Cinematic Measures: Monday Movies

Monday movies are those that don't live up to the prestige of those who made them. They're the minor films by major directors, writers, even actors if you want to think of certain actors as the driving force that makes good movies into great ones. It refers to those movies in an artist's oeuvre that just kind of coast by when we're used to the work of said person brimming with emotion and/or intelligence that makes us want to stand up and cheer or move or do something to make the world a better place: the kind of movies that make the world better for existing and make us better for seeing them. Every director or star takes these kinds of days off. Now there's a name for them.

The name in general refers to the world famous New York Times crossword puzzle and came into fruition after watching the documentary Wordplay, which, because I am not a New Yorker or a cross word puzzler, informed me that the Times crossword get's harder and harder as the week progresses. Monday being the easiest and the weekend being the hardest.

Therefore, a Monday movie is, just what it's name implies: it's a little too easy, too phoned in, too narrow to be considered a really great work. It's a film from someone we expect more from. Scoop is a Monday Movie for Woody Allen, The Color of Money from Scorsese, Death Proof for Tarantino and so on. They aren't necessarily bad movies, they just don't give us what we want from a star or filmmaker who usually produces Friday kind of work.

Other Filmic Measures:

The Documentary Rule

Where's The Airship Movies

The Chocolate Bar Movie

Punch-Drunk Love

Today Kevin J. Olson over at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies (check it out!) wrote a post about Punch-Drunk Love which A) reminded me how much I love that movie and B) made me remember that I wrote an essay in University about how Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who tells his stories through images and one section of that essay was dedicated to Punch-Drunk Love. Unfortunately the bulk of the essay focuses on Boogie Nights, but I think what I wrote provides a nice contast to the ideas that Olson brings forth. Check it out and then go check his out.

I have a love in my life. That makes me stronger than you could ever imagine- Barry Egan, Punch-Drunk Love

After a, expansive epic like Magnolia, a film like 2002s Punch-Drunk Love, at a mere ninety minutes, feels like a minor work from Paul Thomas Anderson. However, upon closer inspection, one finds that PDL is Anderson’s most focused and coherent film, while also managing to be his most artistically daring. Not only is the running time of the film the opposite of Anderson’s two previous epics, but it also plays like their backwards reflection, as it opens with the film’s key image and instead of being about the desire to repair family relations, its main character seeks to break away from them as they are an agent of torment for him. PDL is also an experiment of sorts for Anderson because, instead of using his images to tell the story, he uses them instead to provide a physical projection of Barry’s inner psyche onto the world around him. When Barry Egan is trapped in his office, trying to engage in conversation with possible love interest Lena, his sisters constantly demanding his attention on the phone, his crew experience chaos as a fork lift crashes into a self, sending boxes crashing to the ground, we get to realizing that Anderson is giving us a physical reenactment of what it must be like to be living inside Barry’s head at any given moment. It is a jarring and daring method of metaphysical filmmaking.

The key image in PDL, much like the frogs in Magnolia, appears without warning or explanation. It is a small piano, latter identified be Lena as a harmonium (an ironic twist, as the harmonium is the key object that Barry clings to in moments of unbearable chaos. It, much like her, is the sole object that can sooth Barry’s soul), which is mysteriously ejected from a cab and placed on the sidewalk in front of Barry’s place of business after a van flips over due to a violent explosion and then instantly disappears. Here Anderson is setting up a metaphorical divide in Barry’s psyche. By providing us with a violent image, followed by an innocent one, Anderson shows us the dual nature of Barry who is both a naive child with no true sense of how human communication works in the everyday world, but also a ball of burning rage that oozes beneath the surface just waiting to explode. This is a contradiction we see constantly recurring throughout the film, most notably in a delicate scene where Barry tells Lena that she is so beautiful he just wants to get a hammer and smash her face in.

That scene, although seemingly violent by design, actually provides a startling moment of revelation when placed in comparison with the story his seven sisters tell of the time he smashed the sliding glass door at home with a hammer. By expressing his love for Lena via wishing to smash her face with a hammer, Anderson is showing us a shift in Barry, who no longer desires to put his energy into bursts of violent rage but rather, to putting all of his energy into loving Lena with all his heart.

