It turns out Nietzche was right. That dead syphilitic mustachioed god-is-dead German white male, as seemingly wacky as any Western philosopher, was on to something, at least as regards the Patriots. Nietzche believed that in the battle between the strong and the weak, the weak had won, and they had created bonds (morality and religion) which constrained the strong, because of both their jealousy and self-interest.
I’ve seen some hated teams in my short life: Duke, the Yankees, the Florida basketball team. I’ve hated some of those teams myself. But the intensity of hatred for those three teams is well below the hatred of the Patriots. And to me it makes little to no sense, unless people really and truly do dislike success.
For example, one of the oft-cited reasons for disliking the Patriots is the manufactured “Spygate” scandal (Can we declare the end of attaching –gate to the end of every scandal, incidentally? Even if it is as serious as critics allege, it doesn’t compare to tampering with the machinery of democracy.). The whole scandal centered around some assistant coach or scout or some intern filming the signals of the Jets during their opening-game ritual massacre. It was against NFL rules; the Pats were fined their first-round pick and six figures.
It’s indisputable that this was against NFL rules. But it’s a leap to go from being against the rules to the Pats are a dirty, tainted team who deserves the derision and scorn of all decent human beings. Rules are rules, but not all rules are commandments. I don’t think badly of jaywalkers or speeders. Within the NFL, I could care less about people who leave their socks a quarter-inch too high.
Now, no one thinks that the socks issue deals directly with the integrity of the game, and so it is a different issue than “Spygate.” Nevertheless, however, the mere existence of the rule does not guarantee its moral force. Simply put, does this rule in fact promote the general welfare of the game?
The answer, really, is no. It’s legal to put an advance scout up in the stands to watch the signals of the opposing teams. Writers and scouts admit this freely. If you could field an army of scouts with photographic memory to memorize the opponent’s signals, that’d be legal too. So the only real difference between the illegal, immoral act and the perfectly OK act of scouting is a piece of technology. The underlying act is the same; the only difference is what you’re doing it with. So stealing signals, the alleged corruption about the whole affair, is perfectly legal and even approved.
The reaction to Spygate reeked of intellectual inconsistency. People have hated for less but I doubt that that explains the depth of their hate. For example, what seems like a much more logical issue to seize on, Rodney Harrison’s HGH suspension, has been ignored.
Another reason I’ve heard about why people hate the Patriots so much is because of how hyped they are, and how overrated they are (with special vituperation reserved for Tom Brady). This, too, is unjustified because if there’s anything that deserves the undivided attention of sports fans’ eyeballs, it is unmatched feats, which the Patriots are two games away from achieving.
A third reason for hating the Patriots has to do with their violation of the unwritten rules of the game in running up the score on hapless teams. Of course there’s no formal rule against mauling an opponent beyond necessary, but there has been a strong code of honor about flaunting the heights of your superiority over one’s opponents. It’s a perceived issue of cruelty: of going out of one’s way to impose humiliation on an opponent. The Patriots did not need to score more, and in fact it could have been counterproductive to do so: they could have lost a significant player to injury.
What’s interesting about these issues, though, is the deeper image that people see of the Patriots. Basically, the Patriots’ achievements have been ill-gotten: either they took it improperly, or their image has been dutifully burnished by an adoring media. Success outside of the approved channels is tainted.
What this proves is that Nietzche was correct in this instance. But clearly not all. I don’t know of anyone who hates Tiger Woods, for example. Michael Jordan was easily the most popular athlete of his generation and perhaps ever. Roger Federer inspires awe among those who know of him. What separates the Patriots from those other athletes? And, if these different athletes receive a different amount of esteem, how should we feel about success as sports fans?
Everyone loves March Madness because the underdog has a strong chance of winning. A fan who embraces a winning team too quickly and too promiscuously is branded as a “bandwagon” fan. Even though there are many popular successful athletes, there’s still a perception that winning has to be done in a certain way.
Let’s start with the two rules and see if we can figure out the Michael Jordans and Tiger Woods. Both of these rules have to do with tribal identity. The latter rule’s connection is easy to see: someone who switches between teams too quickly is too mercenary, without bonds or ties. The former rule is a bit harder to see, but I think it has something to do with the chances of success for your tribe. By rooting for an underdog, you’re affirming the possibility that hey, it can happen to you too!
What Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Federer all share is that they don’t really have any tribal identities. First, two of the three play individual sports unaffiliated with a specific region of the country which exempts them from regional prejudice (Ohio State, meet the University of Michigan). Second, their heritage cuts across boundaries: Woods is, as he reminded us, Cablinasian; Jordan is a post-racial African-American in public image; Federer is from a small country renowned for peace, cuckoo clocks and chocolate. Last, the media loved them all which makes it harder for critical stories to be incorporated into their image (for example, Michael Jordan was often a mean SOB, as anyone who read Playing for Keeps can’t really escape, especially with the incident where he ended some kid’s career in training camp). All are inoffensive, leaving us free to appreciate them for their art.
What they have, the Patriots lack. They have a very specific regional identity: Boston and New England, a region famed for producing sanctimonious assholes (see: The Puritans, and also the contemporary Masshole). Add to that the success that every other Boston-area sports team is having (except for the Bruins, but no one cares about hockey), and people from other places just have to be wondering: when do we get a chance to wake up with a victory hangover? Which is, recall, part of the fun of March Madness. And, of course, the media is not particularly fond of them, because Bill Belichick dislikes the media making it hard for the media to write dumb stories about how little Jimmy Belichick (assuming there is a Jimmy Belichick) slipped and skinned his knee, among other dumb stories the media could possibly be writing. Plus that, with the scandal, the media got a chance to moralize. Human beings love to be feel and express their superiority over their fellow man, and media members are human beings with a megaphone.
The Patriots’ success is exclusive, not inclusive. People outside New England just can’t relate, in general.
Well, if that’s why they’re hated, the next issue is whether we should be hating and resenting them for their success. We could hate them if their success was truly ill-gotten, and there is a not insignificant part that is: running up the score is distasteful. But that’s it, from my vantage point, at least. Their success is earned.
But can we justifiably hate earned success in sports?
One of the great aspects of sports, that distinguishes it from wrestling and theater and movies is that it is unscripted and that no one knows how it will end. That makes sport a human drama with verisimilitude, because of course no one knows how our own will end up (or won’t tell at the very least). We want to be astonished what our fellow human beings can do, what mountains they can scale.
This is the theory at least, but several million will hate the Patriots if they break through the barriers that stopped almost everyone else and go 19-0. That would be astonishing. Because, between the winning of the Patriots and the winning of the other two Boston sports teams, the game is beginning to look a little rigged to many people. There’s a tension that I don’t think can be resolved, because the scaling of the mountain makes it seem less formidable and impressive. The achievement seems better in theory than in fact. And if scaling the mountain is something that’s done routinely, then it’s no achievement at all.
As for me, I like to watch mountains being scaled and this Everest hasn’t been climbed yet, so I’m fine with the possibility of the Patriots planting their flag at the top.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
I Like Everything
When musical taste first began to matter, when people started to judge others based on what they liked, I was asked, naturally and inevitably, what my favorite music was. The first time I was asked, I didn’t have much in the way of musical taste: I didn’t really care about music at the time, so I’d classify myself as having no taste rather than bad taste. So I answered that I liked “Whatever sounds good.”
That kind of vague and obvious response (I mean, unless it’s necessary to dispel notions that I like stuff than sounds awful, like high-pitched wails or something) is one example of an attitude people often profess about music: “Oh, I like a little bit of everything, except [insert awful genre here].”
I think it’s kind of a weird phenomenon, because that response is virtually confined to music. People who are asked about what books or movies they favor typically either by naming specific books or films, or naming discrete genres. But never all of music save for one genre (usually one of country, heavy metal or rap, if not more), which is ridiculous, of course, because I don’t exactly see people beating down the doors to hear Shostakovich or whomever, even though, to believe the “I like everything” claim, there’d have to be much more support for jazz or classical, for example, to say nothing of even more obscure genres. And that’s the music that’s on the fringes of our perception; what about the stuff than we can’t even perceive: foreign country’s music, for instance. It’s a response that’s plainly ridiculous on its face.
