 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Game Space and Play Time: |
 |
|
Introduction: The Promiscuity of Comedy
As a glance into any DVD shop will inform you, comedy
resists division into types, categories, sub-genres. Drama, on the other hand,
easily breaks down into a myriad of groups: thriller, horror, action, family
drama, war movie, art film … But comedy? It is all just thrown together, into
one great and unruly family of films. Sometimes a DVD shop will attempt a
specific label, like Romantic Comedy, but even this quickly becomes nonsensical
and unworkable: how many comedies, finally, exist without some love intrigue, major or minor? It is as if the idea of
comedy and the idea of love – its trials and tribulations, joys and
disappointments – go together from the very start, and stay together eternally.
Comedy is such a large and amorphous genre because it
is defined by the affect it hopes to
elicit in us. It is not defined by a historical place or period (like the
Western), not by specific plot structures (like the detective or crime film),
not by the presence of a specific form (singing and dancing in the Musical),
not by a familiar iconography (film noir), not by certain kinds of supernatural
character-types (fantasy). Comedies are defined by only one thing: they hope,
and do everything in their power, to make us laugh. In this sense, their
closest generic cousin is not drama, but horror, which only wants to make us
scream. But screen comedy is even looser and more fluid, as a set of
conventions, than horror cinema.
Comedy is a promiscuous and voracious genre. American
cinema has often tried to forge templates, particular moulds or types of comedy
– satirical comedy, trash comedy, physical comedy, middlebrow comedy, transgressive comedy – but the
destiny of comedy is to recycle, combine, devour, and absorb bits of all other
genres. Rob Reiner’s The Sure Thing (1985), for instance, begins as a teen movie, in the milieu of family home and
school. It sails along nicely, self-satisfied, like this for about 20 minutes.
Then suddenly, its two main characters (played by John Cusack and Daphne
Zuniga) separately get in the back seat of the same car – and now it’s a road
movie. And the road movie association brings new kind of gags, but also tension
(trapped in such a small space, antagonists cannot escape one another and must
interact …), and even menace: what is that redneck car or truck coming over the
bump in the highway?
Comedy likes to slip in and out of generic costumes in
this way. We can call Gregg Araki’s Smiley
Face (2007), for example, a stoner comedy (the drug-fuelled adventures of a
young, female drop-out), but that tag actually ignores or obscures many delightful
things in it: its picaresque journey narrative, its mock-Godardian scenes of political theory (Anna Faris lectures the
factory workers on their exploitation), its Resnais-like
montage-flashes forward and backward in time, its accumulating action-chase
plot, its Dreyer-like absorption in the human face dumbstruck by oversaturated
light (Anna Faris as Dreyer’s Joan of Arc or Gertrud
high on hash cakes) … Not to mention the film’s most revolutionary and
explosive aspect, namely its connection to a beleaguered tradition of female
burlesque (Lucille Ball, the films of Elaine May, Molly Shannon in the Saturday Night Live spin-off Superstar [1999]) in which – as Luc Moullet once wisely said – the actor-hero, to succeed, must
stoop to conquer, must consider no action too degrading, humiliating or
disgusting to perform …
However, American screen comedy does have a history –
a huge, diverse, often uncharted history. And the history of any filmic form
brings with it not rigid templates, but tendencies,
possibilities, emphases … which can then be combined and recombined in new
ways. Some possibilities fall away: it can be truthfully (and perhaps sadly)
said that, whatever talent America has in comedy (and it has a lot), it does
not, at present, have supreme physical performers and artists of the type who
began in the silent era, like Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon or Buster Keaton.
The connection of comedy with vaudeville, the circus, travelling troupes and
even the music hall tradition has largely disappeared: now the players come
from stand-up venues, theatre restaurants, the large and international comedy
festival circuit, and, above all, television. The comedy has become more verbal
and cerebral, less physical – or, when it does become physical (as in the
celebrated toilet scene of Bridesmaids [2011]), it stages the loss of bodily
control, not its acrobatic or athletic mastery.