That scene segues perfectly into the film’s second key image (the phone) and the final scene in which Barry encounters the mattress man Dean Trumbell who harasses Barry after having called a phone sex line, and whose goons also put Lena in the hospital after crashing into Barry’s car. The phone is a cause for much anxiety in Barry’s life, like how his sisters constantly harass him at work with their insistent calls. Also the phone is the sole object that stands between Barry and his ability to fully commit himself to Lena because it acts as a constant reminder of Barry’s relationship to Trumbell. It is only with slight irony that, when going to see Trumbell, Barry arrives with the receiver of his home phone in hand, the cord dragging behind. It is here that Barry mutters the classic line about having a love in his life, and, in the films most uplifting dedication of love, finally hands the phone off to a spare employee after threatening to “beat the hell” from Trumbell.

Another use of symbols worth exploring is the way Anderson uses colour in PDL, especially red and white, as discussed by Cubie King in his essay Punch-Drunk Love: The Budding of an Auteur. Cubie assess that, “Red serves as the colour that leads to Barry’s happiness” (2005). Cubie could be on to something as he recalls significant moments of red being used: the woman dressed in red in the background at the supermarket as Barry looks for items he can earn frequent flyer miles off of, the red cab that drops the harmonium onto the sidewalk, the stewardesses dressed in red who wait at the end of the terminal for Barry to board the plane to Hawaii, and the red arrow which shows Barry the way to escape from the four blonde brothers (2005); all signs leading to Barry’s happiness.

White on the other hand, according to Cubie, acts as the opposite. It is his “oppressor” (2005). The white walls of Barry’s headquarters entrap him, the white phone receiver which is the cause of much anxiety for Barry, and the white hallways which Barry must frantically run through in order to get back to Lena for their first kiss, etc. Thus, further exemplifying Anderson’s desire to make PDL play like a physical representation of his main character’s fragmented psychological state, and, as a result, crafting a film that has come closer to any since Scorseses’ After Hours (1986), to providing an in depth representation of character psychology entirely through images.

Can You Spot A Great Film?: A Justification of Shutter Island

There are two director's working today who, above all others, have managed to rise above just being great filmmakers and into the realms of pop culture phenomenons. One is Quintin Tarantino and the other is Martin Scrosese. The problem with great filmmakers reaching this status though is that hordes of viewers flock to their movies for no better reason than because everything attached to their name must be brilliant by default. This isn't based on any critical logic, any in-depth thought or any knowledge about the trajectory of the filmmaker's career; it's just generally accepted pop culture wisdom that has been passed down through the generations. I know hundreds of people who think Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas are masterpieces, and they are, but I can count on one hand roughly how many people have been able to provide a decent explanation as to why this is the case.

Therefore kids, and adults too, will go to these movies and declare them masterpieces because well, isn't that what Tarantino and Scorsese do: make masterpieces, as if they have exceeded mere morality and are instead a brand name known for quality every time. And, in fact, they are known for quality. I've only seen one Scrosese movie I didn't like (The Colour of Money) and two Tarantino movies I didn't like (Reservoir Dogs and Death Proof), but I could sit down and conduct a conversation or debate, justifying my loves and disappointments for every film each director has helmed. After seeing Inglourious Basterds in August I went to the McDonald's across the street from the theater to get a McFlurry when some kid I knew vaguely from high school, who had apparently also seen the movie, explained to his friends with vigour all the ins and outs of Tarantino's oeuvre without ever once saying anything useful about the aesthetic texture of his films, the brilliance of their construction, the subtlety of using dialogue to create the kind of drama that no physical representation could, and so on. Every time I hear conversations going on like this I think feel like interrupting and saying, "Hey kid, Tarantino is more than just hip dialogue and references to other films." And then I think of French critic Pierre Rissient who said that 'It is not enough to like a film. Oe must like it for the right reasons."

