was having cell phone troubles, called her cell phone company and got disconnected seven times in the course of one call. By the end of it, even I was livid.
Still, everybody’s inept at something. Albert Einstein was said to be pretty absent-minded, and once even walked into an open manhole. And he was the guy who said, “There are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity – and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Most of us are fortunate, though, to at least be competent at what we do for a living. I say that as a guy who’s lost a couple of jobs. I never got fired for screwing up, though, not that I didn’t sometimes give my employer ample reason to can me. I have a bit of a problem with authority and what got nailed for breaking some rule or other. I guess you could say I’m inept at following rules, although I think that’s a bit harsh.
By itself, ineptitude isn’t always that irritating. Hey, stuff happens. What drives me to drink is when a truly clueless, inept person doesn’t seem to care or gives me attitude, as though they can scare me off. That’s when I get really Sicilian. I once had a customer service experience at a Fargo big-box store that nearly landed me in prison for murder. I’m not sure, though, that any jury would’ve convicted me if I got a chance to testify.
Really, though, as much as I think stupidity plays an important role in the way of the world, you have to admit that most of the people you deal with every day are competent, if not excessively slow. Were that not true, we’d all constantly be in frothing, counter-pounding mode.
As it is, that’s a thankfully rare occurrence. One thing I do to avoid it is to stay away from Adam Sandler movies. It seems to be working so far.