But let us not bemoan, with false nostalgia, the loss
of particular tendencies and possibilities. The verbal comic tradition that
passes through Jack Benny to Woody Allen and Billy Crystal gives us Albert
Brooks – a figure who has no real equivalent in Hollywood’s supposed Golden Age
from the 1920s to the ‘50s. Cameron Crowe today draws much from his mentor Billy
Wilder, but also mines the vibrant, varied youth culture that Wilder effectively
left behind at the very start of his career, after The Major and the Minor (1942). There is no one today can who
depict a crazy, energetic community, fractious yet completely interconnected,
the way Preston Sturges did in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) – yet this community finds an
equivalent, and Sturges’ penchant for provocation and
outrageousness finds its modern-day match, in David Wain’s films Role Models (2008) and Wanderlust (2012).
This essay sketches a history of American screen
comedy that is ‘partial’ in two respects: it covers only a very small portion
of the films produced between (roughly) 1930 and 1980; and it stresses a
particular angle or point of view. My approach to the history of comedy is to
take the emphasis away from the usual concentration on character psychology,
and on the narratives that support this natural, commonsensical ‘human
interest’. This is in no way to downplay the crucial contributions to screen
comedy of either scriptwriters or actors. However, I believe that what we
really need to excavate and understand in this history is the notion of film
comedy as what I call a game space:
above all, a play with character stereotypes, familiar plots, and cultural
clichés. Comedy opens up a space and time for play with such elements – a
process of play that is both highly formal in its working (drawing unprecedented attention to the language and
conventions of the film medium itself), and critical,
in the sense of opening up and expanding the gap between representation and reality,
stereotype and person, cliché and truth. This is the thread that connects Ernst
Lubitsch to Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges to Frank Tashlin, and Jerry Lewis to the teen movies of the 1980s.
Out of the many key figures who could be considered here, I leave aside such giants as Leo McCarey,
Frank Capra, George Cukor, Mitchell Leisen, Gregory
La Cava, Howard Hawks and Blake Edwards (1), to concentrate on the network
formed by mainly three masters – Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges and Frank Tashlin – with sidelong glances at a few
others.
Ernst Lubitsch: The Semantic Chessboard
Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) has left us one of the
richest bodies of work in cinema history, as rich as Fritz Lang, Alfred
Hitchcock or John Ford. He is the supreme filmmaker of invention. Inventiveness was his watchword, as he challenged each
of his collaborators (especially his writers, such as Samson Raphaelson) to find a new
way to narrate a plot move, signify a character’s function, or suggest
something that could not be explicitly said or shown. Everything in Lubitsch’s
cinema – certainly by the time he installed himself in Hollywood, after his early
productions in Germany – was a matter of clever artifice, stylisation,
innuendo, hieroglyphics. This is, in fact, exactly
what we mean when we refer to ‘the Lubitsch touch’, as it became known
popularly and in the film industry during the director’s lifetime: signalled,
above all, by the camera staying fixed on a closed door (behind which, of
course, we know exactly what is happening), with only a musical cue, or the
commentary of another, excluded observer, to fill in the blank.
Lubitsch’s work produces an alienation or estrangement effect in two, subtle ways. Not, as this idea has come to mean in Brechtian dramaturgy, by ‘breaking the illusion’ of the
fictional world – that would come into vogue later in American screen comedy,
and through another tradition. No, first of all, Lubitsch brought with him what Edgardo Cozarinsky refers
to as ‘the gaze of the outsider’, the observation of the European-Jewish
immigrant, upon the scenes of American life and the conventions of its culture.