I'm not trying to be some sort of film snob here, but what Rissient says is true: it's not enough to like films because the vast majority of their viewers have deemed them good. You have to have a justifiable reason, otherwise, your opinion is a moot point that is being set up to be knocked down. That's why bad films like The Usual Suspects, The Boondock Saints and Fight Club have gotten so popular: a lot of people started to say they were good simply because they were different until the point where it would be considered taboo to cast a bad word against them (see my reconsideration of Donnie Darko to see what I am talking about).

But now I have gotten off topic because those kids are talking about movies they liked. I'm talking about good movies: movies where you can see a masterful director making the best out of what they have been given. I'm talking about appreciating good lighting and editing and camera angles; all that stuff that lead to a films overall style. Too often people confuse movies they like with movies that are good. Anyone can express if they likeed something to some sort of extent, but few people have the knowledge to judge whether a film is actually good or not.

That finally brings me to Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island which is the kind of film that really tests Scorsese's (or any great filmmaker's) audience and separates the film "viewers" from the film "watchers." I say this because as I was watching Shutter Island, someone in the back of the theater was laughing as each new revelation of the story was revealed, clearly so disgusted with the path the story had taken that he just had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Then, after the screening, I heard some teenage girl declare it the "gayest" movie she had ever seen. Really, I thought, these are the people who go to see Scrosese's movies?

But you see, Shutter Island is a good movie. It's actually a masterpiece if you don't take the story into consideration. It's a masterpiece in film style, perfectly evoking a long forgotten time and genre of filmmaking. Scorsese flawlessly evokes the look and feel of the 50s film noir and uses that as a grounds to create the suspense of horror of the story. How does it do it? Well how about the brilliant overhead lighting, casting long shadows up walls and across floors, the shot that begins as a close up of Leonardo DiCaprio's face until pulling up to reveal the vastness of a cliff side lurking just behind him, one wrong move leading to death. Then there's my favourite shot in the movie. It takes place in Ward C and is an overhead shot on a low angle that shows a maze of steel stairs and corridors hitning that the story starting to come apart by perfectly representing the main character's state of mind: cold, dark, confused, and going in an endless tangle of directions all at once. The examples could go on for days.

That's great filmmaking. If the story isn't up to Scrosese's standards, well at least he still brought his A-game to the table. That's the problem with Scrosese as a pop culture icon: everyone can see the brilliance of the tracking shot in Goodfellas because tracking shots are big and obvious and draw attention to themselves, but when Scrosese goes subtle, pays homage to a past film genre, creates for his film the style it deserves and not the one that announces itself as film style, the movie is passed off or thrown away, as if it never occurred to these people to ask why Scrosese is considered, after all, one of America's best living filmmakers in the first place, because, believe it or not, there is a justifiable reason. It's the job (and the fun) of movie lovers to figure it out.

Shutter Island (4 out of 5)

The boat rolls out of a fog so dense that it renders everything a brilliant white. It might as well be sailing straight out of 50s film noir. Aboard it U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels vomits violently in the washroom. This is a man who has not repented for the sins of his past and carries that burden atop his every move. As an agent he looks the part: tan suit, sharp hat; the whole nine. As played by Leonardo DiCaprio he’s a seasoned professional: been too many places to be much surprised anymore and seen too many things to much care, and yet he carries hidden secrets in the way he holds his shoulders and hangs his head. To him, this new case at the state run mental hospital for the criminally insane will be an in-and-out job but his partner Chuck knows better, “If these guys only heard voices and chased butterflies they wouldn’t need us.”

The men are escorted to an entrance gate, surrounded by looming brick walls and guarded by emotionless men with big guns. They are instructed to hand over their weapons because, as a state run facility, it is the law that the guards carry rank over the cops. They’ll play by their rules or not play at all. While a storm brews outside they are lead to Dr. Cawley, the man in charge. He is played by Ben Kingsley which means he is proper, well-spoken and pristinely mannered, while also managing to give the feeling of always holding something back. It doesn’t help that his colleague at the institution is played by Max von Sydow who has made a career out of always holding back deep secrets that give off ominous tones.

