Hollywood as Propaganda #3
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Ok, so this one isn’t propaganda per se, but having come across this film again recently (someone was channel scrolling, settled on this film that had just started, and I was in the room with them), I thought it was worth commenting on what, essentially, amounts to a conditioning of cultural attitudes towards the LGBT community, particularly among children. A popular film at the time (mid-nineties), Ace Ventura: Pet Detective appealed mainly to younger audiences. The goofiness and ridiculousness of Ventura as a character, the immaturity of the jokes, the premise of animal lover saving animals, and the PG-13 rating, was always unlikely to attract older viewers (Leslie Nielson fans aside, perhaps).
Being ten or eleven when I first saw Pet Detective, I was one of many kids the film appealed to. So much so that, after the release of the sequel, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, in 1995, me and a friend decided that we would become pet detectives ourselves, and spent a whole week planning this future business. Quotes from the film would be referenced frequently, with entire scenes worth of dialogue memorised. All-in-all, I probably watched the films in excess of twenty times each, and I can’t lie, not once do I remember thinking about the people who were being openly laughed at. I got the jokes, though. I got them and laughed along with them, full on belly laughing throughout some scenes. For example, the montage that follows Ace’s realisation that Lt. Lois Einhorn, antagonist of Pet Detective, is actually former Miami Dolphins quarter-back Ray Finkle, was one long belly laugh when first seen.
“Einhorn is Finkle!” Ventura cries, elated at cracking the case of the missing dolphin, the central component to the film’s plot. But this elation soon turns into disgust. Having previously been kissed by Einhorn, a full-on kiss, it should be said, Ventura’s tone of voice and facial expressions waiver at the realisation.
“Finkle is Einhorn! Einhorn is a man! Oh my God, Einhorn is a man!”
Ventura then runs into the bathroom and throws up, violently. In keeping with the film’s ridiculously exaggerated humour, at one point he puts a toilet plunger to his face and plunges himself. Following this is excessive teeth brushing, with toothpaste squeezed directly into his mouth and ingested. Even more ridiculously, he then strips naked, BURNS HIS CLOTHES, runs into the shower, and collapses crying. The impression we get is of a man who feels not just repulsed, but is feeling ashamed and violated. That’s the joke.
As a kid, the deeper meaning wasn’t totally apparent. The hilarity was in the over-exaggeration, the cartoonish facial expressions that Jim Carrey is so good at producing, and yes, the mock shower cry, and the whine of, “Why, why, why?” as he slides down the wall in despair.
Needless to say, this was all pointless. The kiss had been a day or two earlier. Any contamination, to use language to the effect of what is implicated in the montage, would have already taken effect. The reaction, then, could have easily stopped at the vomiting. That would have been enough to prove beyond doubt Ventura’s heterosexuality, and his mock repulsion. But in taking the montage to the places it does, the film deliberately, and calculatedly, presents a view of homosexuality, and transgenderism, as being physically repugnant.
This moment, and other similar moments from cinema history, has often been dismissed as an unfortunate product of its time. Such a dismissal, however, acts on the assumption that popular culture merely reflects ambient social attitudes, rather than actively shaping and reinforcing them. What we encounter in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is not an isolated joke, but the staging of a culturally sanctioned pedagogy.
Disgust as Ideology
Disgust, as a moral and political affect, is neither neutral nor universal. It is cultivated, often unconsciously, and, in relation to other people, aimed at bodies that are perceived as abject, impure, unnatural, or deceptive. In this scene, and the later climatic one, in which Einhorn is stripped off her clothes and exposed as a trans person, the transgender body is positioned not merely as an object of comic derision but as an abomination. Ace’s reaction functions as a pedagogical cue, one that teaches us that disgust is a natural response to what he has been exposed to.
This is not merely incidental. It is a weaponisation of humour aimed at maintaining the boundaries of gender normativity. In Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the trans woman’s body is projected as a site for fear, shame, and bodily recoil, feelings that are then projected outward in the form of collective humiliation and laughter.
The Ideological Work of Comedy
For the political philosopher Slavoj Žižek, ideology is at its purest in jokes. What Ace Ventura: Pet Detective performs is a kind of ideological purity, whereby the trans body is exposed, rejected, and expelled from the moral universe of the film. The audience is invited to participate in this expulsion, not critically, but viscerally.
This is the logic of the film’s “vomit gag”, an aesthetic of cleansing, and of moral hygiene, that has deep roots in the policing of gender and sexuality. To laugh, in this instance, is to consent, or to internalise the narrative that certain bodies are not only laughable but contaminating.
We must not mistake the absurdism of Carrey’s performance, then, for subversion. His character, while ostensibly clownish, is not undermined by his own grotesquery. He remains the hero. He is rewarded. He is, ultimately, right. The trans woman, meanwhile, is reduced to an unstable caricature: deceptive, predatory, mentally unstable. There is no ambiguity here, only punishment.
Transgenderism as Mental Illness
Possibly the most dangerous insinuation made in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is the link created to mental illness. In the film, mental illness is also turned into a source of derision, which makes transgenderism, by association, even less acceptable. For context, for those who haven’t seen the film, Einhorn, or Finkle, is sectioned and institutionalised after a severe mental breakdown. This breakdown is of the clichéd, stereotypical kind, of course, with Finkle being depicted as being broken by bitterness, obsession, and hate.
To investigate Finkle’s time in the institution he was held, Ventura goes “undercover” as someone afflicted with a mental health condition. Carrey’s performance here is an incredibly stupid one, but one made possible by existing perceptions of mental illness. It is in this institution, it turns out, where Ray Finkle became Lois Einhorn, making the Finkle’s transition from male to female one that is paradoxically calculated and insane - a case of evil genius, almost.
The Message to Younger Audiences
It matters that Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was aimed at younger audiences, or at least consumed as such. Its audience, primarily young boys like myself, absorbed not only its humour but its implicit morality. What it taught, subtly, through affect and repetition, was a blueprint of, for lack of a better phrase, gender terror: that to be attracted to a trans person is a crisis; that to have a non-typical heterosexual encounter contaminates one's masculinity; that the appropriate response is shame and aggression.
We should not underestimate the cumulative psychic toll of this cultural programming. And though Pet Detective did not invent transphobia or homophobia, it normalised their manifestation, and legitimised the mockery and dehumanisation of gay and trans people. And as for any gay and trans people watching the film, the message was equally clear: you are the joke, it is your body that is wrong, and its presence serves only as an infliction of trauma, as a vehicle for comedy, and as a representation of a warped mental state.