Summary
The Studio is full of bad jokes and fake laughs in Episode 7, but that’s the point, as social awkwardness and Hollywood’s self-importance rub up against more worthy causes.
I didn’t like Episode 6 of The Studio as much as I’ve liked some of the others. It isn’t as perfectly balanced as the third episode, as brilliantly specific a parody as the fourth, or as generous to the supporting cast as the fifth. But it still works, both as a broad send-up of the self-importance that Hollywood blockbusters must necessarily burn for fuel and a character study of a man so helplessly insecure that he has to equate green-lighting a zombie diarrhoea movie with curing cancer in children.
That right there is the main joke of “The Pediatric Oncologist”. Matt is dating a woman named Linda (Rebecca Hall) who happens to be one, and he joins her at a lavish charity gala hosted at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre (which Oppenheimer used as a set) to raise money for a worthy cause. But there are other things on Matt’s mind, namely the trailer for a stupid movie titled Duhpocalypse! starring Johnny Knoxville and Josh Hutcherson that is apparently a broad satire about medical disinformation but is really a movie about the explosive spread of a contagion via the rotten anuses of the infected.
It’s clear from the jump that Matt and Linda don’t have much in common. She doesn’t seem especially interested in film in general, let alone the MK Ultra franchise, a string a seven $3.8-billion-grossing action movies that Matt is nebulously responsible for. It’s obvious from the look on Rebecca Hall’s face that she thinks he’s a bit of an idiot manchild, which he is, but usually people like that know they’re like that. Matt doesn’t. He thinks he’s a profound champion of outsider art and that everyone should find his accomplishments, such as they are, just as impressive as he does.
For what it’s worth, I agree with Matt that all movies, even bad ones, are art. But I also agree with Linda that movies shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as curing cancer in terms of importance to humanity. The dichotomy between these two trains of thought is reiterated constantly in The Studio Episode 6. When Matt and Linda enter the gala, both are on their phones like the busy businesspeople they are, but Linda is on a call about potentially saving a sick child’s life, and Matt is on a call about ensuring that the trailer for Duhpocalypse! includes Hutcherson being sharted on. Did I mention Spike Jonze directed this fake movie? Linda has never even heard of him.
You’ll notice that even by parody standards, Duhpocalypse! is even more of a stretch than the Kool-Aid movie from the premiere. It’s an intentional choice designed to emphasise the ridiculousness of Matt’s position. If he were championing something like The Godfather, he’d have a point. Correction: He does have a point. And he’s being mocked and ridiculed by Linda’s doctor friends long before they know what the movie is about. But the fact that Duhpocalypse! is so ridiculous makes Matt’s passionate defence of it even funnier. His outlandish claims that making movies is morally equivalent to saving lives becomes increasingly preposterous, culminating in a ridiculous payoff during which an annoyed Matt outbids the doctors during an auction for a golf trip to Ireland and then holds the vacation hostage until the doctors admit that what he does is just as important as what they do.
They don’t, obviously. Matt crashes out figuratively and literally, leading to him breaking his finger and collapsing through a table. As he’s being wheeled into an ambulance, Linda tells him she has phoned ahead to get him a private room. Matt gloats that there will be a screen on the wall, which apparently proves his point. At least he still has MK Ultra.
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