#Billy madison script movie#

The shorthand for Buscemi’s pathologies (the list! the lipstick!) could not be shorter. Buscemi’s character is a disturbed dude, and whether or not the young viewer understands this in the way an adult would, he or she is likely to intuit it. Not so here–the scene isn’t even funny enough, not by the film’s usual terms, to give the kids an out. There are plenty of other instances of grown-up humor in the movie, particularly during interactions between Adam Sandler and his love interest Bridgette Wilson, most of them played broadly enough that young’uns can giggle at the silly stuff and let the rest pass them by. Because there’s really no amount of contextualizing a young viewer can do to avoid the scene’s fundamental weirdness. Anderson-style constriction, but still skillful construction–the inclusion of the first scene with Buscemi is a minor miracle. Given the skillful construction of Billy Madison–not P.T. But Billy Madison‘s ruthlessly designed for mass appeal, is the point. Is the scene all that funny? Not really, at least not today, not to me. Teens appreciate Billy’s chemically-induced vision of a giant penguin in the film’s opening scenes, and for pre-teens, the presence of a giant penguin is enough. Also, spoiler alert.) Billy Madison is a cleverly-built comedy in that children of all ages can enjoy it at (roughly) age-appropriate levels.

(Unless you count a faceless hunter killing Bambi’s mom as a brazen anti-hunting message or something, but even that’s more text than subtext–not subversion proper. I have a theory that the lipstick scene in Billy Madison was many millennials’ first encounter with legitimately subversive cinema. I have no idea how my mom and dad would have reacted to Steve Buscemi languidly smearing lipstick on his face in my presence. In any case, I regret that we didn’t make it to the above scene, which I wouldn’t see until a year or two later. And they were probably right to do it I don’t think I soiled myself for attention afterward, but it’s the kind of thing I totally could have done at eleven, with enough prodding from the friends that my parents also disapproved of.

#Billy madison script movie#

Probably part of the reason why the turned the movie off after the scene in which Adam Sandler deliberately pees his pants–afraid I would get some ideas. Disapproving of the film, not of me, although they weren’t crazy about the way I was behaving that year either. I first attempted to watch Billy Madison in fifth grade, alongside my disapproving parents.