This is (Not) a Review of Lady Ballers

I am fascinated by Lady Ballers. It frankly haunts me.

This really shouldn’t shock anyone who knows me, I am well known in most of my friend groups for having an affinity for…let’s be gentle and say “Less well regarded media.” Trash, to be less generous, I like trash. And I think I have good reasons, they tend to be raw and unpredictable, unfettered from usual conventions, in ways that I find engaging. When an artists is unfettered from conventions and executes their vision with skill and precision it’s often one of my favorite pieces of art of all time. But even when it’s put into a poorly executed project the results are still revealing. What a writer or director chooses to do when freed from the usual constraints of marketability, story structure or taste is revealing. Gaze long enough into the abyss that is The Room, a piece of Tommy Wiseau’s soul will gaze back. Whether looking at his ass is worth it is up to you.

Which honestly makes the output of the Daily Wire fascinating because I feel like we’re at the farthest reaches from that kind of work. Oh they’re still bad: Lady Ballers may be executed with a similar amount of skill, a similar grasp of cinematic fundamentals, a similar level of script focus, as Wiseau’s opus. But even the weird, self serving honesty that makes The Room such a fascinating piece of work is gone. When you stare into Lady Ballers, no part of Jeremy Boreing’s soul stares back.

So why am I still staring?

My more anxious friends, or perhaps my therapist, might be worried that I’m seeking out media about how I’m a monster who must be stopped as a kind of attack on myself. An artistic version of self harm, the way a dive into the worst the internet has to offer about you can be a form of digital self harm. Except…I dunno, I don’t feel harmed. If it’s going to be artistic self harm it has to hurt, but Lady Ballers has no teeth in its attacks on trans people. It’s the same bullshit I hear on twitter day in and day out, barely altered to fit the medium. Am I supposed to be hurt by the not one, but two different Dylan Mulvaney references? Cause at this point, I’m kinda numb to Bud Light Jokes.

And it’s not like the plot is exactly making its points well or in a convincing way. The characters, the story, the themes, even the comedy, all of it needs to twist around the need to shove as many right wing talking points as possible into its one hundred ten minute runtime. The main character’s daughter, who could be considered one of the movie’s main characters (if I were willing to concede it has characters) completely flips her opinion on women and whether trans women count as women, without explanation or buildup, purely so she can be used as a mouthpiece for some misogyny. Not even transphobia or transmisogyny, just regular old misogyny, straight out of a bad 80s standup. The core of the argument of the film, that trans women must be excluded from women’s sports to protect women’s sports, falls apart when you realize how much naked contempt the movie has for women’s sports.

Maybe the core of the film, the part that means something, isn’t found in the text of the story, but in a moment towards the middle where the movie stops dead in its tracks to simply advertise its director/star’s business ventures. And when I say advertise, I mean it. I don’t mean an obtrusive product placement or an in-universe ad for a real world product. Not even an unrelated ad, like the movie is a YouTube video and you’re waiting for the Skip button to light up. No, the movie simply stops, the cast does an ad spot for Jeremy Boreing’s grooming products, and the movie resumes. Its presence fascinates me, a depth that even Adam Sandler at his hackiest has yet to plumb. An open admission that the film has no interest in artistic credibility or even a baseline level of verisimilitude. It will shatter its own fiction on the off chance that it gets you to buy even a single overpriced razor.

So is that it? Is that the soul of Lady Ballers? Just a naked cash grab, scrambling for some of the cash that’s sloshing around the anti-trans movement? Even the greatest actors alive aren’t above doing Jaws IV for the money but…can that really be it? The return on investment for a streaming movie is complicated, difficult to quantify and even at its best, not huge. Can it really be easier money than just publishing another 50 videos of Ben Shapiro going over the same exhausted points again? If they’re after money then why bother shooting shot reverse shot on a dolly circling around the characters? Why does every Daily Wire alumni take time out of their busy schedule of repeating the same 5 talking points to have a cameo? And if they want to be a real movie, why do they shatter their credibility as a movie to do an ad spot?

And this lack of credibility isn’t a universal thing among the Daily Wire’s fictional output. In an effort to understand my fascination with this movie, I did watch some of their other movies, Terror on the Prairie and Run Hide Fight and they’re like…actual movies? I wouldn’t call them good (in fact they’re both pretty bad) but they’re credible films, they have plots and arcs and characters, a world that they take seriously. This is a unique element of this film.

Maybe it’s a natural progression of comedy films; I referenced Adam Sandler above, and the distance between the overt and pervasive product placement in his numbingly dull crossdressing comedy Jack and Jill and the actual advertisement in the Daily Wire’s numbingly dull crossdressing comedy is smaller than you think. But as easy at that explanation goes down, it leaves a bad aftertaste. The difference might not be huge, but there is a difference there, and more to the point Jack and Jill represents a nadir of Sandler’s shamelessness, a nadir he hasn’t gotten back to in the 13 years since its release. Perhaps I’m being naive, but I refuse to believe that this is just the natural endpoint Happy Madison productions is heading towards, and the Daily Wire just got there by accident.

This is not a review because I don’t know how to review this movie. Is it good, is it funny, does it accomplish the goals it sets out to? Well fuck no, god no, and obviously no, in order, but what does that matter? What does my opinion matter to a movie whose only goal is to exist to spread hate and fear about me and people like me? It won, it beat me, it exists and the people who hate me will talk about it, will defend and laud it, not for anything it says or does, not for any joke or point, but just to make sure I and people like me know that they hate us. It’s not a piece of art, a conversation between audience and artist, it’s a sermon. It’s not a movie, it’s a badge that they wear on their chest.

You know, I said I was maybe being naive about Happy Madison a moment ago, but maybe I was also, in my own way, being naive about this movie, about this movie not reflecting Jeremy Boreing’s soul. And maybe I was wrong. Maybe this movie, this awful, ugly, cruel film, this movie that thinks that all you need for film is to staple right wing talking points to the skeleton of a plot that was hackneyed when Juwnanna Mann did it over 20 years ago, that attacks trans people to “Protect Women’s Sports” while not even pretending to not hate women’s sports, this movie that puts such pathetically outdated misogynist stereotypes as “Women can’t park” into the mouth of a literal child, maybe it is a reflection of Jeremy Boreing’s soul. Maybe when I gaze into the ad spot for Boreing’s razor company, his soul is gazing back.

And I can’t think of any insult deeper than that.