Bad Boy Bubby
Bubby is 35 and has spent his whole life in a one bedroom apartment with his mother. He is told that the outside world is full of poison gas and his mother wears a gas mask as she walks out the door, telling him to "stay still!". His mother cooks milk over bread, cleans him and uses him for her sexual urges. This all changes when his biological father returns, not knowing he has a son. He finds Bubby's talent for imitation amusing at first and then disgusting and Bubby's parents abuse him. Bubby reacts and his Oedipal cycle is complete.
We root for Bubby because he is such a complete innocent, but the Freudian world he lives in is so ugly, so soul-rending, that Bubby continues to do the most evil actions in response to it. This is like Being There, as Dave suggested, but also the recent film Bugsby Bear draws quite a bit from Bubby, both of which have child-men set loose on the world. But while those two films are charming, Bubby takes delight in a Lynchian ugliness of the world which beset our Ulysses with calamities, only he has not a whit of inner craftiness.
Of four films about child-men (Bubby, Being There, Bugsby, and Lars and the Real World), I might rank them by their level of support or attack of the innocents at the center of the films. Lars is the most supportive, an ideal community, while Bubby is the most cynical. None of these portrayals feel realistic. Perhaps Bugsby Bear feels more realistic because people are entranced by his uniqueness, but drops him like a hot potato when it is difficult. In Bad Boy Bubby, people aren't just thoughtless, but mean. Not all people, but most seem mean and some are nice. Not only is that not the world I live in, but it is not a world I wish to live in. I think that Bubby is the smartest of the four films, but in the end I am left with a hopelessness in which one has to survive past horrible parenting, random violence, spite and one's own personal overreactions in order to have luck shine on us and we can live a happy life.
3.5/5
Bad Boy Bubby is my favourite recommend, which given it is a dark film is not necessarily a nice recommend. I am not sure that der Heer's vision is Lynchian. It is a somewhat ugly world Bubby goes out into, but does not have the noir weirdness to it. Perhaps that does mean it lacks a craftiness that Lynch brings, but that is fine with me.
Yes Bubby's is a bleak world, but there are glimmers of light (for a different bleak view of humanity try Lichter aka Distant Lights (2003), but I do not remember any glimmers of light in that one).
Thank you for watching the movie.