So why did I respond that way, and why do I hear so many people respond that way? Why do I still respond that way? If I were being honest, I’d say that I basically like exactly two genres: classic rock and hip-hop. I like a lot of artists who aren’t members of those genres, but those two genres account for the majority of my iTunes library and music plays right now and probably will for the conceivable future. But I’m not honest, or rather, since I usually respond to those questions on autopilot (interesting discussions about art usually begins with why rather than what), not conscious. Something subconscious takes over in those instances and demands that I answer in a certain way for reasons of its own.
I suspect that those reasons have to do with being judged. It’s a trite point that middle school is the judging ground, but it’s true enough I suppose. Probably the more important part is that, with acne disfiguring you and changing height stretching you into different forms and all that stuff, you’re morphing from one identity to another and you’re starting to figure yourself out. There’s a confusion of identity there, and for many (most, maybe—I don’t know anyone who dislikes music, whereas I know plenty of people who never read or rarely watch movies), music helps define your identity.
Music marks you with one identity or another for a very simple reason: it lends itself to creating a community. Movies, of course, can be watched communally but they dominate rather than underscore. The sense that movies steal you from your world and insert you into another is often one of its strengths, but you certainly can’t have a discussion about it while it’s happening, unless you’re the asshole in the row in front of me in the movie theater who takes cell phone calls while the movie’s playing. Also, because music is less interpretive than critical, it’s easy to banter in easy emotionality rather than criticism. That leads to good feelings when people just shoot the shit about how mind-blowing that guitar solo was or whatever. Also important, in these digital days, is the ease of exchanging or downloading music, meaning that cooperative action becomes paramount. What you get are little gated communities enclosing people exchanging agreeable pleasantries.
Notice, though, the three genres that I mentioned above: country, hip-hop and heavy metal. Everybody I know hates at least one. I personally hate two of the three (country and heavy metal). I can’t really say I have a real firm reason for hating either of these; I probably hate them more on principle than anything else. I haven’t listened to a ton of country (everyone tells me, though, that I’d like Johnny Cash, and remember: there is always one privileged exception. For rap it’s often but not always Kanye West. Heavy metal is…fuck I don’t know. I’m not cool enough to, but I’m sure someone does), so I can’t really say I’ve thought it through. It’s probably a combination of the fact that the few times I’ve heard either of these genres, I’ve been bored and unimpressed, and the people who tend to listen to these genres are easily stereotyped (country is hicks, heavy metal weirdos, emo is annoying over-emotional assholes, ec.) and so really blocks any critical sensible scrutiny.
So when people answer, “I like everything except [yucky genre here],” what they are often saying is, “please don’t count me out of your social group.” Or, rarely, they really do like everything. But these are rare and outnumbered by lazy individuals such as myself who only want to coast through a conversation (because if I answered “hip-hop”, and I ran into someone for whom hip-hop is a “[yucky genre here],” well, we’d have just eliminated a topic of conversation and as we know, that is worse than slaughtering puppies or endangered species.) What we’re hoping to avoid is being judged, especially by the music snob, a species that is particularly virulent and common in comparison to the movie snob and practically-extinct book snob. Because having people think you’re uncool is pretty debilitating.
Now, this isn’t all bad. It’s really cool to bond over music, as it is for anything (well, except cults). And it’s a magical feeling to discover some bootleg, some obscure song, and share it with your friends (that makes you an authority). Insofar as we have stuff we like and stuff we don’t like as much, we’ll always be comparing what we like to other’s preferences as a way to assess their personalities. That’s way more complicated than it can seem, because often people just don’t put that much thought into why they like what they do.
That kind of vague and obvious response (I mean, unless it’s necessary to dispel notions that I like stuff than sounds awful, like high-pitched wails or something) is one example of an attitude people often profess about music: “Oh, I like a little bit of everything, except [insert awful genre here].”
