Barton Fink

"I could tell you some stories," Charlie Meadows tells Barton Fink. I pay attention to repetition. I think I caught that repeated line the first time I watched the movie, but the first time I saw it, I didn't like Barton Fink at all because the plot centered on writer's block, which made me so anxious I could only wring my hands and sweat as I watched the movie. I think I actually wanted Meadows to kill Fink that first time I watched it. This time I really enjoyed it and thought it was funny. The big joke--the one that I think the reviewers (many of whom I read this morning) missed--is that Barton Fink is tortured with despair over not being able to write a story of a common man, when a supposedly common man keeps presenting himself in his room at night and offering to tell him stories. Every time, Fink interrupts him and rants on and on about not having a story. That's funny.

I guess one person got close. New York Times reviewer, Vincent Canby called it "a satire on the life of the mind." One might say that Fink is so caught up in the life of the mind that he is trapped and tortured and that that mind is personified in a way by the hell of the Hotel Earle, with its oozing and eventually flaming walls. Another clue of the "heady" torture is the repetition of the word "head." Reviewer Jeff Vorndam (Aboutfilm.com) says "people are said to have a good head on their shoulders, people are admonished not to lose their heads." Meadows keeps having to go to New York because things are "all balled up" in the "head office." We only find out later that John Goodman's character, Charlie Meadows isn't a good natured insurance salesman at all but instead is a murderer who chops the heads off his victims. This life of the mind business is tough going, evidently.

Another funny part of this film is in the earnestness of its characters. It's interesting to me that they are extremes--almost types, but quirky enough not to be. For example, W.P. Mayhew is another screenwriter Fink meets. Mayhew is obviously patterned after William Faulkner, yet somehow he is wonderfully his own person from the moment we meet him, or really just his legs, poised just so against a handkerchief as he vomits in the men's room. Another hilarious character is the movie studio executive, Jack Lipnick, who speaks in delightful Hollywood-esque non sequiturs and in the best scene of all, when he has summoned Barton Fink to, once and for all, tell him the plot summary of the film he is writing, ends up kissing his boots, thanking him for having the artistic integrity to say he doesn't feel comfortable revealing the plot until he finishes the script (which is a lie anyway). It's just great writing on behalf of the Coen brothers, that somehow we recognize these characters as types, but rather than groaning and rolling our eyes, we find ourselves rubbing our hands together delighted to see the quirky way they display their type-tendencies.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time reading the reviews of Barton Fink this morning because I couldn't answer for myself the question that came from the clear references to hell. By the end of the film, when the hallways are on fire (and no alarm is sounded) and John Goodman keeps saying how hot he is, looking more and more demonic, one would have to be asleep to miss the point about the hotel being its own miniature hell. I understood the reference inasmuch as the Coen brothers seemed to be saying that the life of the mind, the life of the writer can be like living in hell sometimes. But somehow the comic tone, the message of the writer not taking himself too seriously made me think I hadn't understood some deeper message.

Despite some embarrassing misspellings and writing problems, the Aboutfilm.com review by Jeff Vorndam was very insightful. He sees Barton Fink as addressing several themes, including the ones I've mentioned, but he also mentions a whole political and ideological message that I missed. To begin with, he noted the names of the police officers, Deutsch and Mastrionotti, as emblematic for German and Italian fascist political beliefs of the time (to contrast with Fink's liberal views)--in fact, they even harass Fink for being Jewish; Vorndam also points out that we find out later from these policemen that Charlie Meadows's real name is Karl Mundt, and when Mundt executes the police officers shouts "Heil Hitler." He says that this information certainly could have led Roger Ebert to conclude about the film that:

The Coens mean this aspect of the film, I think, to be read as an emblem of the rise of Nazism. They paint Fink as an ineffectual and impotent left-wing intellectual, who sells out while telling himself he is doing the right thing, who thinks he understands the "common man" but does not understand that, for many common men, fascism had a seductive appeal. Fink tries to write a wrestling picture and sleeps with the great writer's mistress, while the Holocaust approaches and the nice guy in the next room turns out to be a monster.

So, the idea of Goodman's character being the devil comes to a different conclusion in this view of the film. Vorndam ultimately dismisses this view as the answer to the film, but it is an interesting one to consider and there may be an element of truth about it. I agree that the Coen brothers do seem to be making fun of writers who take themselves too seriously (particularly with their ideology) and that is an element of the humor in the film.

This is a good one. There's so much to consider about Barton Fink, really. I didn't even get to the cinematography, which is really important as well, making the hotel come alive. Another element that seems really important here is intertextuality. On this viewing, for example, I found myself thinking that it would be interesting to consider Barton Fink and The Shining together, just to look at the way the building comes alive in both films and the way the cinematography becomes its own character in both films as well as in how the demonic element is managed. Vorndam also notes tributes to two of Polanski's films in Barton Fink. I also thought this would be interesting to discuss in the context of Adaptation to discuss the way each author and filmmaker deals with the issue of writer's block. As it turns out, the filmmakers in both cases actually did have writer's block and wrote it into the script (Kaufmann was blocked about Adaptation and the Coen brothers about Miller's Crossing). It would be interesting to talk about intertextuality in that regard. This is a great movie.

Cable Guy

There's a certain kind of comedy that I find more anxiety-provoking than actually funny. Cable Guy is one that would fall into that category, though maybe not completely. Critic Gerald Mast would classify it as a reductio ad absurdum plot, where “a single mistake in the opening minutes leads inexorably to final chaos” (“Comic Films” 227). Here, Matthew Broderick, as always, playing himself, befriends the cable installer, being kind against his better judgment. The cable guy (Jim Carrey) at first seems like a geeky, clingy guy with poor social skills, but as Broderick finds out, he's actually big trouble and ends up causing Broderick to be arrested, lose his job, and almost lose his girl (as well as the respect of his family).

What is it that bothers me about these reductio ad absurdum plots? Well, first is their utter obviousness. Just as Mast says, within the first moments of the story, we already see how it will end, that a series of disasters lie ahead, that things can only get worse for our hero, the mensch. At that point, I always think, oh ferchrissakes, why even bother watching? I know what's coming. I've grasped the entire film in a mere 30 seconds. Why watch any more? Life all by itself is stressful enough. All I do is wring my hands and anticipate disaster. That's no fun.

Perhaps another aspect of Cable Guy that troubles little old sentimental me is that it's kind of sad. Matthew Broderick's character, since he seems to be so typecast, feels very real, a nice, gentle guy who wants to do the right thing and be kind to someone who seems to be a loser. Hell, who knows, maybe the cable guy will improve his social skills and be okay in the long run. There's no dialogue that says this, but haven't we all thought this at one point or another about another person? Then, the Jim Carrey character is very well played, meaning that, for Carrey, the character isn't overplayed at all. He's a truly geeky guy with an under-bite and a lisp. Frankly it's ironic that Carrey, a personal favorite, isn't especially funny here. I imagine Stiller, in considering casting decisions, snickering over the joke of Carrey, usually over-the-top funny, being kind of silly but also a sad sort here. It's clever, even if it didn't happen. Anyway, ultimately, I find him pretty sad, even though I think that I'm supposed to laugh at him. The problem is that Carrey makes him too human for me to laugh. So I'm frustrated because I see what's coming, and I sort of like the characters too much to want to endure the agony.

And...so...but...it isn't that simple. I had forgotten an important element of this movie: Ben Stiller directed it, and this second time that I watched it (now that I know more about Ben Stiller from movies like Zoolander and The Royal Tennenbaums) I realized that Stiller had carefully introduced a whole subplot (as well as a few of his favorite comedy geniuses) to distract the audience from the sadness of the story. The subplot interrupts various TV-watching scenes in the film (of which there are many) and consists entirely of Court TV updates on an ongoing (fictional) trial case in which a child star murdered his twin brother (both played by Stiller). Stiller even goes so far as to show an ersatz movie promo of a film starring Eric Roberts as the twin brothers. The whole thing is a little absurd, but it's funny, especially when one considers it in the context of the time when this was written and produced: 1996, shortly after the Menendez brothers trial (for killing their parents) and the O.J. Simpson trial. Anyone who was conscious through that era knows that the level of intrusion of these court cases into the popular culture has been almost unmatched (in idiocy) since. Stiller also entertains us with his cast of comic genius pals, friends from his short lived (but brilliant) comedy sketch show on MTV. Andy Dick plays the knight at the medieval theme restaurant and Bob Odenkirk plays Broderick's brother in the family scenes. And Owen Wilson, ubiquitous in today's comic films, plays Broderick's girlfriend's date in what might have been his first role. Same for Jack Black, who plays a minor character in the first film I remember him in. (According to IMDB.com, both actually had played in previous films, but nothing you or I would have seen.) These great comedians cannot help but be hilarious and that helps break the anxiety I feel as a result of the larger plot and the sadness I feel about the loser characters.

