CONSEVATIVE TASTES : Remember to Laugh
Bowman, James
conseRvATIve TAsTes Remember to Laugh by James Bowman L ast month in this space, we had occasion to notice that heroism is now treated as a matter for com-edy (see “No Room for the...
...Being moody...
...Two Academy Awards Waiting to Happen...
...He is the author of Honor: A History and the new book Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books...
...They are just Harry’s quaint, old-fashioned way of pretending to himself that he’s not the evil thug—or at least not just the evil thug—he really is...
...Here’s one...
...Ray turns and, taking in Ken’s drawn gun at a glance, says: “You were going to kill me...
...It’s not giving away too much to reveal that, about halfway through, Ken is instructed by the sinister Harry (Ralph Fiennes), his boss back in London, to kill his younger companion...
...No and any of a dozen or so others, not to mention Dr...
...I’ll not go on to reveal who dies and why, but there are multiple further mixups and mistakes that remind one of those old-fashioned sex farces where people are always finding themselves in the wrong bedroom...
...On it is written in large, childish printing, the words: “1...
...This has taken the Internet by storm and adorns the T-shirts of the many fans who presumably love the movie not for its human drama, if any, but for the Grand Guignol-like thrills of its caricature villain...
...The alleged re-definers of evil are the same...
...Just look at the wacky killers in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, a movie about two hired assassins holidaying in Bruges, Belgium, while they await instructions from the crime boss who employs them...
...Ray is new to the contract killer game and, in committing his first murder for Harry— of a priest, no less—he has accidentally killed a little boy who had been waiting to make his confession...
...It’s true that In Bruges is funny, but it is so only because movies generally and movie violence in particular have over the past 30 years become ever more detached from reality...
...Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood and Mr...
...says Ken...
...Of course, there were also Goldfinger and Dr...
...But unless somebody makes that case, it won’t be long before everything becomes a joke, which is beginning to seem pretty much the state we’ve arrived at now...
...Ken, who has up until now been trying to get his resolutely philistine friend Ray to appreciate something of the cultural riches of Bruges, is genu-inely sorry to have to kill him, but he follows Harry’s instructions up until the point where he approaches Ray from behind with his gun drawn...
...2. Being bad at maths...
...I’m not allowed, and you are...
...You just can’t...
...Ray is eaten up with guilt about this, and Harry, who has what he calls “principles” about killing children, simultaneously decides that Ray must die...
...In this world, movies, like painting and the other arts before them, can only be judged on formalist criteria...
...Though it occasionJAMes boWMAn ally pretends to have a serious subtext, the movie is essentially just a laff-riot...
...Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men give fine performances in (I would say) inferior films, but in what sense could they be said to “redefine evil...
...The early modernists, in film as in painting, were often bril-liant craftsmen who created objects of great beauty...
...Both Mr...
...You were going to kill yourself...
...On the cover of Entertainment Weekly aweekortwobeforethisyear’s Oscar ceremonies, a photo of the Oscar nominees Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem—the eventual winners in the categories of Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor—were featured under the head-line: “The Bad Boys: Two Villains Who Redefine Evil...
...Where there’s a joke, there’s got to be a punchline, and villainy is now more often a joke than not...
...conseRvATIve TAsTes Remember to Laugh by James Bowman L ast month in this space, we had occasion to notice that heroism is now treated as a matter for com-edy (see “No Room for the Gentleman Amateur,” TAS, March 2008), but we might have added that the same is true of villainy...
...Evil’s Mini-Me, or Hannibal’s goalie-mask and fondness for fava beans and Chianti while devouring human organs...
...says Ray...
...But what else could he expect...
...Though Anthony Hopkins’s Lecter was in theory supposed to be a scary guy—as are, for that matter, Plainview and Chigurh—he was so over-the-top in his scariness in Silence of the Lambs that he was already on the brink of becoming a joke before he was brought back in Hannibal—and the erotic 66 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 charge between him and the fair Clarice (Jodie Foster in the first film, Julianne Moore in the sequel) was made explicit...