I think it’s kind of a weird phenomenon, because that response is virtually confined to music. People who are asked about what books or movies they favor typically either by naming specific books or films, or naming discrete genres. But never all of music save for one genre (usually one of country, heavy metal or rap, if not more), which is ridiculous, of course, because I don’t exactly see people beating down the doors to hear Shostakovich or whomever, even though, to believe the “I like everything” claim, there’d have to be much more support for jazz or classical, for example, to say nothing of even more obscure genres. And that’s the music that’s on the fringes of our perception; what about the stuff than we can’t even perceive: foreign country’s music, for instance. It’s a response that’s plainly ridiculous on its face.
So why did I respond that way, and why do I hear so many people respond that way? Why do I still respond that way? If I were being honest, I’d say that I basically like exactly two genres: classic rock and hip-hop. I like a lot of artists who aren’t members of those genres, but those two genres account for the majority of my iTunes library and music plays right now and probably will for the conceivable future. But I’m not honest, or rather, since I usually respond to those questions on autopilot (interesting discussions about art usually begins with why rather than what), not conscious. Something subconscious takes over in those instances and demands that I answer in a certain way for reasons of its own.
I suspect that those reasons have to do with being judged. It’s a trite point that middle school is the judging ground, but it’s true enough I suppose. Probably the more important part is that, with acne disfiguring you and changing height stretching you into different forms and all that stuff, you’re morphing from one identity to another and you’re starting to figure yourself out. There’s a confusion of identity there, and for many (most, maybe—I don’t know anyone who dislikes music, whereas I know plenty of people who never read or rarely watch movies), music helps define your identity.
Music marks you with one identity or another for a very simple reason: it lends itself to creating a community. Movies, of course, can be watched communally but they dominate rather than underscore. The sense that movies steal you from your world and insert you into another is often one of its strengths, but you certainly can’t have a discussion about it while it’s happening, unless you’re the asshole in the row in front of me in the movie theater who takes cell phone calls while the movie’s playing. Also, because music is less interpretive than critical, it’s easy to banter in easy emotionality rather than criticism. That leads to good feelings when people just shoot the shit about how mind-blowing that guitar solo was or whatever. Also important, in these digital days, is the ease of exchanging or downloading music, meaning that cooperative action becomes paramount. What you get are little gated communities enclosing people exchanging agreeable pleasantries.
Notice, though, the three genres that I mentioned above: country, hip-hop and heavy metal. Everybody I know hates at least one. I personally hate two of the three (country and heavy metal). I can’t really say I have a real firm reason for hating either of these; I probably hate them more on principle than anything else. I haven’t listened to a ton of country (everyone tells me, though, that I’d like Johnny Cash, and remember: there is always one privileged exception. For rap it’s often but not always Kanye West. Heavy metal is…fuck I don’t know. I’m not cool enough to, but I’m sure someone does), so I can’t really say I’ve thought it through. It’s probably a combination of the fact that the few times I’ve heard either of these genres, I’ve been bored and unimpressed, and the people who tend to listen to these genres are easily stereotyped (country is hicks, heavy metal weirdos, emo is annoying over-emotional assholes, ec.) and so really blocks any critical sensible scrutiny.
So when people answer, “I like everything except [yucky genre here],” what they are often saying is, “please don’t count me out of your social group.” Or, rarely, they really do like everything. But these are rare and outnumbered by lazy individuals such as myself who only want to coast through a conversation (because if I answered “hip-hop”, and I ran into someone for whom hip-hop is a “[yucky genre here],” well, we’d have just eliminated a topic of conversation and as we know, that is worse than slaughtering puppies or endangered species.) What we’re hoping to avoid is being judged, especially by the music snob, a species that is particularly virulent and common in comparison to the movie snob and practically-extinct book snob. Because having people think you’re uncool is pretty debilitating.
Now, this isn’t all bad. It’s really cool to bond over music, as it is for anything (well, except cults). And it’s a magical feeling to discover some bootleg, some obscure song, and share it with your friends (that makes you an authority). Insofar as we have stuff we like and stuff we don’t like as much, we’ll always be comparing what we like to other’s preferences as a way to assess their personalities. That’s way more complicated than it can seem, because often people just don’t put that much thought into why they like what they do.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Juno vs. Knocked Up
“That’s not funny!” a voice hissed, and it was true, what was going on on-screen—Jennifer Garner’s character was trying to talk, through Juno MacGuff’s (the title character) pregnant belly, to her adoptive child—should not have been funny, but, nevertheless, two guys up front found it quite funny. Otherwise the room was silent; they realized the emotional gravity of the situation, as Jennifer Garner’s character clearly, so desperately wants to have a child, and she is so clearly ready for it, with only her biology blocking her from what should be her destiny, leaving her reliant on a pregnant high school junior.