Anyway, even though this is one movie that sort of irks me in its predictability, I do think it's worth considering for the dark comedy film class. It makes a good statement on the state of the popular culture in the late 1990s, and it's an interesting use of the subplot. And if nothing else we can gaze in awe at the handiwork of Ben Stiller, who directed this when he was 31. Wow. Famous parents or not, we must concede that Ben Stiller is nauseatingly talented.

Citizen Ruth

I'm not sure what to say about this one. Was it entertaining? Yes, I guess so. The humor in this movie felt kind of like following someone else's footprints on a snowy path: each step was right there where it was supposed to be. The right-to-lifers were obnoxious hypocrites who wore too much hairspray and whose teenage daughter's demeanor belied their happy-family exterior. Most of them, though, were men, as is often the case. The pro choice people were lesbians in sensible shoes and bad haircuts, women who had passionate beliefs about pregnancy, something they have to pay $20,000 a pop for (or if you're less cynical, $10,98 for a turkey baster). Let me back up here, though, and explain that the premise of the movie is that when Laura Dern's character, Ruth, who is a hopeless fume-huffing, alcoholic wastrel, finds herself pregnant, the judge publicly charges her with reckless endangerment of her fetus and privately intimates that if she gets an abortion the charges will be dropped. The result is a fanatical activists' turf war over the fruits of Ruth's womb.

Laura Dern plays this character quite well, but even Ruth is a "type," and that is what is so irksome about this film. In trying to prove a point, the filmmakers (men, incidentally) made the characters into iconic activists and even an iconic drug abusing Jane. Iconic as she is, Jane is probably the least offensive in the story, and her stupidity makes for some truly funny moments. For example, the pro-life family takes her to a pro-life clinic, where the doctor and the nurse give her an extremely biased description of the development of the fetus and then urge her to make the right choice and keep the baby. Her response is a refreshing, "Are you fuckin' people deaf? I said I want an abortion." She does this in a number of arenas, with both factions as well as with the media. The point, ground in practically to dust, is that Ruth is the only honest character, that even though she is ignorant, naive, and misguided, she's still actually better and smarter than extremists at either end. That probably is reasonably true, but so what? Of course the
truly (supposedly) poignant scene is where the factions begin to fight with each other in earnest and she finally stands and yells that isn't it her body and doesn't she ultimately have the choice. That's the great directorial slap
across our collective faces, I gather, where we're supposed to jump up and take notice and say, yeah, what about all that??

I still am not entirely convinced that there's a point to this movie, at least to those of us who have spent more than a minute thinking about the terrible selection one must make in the face of an unwanted pregnancy. Neither decision is a good one, I'm sure, and this movie sort of confirmed my ambivalence. So, once again, I find myself asking why I spent my two hours on a movie. The real reason I watched Citizen Ruth was that it was suggested to me kindly as an example of dark comedy, so now I must think carefully about why it doesn't qualify as dark comedy in my mind. Well, the premise of objectifying Ruth's unborn baby has an element of disregard for life that Wes Gehring suggests as characteristic of dark comedy. Hmmm...thinking more about this, maybe I'm wrong. Gehring also talks about the futility of going on, that the sense behind characters in dark comedies is that one has to keep on, even in the face of misery and despair, because “the message is that there is no message, so audience members had best steal a laugh before they are too dead to even do that” (Dark Comedy Film 2).

Monsieur Verdoux

Charlie Chaplin movies are interesting. I know I already wrote about The Gold Rush, which, though Wes Gehring wrote about it in the context of dark comedy film, I thought had a more slapstick brand of humor. This one, Monsieur Verdoux, is definitely a dark comedy. Like any Chaplin film, though, my overwhelming sense of it is that it is sad. I always thought Charlie Chaplin was a sad figure; certainly his life story is a sad one. He was an orphan on the streets of London, starving. I forget how he managed to find his way into film. I know, though, that that sadness always creeps into his face and into his stories. It always interferes with my having any real belly laughs from his films.

Monsieur Verdoux, though, is complex and provocative, in addition to being quite amusing. It is based on the true story of a French serial killer, Monsieur Henri Desire Landru, who married rich widows and "liquidated" them (as well as a couple of dogs and a boy). It was originally Orson Wells's idea to make a documentary about Landru, and Wells received credit for the original idea and even at one point claimed to have written a draft of the screen play, though his contract with Chaplin Films doesn't support that claim. The ending is the most provocative part, when we realize that Monsieur Verdoux has become a completely sympathetic character--sympathetic to the point of being sentimental--and then suddenly the focus of the narrative turns global and makes some startling (and apt) comparisons. Let me summarize briefly, though.

Verdoux has a girl in every port, literally. To each he tells a different story, but his goal is always the same, and that is to bring her money into the house along with a foolproof murder method. We never see him murder the women, but the murders are strongly implied enough so that, well, even if we did miss them, we'd see him furiously counting the money the next morning and know that the woman would have to be gone. Some of his wives prove more difficult to kill than others. The best one is the character played by the young Martha Raye, who plays the nouveau riche loud-mouthed lottery winner whose fortune has been told as always lucky. Indeed she is because every supposedly foolproof method he uses to kill her fails. It is quite funny, particularly since Martha Raye so brilliantly plays an obnoxious woman that I find myself hoping that he'll kill her. But then we see him visit a house where a little boy hugs him and calls him dad. At that house, the wife, wearing leg braces, is confined to a wheelchair. While the sentimental background music plays, we surmise that this is his true wife, for whom he's stealing all the money.

Another equally sentimental part comes when he learns the recipe for a foolproof undetectable poison from his chemist friend. Mixing up a batch, he plans to try it on a bum, someone no one will miss, who when found dead will be autopsied and the results printed in the newspaper. It will be a perfect way to test the poison. So we see him walking down a rainy street, where he stops and talks to a beautiful woman standing alone in an alley. He takes her to his apartment and pours her some poisoned wine. He asks her about her story and learns that she is the perfect candidate--just out of jail with no family. He is kind to her and cooks her a meal, but remarkably, she never takes a sip of her wine. They begin to have a philosophical discussion, in which she reveals that she is truly optimistic about humanity and about love, that no matter how tough life has been for her, she will not give up her hope. When he hears this, Verdoux obviously decides he can't kill her. Claiming that he sees cork in her wine, he takes away the poisoned glass and brings her a safe one to drink, later sending her on her way with some money. Still later he sees her and she thanks him for his altruism.

I think the sentimentality of this film is worth commenting about because sentimentality is the kind of mood that detracts from dark comedy, for my money. I think we have to look at this film in its historical context, though, and be somewhat forgiving. The late 1940s audience, I believe, would expect a certain amount of sentimentality, niceness, or kindness from a film, particularly one that jokes about murdering widows, or else it would have been poorly received. Think of it as the gentle touch of kid gloves that the audience of the time required. Now in this jaded age, those sentimental scenes take away from the dark comedy because they soften Verdoux as a character too much. He becomes so sympathetic that I am saddened when I see him get caught.

Even so, the film remains extremely provocative for one that is more than 60 years old. Interestingly, this is Chaplin's last American film; it came out during the first wave of McCarthyism, when there were some suspicions already about Chaplin. The message of the film didn't help. I mentioned before that the focus of the narrative changes at the end. Suddenly we see a montage of film clips of some of the political events that led to World War II: First, there are the newspaper headlines announcing bombings, then the film clips of Hitler and his troops marching and so on. In the end of the film, we come upon Monsieur Verdoux as an old man who has come to regret his actions. He encounters his old friend, the young woman who thinks he altruistically helped her, and she thanks him again by taking him to a fine restaurant. There he is recognized by the family of one of the wives he killed and is arrested and put on trial. At his trial, Verdoux speaks out, knowing he will be hanged nonetheless. He wonders at the hypocrisy of a society that rewards and honors the men that make and use weapons of mass destruction that kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people in World Wars, yet punishes or executes the man who kills only a few.

When one watches the news at present, seeing reports of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, this seems like a very timely argument. When death is practically mass produced by these enormous bombs that are dropped without regard for the innocent lives they end, how can we blame the soldiers for not valuing the lives and dignity of individual prisoners? There couldn't be a timelier argument. It would probably be about as popular in today's totalitarian regime as it was during the McCarthy era. The message made Chaplin immediately suspect as a communist sympathizer, which made it nearly impossible for him to do much promotion. When he was interviewed around the time of the film's release, reporters asked him questions about why he had turned down American citizenship and about his finances and taxes, which were more the concerns of the McCarthy hearings. Not much attention was paid to the film, sadly. It's a bizarre form of censorship we Americans have.

Death Race 2000

This is one of those movies that people refer to without ever having seen it. I know I have! It's such a famous cult film that I'm sure I must have seen parts of it in some dorm room or at some party somewhere in the last 20 years. At least it looked familiar. But when you think about it, cult films, with their low budget looks, have a way of appearing all the same--particularly the gory ones.

