Twice, I've introduced The Terrys to someone and both times I got nervous at the exact same moment: a close-up of the crowning during a childbirth scene. It's a really convincing latex model of a damp head splitting flesh. Will Kai walk away from the TV (after I'd shown him 2 Girls 1 Cup, he went on to the balcony of our friend's 37th floor condo and just looked out alone for a few minutes at the Toronto skyline, King of New York style)? Will Loretta think something wrong with me? That I'm some sort of monster for so enjoying this 13-minute short film about a meth head couple, both the man and the woman named 'Terry'? The crowning is the film's climax, narratively, but also disgustingly. There are many, many disgusting moments. In an abandoned lot, for instance, the actual act obscured by an oil drum, the female-Terry going down on an ex-convict as he flexes his arms: "I'm going to come in your mouth... Yeah!" O-face. The male-Terry going down on the female-Terry (pregnant) as she sits with spread-legs on the examining table at an OB/GYN: "Tastes like metal… like tomato soup." Despite all this punk-rock comedy, this isn't a sketch-equivalent of 2 Girls. Though we do need to commend Tim and Eric, the comedy duo who wrote and directed, for all this audacity, the menacing soundtrack, the deadpan voiceover, The Terrys feels like more than just spectacle. When my brother emailed it to me, he wrote, "This runs the gamut of human emotion." A bit of hyperbole, but hyperbolic is the best tone for something so fucking crazy.
The Terrys live in a trailer park. The male-Terry has a mullet and matching mustache. The female-Terry wears a denim skirt and a weirdo tank-top that goes as her stomach-folds go. They both have sores, brown like rust spots on a '95 Taurus, all over their faces. They're addicted to ice, the narrator tells us, which is a combination of crack and meth. "You want to suck on my little cock," the male-Terry asks as he slips his glass pipe in and out of her mouth. In their bedroom, the male-Terry spins before pressing into the female-Terry who's splayed against the window frame. There's something that looks like doggy-style as the female-Terry squeals. They never take their clothes off. "Although they only dry-humped," the narrator deadpans, "they conceived a child that very day."
So, this isn't dogme-style representation. And every once in a while, I like my pop-art a bit surreal. In Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor wakes up one day to find his stomach "sectioned off by little crescent shaped ridges into segments". In Blue Velvet, Frank Booth breathes deep from a canister containing an unnamed gas before fucking a girl, spasming for a few seconds, and yelling "mommy" as he comes. These works use the absurd to remind me about the difference between my ordinary existence -- the undergrad degree in philosophy, the arugula with lunch, the Nivea cream before bed -- and other marginal (as in on-the-margins) existences. Gregor with his newfound cancer (or if you prefer a different reading, his depression, AIDS, or midlife-crisis). Frank with his sexual deviance and violence.
The Terrys reminded me, too, of the gulf between me and a type of marginal people. Not so much the regular-seeming folk of the trailer park. The narrator says, at the beginning of the movie, that the park "is home to parents and even grandparents and some wanting a simpler way of life." There are kids with dirty clothes, an old black man with a white beard and no teeth. They are only a little bit different from me. They are not The Terrys. These are obviously cartoon-ed versions of a type of rural poor. The female-Terry, I should mention, is played by a huge actor, Eric Wareheim, in a bad blond wig and brunette 5 o'clock shadow. There's, of course, no way that dry-humping, regardless of the variation of positions, can lead to pregnancy.
The blatant unreality of the characters is useful, though. Often, depictions of rural-poor in movies and TV are glossy, a more deceptive kind of unreality. Take Breaking Bad, for instance. Jesse and his girlfriend Jane spend days locked away shooting heroin and smoking crystal. They're never, even when passed-out and surrounded by empty Los Pollos Hermanos styrofoam and used syringes, anything other than two beautiful young people. Even the addict-characters who are made-up to be ugly, like the prostitute Wendy, have minds with which we can sympathize without much imagination. Wendy, for instance, tries to help Jesse poison some rival drug dealers who killed a child. She helps because she has a child of her own.
In contrast, the Terrys are fucking extraterrestrials. They kept me thinking about people whose minds aren't as clear as mine (and, yes, I realize the dangerous existential ground of believing my own thinking 'clear'; I could, any given morning, wake up a bug), who do sex and health and family in ways I don't imagine. And vice-versa. After The Terrys conceive, they go to the aforementioned OB/GYN. The doctor is sober and knowledgeable in his prescription. He tells the female-Terry that she needs to stop drinking and smoking drugs because it's dangerous for the baby. If she doesn't stop, the baby might be born a demon. This is all foreign to The Terrys. And not figuatively. Actually foreign. Despite the English sign on the storefront, the doctor is speaking in full-Spanish. We, the audience, understand his advice because it appears in subtitles at the bottom of the screen. "I don't know what the fuck you're saying," the male-Terry says, "I don't fucking talk chicken." Chicken versus English. That's how wide the gulf is between us and The Terrys.
Somehow, The Terrys do give birth. A home-birth, no less, with the help of an instructional CD-rom purchased at a thrift shop. This movie stays comedy because The Terrys don't just dumpster the kid. That's such a verging-on-cliche tragedy that The Onion had a headline about it: "New York City to Install Special ‘Infants-Only’ Dumpsters". The Terrys doesn't necessarily unpack the mentality and circumstances of someone who would do such a thing. But, oh yeah, it reminds, there are some people who might consider the dumpster.
