6/27/15 (Part One): The Unreality of Modern Life

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absurdist, Adaptation, Alain Chabat, art films, auteur theory, Élodie Bouchez, breaking the fourth wall, Charlie Kaufman, cinema, confusing films, dark comedies, dream-like, electronic score, Eric Wareheim, experimental film, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, hogs, Hollywood producer, Hollywood satire, husband-wife relationship, insanity, John Gallagher Jr., John Glover, John Heder, Jonathan Lambert, kooky psychiatrist, Kyla Kenedy, life imitating art, Lola Delon, loss of identity, Matt Battaglia, meta-films, Movies, Mr. Oizo, Patrick Bristow, producer-director relationships, Quentin Dupieux, Reality, Rubber, surrealism, Susan Diol, Synecdoche New York, Thomas Bangalter, videotapes, writer-director-cinematographer-editor, Wrong, Wrong Cops

Many filmmakers merely flirt with the weird and “out there,” toeing a carefully demarcated line in the sand between material that genuinely challenges viewers and material that upholds our own, personal status quos. These films may seem impossibly strange, from the outside, but cracking them open, as it were, tends to reveal their decidedly mundane inner workings. Gussying up a traditional narrative with stylistic tics and quirks, complex timelines and pseudo-philosophical meanderings doesn’t make it genuinely challenging any more than slapping a suit on a dog makes it the chairman of the board.

Standing on the fringes of these “politely difficult” films, however, are another batch of filmmakers: the agitators, the genuinely strange and the patently difficult. These are the filmmakers, artists like Charlie Kaufman, Yorgos Lanthimos, György Pálfi, Guy Maddin and Gaspar Noé, who possess singular visions that sit so far outside the mainstream as to seem almost alien. From films like Adaptation (2002) and Synedoche, New York (2008) to movies like Taxidermia (2006), Enter the Void (2009), Dogtooth (2009) and Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988), these headscratchers are as far from popcorn multiplex features as one can get, immersing audiences into bizarre worlds that look strangely like our own, albeit twisted through a fractured mirror.

And, just to the left of that particular group, stands French auteur Quentin Dupieux. With a body of work that includes some of the most genuinely bizarre, out-there films I’ve ever seen, Dupieux has quickly become one of my very favorite modern filmmakers. As a firm believer in the auteur theory, Dupieux is sort of my gold standard in this day and age: not only does he write and direct his films, he also shoots, edits and performs the electronic scores (Dupieux is also a world-renowned electro-musician who goes by the name Mr. Oizo)…talk about a one-man band! Any new Dupieux film is cause for celebration, which leads us to the subject of our current discussion: his newest oddball creation, Reality (2014). Did I expect the unexpected? But of course. Did Dupieux deliver? Between my aching cranium and over-stimulated imagination, I’m gonna have to answer in the affirmative.

Coming across as a bizarro-world take on Adaptation, threaded through with elements of The Truman Show (1998) and left to melt in the noonday sun, Reality deals with three separate individuals and the ways in which their lives eventually crisscross each other, leading to no small amount of pandemonium, confusion and inner turmoil. Reality (Kyla Kenedy) is an inquisitive young girl whose hunter father (Matt Battaglia, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a young Paul Newman) has just killed a wild boar in the woods and pulled a blue videotape from its carcass. She also seems to be the star of some sort of film being shot in her room, while she sleeps, by a kooky director named Zog (the always-kooky John Glover)…you know, your basic kid stuff.

The next corner of our triangle is inhabited by Dennis (John Heder), the mopey, downtrodden host of a TV cooking show who wears a moth-eaten rat costume and scratches his (possibly imaginary) eczema like it was going out of style. All that Dennis wants is a little relief from his constant irritation but a trip to outrageously obnoxious Dr. Klaus (Patrick Bristow) makes him out to be either a liar, an idiot or both.

The final point of the triangle, preternaturally nice cameraman Jason (Alain Chabat, who featured prominently in several Gondry films, among many others), also ends up being our defacto protagonist. After working his way up from receptionist to cameraman on Dennis’ show, Jason now wants to take the next step and secure funding for his own film, a strange little sci-fi movie about evil, sentient televisions called Waves. When Jason goes to pitch his idea to mega-producer Bob Marshall (Jonathan Lambert), however, the Hollywood exec is only interested in one, single aspect of the proposed production: if Jason can come with the best, most “Oscar-worthy” groan of all time, Marshall will fund his film, sight unseen.