Well, anyway, this one has made such an impact on the popular culture that even my GRANDFATHER made jokes that could be traced back to it. See, the very basic idea behind the movie is that the main characters are in a national race and they score points by hitting people on purpose; the crueler the hit, the higher the points. So my grandpa would be stopped, say at a stop sign, where crossing in front of us would be a rather large woman in a pair of tight pants, whose ass cheeks looked (as my great aunt would quip) like two pigs fightin' in a bag. Then he would say "Two extra points for her!" Even worse would be a guy in a wheelchair or a kid with braces on her legs. You get the idea. Talk about dark comedy!

Really, Death Race 2000 isn't quite as twisted as my family evidently is. The characters in this film hit just the average person on purpose, but that is gruesome enough. It's certainly an example of dark comedy, a completely over the top example, but perfect for someone who wasn't quite clear on the difference between your average funny movie and a dark comedy. It does serve to draw the line: It crosses over the line and stomps on it. Directed by Paul Bartel (who also did Eating Raoul), Death Race 2000 is another example of formalism: it has poor production values on purpose, at least in part.

Just look at the title for the first bit of evidence: This is one in a long line of movies, books, films, and television programs that addressed the fear of the turn of the century. Growing up in the 1970s, I saw these become clichés, because so many had considered the question of what life would be like in the rapidly advancing future. On television alone I can think of a jillion examples: The Jetsons, Lost in Space, Star Trek, Speed Racer....all those were set in the 21st century, which at the same time always seemed impossibly remote and impossibly close. My favorite part of Death Race 2000 is the sets; whenever we see the starting place of the race, from where the announcers are speaking, we see the cityscape behind us, in which there are some fairly realistic skyscrapers and then the rest is very obviously cartoon-ish
"city-of-the-future" color line-drawings of minaret-like structures (like in the Jetsons) suspended in space and connected by a monorail of some kind that speeds by, all in a crayon-ish animated way, and in the same shot as the announcers and the more realistic skyscrapers, so the juxtaposition really highlights the contrast.

Another example of the formalistic treatment of the subject matter has to do with the gory scenes. When the racers purposely hit pedestrians, it is at great speed, and the result is flying bodies and body parts, which the camera zeroes right in on. These are gory and graphic scenes, but not especially realistic. So we see the accident coming, the car hits the man, the man flies in the air and then it falls to the ground covered in a red paint-like substance that we're supposed to believe is blood. If Bartel had tried a little harder and made it more realistic, I don't think those scenes would be funny.

Most importantly, though, to fit in with Wes Gehring's definition of dark comedy, this movie quite absolutely demonstrates a disregard for death. Because I have some other films that do a better job of communicating that (as well as other dark comedy characteristics), I don't think I'll show this in class. However, I do want to say that this is the kind of film that is easy to write off as a big mistake for Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine (who play the lead roles)--but it's a lot more sophisticated than meets the eye. The premise of the race is that it is government-sponsored, at a time when the government is fairly totalitarian; we begin to realize during the race that its purpose seems to be to act as a kind of soporific spectacle to detract the public from the totalitarian government goings-on. We also learn that David Carradine's character has been raised and "programmed" by the government to be a heroic racer, and that the folklore of his having many facial scars and reattached limbs is just that--folklore, invented to fuel the fanaticism of the public. The side plot is that the underground protest group is trying to kill this racer in order to foil the government's propaganda materials. Whenever the protest group is in danger of getting publicity, the government denies it exists and blames its actions on the French, who are vilified throughout the film. It's rather chillingly prescient, to my mind, and very clever. My guess is that much of this complexity was lost on the audience that watched it for the blood and guts. Anyway, I go into this detail to make the point that this kind of movie often DOESN'T work because there isn't a complex substructure underlying the plot. When there is one, it makes the film worth watching, even 18 years later.

The Loved One

I have been wanting to see this movie for about thirty years--see it again, that is. This is another movie that my parents took me to when I was in primary school (yes, and that's why I turned out as demented as I am today). I had this mixed up in my mind with another one they took me to, called Home for the Holidays, which is actually brilliant, and I wish I could find it on DVD or video. That one is the one I remember that is a combination comedy/suspense-thriller, where there are scenes like the one where the guy gets in the shower and the walls close in on him, ultimately crushing him to death. When you're eight years old, it doesn't occur to you how stupid it is that the character doesn't just step out of the shower stall when he sees the walls begin to come at him. All I know is that to this day, thanks to Home for the Holidays, I get a little panicky in a small stall shower. That is enough, though, of my childhood drama. Can we all have a group hug?

The Loved One is probably somewhat less inappropriate for a small child, though I remember some playmate of mine explaining that her parents had disapproved of my having gone to it. Oh--before you do the math and calculate me to be much older than I already am, I saw this movie in a theater in the mid-seventies, even though it had been released ten years before, in 1965. Remember, young'uns, that at the time there was no such thing as a videocassette (much less a DVD), so movie theaters commonly ran old movies that had been popular just for the hell of it.

Anyway, The Loved One would be a perfect movie to show either right before or right after The Trouble With Harry because both of them deal with the same issue, disrespect for death. Both cause us to consider the way Americans treat death in contrast with the way the Brits do. So in discussing The Trouble With Harry, the class would consider the fact that the movie did poorly in the U.S., whereas it played for months and years in some European theaters, proving, as one reviewer said, that dragging around a dead body is more funny to the English than it is to the Americans. I mentioned before that The Trouble With Harry was written by an Englishman, and Hitchcock changed the setting from England to America. Well, The Loved One has a continental genesis as
well. The movie is adapted from a book by Evelyn Waugh, who was inspired to write it after he was horrified by the experience of attending his Uncle's funeral in Los Angeles. For this one, the class would talk about the social commentary.

The two diverge when we get to the topic of social commentary. Hitchcock wasn't interested in that at all; he's more psychological, all in the mind. The Loved One is all about being a scathing satire of the American entrepreneurial greed and disregard for ceremony, social stature, and so on. It goes like this: Amid brassy, patriotic (American) music, Dennis Barlow disembarks the airplane at LAX to visit his uncle (played by Jon Gielgud, who was even old back in 1965!). When Dennis goes through customs, the agent is immediately suspicious of his "Beatles haircut" and his vocation (first he says "A.I.D., that is, artificial insemination donor" and then he says "poet"). The scene is funny because we find out a few things: first, that Dennis is a shady character, and second, that right away, Americans are just not as polite as this English character expects them to be. Just to be fair, the English characters are not much better. Dennis's uncle takes him to a social event with his English ex-pat friends, all of whom are pompous and very much about how things will look to everyone.

We soon find out, though, that Americans are far worse. We see Dennis's uncle, a painter, go to work at a movie studio where he has worked for many years, only to find out that he has been replaced by an appointment based on nepotism. Not only has he been replaced, but his boss is too busy to tell him; he finds out by finding another name on his door. The uncle goes home and hangs himself. His English friends, true to form, are most concerned with his being buried in the place where it will "look" the best, so they encourage nephew Dennis to go to the Whispering Glades cemetery and mortuary. Of course, hijinx ensue. It proceeds from bizarre to ridiculous, beginning with the mortuary intake interview, when the mortuary hostess, the aptly named Miss Thanatogenous, asks to be sure that the deceased is Caucasian (Dennis replies, "No, he's English.").

The cemetery and mortuary operation turn out to be a scam operated by a cultish religious figure and his disciples. By falling in love with Miss Thanatogenous, Dennis accidentally discovers and exposes the scam, which ultimately leads to a plan to fire the bodies into perpetual orbit around the earth (in "eternal grace") so that the cemetery land can be used more profitably. It's all very crass and American, and very funny. I imagined that this might be funniest to students who grew up in countries other than the U.S., because I think they would understand the commentary on American culture better than those of us who grew up here.

I have one more thing to say about The Loved One but it would probably also apply just as well to The Trouble With Harry and a few of the others. When I see these movies that are 30 or more years old, I am struck by the pacing, or rather the way the pacing has changed since then. There's so much story that would be omitted these days. Modern films leave a lot to the imagination, have many gaps in time and allow us to fill in parts of the stories in our own minds. These earlier films spend LOTS of time giving us background information or showing us the tiny details of how a relationship develops. To me they are sometimes ungodly slow. I prefer the quick, modern pacing to this plodding along. It would be interesting to see what students think. What does that say about us, about present-day society?

Crybaby

I watched this one in thinking about my PDE/dissertation. Between Three Amigos and this one, I feel like I have actually come upon some good ideas about where I'm going in writing about place and humor.