(2) What this means, in action, is that the simplest transactions of everyday
social life – greetings, manners, monetary exchanges, conversation – are rendered
strange, a riddle to be decoded. Language, bodily movement, rituals of meeting,
processes of shopping and selling … all these things are rich material, fertile
soil for Lubitsch’s comedic imagination. Even when Lubitsch comes close to the
typical, sentimental romantic comedy, as in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), his highly concrete, even materialist vision gradually turns the
scenario into something else: the plot becomes like a diagram that reveals a structure,
showing how “human beings are transformed into servants of commodities” and
underlining “the relations of force in the world”. (3)
I do not mean to thereby claim that Lubitsch was a
keen Marxist secretly lurking, like a spy, within the American system. Quite
the opposite: like many émigrés (Douglas Sirk, Otto Preminger and Lang are among the striking
examples), Lubitsch embraced the culture of his adopted homeland lovingly, and
‘indulged’ it accordingly. In fact, the sly quality of Lubitsch’s cinema, that
lurking, off-screen smile or wink which may or may not be subversive or
critical at every point of his films, comes precisely from this quality of
indulgence – his eagerness to please his masters and employers, his drive to
succeed as a good, American businessman in the entertainment industry. As the
eternal outsider working hard to be accepted as an insider, Lubitsch overplays his hand, delivers too well on what he intuits is expected
of him as a storyteller, humourist and entertainer. In
doing so, he truly instigates a tradition: we see traces of the same, subtle
game in the work of Louis C.K., when he makes a film about success in the black
music scene (Pootie Tang, 2001); or when Cameron Crowe
makes the phrase “show me the money!” the central theme of Jerry Maguire (1996).
Lubitsch is sometimes regarded as the inaugural figure
of sophisticated comedy in American
cinema. This is a term with which we need to be careful, whether we are
speaking of Lubitsch, Wilder or Joseph Mankiewicz –
for it is not the opposite of vulgarity,
something which, in its transgressive, liberating and
socially levelling force, plays a
major role in virtually every branch of comedy included in this survey. Lubitsch
must be thought of as sophisticated in an almost technical or generic sense:
his films take a decisive step away from physical burlesque, from the tradition
of the visual and frequently corporeal gag (to which we shall return), and invests all his creative energy, from the start
of the ‘talking pictures’ period, into what we can call a scenography of speech: spoken words, back-and-forth conversations, choreographed
in relation to accompanying gestures, eye contact, and so on – an extraordinary
game of both revelation and dissimulation, simultaneously.
Now we arrive at the second major level of estrangement
created by Lubitsch’s cinema – his intensely formalist tendency. By this, I
mean to signal how every element in his films, from the mirco to the macro levels of structure, is systematised: everything repeats, echoes,
mirrors, inverts, or transforms something else, and no detail is ever left in
surplus, unsystematised. Everything is taken up, energetically used and finally
exhausted or discarded within the game
space that is the film itself. For examples, think of how The Merry Widow (1934) breaks down words
into syllables, the name ‘Dan-i-lo’ distributed
across three different shots and three different speakers; or the objects
(purses, wallets, keys) that get stolen and pass from person to person in Trouble in Paradise (1932); or the
alternating comparison between two renditions of the same song (“You’re the
Cream in My Coffee”) in The Smiling
Lieutenant (1931); or the always varied repetition, in altered contexts, of
the line “It’ll get a terrific laugh” in To
Be Or Not To Be (1944); or the bold triangular structure – two bodies
always united, pictorially, against a third, but with the identities in ‘the couple’
always shifting – of Design for Living (1933). Indeed, it has often struck me, looking once more at Lubitsch’s mise en scène, that he must have had an
uncanny ability – a gift to any filmmaker – to see what was in
three-dimensional space in front of him on the set, and instantly mentally
process it into a flat, two-dimensional space: images as pieces or tokens on an
imaginary semantic chessboard, where characters stand less for themselves than
for particular bundles of values and
meanings.
“If there's something missing, that signifies trouble in
paradise”! Is there any wonder that the radically-minded film critics at Cahiers du cinéma and elsewhere, at the end of 1960s, gleefully seized on Lubitsch’s films for
their dazzling cynicism, their insistence on money as the basis of all
interpersonal exchange (including the erotic), and their effortless
foregrounding of every manipulative trick and corny convention reigning in ‘30s
Hollywood? (4) Yet Lubitsch was never simply inside or outside the codes of his
time; while he brilliantly up-ends every appearance (as much through sound
counterpoint as through framing and editing games), he also lets us enjoy the
sly virtuosity, the infinite caginess, and finally even the mutual tenderness
between his principal characters – so often themselves also outsiders to the
social system, in one way or another (this tendency in his work culminating in
the sublime, late masterpiece of Cluny
Brown, 1946). Ultimately, as with all the very greatest filmmakers, Ernst
Lubitsch’s cinema endures just as much for the innovation of its form as for
the perfection and clarity of its content.