That’s the set-up to Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, the director’s first excursion back into thriller territory since Cape Fear and his first into classic horror and film noir. Two Boston cops are sent to the isolated institution in order to track down an escaped patient that no one will admit to having seen escape or know exactly how she went about it. “It’s as if she just evaporated through the walls,” assesses Cawley, and he may be right; there seems to be a lot of spirits haunting the walls of Shudder Island, or at least the pain of their memories. The girl in question us Rachel, who drowned her three children and still, according to Dr. Cawley, has no idea what she has done or that she is even in an institution.

The grounds are divided into three buildings, a ward for the men, a ward for the women and Ward C, which used to be an old Civil War post and houses the most dangerous criminals. No one is allowed access to Ward C without the accompaniment of both Cowley and the warden.

As the investigation progresses Teddy is attacked by migraines and visions of his wife who was killed in a fire and to his days during World War II in which he saw dozens of men slaughtered without mercy in a concentration camp. As the investigation progresses and Teddy gets closer to uncovering the truth his inner demons take him closer and closer to the physiological breaking point. What about the institution that triggers these dark feelings in Teddy is one of its many secrets, of which I dare not continue to hint at.

This is a brilliant set-up for Martin Scorsese to evoke that golden period of classic horror and film noir, which consisted of wounded men carrying their emotional baggage around on their shoulders, drifting from one job to the next, always searching for some sort of inner redemption that is just out of reach. Here Scorsese once again proves himself the master of tones and moods, of implying more by showing less. Shutter Island is, if nothing more, a brilliant exercise in set design, lighting, costumes and editing. Every frame is meticulously constructed to convey the sinister undercurrents that could lie around every dark, damp corridor of the wards. Consider the way Scorsese slowly tracks the camera through desolate spaces in ominous point-of-view shots, how high angles reveal labyrinth mazes of unending stairs and corridors or how the camera cranes up from close-ups to reveal imminent danger lurking in the background. Not to mention Ward C, when Teddy finally gets there. It’s a virtual hell-on-earth that will go down as one of the great horror sequences of its time.

As a thriller, the first two thirds of Shutter Island are riveting and we eagerly anticipate what new tricks Scorsese has up his sleeve. And then, as most thrillers tend to do, the film loses touch in an effort to ceaselessly explain itself (a verbal description in the third act is followed by a flashback that visually depicts the exact same thing) and we’re left with another case of the explanation being much less than the buildup, leaving the sinking realization that the material has no intention of rising to the occasion that Scorsese and his actors have set for it, leaving Scorsese trying to pull rabbits out of empty hats.

And yet Scorsese’s brilliance as a filmmaker still stands outside of the story and keeps the wheels spinning. The filmmaker’s mastery of his craft oozes into every perfectly constructed shot and the film thus, even when stalling, feels like a work of art to be hung on the wall and pondered over the delicacy of its creation. As the greatest living filmmaker working in America, Shutter Island will not be remembered as Martin Scrosese’s best film. In lesser hands it wouldn’t even pass as a tolerable thriller and yet even as its plot crumbles down around it, as an evocation of a classic, long forgotten genre and all its moods, textures and surfaces, it is just about a perfect stylistic exercise.

Word on the Street

Last Friday I stole an idea from Mad Hatter where, instead of writing something original on Friday I just posted links to other people's interesting stuff. But then I didn't do it just quite right and Hatter scolded me for linking to too much news and not enough original blog posts. So this week I thought I'd give it another go and include more blogs this time.

Everyone is blogging about the Oscars. So much so that I've stopped reading all the full posts and just skim the ones that have some degree of appeal. Regardless, Nathaniel R at The Film Experience seems to be providing the most frequent coverage.

Speaking of The Film Experience, Robert has sparked a comments debate about whether or not Christopher Nolan's Memento is a masterpiece or not. (I weigh in on that debate somewhere in there).