Crybaby really isn't one of my favorite of John Waters's films. In fact, it marked the beginning of his selling out. I don't really fault him for selling out; he had to if he wanted a budget and an audience for his films. But I'm partial to the really gross older ones like Pink Flamingoes and Desperate Living. Crybaby, though, is interesting because it's sort of a bridge between the earlier gross films like Female Trouble and the more polished mainstream films, like Serial Mom. In Crybaby, Waters has moved from using all freak actors to having some more widely appealing ones, like Johnny Depp as Crybaby himself, and Amy Locane as Alison. But he hasn't graduated yet from the freakish characters, like Kim McGuire as Hatchet-Face/Mona. So Crybaby to me marks Waters's transition from filth-filmmaker to a more mainstream guy; I think that Crybaby demonstrates that the transition was an unconscious one, since he seems to have used Hatchet-Face, who would have been an appropriate character for earlier films like Polyester or Desperate Living, alongside these newly cast characters who represent his more mainstream creative impulses.

Now, that said, I suppose I have to concede that representative of Waters's mainstream (later) creative work is Serial Mom, in which a suburban mother kills people who make her angry (including a wonderful scene where she runs over a high-school teacher in her mini-van several times and after which the words "pussy willow" will never be the same to the viewer); another representative mainstream work is Pecker, the sheer genius of which, I believe, lies in the title, which was officially John Waters's Pecker, meaning that he got everyone in America (who went to his movie, at least) to say "John Waters's Pecker" out loud. One of the structural elements in the plot of Pecker is the male strip-tease dancer's practice called tea-bagging. You'll have to look that one up on the Internet if you don't know what it means. Anyway, I'm explaining this by way of admitting that even John Waters's mainstream films are hardly mainstream.

So Crybaby is interesting because of where it fits within the Waters filmography. But looking at the elements of humor and place in Crybaby can be interesting too. I hadn't thought that much before about the important role struggles around class play in Waters's films until I read a journal article where the writer compared the storyline of Hairspray with some actual racial issues that happened in Baltimore at the time, commenting on the important role class played in the film. I don't have citation information on that (though I know I should), but that writer deserves credit for pointing me in the right direction. Class is at the very center of what happens in Crybaby.

The plot goes like this: The preppy/cheerleader/jock set hates the stoner/biker/redneck set, but the prettiest cheerleader girl, Alison, falls for Crybaby, who is nothing but trouble. That's a pretty universal plotline for a romantic comedy, not so far, in fact, from its comedy cousin, Romeo and Juliet. Maybe a little closer to this story would be Grease, particularly in the way Alison's character is "trashed up" to please her trashy man. The class differences are fairly universal for most of the film. However, the part that interested me was where we see Pepper (played by Ricki Lake) have her baby shower in her aunt and uncle's basement. Up until that time, they could
have been any trash anywhere, but here they are securely located as Southern White Trash, in the decor of the trailer, the gifts, the toothless expressions, and the speech. Just for example, the baby crib she receives has a rebel flag pillow. I think these scenes where the characters are identified so strongly as Southern Maryland poor people are funnier than most others precisely because the details are so correct.

The scene has total authenticity and we laugh at what we recognize, and then when it has been authenticated, we get a laugh at the incongruity, because of course, no one would try on purpose to be like these poor white trash folk, but Alison here does (even, unbelievably, with her snooty grandmother's support in the end). So for these reasons, I think Crybaby is actually a pretty interesting film. It's evidence of a change in Waters's writing style, and it demonstrates how the humor works best when elements of place are used most accurately.

Three Amigos

I watched Steve Martin's Three Amigos the other night (in the process of thinking about which of Steve Martin's films I might want to consider in my dissertation). I have TIVO set up to record any Steve Martin event, so I regularly get his appearances on Hollywood Squares or strange things like his tense interview with Ellen DeGeneres (and from this we would gather that he hasn't gotten over his ex, Anne Heche leaving him for Ellen). But I also see every movie Steve Martin has done, whether or not he has written it. There's a real difference between the ones he writes and the ones he just stars in. The cynical among us would say that the difference is that when Martin writes the film, we can count on the fact that it doesn't make money. I don't know that that's always true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were. The fact is, intelligent movies often don't make money.

Three Amigos is one that Martin wrote (or co-wrote, along with Lorne Michaels and Randy Newman--of "Short People" pop music fame), and it's a great example of the way Martin's films are intelligent, even though they might come off as stupid to the mainstream audience. The basic plotline is silly: three silent movie heroes lose their jobs and go to Mexico, believing they have been hired for acting jobs, when in fact they have been hired by a small town who believes they are actual heroes. Hijinx ensue. Of course, the presence of a beautiful woman helps to urge them to stay and fight the actual bad guys, regardless of the fact that they are fools. We know they'll prevail, by some sort of fool's luck, and indeed they do. The very predictability of the plot would be a turnoff to many viewers.

But an interesting observation here, I believe, is that Martin never meant to develop a complex plot. Rather, he wrote a predictable, "Hollywood" silent film plot in order to parody the form. A great deal of the film's humor, in fact, relies on our knowledge of early Hollywood films, of the formulaic pictures in the genre that my mother would call "horse-shit and arrow." The movie begins, for example, with establishing scenes from one of the Three Amigos's supposed movies. Filmed in black and white, the scene is appropriately melodramatic, with the requisite stops in action for the insertion of dialogue frames. Even better is the makeup, an exaggerated version of that macabre pancake white with the deep, dark appearance of black lips in what we know now had to be highly painted red perhaps in the effort to make them show up in black & white. It's exaggerated, but not by much, and that fact alone is funny to the viewer who has seen those old silent films. We laugh in recognition at how adept a parody it is!

I spoke before of melodramatic scenes: I think Martin went to much trouble to try to incorporate every possible cliché--the one where the villain rides away with the screaming, yet plucky heroine, the little boy who looks up to the cowboy hero, the cowboys' double-cross of the villain (just when we think they're sunk), the way the townspeople give up on the heroes, which fuels them to conquer the villains. Martin isn't trying to be mimetic here; rather than imitating life, he's imitating art. He is making fun of these formulaic endings by having silly, unbelievable characters go through the motions in familiar plots. I find it very clever, actually.

So the reason, maybe, that Martin's films don't enjoy critical success is that the mainstream viewer doesn't think through this kind of complexity in order to find out the point. As the world's biggest fan of absurd and silly comedies, I still want to feel like my two hours weren't wasted. So what's the point of
Martin's parody of the horse-shit and arrow genre? I think at least in part that Martin makes a bit of fun of the audience who falls for the kinds of formulaic plots he's sending up. I think he means for us to pay a bit of attention to the ideas behind the story. There's more to this, I'm sure. It's important enough to be a big part of my dissertation. It would be interesting, in fact, to look at this movie in conjunction with Christopher Guest's really bad Western. More on this later, to be sure!

The Trouble With Harry

Ah, exquisite Technicolor! Really, the film could be about anything and it would be wonderful. Hitchcock, of course, is masterful for any number of other reasons, but he really does exploit the splendor of Technicolor in this film, since it is set in a mostly outdoor autumnal Vermont. The basic plot is utterly unlike the standard thriller Hitchcock fare. It goes like this: A man finds a dead body, who turns out to be Harry, lying in the woods. He thinks he hit the man by mistake while shooting at squirrels. Others come by, several with a good reason how they might have killed Harry. The original finder of the body tries to bury it, but new discoveries keep requiring that the body be dug up. The comedy in the film arises from the utter disregard for death everyone seems to have (a definitive mark of dark comedy, I might add). The two romantic side-plots take precedence over any remorse the characters might have had over death.

So anyway, The Trouble With Harry is based on an English novel (same title) by Jack Trevor Story, and really the idea of laughing at a body being drug around is much more European than American. In fact, we're reminded of this in the documentary that accompanies the DVD, which mentions that this film did poorly in the U.S., but ran for weeks and even years in some European theaters. Apparently it came
about when Hitchcock read the book and thought it would do well as a movie, choosing to use an American setting. Actually, I think that alone is worth discussion. The change of setting had to be quite purposeful. If he was making a Hollywood movie, I gather, he would have to use an American regional setting, rather than an English one, or the movie might not have been made. Perhaps the studios preferred it. I don't know. That's an interesting thing to consider, that setting could make a difference. Think about it, though. If someone invited us to a movie set in England, wouldn't we immediately imagine some god-awful, unbearably slow-paced period piece with unintelligible northern England accents? Blech. It's a terrible generalization to make automatically, but it's probably one that is fairly representative of the average mainstream American movie consumer.

