Monday, August 9, 2010

Happy Gilmore and Plot Devices

In the 1996 film Happy Gilmore, there is a scene where a moving company comes to take all the furniture out of a house that is being repossessed by the bank. In order to stop this, Happy jumps on a couch that is being carried by two men from the moving company.

I always think that those men should be very angry. After all, Happy does disrupt their job and nearly caused a great amount of physical harm to them (their backs and possibly smashed feet). However in the next few minutes of the film the two men from the moving company are out on the lawn trying to shag golf balls using Happy's grandfather's clubs. Now it makes sense--they don't care.

The movie jumps forward from that scene with Happy realizing that he has a knack for golf, and he heads out for tournaments ranging from Florida to Denver. If you are watching this movie in the near future, don't forget about the movers. It is their carefree attitude toward their job that allows Happy to discover his gift and reach the plot. If they had gotten mad at him and left, then none of the hilarious events after the fact would have happened. They are the unsung heroes of that movie.

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