Whenever I find something earnest, and someone else finds it amusing, with a hint of derision, I always feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable both because I feel as if my analysis of the situation is wrong, mistaken, and because my emotions are being derided as well, as if the stake I feel in the characters and their situation is wrong, as if the empathy I have for them is misdirected. Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in another’s skin, so by laughing at my empathy, they are laughing at me, in a way. Not that feeling uncomfortable is necessarily wrong or incorrect; I deserve laughing at in many occasions.
The types of movies that provoke these uncomfortable feelings tend to be more ambitious than other movies. For identifiable portions of the audience to be laughing while you are empathizing, it must be a movie that mixes both mockery and solemnity. That’s more ambitious for two reasons. First, technically, it means that the filmmaker (or artist in general, I guess, but this effect, of being uncomfortable because of the disharmony of your reactions and another’s, is best achieved with an audience) must be adroit enough to signal convincingly when and what is supposed to be funny, and, conversely, when and what is serious. Second, in terms of story, to be done well, the story must be complex enough to have nuance. It’s an old observation that humor is rooted in pain, and that’s more or less true. But, of course, some pain is distinctly not funny, which is why people will wonder when it’s too soon to joke about tragedies, or why people will speculate that 9/11 killed irony (well, at the time; that movement seems to have hit a snag). Which means that some pain is worth laughing at; other pain is worth honoring. Which is which? That produces that difficult issue for the audience, because they might disagree with the artist’s intentions, or the artist’s intentions might be ambiguous.
The conflict is between earnestness and irony, between putting your mind in someone else’s or laughing at appearances. The two approaches suggest something different in outlook towards the character in question, because the first implies something noble or worthwhile; the second implies that that character, or at least that moment of weakness, is not worthwhile (or at least only worthy of mockery). The trouble, then, is to get stuck on one mode or another, or to apply the wrong mode to a situation.
There’s been a recent spate of films that attempt to blend both humor and tragedy, to be tragicomic. Many of these revel in small quirks for humor but, in the end, shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of, “ain’t people cool?” Or not cool, but worthy. Noble. To name a few examples: “Garden State,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” Wes Anderson’s films, and of course “Juno” and “Knocked Up” which share more than being pregnancy films.
The problem is that many of these films treat their characters schizophrenically: there is the quirky, humorous part of them, and then that noble almost tragic part. “Little Miss Sunshine” probably suffers most from that fault. Aside from Steve Carrell’s character, who keeps a dignified humor throughout, the other characters often seem like chess pieces pushed along for specific purposes the director had in mind. In short, not like real people, by which I mean not that they’re unrealistic (one of my favorite novels is One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which a character has nineteen sons all with the same name, and that is relatively realistic in comparison to some of the other escapades), but that they’re not self-directed. Take for instance the climatic scene in the movie (spoiler!—skip to next paragraph if you care), in which the daughter, competing for the title of Little Miss Sunshine, dances to Rick James’ “Superfreak.” Obviously inappropriate, and it necessitates the rest of the members of the family dancing with her, in order to save her from embarrassment, which ends up uniting them. Now, the serious point that the director appears to be going for is that this is a satire of beauty pageants, which is a good point, if overdone, and, taken by itself, hilarious. The problem with this is that it makes little sense, considering the characters in the movie. Now, Olive, the daughter, has been prepared by her (dead, at the end of the movie) crass, rude grandfather. That gives the scene its initial comedic punch, because that is presumably what that cranky coot (I say this with the greatest affection—he’s hilarious) would do. Except it isn’t. The grandfather isn’t a stupid character. Surely he would know what happens in beauty pageants. So then why would he suggest a deliberately offensive dance? He knows how much the pageant means to Olive. For that matter, why would Olive, who had watched and participated in so many beauty pageants, go through with that dance? And what did she do in the qualifying? And so on. The final performance raises more questions than it answers, making it dramatically unsatisfying.