Another interesting part of The Trouble With Harry has to do with setting as well, though it is more about style. I observed right away that the scenes are quite stage-y and the sets not especially realistic. It reminded me of Louis Giannetti's discussion of formalism vs. realism in Understanding Movies. Giannetti would say that Hitchcock clearly had the resources to design and film in extremely realistic sets, so the fact that he didn't has an intentionality about it. A filmmaker uses a formalistic style when he wants us to pay attention to what went into making the film, right? For those who doubt me here, I will recount the story I heard in the documentary about the making of the film. Hitchcock's daughter and a few of the producers narrate the documentary, telling the stories behind the making of the film. One producer explained that Hitchcock first filmed the establishing scenes around Stowe, Vermont, but then a terrible storm came and blew away all the leaves literally overnight. In order to preserve continuity, Hitchcock had the leaves collected into crates and shipped back to Hollywood, where they were glued onto fake trees on a set and sprayed in the proper colors. With that attention to detail, we can see that he had the resources to create realism if he wanted to...but he didn't.

Giannetti would call Hitchcock's staginess "stylistically flamboyant," saying that a filmmaker who chooses to use this expressionistic style is "concerned with spiritual and psychological truths" that they can portray better by "distorting the surface of the material world" (Understanding Movies 4). One reviewer I read somewhere (perhaps on IMDB.com) said that the film was interestingly simplistic, so simplistic in fact that it could almost be a children's movie. I thought that was a fairly accurate statement. Of course dragging a dead body around isn't necessarily children's fare, but when we think of the simplistic gestures made by the characters moving through simplistic sets, there does seem to be a purpose behind it. What could it be?

Maybe to answer that question, we ought to consider the end of the movie. If we try to figure out what the point of the whole story is, we see that at the end, the characters realize that the only sane thing to do is to clean up Harry (who is now a little worse for the wear for all the burying and un-burying he's endured) and then put him back where he was found originally. That way, they can report his death to the authorities as should have been done to begin with. The lesson is that there really was no point in trying to conceal the death, since no one could prove any of them were responsible for it. It's a twisted, dark comedy version of "It's always easier to do the right thing." So, since even the message of the film is a bit of a joke, I think that the consideration in the staginess and formalistic sets is Hitchcock's nod toward the snide humor of the film. He seems to want us to know "this is all in fun," or "we're all laughing here because it's so wrong and
we'd never actually do it." This is a film that is very much worth watching in the dark comedy film course, not just for the Technicolor alone!

Eating Raoul (1982)

This low budget dark comedy stands up to the test of time surprisingly well! It was like mining the depths of my consciousness, way back to the days of my late adolescence, that one summer when we had HBO for free and I watched this movie about every third hour. I still knew some of the lines by heart.

The plot goes like this: a square, old-fashioned couple wants to open a restaurant. Surrounded by a world of people of poor taste--and worse, of loose morals--they constantly strive to maintain a certain purity while they save their money for a down-payment on their dream place. The problem is, the pesky swingers who are their neighbors keep intruding, with partygoers mistaking theirs for the swinger house. The result is that when a swinger comes in and nearly rapes Mary, Paul kills him accidentally by hitting him over the head with a frying pan. They discover $600 in his pocket and decide on a brilliant scheme that will help the world in two ways: By advertising dominatrix services in a local sex rag and then killing the respondents for their money, they will both earn enough money for their down-payment and rid the world of some vile people. Everyone wins! Then they are discovered by local crook, Raoul, who insists on a cut in the business.

To see the movie again as a scholar was a lot of fun because I noticed so many things that made it rise above its poor production values and last beyond its popular-culture-datedness. For one, it's very emphatically set in L.A. with an opening montage of shots of working class, seedy L.A. The voiceover humorously explains the gist of the film, that materialism has taken over, has become, in part, an obsession with having sex and that sex as a material possession of a sort has started to be equated with everything else, including food. Funny hot dog stand signs are shown to illustrate the point. This prepares us for the Blands, Paul and Mary, who are so proper they take turns undressing in the walk-in closet (door closed) while they get
into their matching pajamas and get into their chaste twin beds. It also is a great setup to the wonderful juxtaposition between their utter horror at the sexual deviance of the people around them and their disregard for their own violence and larceny.

In a juicy side-plot, Mary engages in an affair with sexy Raoul--with some pretty steamy scenes where they smoke Thai stick and get pretty naked. I should say as an aside here that one particularly graphic scene made me think about how comfortable I would be showing the movie to college students. But, hell, they're adults, right? And it's such a great example of dark comedy because I think a lot of what dark comedy is about is that tension between the old, rigid rules of behavior and the new, modern permissiveness. That is where so many laughs from this film (and many others like it) come from. Anyway, part of the tension of the film has us in the dark about whether Mary will betray Paul and stick with Raoul or break up with Raoul and stay with Paul. Raoul promises her that a restaurant kitchen is no place for a beautiful woman--he says he can keep her in style by expanding the "business." On the other hand, Paul offers stability and the fulfillment of their dream of owning a restaurant. Mary doesn't let herself be tempted by the lustful seedy life of the sexually gratified.

There's so much to this film. From the standpoint of semiotic analysis, one can find many clues about the characters. In fact, it would be fun to talk with students about semiotic analysis regarding this film because it's so heavy handed and funny--like the turgid cylindrical objects that seem to accompany Raoul in every shot. There's also the element of repetition--we might use the real estate agent's visits, for example, as a barometer for the way the characters change in this film. Each time he comes, Paul and Mary are in a panic to impress him with dinner. To discuss the way the dynamics of power change within that relationship would be productive. Certainly, a Marxist approach might be interesting too: class seems to be an issue here. The filmmaker spends a lot of time and precious film establishing shots of the working class L.A. How does that compare with the upper middle class existence of the swingers--and of Paul and Mary who seem to straddle the classes? How would a feminist read this film? It might be interesting to look at the women characters in this film, Mary and the dominatrix, and analyze them. Who is truly liberated and who is subjugated? Hmm...it might even be an easy place to start and to talk about critical approaches, then.

Well, I'm starting to think that the exploration part of writing this course needs to become somewhat more structured. I need to decide just how many films I want to bring into the course and start writing.

Margaret Cho

Margaret Cho played in D.C. this weekend. We saw her 8:00 show on Saturday night at the Improv. She is, as one might imagine, great fun to see live. Who knew she had lost a bunch of weight, though, and looks even more beautiful than ever. Wow. She came onstage in what seemed to be a pair of black tights over a pair of black underwear and some red and black striped thigh-highs, with a belt on top of all that, and then a skimpy shirt and some red lacy gloves that came all the way up her arms. The first thing she said was "Sorry about the gloves. I just saw Prince in concert." She went into a joke about him, saying that Prince always has his cock in one hand and the Bible in the other, you know, like, "Oh yeah, baby, do it like that....thank you, Jesus!"

I can see that recreating Cho's act on paper is nearly impossible. I hadn't really thought of it before that so much of her humor is based on impressions. I had heard her impressions of her mother, which really are so funny. The Korean accent is so funny to me because I've worked with so many students who sound EXACTLY like the accent she does. But Cho also does a lot of what might be called imaginary impression. In one part of her act, she talks about having gone on an Atlantis cruise (a gay cruise), where there was a reading room. Then she does a whole riff on the idea of the reading room, that it couldn't possibly be a place where people sat and read books. All of a sudden Cho transforms herself, voice and stance, into this kind of ghetto drag-queen, saying "R-E-A-D," defining it as, "What you do when you decide you don't like someone. You look them up and down and then you stare at something you don't like." Pick, for example, their close-set eyes. "Do you have to get special glasses made? Maybe you could go to Lens Crafters. I hear they can make them in just about an hour." You're probably not laughing if you're reading this without ever having heard this act, because the whole joke is in the inflection.

So I said before that I knew she did impressions of her mother and that her audience awaits those impressions because they are funny. I can see that, too, as an artifact of her Korean-ness, her Other-ness, if you will, a sort of acknowledgement of being on this imaginary border. At any rate, I expected to see this in her comedy. But what I didn't expect is the inflection that I am finding it so hard to explain. I found that most of her jokes, including the drag queen above, were delivered in the hip-hop/ghetto/urban vernacular or accent. How do we explain this?

For one thing, young, hip people try to dress and sound black these days. I have to look up a great New York Times essay I read about that last year. The Dave Chapelle Show did a great skit about a blind black man who was a white supremacist. In one scene, his friends are driving him to a White power rally. At a stoplight, the pickup truck he is in pulls up to a car full of teenage (white) boys playing loud rap music. The Black White supremacist yells at them about their music, calling them, "Niggers!" The boys look at each other with horror for a second and then high-five each other because they think it's so cool to have been called that. Margaret Cho is clearly a part of this phenomenon. She seems to adapt a ghetto persona every time she means to deliver a punch line.

So is that because Black culture is cool? Does Cho, as a person who treads so many borders, feel equally comfortable among any of these marginalized cultures? How does it work?

