Closing a loop

Here I am, dragging this humble blog out of the bottomless pit where my past creative endeavors have gone to die. “Not yet” I whisper to it; “the overhead on making this is too low, plus I have some thoughts on mustard that I might need to get off my chest at some point.”

Friends, enemies, countrymen, I took a brief unexpected hiatus from writing this thing that is technically considered a publication, even though I was really enjoying it. Personal circumstances were getting in the way. Nothing incredibly serious or traumatic, but, you know, life stuff can pile up and gum up the works. I don’t want to get preachy or self help-y but let me take a moment to advocate for circling the wagons and doing what you need to do to take care of yourself when dealing with life, even if it means stepping away from something for a bit. We live in a culture where it feels like you always need to have “something to show for it”. Counterpoint - no you don’t! Gettin’ by without ruining your health, driving yourself nuts, or pissing off all your family and friends is a notch in the win column. And when you feel like you’ve started to get more gas in the tank, you can sit down at your computer and try to string together some coherent thoughts on your recent viewing of Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.

That’s right I’m finally making good on my desire to plumb the depths of the Eddie Murphy prosthesis-based family (?) comedy from the year 2000. I had not seen either of the Murphy “Nutty Professor” entries¹ , but I watched the trailer for the latter one during a YouTube rabbit hole and observed that the absolute, wild abandon of its humor seemed to exemplify the shrugging naïve optimism of the period of time in between Y2K and 9/11. On the other side, I don’t think that’s the case, but it could be that Nutty Professor II: The Klumps tapped into a deeper truth that is more representative of that era than my cursory assessment. Spoilers ahead for Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps, which I am going to shorthand into NP2:TK for the sake of expediency, and to foster some collegial familiarity with you, the reader. This is our stupid little abbreviation. By the way, I watched this movie like 5-6 weeks ago, so forgive me if I’m a little hazy on a few details because lord knows I can’t be bothered to go back and watch it again for posterity.

NP2:TK begins with the titular Nutty Professor, Sherman Klump, finding himself at a good, stable place in life. He has invented a de-aging formula and has a loving relationship with a genetic researcher and fellow professor at Wellman College named Denise Gaines (played by Janet Jackson). Sherman wants to buckle down and propose to Denise, but he is troubled by his id-like alter ego, Buddy Love, lurking in his subconscious. This is portrayed elegantly in a nightmare sequence in which Sherman gets a massive erection at the altar. The head of his phallic protuberance bursts through the front of his trousers and it is revealed to be Buddy Love. A terrified Sherman shoves Buddy back inward, only to have Buddy come out of his rear end and kick the clergyman in the groin. Mind you, this is in the first five minutes or so of this movie, so I was preparing myself for a singular cinematic experience.

Sherman has a few incidents of Buddy breaking out of his subconscious and causing him to say or do something untoward, including messing up a proposal to Denise. There is also a scene where the Klump family goes out to dinner to celebrate Sherman’s father Cletus’s retirement where Grandma Ida waxes poetic on her sexual relations with her companion Mr. Isaac and teases her son in law Cletus for being impotent. A Buddy Love outburst causes Cletus to choke, and in the process of giving him the Heimlich maneuver, Sherman causes Cletus to fart on a birthday candle which sends a set of nearby drapes up in flames.

Worrying about the destructive influence of Buddy Love, Sherman seeks to rid himself of Buddy entirely. Denise’s research involves isolating genetic material, and against the advice of his lab assistant Jason, Sherman isolates his own DNA containing Buddy Love. After he leaves the lab, Jason’s Basset Hound, Buster knocks over the DNA material and one of Buster’s hairs lands in the goo, causing an independent Buddy Love to grow.

Thinking that Buddy is out of the way, Sherman proposes to Denise, and gets informed by Dean Richmond that a pharmaceutical company is willing to pay $150 million to Wellman College for the de-aging formula. Buddy learns of this offer after confronting Sherman and Denise at a movie theater and tries to make a counter offer to the pharma company to provide the formula for slightly less money. Knowing that he needs to keep the formula out of Buddy’s hands, Sherman hides it at his parent’s house, I think in their garage fridge or something like that. This seems like a dumb hiding place, but it actually tracks because Sherman realizes that the DNA isolation has changed his body chemistry and he’s getting stupider!

Cletus finds the de-aging formula and takes some to regain his youthful virility, to the disgust and horror of his wife. Buddy finds out where the formula is hidden, takes some of it, and replaces the rest with fertilizer. At a demonstration of the formula for the pharmaceutical company and the press, chaos ensues when a tainted formula causes the experiment hamster to transform into a giant monster, which, uh… has a nonconsensual sexual encounter with Dean Richmond, who is hiding under a fur blanket in the same pattern of the fur of a female hamster.

The light went out of my eyes as I realized I’m inching towards 1000 words summarizing this movie so I’m going to blow through some stuff here. Sherman is screwed, he’s getting dumber by the minute. He realizes that he needs to reincorporate Buddy Love into his genetic material to regain his intelligence. They plan a trap to make Buddy take the de-aging formula by putting it on a tennis ball and throwing it to him. Because Buddy has part dog DNA, this is a viable plan. It causes him to turn into a gross baby and then eventually a pile of goo. It seems like its too late but then Janet Jackson cries at the fountain where the goo evaporated and the tears make it work again so Sherman drinks from the fountain and is cured, happily every after the end.

NP2:TK is neither fish nor fowl, its a strange amalgam that is technically executed but the end result isn’t quite right, much like the cursed experiments of Professor Sherman Klump himself. NP2:TK has some surprising depth for what is billed as a goofy comedy; I think it really has something to say about reckoning with the Jungian “shadow self”. Sherman’s attempts to stifle and excise Buddy Love lead only to ruin. He learns that we need to reckon with those darker parts of ourselves, accept them, and manage them appropriately in order to live a balanced life. And then there is a scene where the joke is that the horny old grandma takes out her dentures to blow a guy in a hot tub. Excuse me, I think the police are here to arrest me after typing this paragraph.

My feeling after watching NP2:TK was that I wished it was either stupider and more absurd or that it would lean in to its sensitive side. This murky space is what convinces me that my initial prediction was partially right - this movie is an encapsulation of the post Y2k/pre 9/11 culture, but not in the way I had originally thought. The fart jokes and cartoonish humor in the film live on the surface, but beneath that is a story about accepting all the parts of yourself. And then that message of self acceptance is muddied by the cheap jokes made at the expense of people who are fat throughout the film (though I’m not coming to this movie expecting a sensitive and nuanced take on that subject matter). Likewise, my own surface level assessment of the culture of 2000-01 was that people were all blinded by optimism and the sense that nothing bad was ever going to happen to them again, but that isn’t correct at all. Bad stuff was happening to people during that very time! And there was more bad stuff simmering below the surface that would come out in weird and awful ways over the next few decades.

I have no idea whether this argument “makes sense” or whether expanding on it over the course of an essay is a “good idea”, but I needed to get this albatross off of my neck. And so, I am back.

¹ I haven’t seen the Jerry Lewis one either, he gives me a bad vibe.