From this point, it becomes a madcap dash as our three corners all attempt to achieve their goals: Reality needs to find out what’s on the videotape, Dennis needs to cure his skin condition and Jason needs to find the ultimate expression of pain and present it to his increasingly unhinged producer. Did I also mention Henri (Eric Wareheim), Reality’s school superintendent, whose cross-dressing dreams appear to be bleeding into reality? How about Jason’s wife, Alice (Élodie Bouchez), the shrink who’s treating Henri in between disparaging virtually every aspect of her husband’s life? Somehow, all of these disparate elements come together to form a real tsunami of the strange, culminating in a truly mind-melting meta-commentary on the nature of authorship, the terror of identity and the inherent insanity of the Hollywood movie machine. In other words: par for the course for Dupieux, the crown-prince of impish cinematic provocateurs.

As an unabashed fan of anything and everything Dupieux (last year’s Wrong Cops was my pick for best film of the year), approaching any new film of his is always a bracing mixture of anticipation and nervous optimism: I haven’t been let down, yet, but I’m the kind of gloomy gus who always expects disappointment around every potential corner. As luck would have it, however, Reality isn’t the film to break Dupieux’s hot-streak, although it definitely doesn’t rank as high as Wrong Cops or Wrong (2012) in my personal metrics. Despite being a much more baffling, confounding experience than any of his prior films, Reality handily displays an outsider filmmaker in full control of his faculties, bound and determined to submerge us in his particular flavor of “reality,” whether or not our poor minds are equipped to handle the experience.

One of the most notable differences, right off the bat, is the more austere, “realistic” vibe of Dupieux’s newest film. In fact, it isn’t until nearly 30 minutes in where it really “feels” like a Dupieux: the scene where Wareheim is introduced, driving a jeep down the street while wearing a gray dress and red scarf, all scored by that subtle “Oizoian” brand of simmering electronica, is quintessential Dupieux and one of his most striking scenes yet. While the film goes on to blend the more serious vibe with some of the goofier elements of his past films (Klaus is the kind of character that can pretty much only exist in a Dupieux universe), there’s a much different vibe here than either Wrong Cops or Wrong. If anything, Reality plays like a more under-stated, low-key take on the existential insanity of Wrong.

As befits Dupieux’s films, he gets some extraordinarily great work out of his cast. While Heder doesn’t get quite as much screentime as I would have liked, he gives the role his all: at times, his performance reminded me of Michael Keaton’s outstanding work in Birdman (2014), albeit without many of Keaton’s subtle shadings. Kenedy does a great job as Reality, disproving the old adage that child actors can’t hold their own amongst the grownups. Glover is predictably odd as Zog, while Lambert has an obscene amount of fun as the batshit crazy producer: whether he’s forcing cigarettes on poor, non-smoking Jason or sniping surfers with a high-powered rifle (complete with scope), Marshall is an absolute force of nature.

For his part, Wareheim turns in my second favorite performance of his ever, the first being his role in Wrong Cops. I never actually liked anything Wareheim was a part of until he got involved with Dupieux’s films: needless to say, I still don’t care for any of his other roles but I’ll be damned if he’s not an integral, necessary part of this particular world. Any and all of Wareheim’s scenes here are easy highlights (the dream sequence where he yells at an old man is, hands-down, one of the funniest sequences of the entire year) and he fits the overall ethos like a glove: as strange as it seems, Wareheim just might be Dupieux’s muse.

While the ensemble cast does remarkable work, however, Alain Chabat’s performance as Jason Tantra is the beating heart of the film. Reality would frequently collapse into chaos if we weren’t so invested in poor Jason’s quest: as he tries to satisfy not only his work and home commitments but his inner, artistic ones, it’s easy to see Jason as a kind of “Everyman” (albeit one focused on the entertainment industry), an avatar for a modern world lost in the clang and bustle of its own progress. The scenes where Jason fights to retain not only his sanity but his very identity are so fundamentally powerful because Chabat cuts through the inherent absurdity and shows us the real, scared and confused individual beneath.

As befits the rest of Dupieux’s oeuvre, Reality looks and sounds amazing: he really has an eye for crisp, colorful cinematography that pops on the screen and that trademark score elevates and enhances everything it comes into contact with. Dupieux may wear an awful lot of hats but he wears them all like a champ, not a chump: he’s a true auteur, in every sense of the term.

