I like to think I am, in some meaningful and absolute sense, a good person. But on days where I fall short of this objective — where I don’t feel like giving up my subway seat, for example — I take solace in the certitude of my relative virtuousness: I am, at the very least, no worse than most people. The world is ablaze with fires someone else started; surely none of them are my fault.
It’s easy to find evidence for this moral superiority if we feel compelled to self-select for it. And while this conviction isn’t incorrect — bigots exist in abundance and enact unforgivable violence on marginalized people — it isn’t especially helpful. We may not be part of the problem, but when patting ourselves on the back from some imagined moral high ground, we’re sure as hell not part of the solution. Nowhere is this issue of unactionable, self-congratulatory disdain more prevalent than in Hollywood, where producers love to finance, and then give themselves awards for, films shaking their heads at cartoonish intolerance and comforting audiences for doing the bare, passive minimum — all while ignoring the still urgent issues within both the world and their own industry.
One place where this lack of self-reflection has been most disappointing is in the hidden camera comedy genre. Prank comedy is by nature an outsider medium, depicting the unpredictable actions of everyday people and, as they face mounting absurdity, revealing something about their moral compasses. But much of the mainstream prank comedy of the last two decades has used this access to punch down. Films like Borat treat the audience as co-conspirators, creating a fundamental divide between the viewers and those they prank; we can watch the powerful and ignorant debase themselves, safe in knowing their decisions offer no implications about us. This isn’t bad comedy — I enjoy watching Rudy Giuliani receive his comeuppance as much as the next person — but it is unchallenging. Prank comedy is most successful when it asks us to identify with the subjects on screen and to recognize the discomforting proximity between their actions and our own.
This is the exact dynamic Eric Andre, already one of the masters of surreal pseudo-realism, achieves in his latest film Bad Trip. The Netflix mockumentary follows Chris (Andre) and Bud (Lil Rel Howery) on a road trip to New York, where Chris hopes to confess his love for childhood crush Maria (Michaela Conlin). This loose plot allows for detours to a number of corners of the country, where Andre and director Kitao Sakurai bring their patented brand of shenanigans. Bad Trip works within the style of broad, physical comedy established by its predecessors, and these pranks are, on the surface, no different than those we have seen before. But despite using this same cinematic language, the film’s portrayal of its subjects aims for a more complex reaction from its audience — Andre is interested in using our disbelief to inspire not only amusement, but introspection.
Most sequences in Bad Trip are constructed to follow a similar trajectory. As the setup, Chris, Bud, and Trina (a standout Tiffany Haddish) form connections with strangers, establishing the geography of the setting and drawing potential subjects for the prank into the audience’s field of view. Then the actors begin to spend the goodwill they’ve accrued. Once begun, each prank escalates quickly, dragging subjects straight into the deep end of absurdity before somehow going even further — Andre raises the stakes of each scene one more time than I expected to be possible. A car wash customer who has watched Chris’ clothes get sucked into a vacuum while trying to help him talk to Maria? Asked to get her number while our hero hides naked in the backseat. Pedestrians who have volunteered to mediate the breakup of two friends crawling out of an overturned, stolen car? Treated to an explosion and the threat of further danger to both Chris and themselves.
Watching subjects deal with this ludicrous mounting of stakes builds a tension throughout the film more nuanced than the usual transgressive thrill at seeing a prank executed. For every time a gruff passerby asks Chris to get out of their face, there is another moment where someone responds to his insane antics with immense empathy. The army recruiter who consoles Chris during a mental breakdown; the patrons at the bar where he gets too drunk, who try to provide assistance even as he throws up on them: the more we see these people commit genuine emotional investment to Chris and Bud’s absurd woes, the more the film’s hijinks at their expense become uncomfortable.
The key component of Andre’s method is that, rather than setting a low bar of social obligation for his subjects and gloating as they fail to clear it, he sets a lofty bar and allows us to both laugh and marvel as people attempt to rise to the occasion. Each prank watches the subjects stretch their empathy past any reasonable human limit and then ends on a stinger of apathy when they’ve finally had enough. The aforementioned car crash scene ends with the intervening bystanders walking away in frustration as Chris mopes back towards the explosive vehicle. Andre’s provocative abilities in such scenes are unlimited, so these decisions to walk away from the mayhem are understandable, but while detachment is the destination, it is not the sole focus. Each scene cuts as soon as the subjects disengage — in the context of the kindness leading up to it, this can be read either as confirmation of people’s inherent selfishness or as a celebration of how much stress they endure before this selfishness manifests.
If each individual prank illustrates the possibility of compassion from its subjects, then the cumulative effect of the film is to realize a similar investment from its viewers — something it accomplishes through its dedication to maintaining its own baseline reality. Even in expository or transitional scenes, Sakurai’s camera never wavers from the omniscient mockumentary style that characterizes the set pieces, and the actors always treat the emotional stakes of Chris and Bud’s journey as legitimate — the ceaseless misadventures create a cumulative strain on our heroes, one that is palpable to the audience. The beginning of the film is its weakest stretch, mostly because we’re not sure how seriously we’re supposed to take Chris and Bud’s struggles. But Andre and company never wink, and as we adjust to the strange pseudo-reality, a funny thing happens: we, like the subjects of the pranks, start to invest in the characters’ issues as real.
Bad Trip’s agenda, if it has one, is in asking us to question whether the constructed nature of this reality makes it any less legitimate. This comes to a head when Bud cuts off his friendship with Chris, who chases down a bus to win him over again. The ensuing dramatic speech is a clear send-up of Hollywood tropes, so over-the-top that it should be impossible to take seriously. Yet that doesn’t stop one passenger — or, if you must know, this reviewer — from tearing up. That speech, and the movie as a whole, make the argument that the process of caring about something is far more relevant than the outcome of that investment. The textual ending of the film sees Chris rejected by Maria but happy he was able to bond with his friend on such a great trip. The actual ending of the film, accompanied by the end credits, shows the actors unveiling the hidden cameras and thanking subjects for their reactions during the pranks — while the pretense for these reactions was fake, the reactions themselves were very real, and there’s an immense catharsis in seeing these people get recognition for them. The endings of the film, and of each scene, establish that our ultimate response is not our sole response and that each moment we are able to commit to something outside ourselves is worth celebrating.
It’s worth questioning, when hatred is as prevalent as ever, the value of such a relativistic ethical stance. America has a founding impulse, renewed since the 2016 election, of humanizing its worst members at the expense of the vulnerable, of telling us that those who are bad are actually good. But Bad Trip isn’t interested in absolving anyone. The question of whether people are good is, the film argues, irrelevant — to assume individuals have some essential nature, whether good or bad, is to forfeit the responsibility of holding ourselves accountable in each moment. After all, the failures of everyone else are well-established, but unlike so many movies that take the easy route of villainizing others for our own comfort, they are failures Bad Trip is unconcerned with. As much as the film’s absurdity makes for an entertaining, irreverent comedy, it also highlights the importance of treating the fostering of compassion in ourselves as a process. Like any good road trip, Eric Andre knows that becoming a good person is not about the destination; it’s about the journey.