I’m not saying that the beauty-pageant wouldn’t or couldn’t happen, merely that it is underexplained. It could’ve worked as a subject: after all, beauty pageants are a worthy object of ridicule (remember that girl with the incoherent answer last summer?), and the emotional investment Olive has is genuine. So the shifting perspective of irony and earnestness could have worked.
Pregnancy, and our reactions to it, is another worthy subject for this approach. A lot of funny shit happens during pregnancy, as both films prove. There’s potential gross-out humor and slapstick and sight gags and all that. That’s also not to mention the social commentary one could generate about it. And the end result is pretty worthy of empathy, of earnestness, seeing as we all went through it in some way.
The lead-up to birth in each film is treated with shifting humor-and-earnestness, and the birth itself is treated, in the end, as very serious. Both movies show birth in all its grossness. So both of them fit firmly into the paradigm, and the question is, how successful is each film?
Juno was more effective than Knocked Up.
The best example comes from the way each film handles abortion. It’s a tricky topic, because for there to be a pregnancy story rather than an abortion story, the woman must choose to carry the baby to term. Which raises the question of how you, the filmmaker, will justify the choice of pregnancy over abortion and what you think that means politically (both movies brought up some debate on that topic).
In Knocked Up, Katherine Hegl’s character has lunch with her mother, who suggests getting an abortion because it’s not a “real baby,” which is the kind of callous, insensitive line that spurred the audience to an “oh shit!” reaction. Katherine Hegl’s character apparently felt much the same way and the story goes on.
On the other hand, Juno spends quite a bit more time on the decision. First she discusses it with her best friend, who, in her flaky way, goes through the mechanics of the process and mentions that some other girls in their school have had abortions too. Neither character really gets in high spirits at that point, and Juno goes to the clinic, where she meets another girl from her class, an Asian, who is marching alone (I say this because I believe she’s the only Asian in the film, and it underscores the marcher’s isolation), who talk about various school things before the marcher tries desperately to convince Juno not to abort, before she shouts “They have fingernails,” which touches something in Juno, who replies, “Really?” Then Juno goes into the clinic, where she is put off by the receptionist, who, playing with a gameboy, obviously doesn’t care about her specifically. From there, a revealing close-up on fingernails, and Juno leaves and runs out, and, as she runs, the Asian marcher shouts at her, “God appreciates your decision!” For Juno, the decision is definitively made: she makes it because of a combination of her quirky personality, and because she feels more appreciated for her by the anti-abortion forces, something that is very important to her. Later, in the film, when Juno asks her dad about love, he gives an answer that affects her deeply, about how you’ll know the person you’re meant to be with when that person loves you for you, good days, bad days, good moods, bad moods, all that.
I’m pro-choice, and Juno made a choice. I know why she made a choice, and it satisfied me. Katherine Hegl’s character’s choice never quite felt like a choice. It felt like that Seinfeld episode, “Yadda yadda yadda”, where everything compromising is “yadda yadda yadda”-ed through, avoiding having to address the subject. Knocked Up felt like it inserted an easy stereotype in order to get on with the story, which definitely had its charms. It deployed a vicious irony too easily on the mother. I’m sure women like her exist, but they aren’t the only pro-choicers out there, and certainly not the only pro-choicers whom Katherine Hegl would have known or listened to. It evaded the subject rather than honoring it.
Notably, the effect of that move was not to make the audience uncomfortable, but to unite them. Stanford, where I saw the movie, is a pretty liberal place, and I bet the majority of the audience was personally pro-choice, and yet we enthusiastically united against that crass caricature. Does that say more about us or the movie? Probably the movie. We should have been challenged, as I was challenged when I saw Juno. Not to say Knocked Up is bad or anything—other than that, I loved the movie—but it definitely had its weaknesses.