While Reality is a typically strong film, I would also be remiss if I didn’t admit that I found the whole thing rather baffling and confounding: this is the kind of film where logic and narrative cohesion mean a great deal less than mood and intention. Although none of Dupieux’s films could ever be called “simplistic,” Reality layers level upon level of meta-commentary until the only natural response for one’s brain is to yell “Stop!” and pull the dead man’s switch. While I’m fairly confident that I understand aspects of the film (the commentary on authorship is pretty difficult to miss and it’s rather easy to see the character of Jason as a surrogate for Dupieux’s own filmmaking experiences), there’s much that remains a complete mystery to me, at least until I’ve managed to watch the film several more times. Suffice to say that Reality is such an experience, I don’t mind doing the heavy-lifting: much better to imperfectly understand a clever film than to be endlessly bored by a dumb one, methinks.

At the end of the day, there’s really not much to say here that I haven’t already said about the rest of Quentin Dupieux’s films: the French filmmaker is a true marvel, one of the freshest, most ingenious voices operating today and just the kind of filmmaker who can help push the industry into a higher plane of existence. If Reality doesn’t rank as my favorite Dupieux (it actually ranks towards the bottom, perhaps tied with Rubber (2010)), it still manages to stand head-and-shoulders above most of what’s out there, proving that the most fascinating things are still coming out of the fringes. Here’s to hoping that if Dupieux ever gets co-opted by the mainstream, he manages to retain more of his identity than Spike Jonze did: I’d love the chance to see him play in a bigger sandbox but only if he got to do it on his terms and his alone.

4/26/14: To Project and Swerve

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absurdist, Arden Myrin, auteur theory, bad cops, Best of 2013, black comedies, cinema, comedies, cops, cops behaving badly, dark comedies, Eric Judor, Eric Roberts, Eric Wareheim, favorite films, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, French cinema, French films, Grace Zabriskie, Harmony Korine, Marilyn Manson, Mark Burnham, Movies, Mr. Oizo, Officer de Luca, Officer Duke, Officer Holmes, Officer Rough, Quentin Dupieux, Ray Wise, Rubber, Steve Little, surreal, Terry Gilliam, Tim & Eric, Wes Anderson, Wrong, Wrong Cops

Quentin Dupieux gets me. He really does. If any filmmaker operating in our modern age can really be tuned in to my bizarre little wave-length, Dupieux is definitely it. While I may hold Refn and Wheatley in the highest regard, never having seen one of their films that I haven’t adored, Dupieux is the crackpot auteur who seems to view the world with my eyes. Beginning with Rubber (2010), the French writer/director/musician (he’s also Mr. Oizo, the French electro artist) has seen fit to depict a world that’s one part Lynchian suburb, one part dystopic wasteland and one part absurdist stage play. While 2012’s brain-melting Wrong serves to set-up the bizarre wonderland that’s finally unleashed in Wrong Cops, Dupieux’s newest is a completely stand-alone triumph, an absurdist nightmare that manages to be both hilarious and disturbing. Basically, Dupieux is up to his old tricks.

Whereas Wrong told a more linear, complex but, essentially, traditional (or as traditional as Dupieux can get) narrative, Wrong Cops functions more as a bat-shit crazy Pulp Fiction, wherein we are introduced to a disparate collection of characters who we then follow about as their stories eventually intertwine. In the case of Wrong Cops, we’re introduced to the titular characters, a ragtag collection of “law enforcement” personnel that are sort of like Police Academy filtered through It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, by way of Harmony Korine. We have Officer Duke (Mark Burnham), who has sex with transsexual prostitutes, delivers the pot he sells to locals by stuffing it in dead rats, carts around a “75% dead” body in his trunk and needlessly hassles a poor teen nerd who just wants to listen to his headphones (Marilyn Manson, in a role that must, literally, be seen to be believed…and yes…he is playing a teenage boy). We get Officer de Luca (Eric Wareheim), who holds yoga students at gunpoint in order to get their phone numbers and his partner, Officer Holmes (Arden Myrin), who uses her young son as bag-man in a money-drop involving the blackmail of a fellow cop. Said fellow cop, Officer Sunshine (Steve Little), has an active side-career in law enforcement-themed gay porn, a business venture which he’s managed to successfully hide from his adoring wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Officer Rough (Eric Judor), is just trying to make the best damn dance track that he can. There’s something missing, however, and Rough just can’t quite put his finger on it. Good thing that the “75% dead” guy (Daniel Quinn) has a thing for beats, though: with a little luck, he may just be able to give the cut the extra oomph it needs to secure Officer Rough a meeting with a top record exec. That is, of course, if he doesn’t bleed to death first. Throw in Eric Roberts as Duke’s drug supplier and Ray Wise as the group “who gives a shit” Captain and you got yahtzee, folks!