The Mad Hatter gives his own tribute to Roger Ebert after the Esquire profile on Ebert earlier this week. To reply to something in his comments section: a large majority of the Siskel and Ebert back issues can be found on the At The Movies website. Be warned though, once you start watching one, you're going to want to watch them all.

Tom Clift puts in his two cents regarding the new Nightmare on Elm Street reboot trailer.

Kid in the Front Row started his own Facebook fan page.

Andrew at Encore's World of Film and TV continued counting down his favourite performances of the decade. Can't say I agree with his number 13 choice, but hey, he's still got 12 more to name.

Everyone is doing podcasts. Here I am, the new kid on the block, who is so technologically incompetent that I can barely even get pictures on my site properly and everyone is putting these things on theirs. Consider me jealous. Piper of Lazy Eye Apocalypse is doing one about the Oscars, Mad Hatter did one where he named his top five Martin Scorsese's movies, among other things, and Big Mike did his first one about the Oscars as well over at Big Mike's Movie Blog.

One more Oscar post from Sebastian from Detailed Criticisms who is none too pleased that Zac Efron and Taylor Lautner are going to be presenters.

/Film is saying that Michael Bay will start shooting big action sequences for Tranformers 3 in Chicago and Moscow. It is still to be revealed where the other 10 minutes of the film will be shot. (Sorry, I couldn't help it).

There's pictures of Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis from John Landis' Buck and Hare. I've read it. It's funny and also not funny, but in a good way.

To anyone else, if you thought you wrote something great and I missed it, drop me a line or scold me in the comments section and maybe I'll catch you the next time around. It was nothing personal. Really.

Laughing into the Darkness: The Forms and Functions of the Black Comedy

I've been promising this for at least two weeks when I wrote about my joy over IFC picking up Todd Solondz's newest film Love During Wartime. This is an essay that I wrote a couple years ago and presented at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN, as part of the Midwest Undergraduate Film Conference. Hope you enjoy it.

Some of the most brutal, cynical, pessimistic and emotionally devastating films ever made have been comedies. One may find it hard to concur with such a statement knowing how comedies have found themselves functioning within the film industry of yesterday and today. Almost entirely forgotten come awards season, the most popular comedies are mostly light and fluffy entertainment vehicles dumped into multiplexes during the summer season in order to draw teenagers with nothing better to do. That may be a stereotype, but with shallow, juvenile offerings such as Little Man, Scary Movie 4, You, Me & Dupree, and Beerfest, the film industry would be hard pressed to argue its case otherwise.

Enter the black comedy, an unrelenting genre that exists at the crossroads somewhere between humor and tragedy, in a vacuum of confusion and indifference, balancing itself on a sliding slope of irony. Alas, black comedy is a mish-mash of the senses providing viewers one thing and then ripping that out from under them to reveal another. The black comedy is as emotionally penetrating as the best of dramas and yet as funny as any straight comedy. Thus, black comedy poses a distinct question of morality: Is it okay to laugh or should we be crying? How do we feel about laughing at masochism, misogyny, or pedophilia? Are these viable subjects for comedy or should such subject matter be left to serious films?

Three such films raise these very questions. They are Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men (1997), and Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998). All three address the function, or in most cases dysfunction, of sex, the alienation of being an outsider in a society that has no use for you, and that funny way in which uncomfortable situations tend to leapfrog back and forth between hilarity and brutality at the blink of an eye.

I was raped once…. He came in through there on the fire escape. He held a knife to my throat and said if I made a move, he'd cut my tongue out. He tied me to the bed... he took his time... six hours. Actually it was a boyfriend of mine. To tell you the truth, I slept through most of it. So... there you are.- Marcy, After Hours

Marcy’s comment functions not a lot unlike the structure of After Hours itself. Where Marcy’s anecdote begins in horror and descends into banality, After Hours begins in banality and descends into chaos. And like Marcy’s speech, After Hours explores the cruelty of sex. It is a film in which its main character Paul Hackett sees sex as an opportunity to escape the boring routine of his life as a word processor, but in order to attain any he must venture into a strange section of New York City called SoHo, a world completely foreign to him. SoHo is a place that Ben Nyce, in his book Scorsese Up Close: A Study of the Films describes as, “A world where others accept deviant behavior with cool detachment” (88).

