Beyond All of Its Virulent Transphobia, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is an Appalling Piece of Work
There are those who argue, with good reason, that it is wrong to see the movies of the past through the hyper-sensitive prism of the present. There is certainly an element of truth to that, and it is important to put art and entertainment into an appropriate historical context.
The appalling 1994 Jim Carrey vehicle Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is not alone in depicting being trans as both a criminal act of deception AND a mental illness, and also something so extreme and revolting that it is literally vomit-inducing. The late 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were full of movies that portrayed trans characters as broken and warped, evil and insane.
That was the awful price of representation: being treated like a freak, a basket case and a liar intent on fooling an unsuspecting world about your true identity.
It was only with the relatively recent explosion in trans visibility and representation that these portrayals fell out of favor and stopped being ubiquitous.
It’s true that being trans was nowhere near as accepted or widespread in the past and that we know a lot more about the trans experience than we did in decades where people who would happily come out as trans in a different era were forced to hide their true selves and pretend to be someone they were not.
That does not, however, excuse the repellent transphobia of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. I fuzzily remembered it containing a scene where the hero, who we’re supposed to root for and also is the good guy, responds to the revelation that a former football player is trans by vomiting in disgust, then brushing his teeth in a desperate, doomed attempt to wipe away his all-encompassing physical revulsion, then takes a plunger to his face in a further attempt to purge himself of the mere knowledge that a trans person exists, and that they had smooched.
This is supposed to be funny, of course. It’s all a goof! You’d have to be pretty damn uptight not to guffaw heartily at an extended gag rooted in the idea that being trans is so gross that it makes people want to blow chunks!
What I had forgotten was that this scene where our hero responds to the mere fact that someone was born a man and then became a woman by puking so hard and so intensely that he thought he’d never stop pays off later in an even uglier scene where a whole group of men AND a dolphin respond to Ace Ventura revealing that someone they think is a beautiful woman has a penis tucked behind her by vomiting just as enthusiastically.
Even a non-human finds the development so revolting that it is moved to hurl.
There are those who would argue that you should go easy on Ace Ventura: Pet Detective because it reflects the ignorance of the past rather than the Wokeness of the present.
That, to me, is insane. Why should you show a hit movie like this compassion and empathy when it treats possibly the most vulnerable and demonized demographic with unabashed sadism? What makes this rancid commercial endeavor so worthy of understanding and kindness?
There’s negative and then there’s vomit-inducing. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’s depiction of the trans existence is negative in that it’s a form of malicious lying for malevolent purposes, a way to get back at strapping heterosexual hunk football players and a form of insanity born of failure and tragedy.
It’s portrayal of trans life is vomit-inducing, meanwhile, in that it depicts throwing up as the default response to learning that someone is trans.
But I would hate Ace Ventura: Pet Detective even if it were not further tainted by the most virulent kind of transphobia. That’s not because I do not like Jim Carrey or consider him somehow “annoying” or “a bit much, all things considered.”
On the contrary, I think Carrey is a brilliant physical comedian who did fine work in films from this era such as The Mask, Cable Guy and Dumb and Dumber. But Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is an absolutely abysmal vehicle for Carrey’s prodigious gifts.
In Ace Ventura: Pet Detective Carrey plays the title character. He’s a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, pompadoured animal lover who is a genius, a Sherlock Holmes-like savant when it comes to deduction and sleuthing, always right and sexually irresistible to every beautiful woman he encounters.
In a possibly related development, Carrey re-wrote the script with director Tom Shadyac from a story and original draft by Jack Bernstein.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective feels like a movie spun off a Saturday Night Live sketch, and not one of the good ones either, except that Ventura is a new creation who just happens to feel like a broad, catchphrase-spouting recurring character from a sketch comedy show.
The titular character makes a living finding lost animals for grateful clients, at least one of whom repays his genius with sexual favors as well as money. Ace Ventura fucks, which is one of several ways in which he does not resemble Ernest P. Worrell.
Carrey’s performance really made me appreciate the likability Varney brought to Ernest. Varney’s signature character was nice and endlessly enthusiastic, whereas Ace Ventura is a rampaging asshole with a smug smirk on his rubber face that makes you want punch him right in the jaw.
Carrey contorts his face wildly. When he grins, which is constantly, he seems to have more and bigger teeth than is at all reasonable. It’s as if all other adults have thirty-two teeth but he has sixty four giant choppers.
The In Living Color alum goes as big as possible here. He recycles bits of his stand-up routine by liberally doling out celebrity impressions, most notably William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, which is widely known as the freshest and most difficult of all impressions, followed closely by Jack Nicholson.
Courtney Cox has the thankless role of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’s idea of a female lead. She’s Ace’s love interest and a publicist for the Miami Dolphins who assists him in his quest to find the Dolphins’ missing dolphin mascot.
Cox delivers much of her dialogue in an affectless monotone that betrays just how deeply unchallenging she finds the role and the film and hops happily into bed with the hero despite him behaving like Evil Ernest on Meth the entire film.
Truly a perfect film.
When Ace goes undercover he follows the Pistachio Disguisey School, which holds that the best way to go unnoticed is by being as loud, obnoxious and attention-hungry as possible.
Oh, and also he talks through his butt at one point. That was big, culturally. It made an impact. To this day when people think about Carrey there’s a pretty good chance they’re thinking of Ace’ dumb hair, dumb clothes, dumb catchphrase and habit of talking literally out of his ass.
Ace tangles with his police antagonist Lt. Lois Einhorn (Sean Young), who at first appears to be merely a hateful misogynistic caricature of a forceful career woman as a castrating shrew. Then things take the proverbial turn once Ace deduces that she used to be a Miami Dolphins field goal kicker named Ray Finkle who lost it after losing the Super Bowl for the Dolphins.
In Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’s climax Ace Ventura methodically takes off the clothes of Lt. Lois Einhorn, item by item.
The joke is that Ace keeps expecting to find evidence that his nemesis is a man but only finds shapely lady parts instead.
Obviously it would be immoral, unethical and illegal to tear off a woman’s clothes in public but the fact that no one seems to have a problem with this is not the worst part of the scene. Not by a long shot.
No, the money shot is the revelation that the ball-busting cop has balls and a penis that she has shamefully been hiding from the world due to her evil trans psychosis. That’s what cues an assemblage of manly men to blow chunks of revulsion in unison.
I should probably point out that this was sold very successfully as a broad comedy for children about a goofy animal lover who solves crimes and that it was probably a lot of children’s first experience with seeing a trans character in TV or film. This includes trans kids.
There were very few depictions of trans characters at the time, and they tended to be evil, insane or both. There particularly weren’t many prominent trans characters in broad, mainstream comedies for children pitched as adolescent boys. So representations of trans people tended to have disproportionate influence and I cannot think of anything positive to say about Ace Ventura’s treatment of women and its trans villain.
I can’t think of anything positive to say about Ace Ventura: Pet Detective as a whole and that’s not because I’m one of those snooty critics who compare everything to Citizen Kane. No, I did not find anything to like about Ace Ventura: Pet Detective because it lacks even a single redeeming facet.
It might have introduced the phrase “All righty then” into the public lexicon but it’s nevertheless all wrong.
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