Like all of Dupieux’s films, Wrong Cops is easier (and better) experienced then explained. He has a particular skill with enveloping viewers completely within the reality of his films, something that Wes Anderson and Harmony Korine are both experts at. There’s never a point in the film, regardless of how strange, random or absurd, where the viewer is taken out of Dupieux’s reality: for my money, it’s one of the most impressive displays of world-building I’ve seen this year. The film has a sun-bleached, washed-out color palette and tone that recalls not only Rubber but, almost subliminally, Alex Cox’s outsider classic Repo Man (1984). I actually see several parallels with Repo Man in this film, not least of which is the almost mundane way in which the characters all deal with the strangeness massed around them. There was definitely this feel in Dupieux’s previous film, Wrong, but that movie was also a much more explicitly fantasy/sci-fi oriented project, as was Rubber. Wrong Cops, by contrast, is set wholly within a world that could, technically, be ours, albeit one in which everything was tweaked a few degrees…a world in which everything was just a little wrong, as it were.

Part of the joy with Wrong Cops, similar to watching exploitation films or anything by Lloyd Kaufman, is seeing just how bad things will get. As with everything else, Wrong Cops doesn’t disappoint on this count: things start bad and get steadily worse until the whole thing becomes a roaring tsunami of bad taste, bad choices, bad behavior and bad, bad people. Truth be told, there isn’t a single character in the film that you can truly “root” for, not one person who passes the sniff test as a “hero.” We spend the most time with Duke but he’s the furthest thing we’d want from a protector. Ditto Officers de Luca and Holmes, a potential sexual assailant, on the one hand, and a cop so dirty that she even “feeds” on her own peers, on the other. The closest we get to an “innocent” cop in the film is Rough who wins by default: he doesn’t really do anything terrible (outside of some hanky-panky with his neighbor’s married wife, that is) but he also doesn’t lift a finger to help anyone, least of all the poor dying guy sitting in his living room.

Films like Wrong Cops walk a very fine line: on one hand, they only work spectacularly well if they push the envelope as far as it will go. On the other hand, however, there a definite difference between crudity with a point (see Blazing Saddles) and crude-for-its-own-sake (see pretty much any Troma film). Earlier this year, I lambasted The Comedy, a hateful hipster-skewering/lauding film that also featured Eric Wareheim in a prominent role. In that case, I was never sure which side of the issue the filmmakers were actually on: more often than not, The Comedy seemed to be celebrating their terrible behavior, while also trying to half-heartedly tsk tsk it. There’s no such hemming and hawing in Dupieux’s film, however: he’s all-in on the various officers terrible behavior but he makes no bones about what unrepentant assholes these people are. There’s nothing to look up to, here, no sense of cool cats thumbing their noses at a square world: these people are part of the problem, not any part of the solution, and Dupieux knows it. He also, however, knows that they are a seriously funny bunch of misanthropes (similar to that lovable bunch of apes in It’s Always Sunny) and gives them plenty of room to work their funny magic.

And the film is funny. Very funny. Unlike the ultra-dry, high-concept Rubber or the wry, tricky Wrong, Wrong Cops is all loud, belching, farting id, the Sam Kinison to the previous films George Carlin. Perhaps this speaks more to my sense of humor than anything else (remember…Dupieux gets me) but I laughed my way through the entire film. Hard. There are so many great scenes in the film that picking out favorites is a little hard but there’s stuff that still makes me crack up, even as I type it now: Eric Wareheim’s hair getting blown back by a tornado of pepper spray from a decidedly bored wannabe “victim”; Mark Burnham tossing a drug-filled rat onto a diner counter like it was no big deal; Officers de Luca and Holmes walking into a murder scene and proceeding to raid the fridge, featuring the priceless exchange, “Aren’t you going to ask any questions?” “I do have a question: how old is this mozzarella?”; the record executive dismissing Officer Rough’s efforts with the revelation that he doesn’t think “anyone’s going to want to listen to music from a black, one-eyed, slightly monstrous DJ.” Wrong Cops is like a bottomless treasure chest, constantly spewing forth glittering new comedic jewels at frequent intervals.

