‘The Mask’ at 30: How Jim Carrey Took Advantage Of A Rare Superhero-Less Summer

Superhero cinema looked vastly different in the summer of 1994, just as it did back in 2003. Thanks to the ongoing success of Tim Burton’s Batman movies, studios were still taking repeated cracks at the cape and/or cowl business. But thanks to a variety of corporate foibles — Batman taking focus from the then-still-recent cratering of the Superman series; Marvel experiencing ongoing financial and development issues — most of the big-name superheroes remained on the sidelines. This is how the summer of 1994 came to feature zero movies with Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, or the Incredible Hulk, but did manage to spotlight heroes and anti-heroes from Caliber Press, Dark Horse Comics, and, uh, the radio?!? The final superhero movie of summer ’94 – at least among those that utilized supernatural elements; the comedy Blankman opened a few weeks later – was also its biggest hit. Recent Ace Ventura and future Riddler Jim Carrey threw on green makeup, a yellow zoot-suit, and occasional CG face-shifts to star in The Mask.

The Mask really should have been the floppiest of the 1994 superhero trilogy. The Crow may have been the most obscure character of the three, but it was a display of extraordinary visual imagination, fused with the unavoidable mystique of rising star Brandon Lee’s tragic death during production. The Shadow boasted the most famous character (albeit by default) as well as the most recognizable actor… for the moment. At the beginning of 1994, nobody saw Jim Carrey coming, at least not in terms of emerging as the biggest new star in Hollywood in years. But the smash success of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective suddenly made a comparatively low-profile New Line Cinema production a hot summer property. The Mask became his first $100 million movie in the U.S., and a big hit overseas, too – incredibly, it’s still his third-biggest movie worldwide. (Yes, it eked out more money globally than actual superhero spectacular Batman Forever.)

It also provided 1994’s only cinematic glimpse at what Carrey looked like with relatively normal hair. No Lloyd Christmas bowl cut, no Ace Ventura pompadour – Carrey’s Stanley Ipkiss, a prototypical (which is to say, vaguely aggrieved) “nice guy,” actually makes the actor look kind of handsome, in a gangly, dorky sort of way. Stanley ups his game when he finds an enchanted wooden mask, which transformers its wearer into a rubbery, green-faced id, which includes bullet-dodging, swing-dancing, and imitating old cartoons. Notably, later in the movie, a generic mobster bad guy gets ahold of it, and turns into a kind of green-faced monster, without any of the Carrey-style vocal elongations or, certainly, the ’40s-cartoon fixation. This makes The Mask something of a pioneer in the Spider-Man 3 field of a dork’s dark side nonetheless reflecting his inner nerd. Somehow, Stanley Ipkiss has lived a life where his idea of a superpowered smoothie is a wolf from a Tex Avery cartoon.

That anticipation of Sam Raimi’s cartoon sensibilities is about all that really connects The Mask to a modern superhero picture. With the other class of ’94 heroes, the movie shares a surprising ambivalence about the very idea of one. Like the resurrected Eric Draven in The Crow, Stanley becomes more akin to the Joker – specializing in violent mischief and revenge – than a traditionally upstanding avatar of justice. When Carrey first dons the mask, his alter ego puffs up with mock grandiosity and declares that he could become a super-hero, the mockery inherent, still goofing on Adventures of Superman stiffness from the 1950s. Later, he robs a bank and shoots an old-timey machine gun at his enemies. This is undoubtedly what a lot of people would do with these powers, even if they weren’t directly inspired by Tex Avery – especially the tween-to-teen demographic that was so enraptured by Carrey’s antics.

In some ways, Carrey’s Mask now plays like a proto-Deadpool. Yes, Deadpool’s comics debut predates Carrey turning The Mask into a household name (though the Mask’s comic appearances in turn predate Deadpool). But more importantly, having a Canadian comic actor portray a quasi-superhero who actually spends most of his time misbehaving, wisecracking, and breaking the fourth wall was an underexploited idea in between The Mask making bank in ’94 and Deadpool becoming a smash hit in 2016. Does the Canadian part really matter? Perhaps not, but it probably helps undermine the All-American Superhero archetype, if only subliminally.

Like Deadpool’s signature mask, the cartoon effects that provided the go-to trailer moments from The Mask are somewhat beside the point, obscuring the face of the actual star whose sensibility defines the character (at least in the movie version). At the same time, how many actors could make a go of complementing such cartoony effects work through their own elasticity? Such was Carrey’s dawning power in 1994, part of an astonishing run bookended by Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and its 1995 sequel. The Mask isn’t his funniest movie of this period, let alone his career; Dumb and Dumber could make a play for either distinction. But it’s notable just how many seeds of future Carrey performances are planted here: The effects-heavy costuming (green, even!) of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the superpowered craziness of Batman Forever, the paradoxically heightened normal-guy affect of The Truman Show, the put-upon-then-empowered normie of Bruce Almighty… they all have DNA in this smaller, borderline-throwaway, stylized vehicle.

By fusing such a star vehicle with a warning about the dangers of self-indulgent wish-fulfillment superpowers, The Mask actually does a lot of stuff current superhero movies tacitly reject: It prioritizes the actor at its center in a way that was very much a part of the early MCU but hasn’t been as prominent in recent years, and it actually features its lead character opting for a non-powered life, rather than learning how to use his awesomeness more responsibly. The movie doesn’t get much of this across in a witty or poetic way – though The Mask isn’t an old pulp character, the movie has that ’90s comic-book retro thing, without the killer art direction – but it does serve as a movie-star parable, perfect for a man about to become of the highest-paid actors of all time.

The movie that got Carrey there was The Cable Guy, two summers later, a mask-off moment where a Carrey goofball crosses the line into criminal stalking. Of course, The Mask features criminal acts, too, laughed off with cartoon logic and dismissed via a crowdpleasing bit with a dog. Underneath the dated CG bug-eyes, Carrey seems to be pre-considering the dark side of stardom; when the Mask version of Stanley isn’t committing crimes or vengeance, he’s mostly preening and performing, in a dance number with Tina (Cameron Diaz), the new bombshell in town, or singing “Cuban Pete” in a production number of amusingly questionable taste. In other words, the Mask commands (and demands) attention, compensating for his everyday life as a nine-to-five doormat. Stanley throws that attention-seeker away – albeit after winning over Tina, who semi-inexplicably likes him for him – while for Carrey, there was no turning back. As different from a Batman movie as The Mask is, as a star study it hits upon a similar idea: Maybe it’s the uncostumed version of this comic hero who provides the real mask.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.