Most of the reason that I’m interested in the nuances, the small details, of these strengths and weaknesses, is that, as a writer, I know that some thing’s existence are useless and ridiculous and deserve mockery (most recent example: airline carriers insist on using ‘deplane’ as a word), and other things are real and deserve empathy and expression. I hope I have the strength to avoid lazy irony, by mocking deserving subjects.
Whenever I find something earnest, and someone else finds it amusing, with a hint of derision, I always feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable both because I feel as if my analysis of the situation is wrong, mistaken, and because my emotions are being derided as well, as if the stake I feel in the characters and their situation is wrong, as if the empathy I have for them is misdirected. Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in another’s skin, so by laughing at my empathy, they are laughing at me, in a way. Not that feeling uncomfortable is necessarily wrong or incorrect; I deserve laughing at in many occasions.
The types of movies that provoke these uncomfortable feelings tend to be more ambitious than other movies. For identifiable portions of the audience to be laughing while you are empathizing, it must be a movie that mixes both mockery and solemnity. That’s more ambitious for two reasons. First, technically, it means that the filmmaker (or artist in general, I guess, but this effect, of being uncomfortable because of the disharmony of your reactions and another’s, is best achieved with an audience) must be adroit enough to signal convincingly when and what is supposed to be funny, and, conversely, when and what is serious. Second, in terms of story, to be done well, the story must be complex enough to have nuance. It’s an old observation that humor is rooted in pain, and that’s more or less true. But, of course, some pain is distinctly not funny, which is why people will wonder when it’s too soon to joke about tragedies, or why people will speculate that 9/11 killed irony (well, at the time; that movement seems to have hit a snag). Which means that some pain is worth laughing at; other pain is worth honoring. Which is which? That produces that difficult issue for the audience, because they might disagree with the artist’s intentions, or the artist’s intentions might be ambiguous.
The conflict is between earnestness and irony, between putting your mind in someone else’s or laughing at appearances. The two approaches suggest something different in outlook towards the character in question, because the first implies something noble or worthwhile; the second implies that that character, or at least that moment of weakness, is not worthwhile (or at least only worthy of mockery). The trouble, then, is to get stuck on one mode or another, or to apply the wrong mode to a situation.
There’s been a recent spate of films that attempt to blend both humor and tragedy, to be tragicomic. Many of these revel in small quirks for humor but, in the end, shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of, “ain’t people cool?” Or not cool, but worthy. Noble. To name a few examples: “Garden State,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” Wes Anderson’s films, and of course “Juno” and “Knocked Up” which share more than being pregnancy films.
The problem is that many of these films treat their characters schizophrenically: there is the quirky, humorous part of them, and then that noble almost tragic part. “Little Miss Sunshine” probably suffers most from that fault. Aside from Steve Carrell’s character, who keeps a dignified humor throughout, the other characters often seem like chess pieces pushed along for specific purposes the director had in mind. In short, not like real people, by which I mean not that they’re unrealistic (one of my favorite novels is One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which a character has nineteen sons all with the same name, and that is relatively realistic in comparison to some of the other escapades), but that they’re not self-directed. Take for instance the climatic scene in the movie (spoiler!—skip to next paragraph if you care), in which the daughter, competing for the title of Little Miss Sunshine, dances to Rick James’ “Superfreak.” Obviously inappropriate, and it necessitates the rest of the members of the family dancing with her, in order to save her from embarrassment, which ends up uniting them. Now, the serious point that the director appears to be going for is that this is a satire of beauty pageants, which is a good point, if overdone, and, taken by itself, hilarious. The problem with this is that it makes little sense, considering the characters in the movie. Now, Olive, the daughter, has been prepared by her (dead, at the end of the movie) crass, rude grandfather. That gives the scene its initial comedic punch, because that is presumably what that cranky coot (I say this with the greatest affection—he’s hilarious) would do. Except it isn’t. The grandfather isn’t a stupid character. Surely he would know what happens in beauty pageants. So then why would he suggest a deliberately offensive dance? He knows how much the pageant means to Olive. For that matter, why would Olive, who had watched and participated in so many beauty pageants, go through with that dance? And what did she do in the qualifying? And so on. The final performance raises more questions than it answers, making it dramatically unsatisfying.