The acting, across the board, is dead on. All of the cops are pretty much perfect but there isn’t a single actor/character in the film that feels off, regardless of how much/little screen time they get. Marilyn Manson, in particular, is utterly fantastic: he plays the part of David Dolores Frank with absolutely zero hint of his more famous day job and the result is a pretty realistic portrait of a hassled teen. It’s a brilliant, metaphysical move that should have been nothing more than silly sight gag (oh look: the Antichrist Superstar is wearing jeans and a t-shirt) but plays like an honest-to-god directorial choice. This, in a nutshell, seems to sum up the Dupieux method: treat everything, regardless of how absurd or meaningless, with the utmost respect. Dupieux may be a court jester but he’s a smart one, perhaps as smart as Terry Gilliam, in his own way.

As previously mentioned, the film looks great and the sparse, dry electro score compliments everything perfectly. Truth be told, I just can’t find anything to really dun the film for: if this was a baseball game, this would have been a home run, no questions about it. As such, I’m pretty much left with just deciding where the film fits into Dupieux’s existing oeuvre. I actually like it quite a bit more than Rubber, which is easily the most “difficult” film in Dupieux’s catalog, but not quite as much as Wrong. While Wrong Cops is a much funnier film than its predecessor, I also think it’s a slightly smaller film: Wrong was working with some truly mind-blowing concepts and metaphysics, whereas Wrong Cops is a peek into an insane world. By the time Ray Wise showed up in a role that couldn’t help but remind me of his turn as Satan in Reaper, I had begun to wonder whether Dupieux’s whole point was to plop us down into a kind of purgatory while his various characters continued their slow shuffle into Hell.

A sentient tire…a talking dog…a collection of the worst police officers in history…if there’s a method to Quentin Dupieux’s exquisite madness, I’ve yet to see it. This, of course, is what makes waiting for his next film so excruciating. At this rate, the next movie could, literally, be absolutely anything under the sun. That’s kind of terrifying, if you think about it, but that’s also pretty damn exhilarating. It’s what creativity should always be. It’s what the movies should always be. It’s why I’m still here…and it’s why you should be, too.

1/24/14: Are We Supposed to Laugh Yet?

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Borat, cinema, Eric Wareheim, Film, hipsters, indie comedies, indie dramas, James Murphy, Jeffrey Jensen, LCD Soundsystem, Movies, Neil Hamburger, pretentious, Rick Alverson, Sacha Baron Cohen, satire, scatological conversations, self-satisfied, tedious, The Comedy, Tim Heidecker, unpleasant

Since things have been a little hectic for the past several days, last Friday was the last time (for a few days, at least) that I was able to cram several films into one day. This particular day, however, ended up being more miss than hit but just barely. I watched one extremely irritating film, one fantastic film and one very disappointing film. Since it turned out that I had more to say about The Comedy than I initially figured, I’ll go ahead and split this day into two: we’ll get to You’re Next and Curdled in the next installment.

As I’ve often found to be true, it’s entirely possible to detest the content of a film while still admiring the craft behind said film. This is certainly true of film’s with extremely disturbing content (Salo, most “torture porn” films) but the same can also be said of film’s that display a masterful touch with cinematography and style yet offer nothing whatsoever as far as content goes. These films, in other words, are the cinematic equivalents of Little Debbie snack cakes: bright, vibrant outsides filled with nauseating nothingness inside. Nowhere can I think of a film that better exemplifies this aesthetic than Rick Alverson’s The Comedy.

Before I begin to detail everything that I disliked about this film — and that’s no inconsequential list, might I add — let me take a moment to list the things that actually worked for me. Right off the bat, the film looks pretty great, at least as far as moody indie films go. The acting, when it can manage to stay away from endless litanies of debauched profanities (which it cannot do for any great length of time), isn’t bad. The trump card of having oddball comedians like Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and Neil Hamburger (listed as Gregg Turkington in the credits) perform in the equivalent of a dour indie drama is interesting, at first, but wears its welcome out pretty quickly. Alverson has a tendency to use indie-instrumental music to set moods and, in scenes such the wordless bicycle ride through the city, it really works. I actually found the bicycle riding scene to be very atmospheric: I only wish that the filmmaker’s had followed that particular muse instead of the one that actually informed the picture: South Park.

