Jon Heder Vs. Car Stereos

The Case For Car Stereos

Driving can be a very tiresome experience. In the city, anyone or anything can just randomly step off a curb and into your right of way -- cyclists, pedestrians, bums, adults pushing baby strollers, babies themselves -- and yet if you hit them, the resulting criminal trial will end with a judgment that you are at fault. Seriously! Plus there are all the road signs and traffic lights throwing themselves up between you and your destination. On the highway, you get hypnotized by the sameness of the countryside or the absence of stimuli requiring you to do anything but maintain your speed and stay in your lane. With cruise control, forget about it. You might as well just take a nap. Not that we recommend that. Though truthfully, if you did, you probably wouldn't really risk hitting a cyclist. A raccoon, maybe, but that could happen even when you're wide awake, and Johnny Law's not going to slap the cuffs on you for thinning their ranks, anyway.

The best way to distract yourself from the less appealing aspects of driving? No, not chatting with your passengers. No, not driving around with your laptop, trying to steal someone's wireless internet signal to surf for really dirty porn. No, not picking up a confused hitchhiker and engaging him in a spirited round of License Plate Bingo, although that is the second-best way. Try turning on your car stereo, bro! On short drives, there's the time-waster of clicking from one FM station to the next, trying to find one that isn't playing any artist who is currently or ever has been a Black Eyed Pea. On a longer haul, you can experience the rich pageant of a nation's opinion-makers (or, at the very least, its opinion-havers) on the lowest-wattage stations to successfully apply for broadcast licenses; if not for them, you might not know that there are still people alive who use words like "octoroon" without irony and who blame Phil Donahue for high gas prices.

When you're alone in a car, the sun goes down, you can't see other drivers, and you're hermetically sealed within glass, steel, and upholstery, loneliness and silence can conspire to drive you quite...quite mad. In such circumstances, especially, the car stereo provides you with evidence that other humans are currently sharing the earth with you, and that some of them want you to take advantage of bargain prices on quality merchandise before the big sale ends Sunday!

The Case For Jon Heder

As our own Hey! It's That Guy! section amply proves, we believe that not every actor needs to be a leading man. Furthermore, there are comparatively few actors who should be leading men. That's not a dis to non-leading-man actors: we think it must be more fun to do things other than get the gorgeous yet pure-hearted girl, save the town from being subsumed by the mega-corporation, or stymie the efforts of the invading aliens. And leading men must think so too, since whenever they break from type to play sexist motivational speakers or incomprehensible pikey boxers, it's covered with more intensity than a papal election.

The point is, Jon Heder's having the perfect career, by some standards: he (basically) started out as a leading man in Napoleon Dynamite, but as the kind of weirdo leading man that regular leading men periodically pretend they want to play. The titular Napoleon was all quirk; the movie in which he appeared, all high irony. We don't want to hear a breath of how its Mormon production team (and leading man) are not ironic but rather the soul of sincerity: the 9842 "Vote For Pedro" shirts we've seen parading about in the world on the chests of Chipsters who certainly spent their high-school years titty-twisting Pedro's real-life brethren say otherwise.

And now, Heder gets to have his leading-man cake and snag it in his weirdo braces (or carry it around town in his weirdo helmet, or weirdly offer it to the girl he's stalking, or whatever), too. The cult success of Napoleon has made Heder famous enough that his gormless face is meant to be the fresh draw of The Benchwarmers, a movie that also contains the poorly aging likes of David Spade and Rob Schneider. As the latest youth obsession the appeal of which studio executives can't quite explain, Heder can randomly pop up, for no real good reason, as a medium (or something) in Just Like Heaven. (See also: Andy Milonakis in Waiting... Or anywhere else outside his parents' basement or an endocrinologist's office.) Heder's voice is so distinctively dopey that it was the centerpiece of TV advertising for this summer's Monster House. Apparently, he can even be the mouth-breathing simpleton getting iffy instruction in the ways of love in this week's School For Scoundrels. Hey, not all lessons can be taught with a blackboard and textbook. Some just have to be learned at the barrel of a paintball gun.

The Decision

Heder's role in Scoundrels may seem like a good score, but look closer. Even those Hollywood executives who treated him like the human equivalent of YouTube -- something they were suspicious about personally, but with sufficient traction among "young people" that they thought they'd better co-opt it anyway, just in case -- seem to be hedging their Heder bets on this one: if they can't convince you to see him get the girl, then maybe you can be enticed by the prospect that Billy Bob Thornton's going to hit him a lot. The presence of co-stars like Sarah Silverman, David Cross, Ben Stiller, and Todd Louiso also seems designed to remind you of another leading man of mysterious appeal: Jack Black. But we know better than studio executives. We know that Jack Black is smart-dumb, like Will Ferrell, and not just dumb, like Heder. Anyway: we, personally, were not swept up by Napoleon Dynamite fever, but we can accept that the movie had its own unique charms and that it was probably pretty appealing before the Date Movie parodies and officially licensed lip balms and whatnot. Hollywood's various attempts to reproduce the Napoleon magic by putting Heder in movies that didn't have Napoleon's organic provenance are all destined to fail. Take him out of the blond 'fro and period costumes and Heder is just another slack-jawed goober romancing Jacinda Barrett. And not one that could try to make himself look fancier by putting together the soundtrack.

Car stereos, by contrast, require no marketing massaging to appeal to the public -- especially now, in the age of the iPod and the mix CD, when you can program your own soundtrack. If you leave your iPod and your mix CDs at home by mistake, you can still pull over to the nearest electronics store and grab yourself a satellite radio, where at least you can pick a channel of programming to fit your particular mood and lessen the boredom of the road. It is true that the more you spend to pimp your mobile audio, the more likely it is that your car will be menaced by thieves and brigands. But the mere fact that such a thing would cross your mind just demonstrates how precious a car stereo really is. In fact, the only thing that could be worse than getting your car stereo stolen on the first day of a cross-country road trip would be getting your car stereo replaced with Jon Heder.

The Winner

Car Stereos