Throw Throw Momma From the Train, From
the Train

I'm not exactly sure why Wes Gehring includes Throw Momma From the Train in his discussion about dark comedies. I guess it loosely fits his definition, since it laughs at death. The premise of the movie is that Danny DeVito's character seems to murder Billy Crystal's wife, thinking that is what Crystal wanted and he thinks that Crystal will murder his mother in return. Of course, things get really, really ridiculous and we're supposed to laugh a lot. The movie had a little more charm than I anticipated, frankly. I'm not a big Danny DeVito fan, nor have I cared much for Billy Crystal after he played the gay character on Soap, lo these many years ago. Both actors are unappealing for the same reason: they play every character completely over the top. There never seems to be much reality attached to their characters; the behavior is always extreme so it takes a lot of effort to suspend my disbelief--too much effort, in fact for me to care about them.

But so there are some good things to be said for the movie. The first half shows DeVito's character in his misguided way trying to please his writing professor (Crystal). He fumblingly tries to kill the ex-wife, ultimately relying on luck to propel him, since he really isn't a murderer. Crystal, no matter how much he hates that ex-wife (who gained national fame by stealing his novel and publishing it under her name), realizes as a result of DeVito's actions, that he wouldn't really kill his wife and doesn't really want her dead. When DeVito tells Crystal he is expected to kill the mother, at first Crystal is the voice of reason, saying he would never kill a person. In fact, he even tries to warn her. The comic twist happens when there comes to be a wonderful parallel to the plot in the first half of the movie. Crystal begins to want to kill the mother, against his better judgment, but he too is too skittish and relies on luck when he almost throws her off the train. Meanwhile, DeVito changes his mind and tries to stop him. In other words, we laugh because we see the supposedly morally superior Crystal stoop to DeVito's level while DeVito rises to Crystal's level.

Ultimately, of course, all is resolved to everyone's satisfaction. But what I really hate about the movie is that feeling I get that I want my two hours back. This is where I ask, what was the point of the story? Why should I care about this comedy? I don't mean to say that every movie should have some deep undercurrent that carries one to a high moral ground. This could never be true for someone who enjoys the comedies of Jim Carrey or even Curb Your Enthusiasm. Let me think for a second about what distinguishes this silly movie from those other silly movies and shows.

Well, let's take Ace Ventura, Pet Detective as a for instance. The real appeal there is Jim Carrey, of course. His character is so outlandish that he's funny. "Re-he-he-he-he-he-ly???" he says, eating sunflower seeds the way a parrot would, or he spins the car around in the parking lot, winding up miraculously parked in a space, saying, "Llllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiike a glove!" He's a caricature of a hokey detective and his overacting silliness is pleasing. Then at the end of the film there is the parody of The Crying Game (see? there's intertextuality even in the basest of postmodern films!). So when I ask myself why I watched it, I think that it was clever in a few ways that I don't see in Throw Momma...

And then there's the absurd comedy of Curb Your Enthusiasm. This kind of comedy is character-based as well. I watch because I want to see what kind of a mess Larry David will make this time. I want to see him say the things one shouldn't say in polite company, the kinds of things I think, but would be too afraid to say. Then, I laugh at the consequences of his lack of self-control from the comfortable standpoint of a person who can't step out of bounds the way David does. Now THAT's a reason to see a comedy.

So Throw Momma... certainly has characters, but they're over the top and stupid, and I don't care about them. It's heavy on plot, but light on artfulness. I say no to including it in the class I'll be teaching.

Network

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

I don't remember why we walked out of Network when it was in the theater, or even what I was doing watching it. I would have been twelve years old when Network was released in 1976. There's a good chance I just didn't understand this satire of the television industry. What's interesting to me about it now, having seen it several times as an adult, is that I don't find it especially funny. Satire is an interesting arm of comedy, I think, because it really isn't very funny. The part that is supposed to be humorous is really only sort of intellectually recognized. "Oh, I see that exaggerated tendency," an audience member might say to himself. Or, "If they don't class up the news, it really end up this way." But there's nothing in Network or in other types of biting satire that bring up a real belly laugh. It's cerebral to the point that it's almost
extra-cerebral.

So Network is about a newsman who grows so disillusioned with the way the news becomes sensationalized that he dares to tell the truth about how he feels. He's the one that says the famous line from the film (above). At first the network fires him in embarrassment, but then they realize that his apparent mental illness is a ratings-grabber. They rehire him as a sort of mad prophet with a message. The viewing public buys his message and the network recognizes its marketability. The result is a chaotic spectacle of this man's decline. The man's only protector, Max Schumacher, the boss who fired him and who was later fired for not bringing him back, is marginalized and used by the new leadership, network executive, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway). Diana plays a wonderful satire of the typical Type A executive...down to her sexual proclivity. She tells Max that she climaxes early and falls asleep quickly afterwards, an easy parody of the typical male lover.

The basic message of the film is that television networks will do absolutely anything for ratings. To the 2004 audience, this is not news. A few years ago, it might have seemed prescient, but at this point such knowledge has become a cliché. So, it isn't just that it isn't particularly funny, but it is also that I don't see any real insight in this movie. Those are two good reasons why I don't want to include it in my dark comedy film course. It doesn't have as many layers as the others, not enough to discuss in terms of comedy.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

We know this is a film of the modern era from the first moment because of its disclaimer in a crawl that slides up the screen before we see anything else:

It is the stated position of the United States Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film. Furthermore, it should be noted that none of the characters portrayed in this film are meant to represent any real persons living or dead.

In the present day, I would take such a warning as a parody of the litigious age we live in, but in 1964 when the film was made, it was no joke. The Bay of Pigs crisis had just passed; in fact, the delay of the film itself was delayed by Kennedy's assassination. The Air Force felt like it NEEDED a disclaimer because a nuclear accident did not seem far-fetched enough to risk. That alone should be proof enough for the development of dark comedy.

The basic storyline goes like this: the airmen who patrol the American skies regularly (as they do today, post-terrorist attack) are without warning given an order to attack the Russians. The colonel of the base is shown shutting it down according to the instructions given for an emergency attack by the Russian enemy. These instructions require the base to be sealed with no outside communication possible and for the soldiers to shoot at anyone--enemy or apparently friendly--who approaches the base. The only person who holds the secret code for communicating with (and potentially stopping) the airmen with the neutron bombs is the colonel, and he seems to have gone completely crazy and ordered the attack for no reason other than to provoke a war. The only person who is able to determine the colonel's state of mind is Mandrake, a British officer (played by Peter Sellers). Unfortunately, Mandrake can neither trick the secret code out of Colonel Ripper nor subdue him. So it becomes a comic drama of the mad American hell-bent on destroying the world. This film is eerily clairvoyant, and while the technology is evidently out of date, the senseless bureaucracy and decision-making based on idiocy is extremely timely.

The film then flips among frantic scenes of the U.S. President (also played by Sellers) and his advisory council in the basement of the Pentagon frantically negotiating with a drunken Russian prime minister, trying not to start the war; as well as the General and his girlfriend (the only woman in the film, who is blissfully unaware of the danger); and Mandrake and the colonel locked away on the base. It's a nail-biter as we watch the moments tick away. If they do not believe the Americans are attacking only by accident, then the Russians will use the Doomsday Machine, which will blow everyone up.

The advisory council asks for the input of weapons expert, Dr. Strangelove (also played by Sellers), who is a thinly disguised Nazi who enjoys the torture and killing people, who keeps slipping up and referring to the president as "Mein Fuhrer!" With the aid of his poor advise, as well as the bad advice of Dr. Kong and the general incompetence of the president and others, the result is a surprise: A mushroom cloud at the end, with an unlikely soundtrack of "We'll Meet Again Someday..." in the background, an "incongruous juxtaposition," according to one reviewer.

The humor here is on a broader scale than it was on Catch 22, even though the subject is the same. The humor, to my mind, is larger in Dr. Strangelove, because it requires us to look at the whole picture of war as foolish, as an overgrowth of the potential in testosterone. Kubrick communicates this idea of folly from the beginning, where the sights of missiles we get are so obviously phallic, and by the names of the characters, who so clearly refer to farcical things (like Colonel Jack D. Ripper, named after the infamous...or of Buck Turgidson, referring to the stiffness of a certain manly organ...or of Merkin Muffly, the shapely young woman whose both first and last names refer to the female anatomy). The names are sexualized in a silly way to seem to imply that the things surrounding war seem to be part of a testosterone party and not part of any serious thought or consideration--the very thing we all fear.

This is an unsettling message. On the International Movies Database, a few people posted angrily that this movie was anti-American and that the director should have gone ahead and burned some flags while he was at it. Then, just like now, calling into question the integrity of the government called into question one's loyalty to the country.