Preston Sturges: The Perils of Populism
If the reign of Lubitsch over ‘sophisticated’ screen comedy runs
from the end of the silent era in the 1920s through to the mid 1940s, then –
overlapping with his final years – the films directed by Preston Sturges (1898-1959) and Billy Wilder (1906-2002), after
their respective apprenticeships in screenwriting, represent two crucial
departures from the Maestro’s legacy. Wilder today remains, in general terms,
the best-known and most beloved of comedy-directors from Hollywood’s Classical
Era – and he is regarded especially highly as a model by other filmmakers,
whether established or starting out, past or present. Why should this be so?
First, he outlived most of his contemporaries, and his late works (such as The Front Page, 1974) managed to seem
not too anachronistic within the new, young American cinema of the time.
Second, where Lubitsch made only one foray into drama (The Man I Killed, 1932), Wilder ended up making almost an equal
number of comedies and dramas, with the dramatic pieces (including Double Indemnity, 1944, Sunset Boulevard, 1950, and Fedora, 1978) regarded as canonical
classics as much as Sabrina (1954), Some Like It Hot (1959) and Avanti! (1972). Third – and perhaps most
profoundly – Wilder downplayed the formalistic side of the Lubitschian legacy (even through he had co-scripted Ninotchka, 1939), and re-invested his creative energies in
the creation of eccentric but believable, ‘fully rounded’, psychologically
coherent characters.
The case of Sturges is quite
different. In 1978, Andrew Sarris bemoaned the fact that “I have all I can do
to keep the memory of Preston Sturges alive among
readers and students who seem to be forgetting more and more of the past with
each passing year of media overload”. (5) Happily,
in the DVD age, Sturges’ reputation (like Lubitsch’s)
is again on the rise, although it poses no serious challenge, as yet, to the disproportionate
degree of celebrity enjoyed by Wilder in the popular consciousness. Yet there
is a paradox embedded in this comparative status of Wilder and Sturges. Where Wilder inherited from Lubitsch the sometimes
aristocratic tendency to privilege those characters who are fast-talking, smart,
witty and urbane (also usually urban) over slow-witted and conservative-leaning
‘average folk’, Sturges, although himself an
extremely erudite and cultivated person, had a strong and profound feeling for
the type of populism – the ‘love of the common man and woman’ – associated,
above all, with Frank Capra. But even this is paradoxical: Sturges venerated
Everyman and Everywoman by turning them into eccentrics, people whose obsessiveness and neurotic tics take them out of the norm.
And, by exploring this, he steadily questioned the stereotypes of American
personality that usually accompany populist ideology, whether poetically
portrayed by Capra, or vilely spewing from the mouth of right-wing Presidents
like Bush or Reagan.
Once long ago, as a teenage cinephile, I found myself sitting in front of Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941). I had been told it was a masterpiece but, as is the case with every cinephile, I needed to be personally convinced of its
greatness – so I waited for the epiphany to arrive. Early on in the film, a curious
scene interrupted its clearly modern, knowing games with social and sexual
roles. It was an intrusion of pure, unmediated corniness, or cornball as we say in English. Henry
Fonda is in the process of declaring his love to Barbara Stanwyck,
via an unctuous parable of children whose destiny it was to fall in love; meanwhile,
in the mise en scène, waves washed behind the ship
deck, and “Isn’t It Romantic?” hummed on the sound track. I thought to myself: how
trite and conventional, what a letdown, what a failure of nerve on Sturges’ part! I felt the film had betrayed me. This was a
comedic masterpiece?
I was in for a severe but salutary
lesson – and this was what ended up being my Sturges epiphany. At the other end of The Lady
Eve, this corny scene gets re-played – but with a few major differences.
