Spoofs its TV cliches
THE funniest scene in the new Baywatch movie comes at the very beginning, when Mitch Buchannon, the leader of an elite team of lifeguards, takes his place atop the stand with the alertness and prideful countenance of a bald eagle. He notices a shift in the wind, which sends a yellow caution flag whipping to the left. He looks to the sky. A parasail lurches backwards. Immediately sensing catastrophe, he dashes full speed across the beach, calculating the parachute’s precise trajectory as it heads toward a line of rocks jutting into the ocean.
Mere moments after the occupant lands in the water, smacks his head and loses consciousness, Mitch scoops him up and cradles him in his massive arms like a newborn. As Mitch, Dwayne Johnson emerges from the water like Poseidon himself, with chiseled features glistening in the sun. A wave crests in the background as the title, Baywatch, fills the screen in giant block letters. A pod of dolphins pirouette in formation behind him, popping off like a fireworks display. The image couldn’t be any tackier if it were airbrushed on the side of a van or printed on T-shirts at a boardwalk gift shop.
In short order, director Seth Gordon and his screenwriters, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, have made it abundantly clear that their Baywatch will be irreverent, cool and knowing – everything that the long- watch. running syndicated TV show was not. They snicker at the absurdity of “an elite team of lifeguards” patrolling the beach like superheroes in spandex. They snicker at Mitch’s Lassielike instincts for danger and the absurd, outsize perfection of his body, which resembles a Humvee emerging from a carwash. And most of all, they snicker at the very idea of a Baywatch movie, which is almost too stupid to contemplate.
Their instincts are correct: Baywatch was a bad television show, a stultifying hour of stock plotting and aquatic derringdo that nonetheless thrived in syndication, due to the appeal of its stars, David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, and its “jiggle TV” prurience. But over 11 seasons and three directto-video movies, the show infiltrated the culture, and for risk-averse Hollywood, it’s usually a safe bet to cash in on existing properties. Attempting a straightforward, big-budget version of Baywatch would be commercial suicide, so instead, the filmmakers treat it like a piece of cultural flotsam that has washed up on the shore.
A quintessentially ’70s show like The Brady Bunch would seem woefully out of date two decades later, so The Brady Bunch Movie turned that fact into an ingenious premise, casting the family as cheerfully oblivious relics in the modern world. Charlie’s Angels, too, could not survive the sexism inherent in three female private Bay- eyes responding to the whims of a disembodied male voice, so it made a joke out of the skimpy costumes and martial arts.
These films aren’t the first to trade on self-awareness and pop-culture savvy. There’s the more standard set by the Wayne’s World movies, which would often break the fourth wall and speak directly to the camera. When Wayne and Garth, the hosts of a cableaccess show, decry selling out to their corporate boss while running through spots for Pizza Hut, Doritos and Reebok, it’s the perfect synthesis of product and products. Just that little wink to the audience makes all the difference.
On top of the throwback subplots and the obligatory cameos from the original stars, comedies such as The Brady Bunch Movie and Charlie’s Angels and Baywatch all have the same little wink, that moment when the film hips the audience to its own fundamental silliness. In Baywatch, a young recruit, played by Zac Efron, tells his fellow lifeguards that their entire operation “sounds like a really entertaining but far-fetched TV show”.
But how deep into this hall of mirrors can we go? Baywatch may not attempt the earnest adventure of the original TV show, but there are many times when its irreverence doesn’t make it any brighter – or even much different an experience. When Mitch and the gang try to infiltrate a narcotics ring running out of a fancy resort, we’re meant to laugh over the deliberate silliness of it, but after a while, it doesn’t seem like a joke anymore.
And for as many times as the characters point out the strange phenomenon of beautiful women running in slow motion, the film ends up ogling right alongside them.
Self-awareness allows comedies such as Baywatch to absolve themselves of their own sins because they cast their failings as deliberate. But there’s a dangerous tipping point at which a film can become the thing it’s parodying or when revealing cliches becomes a cliche in itself. Quotation marks are not a defense against criticism or a ticket to some topsy-turvy world where up is down and trash is treasure. Sometimes a “bad movie” is just a bad movie.