We see other elements of humor as well: the silly incongruity of Merkin, the general's girlfriend, calling him in the war room to see when he can come and crawl back in bed with her is funny because we know such a thing shouldn't or couldn't happen. The same goes for the entire existence of Dr. Strangelove. It's so wrong, it's funny. Ultimately, I don't find this movie as entertaining as Catch 22, although I am finding it hard to articulate why. For one, Catch 22 has a protagonist we can relate to, one we are meant to relate to. We see the pain he is caused by having to drop bombs on people and we want it to stop. On the other hand, with Dr. Strangelove, I don't feel the same sympathy for any character, except maybe Mandrake, who is the only one who seems to realize the whole war thing is nonsense, but even he is not a sympathetic enough character to really care about. In addition, while in Catch 22 we see real suffering and some attempt to show things in a realistic light, Strangelove has characters that are over-the-top types, the kinds one finds in a movie that is set on making a point.

There's nothing wrong with making a point, mind you. Dr. Strangelove is probably worth seeing just to see Sellers in his three comic roles (and to try to imagine him playing General Kong as well, who he would have played as well, had he been able to master the Texan accent). It's the kind of movie that makes one wonder how much has really changed in the last 40 years.

Catch-22

I can't imagine writing a line that so infiltrates the nation's consciousness that everyone knows what it means, even if they never read or saw the referent.

I'm talking about when Yossarian the bombardier wants the doctor to excuse him from flying more World War II missions. His defense? They're awful. They kill people. He's terrified. And besides, everyone agrees that he's crazy. The doctor won't do it, though. He can't, because according to Army regulations, anyone who would ask not to fly more missions by definition couldn't be crazy. It's a Catch-22.

“That's some catch," says Yossarian. "It's the best there is," agrees the doctor.

This movie, based on Joseph Heller's 1961 novel, uses the humorous techniques of irony and reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate the foolishness of war. One early scene is a perfect example. Minderbinder is pitching his idea of the trading syndicate, M & M Enterprises, to Colonel Cathcart, explaining how he will trade surplus items on hand with other military units for profit. So rapt are the two in conversation that as they drive away from the airbase down the runway, they completely ignore a plane that flies right past them and crashes and burns on landing. It's ironic because of course we expect these two human beings to react to this certain death with grief and concern; instead they react with the opposite, utter disregard. I found myself -- in this scene and many others -- gasping with disbelief that the characters could act the way they did.

The larger purpose of the humor, though, most certainly involves what Gerald Mast talks about in his discussion of film theory: reductio ad absurdum, in which a social question is magnified and brought to the absurd both for humorous results and of course to raise the larger social question. Here the question is disregard for human life in war. Heller and Mike Nichols, the director, point out this futility of human life by using repetition. The whole M & M Enterprises subplot, I believe, exists to demonstrate just how little human life matters in the face of the machine of war and profit. Several times we hear Minderbinder say, "What's good for M & M Enterprises will be good for the country." Minderbinder creates his business by trading silk, silk that he harvests by stealing the parachutes from all the flyers, who don't find out until they're on a bombing mission that the parachutes are gone and replaced with a single share of M & M Enterprises stock. A little later, when we see Yossarian trying to comfort Snowdon after the airplane has been shot at, Yossarian tries to administer a dose of morphine from the first aid kit only to discover it, too, is gone, replaced by a share of stock. These scenes are so absurd, they're both funny and disturbing.

Of course Heller meant them to be disturbing. What disturbed me still more was trying to predict student reactions to the film when I teach a class. Will they be as disturbed as I was? I fear that they will not. The genesis of dark or black comedy, set sometime in the 1960s, coincided with the horror of the realization that we all could, at any moment, blow ourselves up thousands of times over with nuclear bombs. In my childhood, this scenario was presented as a likelihood. Most theorists I've read, particularly Wes Gehring, assign a cause-effect relationship between the supposed likelihood of a nuclear holocaust and the genesis of dark humor. This kind of humor had to come about because of the mind's perception of a sort of Catch-22. We can't go on living in the face of an almost certain death, but we do. What other choice do we have but to develop a very sick sense of humor?

To many of my students, this stuff is old news, though. The threat of nuclear holocaust has, in theory, passed. I am not sure I believe that, but at least grade school kids aren't prepared for the inevitable death and, at least as I understand it, high school students don't any longer discuss being within the bull's eye that will turn to dust around the Nation's Capital. Things are maybe even more absurd in the face of this crazy terrorism and suicide bombing and the like. Somehow, though, perhaps with the advent of twenty-four hour news/entertainment television, the seriousness of the situation has lost its frightening edge and instead it's taken on a kind of circus atmosphere, replacing what was once horror with a feeling of strange entertainment. The result is that I don't think anyone is horrified anymore, even though the threat exists. Maybe it's impossible to sustain horror for very long at anything, even if the horror persists. I remember the people I knew in Georgia who lived downwind from a paper plant. If you know anything about paper plants, you know that they emit the most noxious smell, sort of like sewage. At the height of summer, it's absolutely the worst. The folks downwind from the plant, though, just got sort of used to it and forgot about it, even in August. One's smell preceptors, it seems, become overloaded and blocked eventually.

So anyway, I fear that my students' horror preceptors are overloaded and blocked and the significance of Catch-22 will sail right past them.

The Goldrush

Now it may seem like I’m jumping around here, moving from L.A. to a silent film by Charlie Chaplin. That is the very nature of my program at this moment, however fortunate or unfortunate.

For those of you just tuning in, I've just passed the one-year mark and have begun my third semester. I'm taking twelve credits, among which are two courses in preparing for doctoral dissertation research, another in writing a course in dark comedy film for my internship, as well as preparing for a seminar on Dante (I have two peer days to deal with, but I'll worry about those later). So, as this semester starts out, I'm trying to dip my toes in each pool, so to speak, to get the feel of the water. Today it is the internship pool, and the water is fine.

I watched Charlie Chaplin's 1925 silent film this weekend. It's a classic that I know I had to have seen at one time or another because parts of it seemed familiar. Maybe it was in the History of Film undergraduate course I took. The odd thing about those movies that become cultural icons is that one has
heard and read so much about them that it is impossible to know whether or not one's familiarity is genuine. Do I remember the scene where he shovels
snow, or did I just read in a few places about the fact that it was funny?

I know that I must have seen parts of Chaplin films as a kid because, the depressed little soul that I was never much saw the humor in him. I gathered early on that he never gets the girl, or he always gets sort of less of her than he wants. In The Goldrush, he falls in love with Georgia, a dancehall girl who seems not to take him seriously. He invites her and her girlfriends over to his house (in one of the numerous subplots) and falls for her; later he invites all of them for dinner on New Year's Eve, an invitation they accept but with obviously no intention of coming. Meanwhile, the little tramp works very hard to earn the money to buy a nice dinner and presents for each woman. Of course they don't show up, and there's this lovely dream sequence where he falls asleep at the dinner table, dreaming of how happy he will be when they get there. It's so painfully sad, the kind of thing that would have made it impossible for me to watch as a kid. As luck would have it in this one, the little tramp gets rich and does end up with Georgia, who by this time has apologized and proves her love miraculously before she learns he is a millionaire.

The little tramp is not so lucky in The Circus, a 1929 silent film I saw a few weeks ago. I TIVOed it from some late-night showing somewhere. In that one, which is far more political, he's in love with the exploitative circus-owner's daughter, but she loves the trapeze artist, so he sadly sees that the two get together happily while her father takes advantage of him. It has some slapstick moments, but it really is a melancholy film that leaves one wistful.

Anyway, back to the The Goldrush (sorry to ramble so). It's an interesting film for a number of reasons. For one thing, at the time, films were much shorter. The impression in the industry was that the general audience couldn't sit still for a long film, but at 69 minutes, I think this one was long for its time. Chaplin segmented the story, then, probably in response to fears that the attention of the audience would wane. So there's a beginning section where Chaplin scales the mountainside, followed by a bear. Those slapstick moments are followed by his time in the snowstorm in the cabin with the big bully, Black Larsen, where they get so hungry, they cook and eat Chaplin's boot, and Larsen begins to hallucinate that Chaplin is a giant chicken. It's quite funny.

Big Jim McKay, meanwhile, has been sent off to try to find food, but he is knocked unconscious and loses his memory. He gets to town, wherever that is, and all he can remember is that he discovered gold someplace out there, where ever it was that he left his cabin. Finally, he encounters the little tramp in town, and the little tramp can lead him to the cabin. The get to the cabin and sleep there overnight, while a terrible snowstorm blows so hard that it blows the house nearly off a cliff. Only the smallest of ropes that has become wedged between two boulders is keeping the house from falling off the cliff. There's a hilarious slapstick scene after the two wake up, where they walk to opposite ends of the house, Big Jim and the Little Tramp, doing a balancing act, while the house teeters in the balance. It's enough to make this jaded humor reviewer gufffaw out loud. Anyway, indeed the two find and share their fortune here, which is how they become millionaires.