They’re the same words, mouthed by the same actors; except that now Stanwyck is pretending to be someone else, and her motive
is pure revenge. Sturges, too, is out for revenge – on
me, the presumptuous viewer who actually believed the director could stoop to
that earlier moment of schmaltz without a damn good reason. For the first scene
was a set-up, and the pay-off is this: second time
around, the words are ludicrous, and the scene keeps falling apart due to an
obligingly over-romantic horse which keeps nuzzling into the love duet, Yes, I
felt ashamed – to have doubted Preston Sturges for a
single second! And – a more general lesson – to not have realised that the film was exercising its capacity to play a game on and with its
audience, as part of its general game with clichés and stereotypes. (6)
For Sturges,
in the brief but glorious years covered from The Great McGinty and Christmas in July (both 1940) to Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) –
similar to the period of high creativity enjoyed by John Hughes as
writer-director-producer between Sixteen
Candles (1984) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – there is a hitherto
unprecedented emphasis, matched perhaps only in the drama of Citizen Kane (1941 – itself anticipated
by Sturges’ script for The Power and the Glory, 1933), on ordinary life as its reflected
and refracted in the mass media: photography, radio, newspapers, movies. The
reflexive games in Sullivan’s Travels (1941) – a Hollywood film about the conventions and genres of Hollywood, and
the ‘reality’ that is forever beyond their grasp – reach a dizzying peak in
this regard. All of this feeds the central theme, the generating principle of Sturges’ work: in this cinema that is obsessed with showing
how stories are spun and how images are constructed, the worst kind of person,
the most narrow-minded and destructive in their actions, is the one who believes in the immediate, surface meaning of a mediated representation, who takes its appearance for the truth, and does
not question further, or follow the fragile flash of true feeling and authentic
personal identity that is always beyond the stereotyped image/story (The Lady Eve provides an almost textbook illustration of this scenario).
Sturges seizes a central principle of American comedy, especially
what we think of today as romantic comedy, common to virtually every great
director mentioned in this essay: the real, deep truth of a situation, an
individual, a community or an intimate relationship is not to be found in a
fixed, socially sanctioned stereotype, but in a perpetual performance – and performance, in the flux of everyday life, must
depend on a keen gift for constantly renewed improvisation. Since performance is always playing with masks, fake
identities, and smokescreens of contrived, theatrical appearances, the moral or
ethical dividing line between characters is not how smart or witty they are (as
in Wilder or the TV series Seinfeld),
not what class or status they are (which is a constant element in Cukor), but
precisely whether they can remain in the position of player rather than
‘played’, the (joyous, artful) manipulator rather than the socially
manipulated. Thus, redemption for Sturges’ characters
always occurs in a Dionysian mode: it is a matter of repressed, strait-laced
characters finally losing their strict, Apollonian, hyper-rational sense of
self in impulse, immorality, madness. We can see
different traces and mutations of this in the ‘trash comedies’ of today, from Animal House (1979) to Superbad (2007),
where the relentless pursuit of ‘gross out’ bad taste (alcohol, drugs, sex,
music, partying) carries its own Dionyisan call to
find yourself through losing yourself.
Frank Tashlin: A New Kind of Rose
Jean-Luc Godard wrote in 1957: “According to
Georges Sadoul, Frank Tashlin is a second-rank director because he has never done a remake of You Can’t Take It With You [Capra 1938] or The Awful Truth [McCarey 1937]. According to me, my colleague errs in
mistaking a closed door for an open one”. (7) Frank Tashlin (1913-1972) did indeed open a
new path for screen comedy, and one heeded, over decades, continuing into our
present time, by filmmakers in many countries and cultures: Maurizio Nichetti (Italy), Jacques Rivette and William Klein (France), Yahoo Serious (Australia) … and by zany
contemporary American comedies including Smiley Face and Hexed (Alan
Spencer, 1993), as well as the entire careers of Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis.