...That’s why Plainview has comically to slurp up his oil-milkshake and Chigurh to proceed from one murder to the next like a malign superhero, out to show that truth, justice, and the American way are the biggest jokes of all...
...How is that fair...
...Only, I think, in the sense that it is redefined as more comical than sol-emn or scary...
...Just as they took what was then lately considered to be the immensely sol-emn and serious subject of sex and marriage and made a joke of it, so the successor-genre takes the formerly serious subject of murder and makes a joke of it...
...supposedly taken from a transcript of the congressional investigation into the Teapot Dome oil scandal in the 1920s and meaning “I steal your oil deposit...
...it puts an epic in a blender and comes out with… a milk shake...
...At the level of the visual artifact, this year’s Academy Award winners have done the same, but for them self-consciousness has become little more than a mannerism, and their efforts to create something worthy to stand beside the artistry of the past has produced only grotesque parody...
...But there are one or two rare bits that don’t require them...
...Poignantly, we are shown a piece of paper clutched in the dead boy’s hand...
...McDonagh’s witty dialogue in a family magazine, as it is so enseamed with obscenity that the quality of the ver-nacular in his heroes’ mouths can hardly be con-veyed without those words...
...The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, told EW’s Ken Tucker that he “has always looked at Blood ‘as a horror film’—and at No Country as ‘a sort of horror Western.’ ” Just so...
...I don’t know if I would call it a redefinition, but we learned to laugh at evil decades ago from the Bond villains...
...You can’t...
...Here, however, he sees to his horror Ray raising a gun to his own head...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 67...
...Chigurh has his page-boy haircut, his pneumatic cattle gun, and his habit of allowing his would-be victims to flip a coin for their lives, while Plainview has the villainous catch-phrase “I drink your milkshake...
...But this isn’t a new thing...
...Technique is everything and old-fashioned content—plot, character, moral vision—insofar as it exists at all is merely the vehicle for it...
...In fact, this movie is a sort of murder farce, an updated version of the entertainments that amused our grandparents...
...You can’t kill a kid and expect to get away with it...
...This, he claims, “reduces art to a punchline...
...But Harry’s principles turn out to be little more than a joke as well...
...This, as I have arguedbeforeinthisspace(see“TheHeroVanishes,” TAS, September 2007), is part of the legacy of modernism which, whatever its other charms, has all but ruined the movies...
...EW itself recog-nizes this by placing Plainview and Chigurh in the tradition of the Bond villains, Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me, whom it places midway on its scale between “Mean” and “Evil...
...3. Being sad...
...In a sidebar to the EW article,GregoryKirschling writes of his dismay at the eagerness of the popular culture to take up “I drink your milkshake...
...Evil in the Austin Powers movies, which are parodies of a parody, and even, perhaps, the most memorably lurid of Hollywood’s 1980s and 1990s spate of “serial killers,” Hannibal Lecter...
...It is difficult to give a sampling of Mr...
...James bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...The cross-talk act between Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) takes its cue from Pulp Fiction (1994), which pioneered the idea of mining cinematic gold from the dialogue of a couple of mirthful murderers, and The Sopranos, in which we were made uneasily aware that if we took what we were watching too seriously, we wouldn’t be able to laugh at the jokes...
...Ray, don’t...
...Who wants to be the po-faced, prudish spoil-sport who says that it is wrong and spiritually impov-erishing to make a joke of such things...
...You can recognize these villains, whether of the subtly or blatantly comic kind, by their evil trade-mark—Jaws’s teeth, Oddjob’s killer hat, Goldfinger’s love of gold leaf, Dr...
...Modernism in the movies, I argued, allowed them to become self-conscious, so that the director—or auteur as the French foppishly called him—became the hero of the film, rather than the ostensible hero, whom audiences were encour-aged to patronize and feel superior to rather than, as in the past, to look up to...
...he cries...
...Horror, too, now tends to default to comedy...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