It is Paul’s naivety from which Scorsese derives both his comedy and drama as it stands in sharp contrast with this sexually deviant world where Paul quickly realizes that he is disgusted by the behaviors permeating the underbelly of SoHo and wishes simply to escape back home to his banal existence. What is most shocking about the film is that we as an audience exist on Paul’s side of the sexual coin: the straight man in a crooked world. This is how After Hours derives its blackness. By the time it is over and we have shared Paul’s grueling journey into the darkest realms of sexuality, we are drained. We, like Paul, just want to go home.

Maybe most disturbing and hilarious is After Hours’ outlook on the disgusting nature of sex. It is rare in any of Scorsese’s work for one to see sex as being synonymous with pleasure, but After Hours is particularly brutal in its depiction of the underside of the sexual conscious. We see this in one particularly funny scene in which Paul suspects that Marcy’s roommate Kiki has been robbed by a group of burglars. She drops him her apartment keys from her window which overlooks the streets below. He runs upstairs to find her tied up. He is impressed by the professionalism of the knots that bind her hands behind her back. A man cloaked in leather enters the room. Turns out Kiki was not burgled, but was simply engaged in a little friendly S&M. Again Scorsese has allowed the banal to descend into the obscure and the joke is on us, the innocent naïf.

However, for as many jokes as the film makes about Paul, the sad sack of an outsider trying to escape this world of sexually deviant women, it is also unsettling in its treatment of said women. As Ben Nyce points out, “More disturbing and damaging is the films portrayal of women. As agents of Paul’s disorientation, Marcy, Julie, Gail and June are uniformly hurtful” (91). Even more to the point is the fact that Paul approaches all of these women as if they can provide him a portal of escape. Yet all of the women, mirroring the films perfect comic structure, appear normal upon introduction but descend into beings who only desire to entrap Paul, both literally and metaphorically. What the black comedy givith with one hand he takith away with the other.

And yet, despite this bleak content, there is something strangely funny about Paul’s Kakfaesque journey through the streets of SoHo. Because he is so innocent, so naive, so out of place in this strange world, we must laugh at the absurdity of his situation. Take the pathetic line the timid Paul uses in order to escape Marcy after becoming disgusted by the idea of sex, as he projects all of his sexual insecurities upon her once the possibility arises that she could be horribly burned enters into the scenario. He asks her to show him one of the bagel and cream cheese paper weights that Kiki makes, “As we sit here chatting,” he says, “There are important papers flying rampant around my apartment because I don’t have anything to hold them down with” (Minion, 1985). Not only does Paul not know how to deal with Marcy as a sex object, but once it arises that her sex is undesirable to him, he doesn’t know how to handle that either. He is, after all, a long way from his home as a word processor.

Or yet another perfect scene which balances sexual obscurity with hilarity in which Marcy explains that her husband was so fascinated by the Wizard of Oz that he only called her Dorothy in bed. Once again, sex is a hotbed for obscurity and deviancy instead of pleasure. Sex is not escape in After Hours, it is entrapment.

After Hours, at its comic center, operates as a juggling act, constantly presenting us with one thing and then ripping the rug out to show us something else more disturbing and perverse. This is, the very essence of what makes it a black comedy.

This process may not be clearer than in a final scene in which Paul meets a lonely lady at a bar; the most seemingly normal he has met all night. They have a sweet moment on the dance floor in which genuine emotion seems to circulate back and forth between them, she hides Paul in her apartment from an angry mob that wants him dead, and we think that he has finally found someone who can truly help him. She then, in order to hide him, makes him into a paper machete statue, thus making him her own private prisoner. What the film makes us question in these moments is in the true tradition of black comedy: do we laugh at the absurdity of Paul’s situation or do we feel bad that he has been forced to realize the irony that sex is just as entrapping as his 9-to-5 desk job? Are we disgusted by the film’s inherent misogyny or amused by its audacious sexual deviance? The film, like all great black comedies, does not answer these questions, and nicely paves the way for true unrelenting filmmakers like Neil Labute and Todd Solondz.