I’m not saying that the beauty-pageant wouldn’t or couldn’t happen, merely that it is underexplained. It could’ve worked as a subject: after all, beauty pageants are a worthy object of ridicule (remember that girl with the incoherent answer last summer?), and the emotional investment Olive has is genuine. So the shifting perspective of irony and earnestness could have worked.
Pregnancy, and our reactions to it, is another worthy subject for this approach. A lot of funny shit happens during pregnancy, as both films prove. There’s potential gross-out humor and slapstick and sight gags and all that. That’s also not to mention the social commentary one could generate about it. And the end result is pretty worthy of empathy, of earnestness, seeing as we all went through it in some way.
The lead-up to birth in each film is treated with shifting humor-and-earnestness, and the birth itself is treated, in the end, as very serious. Both movies show birth in all its grossness. So both of them fit firmly into the paradigm, and the question is, how successful is each film?
Juno was more effective than Knocked Up.
The best example comes from the way each film handles abortion. It’s a tricky topic, because for there to be a pregnancy story rather than an abortion story, the woman must choose to carry the baby to term. Which raises the question of how you, the filmmaker, will justify the choice of pregnancy over abortion and what you think that means politically (both movies brought up some debate on that topic).
In Knocked Up, Katherine Hegl’s character has lunch with her mother, who suggests getting an abortion because it’s not a “real baby,” which is the kind of callous, insensitive line that spurred the audience to an “oh shit!” reaction. Katherine Hegl’s character apparently felt much the same way and the story goes on.
On the other hand, Juno spends quite a bit more time on the decision. First she discusses it with her best friend, who, in her flaky way, goes through the mechanics of the process and mentions that some other girls in their school have had abortions too. Neither character really gets in high spirits at that point, and Juno goes to the clinic, where she meets another girl from her class, an Asian, who is marching alone (I say this because I believe she’s the only Asian in the film, and it underscores the marcher’s isolation), who talk about various school things before the marcher tries desperately to convince Juno not to abort, before she shouts “They have fingernails,” which touches something in Juno, who replies, “Really?” Then Juno goes into the clinic, where she is put off by the receptionist, who, playing with a gameboy, obviously doesn’t care about her specifically. From there, a revealing close-up on fingernails, and Juno leaves and runs out, and, as she runs, the Asian marcher shouts at her, “God appreciates your decision!” For Juno, the decision is definitively made: she makes it because of a combination of her quirky personality, and because she feels more appreciated for her by the anti-abortion forces, something that is very important to her. Later, in the film, when Juno asks her dad about love, he gives an answer that affects her deeply, about how you’ll know the person you’re meant to be with when that person loves you for you, good days, bad days, good moods, bad moods, all that.
I’m pro-choice, and Juno made a choice. I know why she made a choice, and it satisfied me. Katherine Hegl’s character’s choice never quite felt like a choice. It felt like that Seinfeld episode, “Yadda yadda yadda”, where everything compromising is “yadda yadda yadda”-ed through, avoiding having to address the subject. Knocked Up felt like it inserted an easy stereotype in order to get on with the story, which definitely had its charms. It deployed a vicious irony too easily on the mother. I’m sure women like her exist, but they aren’t the only pro-choicers out there, and certainly not the only pro-choicers whom Katherine Hegl would have known or listened to. It evaded the subject rather than honoring it.
Notably, the effect of that move was not to make the audience uncomfortable, but to unite them. Stanford, where I saw the movie, is a pretty liberal place, and I bet the majority of the audience was personally pro-choice, and yet we enthusiastically united against that crass caricature. Does that say more about us or the movie? Probably the movie. We should have been challenged, as I was challenged when I saw Juno. Not to say Knocked Up is bad or anything—other than that, I loved the movie—but it definitely had its weaknesses.
Most of the reason that I’m interested in the nuances, the small details, of these strengths and weaknesses, is that, as a writer, I know that some thing’s existence are useless and ridiculous and deserve mockery (most recent example: airline carriers insist on using ‘deplane’ as a word), and other things are real and deserve empathy and expression. I hope I have the strength to avoid lazy irony, by mocking deserving subjects.
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