What does Happy Gilmore 2 say about modern golf culture?

My Thesis of Happy Gilmore & the Story of Golf

A film is like a collective dream, dreamt by the thousands of artists whose names you can see in the end credits. It attempts to represent (thus also understand, communicate, or challenge) a complex idea or set of ideas. If a ‘picture is worth a thousand words’, then a 90-minute to 2-hour film at 24 frames per second is then worth hundreds of millions of words… even one as ridiculous as Happy Gilmore and its recent sequel! If it interests you to explore that concept in depth, then read THIS article about the original.

As for my summarized thoughts on the sequel: it’s a serviceable comedy with plenty of laughs and a surprisingly direct take on the modern fragmentation of golf’s culture. Happy Gilmore 2 highlights the ethics & essence of golf (integrity) vs the forces trying to separate and commercialize it for maximizing personal, short-term gain (i.e. “Maxi Golf”).

 

Remembering the Happy Place of 90s Comedy

Image via People.com

Slap-stick humor aside, the original Happy Gilmore (1995) is more than just a classic 90s comedy flick; it’s a great telling of the Hero Myth and one of the best sports movies of all time, with great character setups, memorable conflicts, and a perfectly paced plot. Many describe the original as iconic and memorable – and these words are ultimately synonymous with meaningful. Characters, scenes, lines, and images are memorable for a reason: they bring forth something that resonates within our being.

However, if you thought that the original was critically acclaimed, you thought wrong:

“’Happy Gilmore’ tells the story of a violent sociopath. Since it's about golf, that makes it a comedy. The movie, the latest in the dumber and dumbest sweepstakes, stars Adam Sandler . . . “ – Robert Ebert, February 16, 1996.

Before we dive into how Happy Gilmore 2 speaks into a modern golf cultural context, consider my synopsis of the original (quite different from Robert Ebert’s):

Happy Gilmore tells the story of a colorful, working-class hero who must learn to integrate his anger and passion toward serving something beyond himself. Since it’s about golf, it is about the development of the human psyche. All jokes aside, this class hero’s journey follows the development of self-discipline and vision (the “Happy Place”) through the meeting of a mysterious mentor (Chubbs Peterson). Happy Gilmore is encouraged by his female counterpart Virginia Venit (or inner “anima” in Jungian psychoanalytic terms). He faces a literal dragon (alligator) along with a clear representative of Ego (Shooter McGavin), among many other literal obstacles on his path – including a mechanical clown and hired heckler who both mock Happy’s struggle for an integrated and “whole” identity.

 

My Review of Happy Gilmore 2

***SPOILER ALERT for those who have not seen Happy Gilmore 2.***

While the original Happy Gilmore remains an iconic sports comedy classic, I’m not saying that it was intended to be a psychological masterpiece. The trite concepts of golf psychology are even parodied by one of the film’s funniest characters:

Gary Potter: “Harness in the good energy, bIock out the bad. Harness energy, bIock bad. FeeI the fIow, Happy. It's circuIar. It's Like a carouseI. You get on the horse. It goes up, down and around. CircuIar. CircIe. With the music, the fIow. AII good things.”

In one of my favorite moments from the sequel, Gary Potter (played by the great and late comedian Kevin Nealson) interviews Scottie Scheffler, who is well-known for both his dominance of golf along with his spiritually groundedness and security as a human being.

Scottie responds to Gary Potter’s incoherent questioning with something like the following: 

“…was there a question in there?”

 

Let’s run through the things I loved about Happy Gilmore 2:

  • The golfer cameos killed it

    • Scottie broke a bit from his mold as a boring albeit dominant athlete – they flexed his “bad boy” side in a playful way, making fun of his incidents with police

    • John Daly plays a hilarious shadow-mirror for Happy Gilmore — who he has become by the second telling of this story (self-awareness was a general strength of the sequel)

  • The Will Zalatoris bit made me especially happy

    • Side note: the actor who played the original caddy in Happy Gilmore, Jared Van Snellenberg, is now a psychiatry professor (so I was onto something by exploring a psychoanalytic interpretation of the story…)

  • Adam Sandler brings heart into the movie, like always, with a likeable down-on-his-everything hero

  • Ben Stiller (Hal) and Christopher McDonald (Shooter) continue to be all-time geniuses of playing comedic villains