You see, The Comedy isn’t so much a film, per se, as an extremely misguided attempt to call out that most mystical of modern beasts: the hipster. What, you may ask, is a hipster? Well, it seems to be a bit harder to define than a hippie, goth or metal-head, mostly because those sub-strata of society can (usually) be readily defined by either their attire or their choice of music. Hipsters, on the other hand, seem to be more defined by attitude: a slack, lackadaisical, ultra-sarcastic view of the world that allows for only ironic attachments, whether they be to entertainment, friends or political viewpoints: a hipster will hate Motley Crue but wear a Motley Crue t-shirt because it’s ironic. The hipster (at least as defined by what we see in The Comedy) is a PBR-swilling, smirking, self-satisfied putz, a rather repugnant creature that feels any subject (Hitler, rape, slavery, death) is ripe for hilarious satire. Because, you know, it’s all ironic, dude.

And that, essentially, is my huge problem with The Comedy. Under the guise of taking to task these odious individuals, Alverson has actually given them free rein to run amok for almost two hours. Here’s the exact format of the film, a formula that’s played out time and time again:

— Swanson (Heidecker), a rich, bored “hipster” and his equally bored friends Van Arma, Ben, Cargill and Bobby (played, respectively, by Wareheim, LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, Jeffrey Jensen and Hamburger), hang out together, damn each other with faint praise (“I totally respect your friendship”…”You are so good at being you”), drink PBR, have disgustingly scatological conversations with each other (The low point? Either the bit about hobo cocks being super clean because stock brokers are constantly sucking them or the delightful bit about smearing shit on vaginas…take your pick.) and then go out into the public where they act like boorish assholes and, apparently, attempt to get themselves killed by as many offended people as possible. This is usually followed by a short, quiet scene where Swanson seems to reflect on his actions, only to have the whole cycle begin anew within moments. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Here’s the thing: cinematic history is filled with great films about absolutely loutish individuals. Hell, it’s filled with plenty of great films CREATED by loutish individuals. There’s a fine trick involved, however, with such depictions of obnoxious characters, a trick that outre filmmakers like Todd Solondz know only too well: you may depict any number of endless atrocities, you may say anything, you may go anywhere, as long as the audience understands that you don’t actually agree with these things.

And yes, that is a mighty slippery slope, since it really begins to edge around issues of creative control, intent, art vs pornography, etc. But here’s the other thing: the filmmakers who are the undisputed masters of this domain, people like Todd Solondz, Mel Brooks, Trey Parker/Matt Stone and John Waters, never allow the audience to lose sight of what’s wrong or right. They may depict racist, misogynistic, insane, unpleasant and downright bizarre individuals but there is always the sense that humanity is upheld. The truly evil individuals, in these particular universes, will always be known to us: the filmmakers may not always give them their just comeuppance but we, as an audience, can always see through the act. I don’t mean to say that bad characters in films always need to be punished: I do mean to say, however, that it should be very evident where the actual filmmakers stands on issues like racism, sexism, etc.

The Comedy, unlike something such as Blazing Saddles or Pink Flamingos, is a much more confused  affair. For the most part, there is no commentary on these boorish acts, mostly because everyone in the film (with very few exceptions and we’re talking perhaps five, total, if I’m pressed) are equally obnoxious. Swanson takes a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant and engages in verbal sparring with a comely waitress (played by Kate Lyn Sheil). His method of courtship? Graphic descriptions about how he’s a convicted rapist and will rape anything that moves, including her. The waitress, for her part, gives as good as she gets, indicating that she’s pretty okay with this line of discussion. We’re supposed to understand, of course, that Swanson is being super-duper ironic here: he’s saying the worst possible things he can think of, simply to provoke any kind of reaction in his stunted life. His technique, it must be said, is also successful: after some light rape talk at the restaurant, Swanson eventually takes the waitress back to his houseboat for some more “clever” repartee and some hanky-panky.