By today's standards, The Goldrush is entirely too segmented and disjointed to make much sense, but it evidently made a lot of sense to the early Twentieth-Century audience. Saying this reminds me of what has often been said about the original film audiences who ran away at the sight of a locomotive coming towards them on screen; humor could be and was unsophisticated at the time. They didn't have to have the intricacy in the jokes or even the sight gags that they do in even today's most unsophisticated comedies. The audience was just so much less experienced, so much less jaded. If setting is a factor of place and time, then maybe a consideration of regionalism should add the consideration of the era as well as a sort of unavoidable, package element of the setting. The Philadelphia of the 1950s was not the same place as the Philadelphia of the 1980s.

No wonder they call it La-la land!

I can’t believe anyone wants to leave Hollywood EVER. Every day is more exquisitely beautiful than the last; the ocean is an impossibly aquamarine color and the air smells like hyacinths everywhere. We spent last week in Hollywood, California, a series of perfect days, of crazy cultural differences and kooky sights. On the first day, for example, we went walking on Melrose Avenue, off to the left from La Cienega (I never did learn where the accent was – it seemed to me like it should be over that final e, but the natives seemed to accent the first e for some reason). On this street are designer stores like Dolce & Gabbana and Fred Segal and others, but then further down, it becomes rougher, more goth…more piercings. Down there the crowds were nuts, like furious currents of people who moved at such a pace that it felt like we might be trampled if we stopped even for a second to eye a pair of boots or a t-shirt. It was more crowded even than NYC or certain parts of DC, strange, really. I’m not sure how one could possibly stop and look in such a crowd. The point seemed to be just to move, just to keep our place in the crowd, rather than really to shop or take in any sights. I wondered how the stores stay in business. Anyway, it was in this throng that we saw this guy, a white guy probably a little younger than me, who was holding a sign in magic marker written on cardboard, “KICK ME IN THE ASS $1.” I blame the crowd, then, for our not being able to stop and pay him a buck at least to take his picture. I didn’t really want to kick him, though I would have liked to see someone else do it. Margie observed that he would have to call it quits by about eight or so every night, since by the time people stopped drinking, things would almost certainly get out of hand. I was pretty sure he was a performance artist who was testing those limits. But who knows?

There’s so much to say about the place, about the way it looks. They say that when the Santa Ana winds are blowing, people act strange. I was always intrigued by that, that a certain wind might change one’s mind, an ill wind would blow no good. Indeed the winds did blow when we were there. I would think that the landscape alone might create a certain mindset, that great stretch of flat faced with the wall of mountains. Just the Hollywood hills, harrowing hills really, full of hairpin turns, roads with fatal turns. Everything about it is exclusive, temporary. Those houses built against gravity on the hills reminded me of the news stories one always hears of late spring in California when whole houses wash down cliffs. I have always thought those home owners foolish—why build a house on shifting sands, right? But then the sight of those hills made me think if I had a few million to spare, I would simply have to have one of those tile-roofed plaster villas with the manicured lawns and the exotic trees and the tennis court that juts out over a cliff, a horrific precipice looming over another exquisite paradise of a house below it. The very fact that it could wash away tomorrow makes it all the more appealing, really, because it’s so disposable, so wasteful. And the very road up there tempts fate. It is the kind of road that poor people can’t afford to live on. There would be too many late night deaths. This is the kind of road that no one drives home on tired. As I drove around on a glorious Sunday morning, I thought that the people who live here must have a driver who brings them home late after a play. Or if they drive themselves, they must not be so tired or distracted. These are not shopgirls who drive home drunk after a happy hour. That is one way the landscape can be exclusive. The very turns in the road can add up, like the sounds of a cash register at each spin of the steering wheel, where danger compounds interest in the bank account.

One funny cultural observation about L.A.: We met up with Margie’s old college friend there, who said over dinner that she thought East Coast people were just too intellectual for her, too intent on proving how smart they were. She had a degree in something called spiritual psychology but could never tell me what that was. The best example of the California intellectual aesthetic, though, was on the morning news, when the anchor commented to the woman doing the weather, “Well, this weather sure is like spring. Is it spring, yet, Debbie?” Then Debbie just stands there and says, “Uh…..” She finally said she just wasn’t sure yet. We just cracked up. Never, not even after a commercial, did they ever bother to cut in with the fact about March 20th. We kept saying that, had it been Washington, D.C., meteorologist Bob Ryan would surely have known it off the top of his head, and even more so after the next commercial he would have been back with the precise nanosecond that it would turn spring. In California, the attitude was sort of like, look man, tomorrow is going to be just as beautiful as today; why are you getting so excited? The speed and purpose of thought, I gather, are a factor of culture.

I didn’t expect to like the place so much, actually. While we were there we saw the taping of a sitcom with Andy Dick in it, Less Than Perfect—The show was forgettable, really, for the sitcom itself, but the interesting part for me was to see the rewrites of the jokes that went over badly on the audience (I might have suggested more rewrites, but they didn’t ask me). What you don’t know about sitcoms is how long they take or how many people they employ. For one, a comedian is hired to serve as the M.C., who narrates the activity onstage and keep the audience “fluffed.” Also, there’s a DJ, who plays music at top decibel when the comedian seems to be tired. Further, the taping of a thirty-minute show takes about five hours. At LEAST. According to the comedian, some perfectionistic shows (like Friends) take as much as ten hours. We got sick of it after about three hours and left. The problem was that the comedian kept saying that prizes were in store for the audience members who screamed and clapped and laughed the loudest. To my mind, it began to seem like a clapping monkey thing. I really, really wanted to hang out with Andy Dick, because I’m a big fan, but there was a big tour group of girls from Bryn Mawr, who were completely obnoxious, and also completely fantasy-land material for all the stage guys, including Andy Dick, so gigglng and screaming for this nearly 40 year-old lummox was futile.

We also saw a Steve Martin adaptation of a German play, The Underpants, which was entertaining, though sort of pre-production, and, to my mind, in need of much more adaptation. I wonder whether the mainstream audience would appreciate it more than I did; I am not often fond of the standard period piece. Somehow the jokes based on old morals just don’t send me giggling and holding my sides all over the place. This was no exception. On the other hand, the actors were very good. The cast was Dan Castallenta, who does the voice of Homer Simpson, among a good many other things. The blind guy from Curb Your Enthusiasm was there as well as Jeff Garlin’s wife from the same show. It was very funny and fun to see those actors In particular, the wife from Curb Your Enthusiasm played a completely different character, so different I didn’t even remember it was her until I saw The Apprentice later on.

Most of the rest of the trip was just driving around and exploring. I kept joking that I was a native; I could find my way around L.A. as though I had lived there before. It was positively uncanny, like I had lived in L.A. in another life and I knew just what to do. One thing is for sure, traveling across the country to L.A. is like going to another country. It is just far enough and strange enough to foreign, like another planet.

Moving Forward

As you may note from the dates, it's been a while since I've posted. So much for the commitment to journal each day. I don't like to devote a lot of time to bitching and whining, but if I want to write about what it's like to be a fulltime graduate student and a fulltime teacher, it's probably not such a bad thing to spend a couple of minutes here talking about how hard that is. I've been in my program since March 2003, not even a year yet, and I have yet to be certified, which is a Union Institute sort of half-way milestone. Well, maybe not even half-way, but it will mean that my dissertation proposal is accepted and I can proceed with specific papers and classes and research. By no means am I off schedule. In fact, I am more on schedule than some of my peers. The deadline is coming up, though.

No laundry list of obstacles here, but I do want to philosophize a little about the larger meaning of getting a Ph.D. When someone has a doctorate, people consider him or her to be smart, an expert in a narrow topic (and sometimes, by mistake, in lots of things). I don't think earning a Ph.D. is as much a measure of one's expertise in that tiny, narrow corner of knowledge as it is a measure of tenacity, of staying with something that is impossibly difficult, that just should not be able to be done. As I write this, I think that maybe I don't respect the lucky people who do their doctoral work on a straight shot, right out of undergrad, with no financial worries. Those people don't have as many concerns as I do, I guess. I am talking about the majority of people who get the doctorate, who have to work at the same time, who have to finesse paying for it. For those of us in the struggling camp, this is all about tenacity.

I have the sense that my life lesson here is that no matter how stress-free I try to make my life, how hard I work to make it all fit in, obstacles will arise....CONSTANTLY. If it isn't a sinus infection, it's a work crisis. If it isn't a work crisis, it's an existential one. My mom had probably the best advice. She said, "Look, get used to it: getting a Ph.D. is hard. If it wasn't, every idiot would have one." That's true. If it were any easier, it wouldn't have its appeal, right? So I'm not bitching, but I am saying to you that this February, as my first year ends, I am lettering in strife, earning my stripes in the form of wrinkles, bitten nails, gnashed teeth, and gray hairs (lovingly covered by Loreal in extra-light ash blonde). And while I know it doesn't offer much in the way of money, power, or glory, I'm moving forward, if only to prove something to myself.