Women. Nice ones, the most frigid of the race, it doesn't matter in the end. Inside they're all the same meat and gristle and hatred just simmering.- Chad, In The Company of Men

If After Hours is a film about how devious women entrap men, In the Company of Men is a film that takes revenge with gleeful abandon. Written and directed by Neil Labute, In the Company of Men is a savage look at misogyny within the corporate world. The film tackles serious issues with cold detachment, and if it is a comedy, our laughter stems from a disbelief in just how brutal it is willing to be. It thus employs humor for two purposes: first as a coping mechanism and second, in order to sideswipe us by not allowing us to realize the true extent of main character Chad’s cruelty.

Neil Labute seems to make films about a specific kind of individual. His characters come from a place of position, they are the elite. Labute deals with people of status, be they corporate players, university professors or art students. Because of this, Labute easily projects his anger upon these people. He brings to the surface their shallowness, their greed, their hollow existences, their lack of a moral center; attacking them simply by showing us who they truly are. The comedy of Neil Labute seems to stem from a deep disgust and disdain for his main characters.

In this, the true spirit of black comedy, there is an inherent sadness that lurks underneath the scenes of humor. Labute sees Chad as a product of his own environment, a man who has been socialized into crushing everyone in the way of his path to the top of the corporate ladder. He and his friend Howard are constantly framed by office doors and windows, the camera never moving; they are trapped within the confines of their own corporate world with little room to move. If there is humor in any of this it is in the fact that one man could be so evil and yet so outside of caricature. We laugh at Chad out of fear; a fear that a man like him could actually exist among us.

Chad is thus a corporate slime ball whose plan is for him and the meek Howard to make an innocent deaf girl fall in love with both of them and then ditch her when she least expects. In a scene of utter cruelty, Chad describes with complete exaggeration to his co-workers how the mute girl Christine sounds when she talks. He laughs emotionlessly while comparing her to a dolphin, as she struggles to form words, spit gathering at the sides of her mouth. And yet the scene is funny; funny to think that any human being could be so cruel and unsympathetic; Chad is such a monster that we don’t know how to deal with his extreme behavior other than to assume he must be putting us on. The laugh therefore seems to erupt from a place of confusion; not because we are enjoying ourselves, but as a way of dealing with the underlying sadness of the scene; convincing ourselves that no one could possibly be so cruel by nature.

As stated prior, the second way in which Labute uses humor is to sideswipe the viewer. Just like After Hours, In the Company of Men makes us think we are inside a comic universe only to pull the rug out from under us. Alas, Chad, in an act that uncovers the true unrestricted nature of his cruelty, not only destroys Christine but also Howard in the process, without care or concern. If In the Company of Men is so emotionally affecting, it is because the film steps outside of comic expectation and serves the audience with a cruel backhand to the face during the unexpected climatic moment.

Suzanne Fields states that “What makes the movie especially horrible is that the man who hatches the scheme and seduces the girl gets away without punishment. There’s no justice, poetic or otherwise, for his cruelty” (1998). By doing this, Labute has turned the black comedy upside down. In After Hours the comic tone, as critic Roger Ebert states, lets us know that “We’re not supposed to take it seriously” (1985). However Labute’s approach is more cynical, more real. Fields, explaining Labute’s purpose, says that, “He wants an audience to be deprived of the satisfaction of a moral resolution to make them-and us- experience the depths of moral callousness running amok in our society” (1998). In other words, Labute makes us believe that we have stepped into the comic world which is not to be taken seriously, a satire of the shallowness of corporate players, and then shows us that the situation is all too real by ripping the satire out from under us, leaving only shallowness, and showing that life is cold and cruel and that it is possible for evil to continue to exist without punishment. That Chad rises in status and position among his corporate cronies after his little stunt may be Labute’s cruelest joke of them all.