All fair and good. What, then, to make of the “hilarious” scene where Swanson goes into a predominately black bar and swaggers around, loudly asking, “Where your bitches at” because he “wants to fuck some black ass?” It couldn’t possibly be racist because no one, save the caddish Swanson, would actually do that, right? How about the priceless gag where Swanson pays a Middle Eastern cab driver $500 so he can drive his cab around and yell at innocent women like they were prostitutes for hire? Another fun bit of harassment involves Swanson planting himself in a chair by his dying father’s bedside and regaling the male nurse with delightful anecdotes about “prolapsed anuses” before launching into a clever routine involving the word in phrases such as “Anus and Andy” or “Famous Anus Cookies” (okay, full disclosure: I did laugh at Famous Anus Cookies but I’m pretty sure that was the 12-year-old in me).

And yes, of course, there is plenty of history for material like this. Hell, Sacha Baron Cohen turned these kind of interactions (in the real world, no less) into his entire career and the Jackass guys have been doing it for a while, too. We also have some pretty racist material in Blazing Saddles and South Park, some pretty awful sexual ickiness in Happiness and a horribly worthless schlub in The King of Comedy. The difference, as far as I can see it, has to do with the equal-opportunity scope of the other filmmakers, particularly Mel Brooks and Parker/Stone. Mel Brooks is famous for never meeting anything he wouldn’t make fun of in a film: religion, ethnicity, racism, sexism, social mores, incest, mental illness, nationalism…you name it, Brooks poked at it. You’d have to be pretty brain-dead, however, to mistake whether Brooks’ sympathies lay with Bart or Hedley Lamarr. Every edgy joke, reference and rim shot in the film is funneled towards one, explicit purpose: shining the cold light of truth under the rock and exposing racism as the ridiculous, self-defeating, self-cannibalizing disgrace that it’s always been. Similarly, South Park may seem to unleash quite a bit of scorn on Scientology but compare that to what they’re saying about Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, Islam and the like and it comes across as just another target bottle on the fence. Offensive? Sure. But equal-opportunity offensive rather than specifically targeted.

With The Comedy, however, I was never sure where my sympathies were supposed to lie. I’ll be honest: I’d already mentally checked out a few minutes into the film, as the first scene was a slo-mo fest of slobby, shirtless guys spraying PBR everywhere while dry humping each other. There was such an air of detached bemusement to the scene, almost as if Alverson were saying, “Aren’t these guys just too, too crazy?,” that I could almost smell the self-congratulation coming from the screen.

None of this, by the way, is to insinuate that either Alverson or any of the cast have any intentional purpose to salute this sort of behavior. I do believe, however, that everyone involved lacked the abilities to pull this kind of thing off gracefully, opening the door wide for just such an insinuation. The whole thing, to be honest, smacks of the “enlightened” individual who relishes telling racist and sexist jokes because they “outrage” him so much or the gore-hound who studiously tracks down every frame of questionable content for films that she has no intention of seeing, just to see how bad it really is.

By the time I got to stuff like Swanson arguing for the return of feudalism (because some people just need to serve other people), the relative merits of Hitler (if one could look past all of the murder and stuff) and the scene where the waitress has an epileptic fit (I guess) as Swanson is preparing to have sex with her, only for him to spend the next several minutes watching her convulse while sipping a drink…I had just given up. Any attempt to look for deeper meaning, any idea that Alverson would be pulling the rug from under my feet and doling out bottomless shame to these assholes, was defeated completely by an ending that seems to posit Swanson as a lost, confused soul. Really? Because he kind of came across like a pretentious, racist, privileged douchebag for the entirety of the film. I realized that the extent of Alverson’s commentary on the subject was confined to the title: it’s ironic because the movie isn’t actually a comedy but a drama, dude…get it?

Ultimately, I was left with more questions than answers by The Comedy: What, exactly, is a hipster and does it actually exist in any minds other than other “hipsters”? What the hell was James Murphy doing in this? (to his credit, Murphy often looks pretty ashamed of what’s going on around him but his glee in the church-scooting scene is pretty obvious) Is it possible to have a really good, dark drama populated entirely by comedians? Where is the line between satirizing frat-boy misbehavior and just depicting it wholesale?

Perhaps, in the end, the joke really is on me. The characters in the film are all in their mid-30s, just like me. Perhaps I’m supposed to identify with this in the same way that twenty-somethings identify with films like Ben Stiller’s The Secret of Walter Mitty or Spike Jonze’s Her. If so, the joke is still over my head. I couldn’t imagine doing anything with these people but repeatedly hitting them with a 2×4. When I watch The Comedy, all I see is a bunch of stunted man-babies acting like complete and total jackasses. If Alverson sees something more noteworthy or noble, I sure wish he’d point it out to me.