News > Heat Vision and Jack: A Lesson in Absurd Brilliance
April 10, 2007
Written by Richard Matthes
In 1999, Ben Stiller set out to make the worst superhero television pilot imaginable. The premise was absurdly bad: An astronaut, Jack Austin (Jack Black), flew too close to the sun, his brain expanded—"like cookie dough"—and he became three times smarter than the smartest man on earth, though only when the sun is up. "Heat Vision" (Voiced by Owen Wilson) is his motorcycle, sidekick, and unemployed best friend, formerly known as Doug. Heat Vision was transformed from human to motorcycle by character actor Ron Silver. Not a character named "Ron Silver," but the actor who is purported by the credits to be playing himself. Silver is a "former astronaut," NASA operative, and "gifted actor" trying to find Jack and so NASA can extract his brain and study it.
The pilot was never picked up, of course. Comedies with such a casual disregard for the formulas craved by the narcotized American audience don't often succeed (see: Andy Richter Controls the Universe, The Tick, Arrested Development, et al.).
The Pilot:
The episode begins with Ben Stiller speaking to the camera. He talks about his cancelled show, his Emmy, and how incredible this new show will be. He pushes the hype on the show so much that, by the end, he's calling the special effects comparable to those in Star Wars. He's playing the role of the kid in elementary school who spent three weeks bragging about his amazing diorama of Gettysburg, but when he turns it in you notice that he has placed Washington at the Battle of Gettysburg, fighter jets crashing into tanks among the Union dead, and he has He-Man commanding the Confederate army while riding Battlecat. It's all a calculated ploy, though, that will bring expectations so high that we can't help but laugh at the execution.
The episode follows a pretty standard script. An alien named Paragon infects a cook through a radio, he vaporizes a woman with his eyes, Jack gets blamed for it, he goes to jail. While there, he tells how he became a genius, explains why Ron Silver is trying to catch him, and trains a German Shepherd to get the keys to his cell once sunrise comes and he's a genius again. Meanwhile, Paragon has killed 6 prostitutes, and Ron Silver is fresh on Jack's trail and flirting with the local cop (Christine Taylor), then assaulting said cop. After Jack escapes, he goes back to the scene of the crime, and while there Paragon asks Heat Vision where "The Sunken Pleasure" is, then tries to kill him, then tries to kill Jack, then runs away. Christine Taylor shows up, they go to her grandmother's house, and Jack explains Heat Vision's origin story. Christine and Jack have sex in her grandmother's bed. When she wakes up, Jack has created a "silver bullet" that will kill Paragon—I won't go into details, since it's so amazingly stupid and looks like a radio with duct tape placed strategically on it. They figure out Paragon is going to "The Sunken Pleasure," a strip club where Ben Stiller plays the pirate DJ. Paragon disintegrates a stripper who is giving him a lap dance, a guy tries to beat him with a pool cue and gets disintegrated, and then Heat Vision and Jack fly through the wall, Batman-style. Jack and Paragon fight it out, both pudgy characters trading blows like it's going out of style. Ron Silver shows up, and Christine destroys Jack's "silver bullet" by banging it on his skull. Heat Vision saves them by peeling out on a carpet and tripping Ron Silver, but Jack gets distracted and is knocked into a stripper pole by Paragon. The stripper pole goes through a speaker, and Jack has Pirate Ben Stiller press record and remove Paragon from the cook when he grabs ahold of the pole. Jack and Christine have a heart-to-heart, and then he and Heat Vision continue on the road, with Ron Silver in pursuit.
The Brilliance of Characterization:
Jack Black does not look like an astronaut. He's a pudgy little man with bad hair and crazy eyes. In addition, the human brain is not cookie dough, and probes do not fly all that close to the sun. Jack is a mixture of all the 70s-80s action stars from television, like the Six Million Dollar Man and "Knight Rider's" own Hasselhoff. Add to this mixture the manic intensity of one Nacho Libre, and you've got a completely original and interesting character. While he is supposed to be "three times smarter than the smartest man on earth," he spends his time explaining things in ways that didn't even make sense to the show's writers. He is only intelligent when the sun is out, which means that during the night he's stumbling over words and doing karate kicks.