I want kids that love me as much as I hated my mother- Diane, Happiness

Todd Solondz is one of the most fascinating makers of black comedy. He is, in my opinion, the most unrelenting filmmaker working today because he is willing to bring modern taboos to the surface; dealing with them by having the courage to admit that they exist. His subject matter has ranged from childhood neglect, to rape, to pedophilia, to abortion, and yet, unlike Labute, who seems to have little but contempt for the inhabitants of his films and the society that created them, there is a strange, morbid sweetness lurking within the Solondz universe. He may be just as, if not more dark and relentless in his comedy than Labute, but he also sympathizes with the outsiders of his world.

A true auteur in the sense that his films are mirrors that reflect the state of mind of their maker: to understand Solondz’s films is to understand Solondz himself. In an interview with writer Sigrid Nunez from The Believer magazine Solondz says that,

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It’s in real life that people are over the top. And if I have a certain view of how people behave in this regard, it’s because I’ve been a target for a certain kind of comment all my life. Perfect strangers have always felt free to say things to me in the street, or shout things from passing cars (2005).

Alas, seeing that he is an outsider himself, we begin to understand why Solondz is attracted to the people who inhabit his films. Happiness is comprised of a suburban pedophile who rapes his son’s friends, a sex addict who combs the phone book looking for random women to make lewd phone calls to, a novelist who wishes she had been raped as a child so that her new novel could be more authentic, and a woman who has killed her doorman and placed his remains in plastic baggies in her freezer.

This is dark material, and even though Solondz doesn’t sympathize with the actions of the pedophile or the sex addict, he sympathizes with the individuals as human beings, which is what makes them funny. These are the people who live next door, who appear normal on the surface, the “quiet ones” as the neighbors always say; and although Solondz doesn’t go so far as to make excuses for the behavior of his characters, he does attempt to show that they are in fact normal, or at least in the sense that they too are human beings. There is something ever so sweet about a perfect scene in which Allen the sex addict and the woman across the hall who has recently murdered their doorman find each other and go to bed together, only to lie on top of the sheets, facing away from each other. Solondz is a master of allowing his characters exactly what they would want.

However, it is in the tradition of black comedy that the comedy works at the surface while darker subtexts hide underneath, and this is no expectation for Solondz with Happiness. Although he my align himself with the outsiders who he portrays in his films, there is still the inescapable reality that pedophilia is a serious crime and mental disorder, and for every scene of hilarity there is a moment of absolute bleakness such as the one in which Billy confronts his father about his pedophilia, resulting in a perfectly written scene which is also one of the most uncomfortable and heartbreaking ever to be put on film.

Herein lies the trick to Solondz’s brilliance. He leads us by the hand into situations that we don’t want to be in and then abandons us there, leaving it up to the viewer to interpret how we feel about a given situation. We laugh at a character’s actions and then analyze our own sincerity; do we feel right about ourselves having laughed about rape, pedophilia or abortion? Therefore, Todd Solondz is probably the master of the black comedy (a term he himself hates).

Where Scorsese amplifies his comedy into a state of nightmarish weirdness which could only exist in a world of its own, or at least New York, and Labute only provides us with the option of sharing his distain for his characters, Solondz is a fence sitter. He follows the rules of the black comedy, viewing sex as a function for displeasure, seeing the world from an outsider’s perspective, and making us question how we feel about what we have seen, but he also offers no easy answers or conclusions.

Instead he presents the audience with only indifference, seeing the pedophile, sex addict, and murderer as both people who perform horrible actions and also have a human side, forcing us to look inside of ourselves and assess how we feel about the characters and their behavior based on our own moral judgments. In a sense, although all three directors discussed have either played within the realm of black comedy (Scorsese) or built a career out of it (Labute), it is Solondz, with his complete indifference, pulls the rug out from under us himself, which, despite the hilarity of his films, makes us wonder if he is even operating within the genre of comedy, black or otherwise, at all. No wonder he hates the term.