As I watched the film, the words "Sandler Vehicle" kept murmuring through my mind. When does a film actually become a vehicle for its star? Could we classify the effect of That's My Boy as a kind of vehicular homicide? I kept thinking that the title of the film would be best uttered by someone pointing, identifying a body in a morgue. I stared at everything going on behind the actors, the way one looks at one's shoes when you are embarrassed. What place, or what seat, would I have had on this Sandler vehicle?
The vehicle seems to have no room for passengers: neither for the extras in the movie nor the spectators in the theater. The operators of the vehicle take joy in insulting pedestrians and driving over animals. It inflicted a strange feeling of captivity upon me: it is the first film to successfully make me feel like I was actually watching it on an airplane.
The odd thing was, in being jilted for a non-speaking role in this film, I felt like something less than a "wanna-be." I looked at the trees and shrubs in the Cape Code landscape that serves as the backdrop to the movie and thought I could have been them. What is one notch below screen being? What do you call the person who wants to not be (in the sense of star) on screen? Who aspires to exist like a spider accidentally caught in a diorama?
The strange condition of the extra in this film became clearer to me in the scene where the characters run drunk down a bowling alley. Sandler gets the alley leading directly into our line of vision:
Could I have been a bowler? Maybe that strange figure standing against the pillar behind the disconsolate woman who just had her spare ruined by Sandler? If I had a red shirt, could I have played that figure standing behind the counter in the far distance? (In his miniscule features I read only indifference for the action he is watching, that same indifference displayed by the guy you give your shoes back to when you tell him your bowling score.) There is so little prestige to the celebrities of Sandler and Samberg that in fact they just seem like extras, only nearer to us, further down the alley, so to speak. In stills from the movie, the leads are hard to distinguish from the people who got 70.00 for their day's work. Sandler and Samberg offer a refrigerator bulb in the place of the galactic light promised by the metaphor of a star.The telltale instance, the iconic image, from this film is immortalized on the DVD cover from the movie. It shows us Sandler knocking over pins in great glee:
This is the Sandler Vehicle in a nutshell (and shaped accordingly): he has become a bowling ball. What is the semiotic role of an extra to such a cinematic figure? Had I been chosen to just be or stand or pretend to do something next to the Sandler, my screen existence would have amounted to being little more than alley wax.