    • In Shooter’s case, the turn as an “anti-hero” brought a loveable surprise for the second movie, and if I wanted to overplay my psychological analysis of the original, I would say that this represents Happy Gilmore befriending his ego in order to fight the greater enemy of golf’s degradation as a sport

 

Now that said, and despite my absolute love for the original, there is plenty of “chaff” to separate from the “wheat” of Happy Gilmore 2:

  • Endless cameos to the point that it took me out of my suspension of disbelief, like I was watching a skit about Happy Gilmore rather than a coherent continuation of its plot

  • Many jokes that don’t really work for adults (or for kids)

  • Flashbacks as spoon-fed reminders to the audience about how stupid we are (as if the people watching hadn’t seen the original film 100 times or more)

    • Remove flashbacks and a few cameos, and the runtime comes down 20 minutes, easily.

  • My least favorite part (BY FAR) is how the movie treats Julie Bowen’s character Virginia Venit by killing her with an errant tee shot within 5 minutes. She is the grounded heart of the first movie, and there were plenty of ways to set up conflicts in the second movie. Bowen is one of the best from the original cast, and her presence could have kept the movie from being a completely over-the-top Sandler festival.

 

 

What does Happy Gilmore 2 “say” about modern golf culture?

All gripes aside, I still think that Happy Gilmore 2 is a respectable comedy in a modern world that’s devoid of good comedy movies. I cringed throughout, but I also laughed quite a bit and overall enjoyed revisiting the Sandler-fantasy world of golf. I still found myself interested to explore its choices and symbolism with a bit more depth, given that Happy Gilmore 2 brings in hot-button subjects (mainly, through its obvious parody of LIV Golf).

One could argue that Happy Gilmore 2 even supports sustainability with how much it recycles jokes from the original, but my primary interest is elsewhere in the film.

Happy Gilmore 2 portrays the wrestling of golf’s core ethics within its economic model for success (something like financial sustainability vs socio-cultural and interpersonal sustainability).

The real conflict at the core of both films, in my opinion, is the following:

 

The spirit, ethics, & essence of golf (integrity, individuation, charity, belonging, self-transcendence)

VS

The commercialization of golf (long drives and cheap entertainment to maximize short-term gains, at the cost of morality and even long-term health — the villains of the second movie even literally have separated hips so that they can hit the ball further, representing the ethics of separation)

 

The Tragedies & Ironies of Success

The sequel shows Happy Gilmore confronting (ironically) the radical changes to golf that he himself created on some level (gimmicks, long-ball, poor etiquette). In an admittedly clever inversion of the original film’s premise, Happy is now the one defending golf. It’s no longer the classic “slobs over snobs” golf story (a la Caddyshack), but rather the defense of golf’s purity and integrity through a team-up of slobs and snobs (including Shooter McGavin, who now reconciles with Happy Gilmore in an unexpectedly positive character development).

The story has an almost patriotic support of traditional golf vs alternative “extreme” forms that have radicalized it into something countercultural (“Maxi Golf” being a clear stand-in for LIV). Even more ironically, two players from the team that represents the TOUR in Happy Gilmore 2 (Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau) are LIV players in real life.

The Triumph of Service toward Love & Integrity

At the end of the day, as I shared in my breakdown of the original story, the heart of Happy Gilmore 1&2 is driven by the main character’s personal motives. What makes Happy such a heroic character is his commitment to being a champion of the people while helping those in his close circle (and in the sequel’s case, paying for his daughter to attend ballet school). Happy Gilmore is a deeply flawed but also responsible and loveable hero.

Even Shooter McGavin’s redemptive story arc in the second film comes from his willing sacrifice of lower, short-term self-gratification and egoism (along with letting go of his violent drive to destroy Happy). Happy Gilmore’s claim to happiness was never in his failures as a hockey player, nor in his successes as a golfer, but in his responsible commitments as a grandson, friend, lover, and father.

My Final Take

Does the movie reach the legacy of the original? No. Does it succeed as a watchable direct-to-Netflix comedy? I thought so! As they say, art imitates life, and life imitates art. In the case of Happy Gilmore 2, art imitates itself. Could you counterargue that Sandler himself is guilty of commercializing the success of the original in producing a sequel that no one really asked for? AND is the original still loaded with product placements??

Possibly… probably… but it appears that everyone who brought this film to life had a great time creating it and harnessing in the flow. Speaking on behalf of my inner child, the world needs loveable comedy heroes.

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A Psychoanalysis of Happy Gilmore