Dodgeball is the kind of game kids play in high school: players target opponents with a large ball -- hitting a player eliminating them -- and the aim of the game is to eliminate every member of the opposing team. Following this film’s theatrical release, Dodgeball clubs sprung up all over America -- and if Dodgeball achieves little else, it will be remembered as the film that brought mainstream popularity to this obscure game. Peter (Vince Vaughn), owner of Average Joe’s -- a small run-down gym populated with weirdos and misfits -- has decided to compete in the national Dodgeball championships -- the prize money seems to hold out his last hope of paying off the gym’s mortgage, and preventing it from being bought out by the large impersonal Globo Gym, run by self-described self-made man, White Goodman (Ben Stiller). Ben Stiller has made an art of playing men who are full of their own self-importance and are also very dumb. He dominates scenes with an incessant chatter that constantly contradicts itself in his effort to sound intelligent. He tries to pick up Kate (Christine Taylor, Stiller’s real-life wife) with a speech only Stiller could pull off, "I mean, there’s no reason we have to be shackled by the strictures of the employer-employee relationship ... unless of course you’re into that sort of thing, in which case I’ve got some shackles in the back ... I’m just kidding ... but seriously, I’ve got them..." Many of Stiller’s speeches are made funny by the way that other characters react to them. His comments are met with confused faces, and in many scenes it is precisely the reaction shots that drive home the humour.

Throughout this comedy it is not only the Dodgeball teams, but American society and culture that are targeted. When the final Dodgeball match begins White Goodman turns to Peter and says, "Prepare to be humiliated on cable television." His comment evokes a plethora of American reality shows in which people degrade themselves by doing things they would never normally dream of doing, (such as eating cockroaches), for what Andy Warhol dubbed their 15 minutes of fame and, of course, an often sizable cash prize. In a sense, reality TV, together with the unlimited programming space available on cable television, has brought American society in particular, and modern Western society in general, closer and closer to Warhol’s own peculiar vision of reality. Perhaps the most prevalent area lampooned in Dodgeball is the increasing pressure society puts on people to design and market themselves as a product that is toned, fit and flab-free. White Goodman’s promotional video for Globo Gym explains that, "Here at Globo Gym we understand that ‘ugliness’ and ‘fatness’ are genetic disorders, much like baldness or necrophilia, and it’s only your fault if you don’t hate yourself enough to do something about it..." (The joke falls a little flat when reduced to print, but in the film and in Stiller’s delivery it was actually quite funny.) The script lampoons Western society’s obsession with physical perfection and the way it is valued above everything else. Hollywood’s motivation in producing films like Dodgeball always gives reason to pause and wonder. The film’s overt message reads like a billboard poster: ‘Be happy with the body you have. You’re unique. You don’t need to change.’ The films Hollywood underpinnings, and its obvious complicity in Hollywood’s own very Warholian universe in which the production of an image is the heartbeat of life, and in which all interest in reality is absorbed in an artificial glittering surface, continually demonstrates the hollowness, hypocrisy even, of the film’s overt moralizings. This hollowness emerges at many points. Each Dodgeball team has one ‘ugly’ person on it: Peter’s team has a pasty nervous nerd who is also their worst player, and White’s team has a butch Eastern European woman with crooked teeth and thick bushy eyebrows, who is incidentally, in a nod to stereotypical images of Eastern European athleticism, their best player. When the film pairs up love interests towards the end, it’s inevitable that these two fall deeply and madly in love with each other. Hollywood producers cannot quite conceive of a match between a physically ‘attractive’ and a physically ‘ugly’ person. They make their speeches about being unique, and then present us with Beauty and Ugliness as two mutually exclusive worlds. What this film does give, apart from its humour, is the spectacle of the duplicitous modern-consumer society. It is the spectacle of Hollywood cinema deconstructing itself, of Hollywood revealing that it stands for the very values that the film’s ‘bad guys’ stand for. It’s not an uninteresting spectacle. It’s certainly one that offers a genuine insight into the cultural values in which we ourselves are embedded whether we accept them or not. And it certainly gives an added ironical edge that deepens the film’s comic dimension in a direction that the producers never dreamed of.

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