Frank Doesn't Wear Nightcaps

The day before yesterday, my man and I were debating what to watch on TV. Our tastes in movies are different, and I remember nary a time when we haven’t been fighting over the remote, so to speak; of course, now it is more like your account on Netflix or mine.

I hadn’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road before, and the original idea was to fetch it from the streaming service and check it out. My man, already a fan of the Mad Max franchise when he saw the reboot in the movies, adores the film, and it was one of those precious few of his crazy favorites I had agreed to watch, having inadvertently missed it in the cinema but always having had a yen for both Charlize Theron, and George Miller (because of, you know, The Witches of Eastwick). I was working crazy the summer the movie was showing in Finland, hence the missing. I work crazy every summer, and now, since it was only the second official day of my vacation, it was time to rewind and what better way to do it than by watching something fun on TV? Couch potato merriment for a Sunday night.

As fate would have it, Mad Max: Fury Road had gone to the place the movies and TV shows taken out of circulation go to have a breather, and so we started scrolling possibilities on the Netflix page of options. WW2 documentaries, war epics, inane crime flicks, political movies. What? Come on. I mean sometime, sure, but not for a Sunday evening fun movie night, I don’t think so. But since the evening had begun with the idea of a raging road movie breathing dust and handing out weapons and Tom Hardy driving like a maniac, I hardly felt I was in any position to start suggesting more girly films.

“This is pointless. Check the Classics Section”, I asked, after dismissing eight or nine different movies about soldiers in combat zone, and he, The Matrix. He began scrolling the Classics, and we started heckling. No, no, no, definite no, no, hell no, no, no, n—wait, go back! Bingo! We had a winner.

It was The Naked Gun. The truest of all classics. The motherload, if you will. Boiling it down to its most basic idea by combining two lines from the beginning and the end: "In the intensive care ward at Our Lady of the Worthless Miracle, I'm the head usher."

We reached immediate consensus, and started watching.

As it sometimes goes in a situation like this, the experience was beyond measure. We both had seen the movie before, lots of times, it is one of those unavoidable insanities, like the Police Academy films, or the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, or getting chicken pox as a kid. Everyone knows what it is, everyone knows the classic scenes, everyone knows who Leslie Nielsen is. There was a time in the Nineties when I felt every time I opened the box there was either this one on, or The Shawshank Redemption.

But Sunday night, as we watched The Naked Gun together, for the first time as a unit consisting of the two of us, the simple, endearing charm, the poised and intelligent hilarity of it - and that is exactly what it felt like, although I remember it being marketed as a low comedy with lots of south from the waist humor - reached such proportions I felt at one point that our neighbors might start ringing our doorbell to keep it down, as we were laughing so hard.

The scene at the beginning, where the gangsters shoot Nordberg, and he stumbles face first on a wedding cake, gets his fingers caught in a drawer, gets wet paint all over his coat, steps right into a bear trap, hits his head on a lamp, and what have you, until finally falling off the deck, into the water.

When the doctor, who is also a sleeper agent, tries to murder Nordberg in the hospital by suffocating him with a pillow, is interrupted by enraged Frank storming in the room, throws the pillow at him, causing him to start yelling in deep yet muffled agony, unable to remove the pillow from his face until the doctor has already escaped halfway out the window.

The classics, like Frank forgetting the mic on him when he goes to take a leak during the press conference, and the stuffed beaver. Not so much my funnybone department, but my man was howling with relaxed laughter, the laughter of early adulthood memories and recognition and simple fun, in each of these scenes, and because laughter spawns more laughter, it was all funny. I was happy that my man, having had a difficult and sad summer, was finally unwinding, and if it was because of Frank Drebin peeing and farting - but only once! - in surround sound while the Mayor is trying to explain the safety protocol during the Queen’s visit, so be it. (And let’s face it, it really isn’t low comedy at all, by today’s standards, now is it?)

But the scene that became at once Our Favorite Scene from The Naked Gun was something neither one of us remembered at all from previous viewings, just a little thing, but making it brand new, something saved especially for the two of us, making us both laugh, especially when, after the line was delivered, I told my life partner that that was just like he was in real life, which made him laugh even more. Thus, since Sunday, we both have been using the line when in dialog with each other, whenever there was a pressing need to point out the obvious.

The line is uttered by George Kennedy as Ed, while he and Frank are studying some evidence in the lab. When instructed to check it out on the microscope, Frank hunches over the eyepiece of the machine to study, and says he can’t see anything. “Use your open eye, Frank!” urges Ed.