Ron Silver is not an astronaut. I know, that sounds like sacrilege, but let's proceed from that premise. If "Heat Vision and Jack" cast him as an astronaut, it would be funny, but not absurd. If they had cast him as an astronaut and as a killer, it would be quite funny. What makes it hilarious, though, is that Ron Silver is all of those things and Ron Silver as well. When we first meet Ron Silver, he is giving out an autograph because a coroner saw him as the bad guy in "Timecop" the night before. The viewer can just burst out laughing at any time, because this aspect of the show is always present. It's not a one-off joke, it is one of the building blocks of the show.
Owen Wilson is not a motorcycle. No matter what television may tell you, it's simply not true. He was in "You, Me and Dupree," and no motorcycle would be caught dead acting in such a crappy movie. Heat Vision's origin story is just idiotic: Ron Silver shoots him with a crazy ray gun that was meant for Jack. Why does the ray gun meld him to the motorcycle? Who knows. But we don't care about that, because the whole point of this show is to redefine its own parameters. It's constantly pushing the boundaries, and Heat Vision is no exception. He's a human character in a motorcycle's body, but he also feels what the motorcycle feels, and he can be sad and happy and he can really, really want to light leaves on fire in the yard. Just like Ron Silver's character, Heat Vision is a building block of the show, a joke unto himself.
The Brilliance of Tone:
What makes this show so brilliant, though, is that it ostensibly takes itself seriously while the subtext of absurdity is always present. For example, as Christine is taking the call about Paragon killing prostitutes, Jack is in the background doing Jack Black karate kicks and punches in his blue satin jumpsuit. As she speaks, the audible, "kee-yas!" are playing out in the background. While it is an action show in the foreground, the subtext—the real background—is filled with these touches.
These touches are what allow the show to be as bad as it is, yet be completely hilarious. As I explained above, the plot to the show is horrible. The premise is horrible. The fact that they have a motorcycle who can talk is horrible. But the alchemy of putting all of these together and trotting them out to the audience under the aegis of a serious tone creates comedic gold. If this show screwed up this part, if it took a jokey tone—one that spent all its time winking at the audience—it would be an extended SNL sketch. Instead, it rewards the viewer who understands that the show's structure is built on this serious tone, and that he can be even further rewarded by finding the weak points in that structure and pushing on them. The weak points of the structure are easy to find, because they occur whenever the show glosses over a situation that would make any normal person confused.
For example, when Jack tells Christine Taylor that Heat Vision was created by a ray gun, she just accepts it as though that could happen to anyone. The "cookie dough brain?" Completely impossible, yet nobody questions the reasoning. Ron Silver as an actor, assassin, and astronaut? Again, this is ridiculous, but the show treats it as commonplace and not worthy of comment. All of these instances are what come together to create the absurd brilliance of the show, for these are the moments that can be laughed at even when there is no joke. It's always funny when Owen Wilson talks as a motorcycle, because, well, why the hell is he a motorcycle in the first place? How is it that Ron Silver is such a jack-of-all-trades? Why is a fat, short dude an astronaut with a genius brain?
In today's market, I think it would have been possible for "Heat Vision and Jack" to be picked up as a show. It would probably be cancelled within 6 episodes by a shortsighted network, but there has been a perceptible shift in the comedic tastes of a certain segment of the American public—let's call them the "smart people"—that appreciates comedy that doesn't talk down to them. Shows like "The Office," "30 Rock," and the hilarious new Conan O'Brien-Andy Richter show "Andy Barker, P.I." all have begun to accumulate a die-hard audience of fans. These fans can't stand shows like "According to Jim" and "2 and a Half Men," shows that are so devoted to looking down at the audience that they insert laugh tracks as crutches to help the viewers at home know when to laugh. While there will always be a large portion of the population that will adore the canned-laughter sitcoms, the die-hards that like to be talked to on their own level will hopefully become a strong enough force so that the next "Heat Vision and Jack" will get picked up and given a chance to find its audience.
And yet, while Heat Vision and Jack may have been doomed to TV obscurity at the time of its release, we are now lucky enough to live in an age of wonder. An age of technology. An age of YouTube. And so here, in its entirety, is the entire pilot episode of Heat Vision and Jack. Now that you have learned of the absurd brilliance behind this wonderful show, you are more equipped to fully appreciate it. Without further ado, here it is: the greatest television pilot ever produced.