Tashlin’s path into cinema, during the 1930s and ‘40s,
was unique: through cartooning for books and newspapers, and then Warner Bros
animation. His films, as Roger Tailleur suggested in
1958, create “a universe of pure representation”. (8) Everything in them is
artificial, already constructed, pre-given. Tashlin’s pleasure, a very modern one, is in the game of arranging and shifting these
elements, placing and displacing them. In this sense, he is the extension of Sturges: his films include every kind of mass media, from
printed press through to television and movies (a scene in Rock-a-Bye Baby [1958] where Jerry Lewis hides within a TV frame
and pretends to be the contents of its changing channels is memorable in this
regard).
But,
unlike in Lubitsch or Sturges – and as only very
rarely in Wilder, for instance in the closing seconds of Some Like It Hot – Tashlin never held
back on ideas for breaking the diegetic illusion of
the fiction. In this respect, he was following a tradition – not only of
actor-directors such as Harry Langdon who would punctuate their comic
predicaments with looks or winks to the audience, but also of extreme, wayward
films like Hellzapoppin’ (1941), and the milder assaults on
screen realism routinely carried out by the 1940s Road to … films of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (the latter of whom Tashlin worked with at both the start and end of his
directorial years). Following the narrative category proposed by literary
theorist Gérard Genette, we
can call this the metaleptic tradition in cinema. (9) This tradition, where characters act from an awareness
of the constructedness of the fiction they are in,
has been reactivated, selectively, by Woody Allen in films such as Whatever Works (2009); but it completely
structures a late Tashlin film like Caprice (1967).
Yet
there is also, here, a reinvention of Lubitsch, after the more humanistic,
1940s turn (even if it is a sometimes harsh, unforgiving humanism) of Sturges and Wilder. For, similar to Lubitsch, one side of Tashlin is his play with the formal elements of cinema,
such as visual distortion, image against sound, and breaks in the
self-contained diegesis of the narrative. The other
side of Tashlin’s games is a questioning of the very
basis of narrative and representation, of stereotypes and the ideology they
construct. They explode from within – by taking cartoon-like stylization and
experimentation to their extreme point – the central obsessions of the Hollywood
cinema: finding one’s identity and one’s place, reaching the happy endings of
adulthood, sexual satisfaction, monogamy, and marriage. Such endings are indeed
achieved by the films (just as Lubitsch did in The Merry Widow or Heaven Can
Wait [1943]), but they are rendered strange, contrived to be deliberately
perfunctory or alienating (as in Sirk’s melodramas),
and the narrative path that leads to them is tortuous, baroque, itself
extremely artificial. (10)
Where Tashlin departs from
Lubitsch is in the return to highly physical (and less verbal) gag comedy. Words are not absent, but –
as we see in the work of his protégé Jerry Lewis – they are détourned into often nonsensical cries, mumbles, glossolalia, a kind of sonic and phonetic play sometimes worthy of the
sound-poetry of the Lettrist artists (whose era
corresponds approximately with the span of Tashlin’s career). What matters more to Tashlin is the
construction of highly elaborate visual gags, often taking as their subject
(like the contemporaneous works of Jacques Tati) the
dysfunctional collision between human bodies and the machines and objects
(cars, domestic cleaners, musical instruments) of modern industrial and
consumer society. A taste for Surrealist metamorphosis creeps into this
encounter between human and non-human, creating strange, giddy transferrals of
identity: in films such as Artists and Models (1955), Rock-a-Bye Baby and The Disorderly Orderly (1964), a
medical patient wrapped in bandages runs down a hill, slams into a tree, breaks
part, and turns out to be a hollow shell; or, conversely, an empty suit of
knight’s armour, when sent clanking down the stairs, suddenly acquires magical
motor-control skills.
The cherished notions of narrative plausibility and
logicality, consistent characterisation, and even the unified nature of a
filmic world, are all merrily detonated in Tashlin’s cinema. The stereotypes that give a fleeting ‘body’ or vital animation to
people or ideas or value systems literally blow in from anywhere: from
machines, advertisements, billboards, laboratory experiments, cartoons, mass
media crazes. The giant, painted depiction of a woman at the start of Artists and Models – inspiration, no
doubt, for Fellini in The Temptations of
Dr Antonio (his episode of Boccaccio
‘70, 1962) – has more apparent life than the insect-workers who toil within
it. Like Lubitsch, Tashlin believes in the power of
invention but, with his advanced, modernist melancholia, his dream is that
perhaps, one day, this poetic beauty will be engineered, created precisely from the machines that currently
alienate and separate us: hence, in his testament piece, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), the dream of creating “a
new kind of rose” – a strange, Frankenstein-like creation, no doubt, built from
a palimpsest of ill-matching bits and pieces, just as Tashlin’s films are.
Conclusion: Animal Universe
In the late 1970s, via Animal House, the stoner-Latino films of Cheech and Chong, the Porky’s series
(actually originated in Canada), and many other similar movies, American comedy
took a swerve from the last remnants of sophistication – so weakly revived in
Peter Bogdanovich’s musical At Long Last Love (1975) – and into what Raymond Durgnat has (non-judgementally) called animal comedy. (11) The genre known loosely as the teen movie sets
animal comedy to work in films such as Revenge
of the Nerds (1984) and Weird Science (John Hughes, 1985) – leading, much later, to the Farrelly brothers or Judd Apatow schools of deliberate,
provocative bad taste.
Yet comedy never goes entirely one way, or fits into
just one sub-generic groove. What I
hope I have evoked here is a series of possibilities that always remain
potential, alive. Lubitsch’s sense of formalism and systematisation reappears
in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) and
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002); Sturges’ feeling for loose, performative
communities revives itself in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993); the
tenderness that Wilder felt for his main characters, no matter how flawed they
are, returns in Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Pineapple Express (2008) or Bridesmaids. And on it goes – as Godard
advised us 55 years ago: when it’s a matter of comedy, try not to see the
closed options, only the open doors.
MORE Lubitsch: Angel
MORE Lubitsch (book review): How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride
1. For an appreciation of Edwards (1922-2010) written in 1987, see my “Blake Edwards’ Sad Songs of Love”, Undercurrent, no. 7 (2011).
2. See Edgardo Cozarinsky, Cinematógrafos (Buenos Aires: BAFICI, 2010).
3. See Nicole Brenez, “Shops of Horror”, Rouge, no. 11 (2007).
4. See the special Lubitsch dossier in Cahiers du cinéma,
no. 198 (February 1968), reprinted and expanded in Bernard Eisenschitz & Jean Narboni (eds), Ernst
Lubitsch (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/Cinémathèque française, 1985).
5. Andrew Sarris, “Film Criticism in the Seventies”, Film Comment (January-February 1978), p.
11.
6. For more on the idea and theory of a ‘game with
clichés’, see Claude Ollier, “Josef von Sternberg”,
in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Volume 2 (London: Secker & Warburg,
1980), pp. 949-960.
7. Jean-Luc Godard (translated and edited by Tom
Milne), Godard on Godard (London:
Secker & Warburg, 1972), pp. 57-58.
8. Roger Tailleur, “Anything Goes”, in Claire Johnston and
Paul Willemen (eds), Frank Tashlin (Edinburgh Film Festival, 1973), p. 26.
9. For a comprehensive discussion of the trope of metalepsis in cinema, see Thomas Morsch,
“Permanent Metalepsis: Pushing the Boundaries of
Narrative Space”, in Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg & Simon Rothöhler (eds), Screen
Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Vienna: Austrian Filmmuseum/Synema, 2012), pp.
108-125.
10. For more on the concept of ‘cartoon
narrative’ in live-action, photographed cinema, see Brian Henderson, “Cartoon
and Narrative in the Films of Frank Tashlin and Preston Sturges”, in Andrew Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991), pp. 153-173.
11. See Raymond Durgnat,
“Next Time You Say That – Smile: A New and Revised Dictionary of the Comedy of
Manners”, Monthly Film Bulletin, no.
656 (September 1988), pp. 258-260.
© Adrian Martin July 2012 |
