You're Killing Me!
Larsen, Josh
Movies You're Killing Me! By Josh Larsen In movie theaters across the country, audiences are increasingly being encouraged to laugh at things no sane person should find amusing-at the sight of...
...As Pauline Kael wrote at the time, "Bonnie and Clyde keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance-holds our attention by throwing disbelief back in our faces...
...Why'd he try to kill me...
...Ask today's movie audience "What's so funny...
...Later, we laugh a bit more uneasily when he runs between two machine guns, causing the bad guys' bullets to chew up each other's faces...
...But now the joke is on Bonnie and Clyde...
...Blonde (Michael Madsen) tortures and interrogates a captured cop by slicing off his ear...
...The moral qualms audiences felt when they first chuckled at Bonnie and Clyde's clumsy getaway and then, a moment later, watched Clyde fire a bullet in an innocent man's face are beyond us now...
...and it's far from unlikely they will regale you with an account of a scene in which someone was shot in the head...
...Tarantino's first feature, Reservoir Dogs, works within the same vein...
...In fact, one could easily argue that the association between things that make us laugh and things that make us wince has always been a part of film...
...The audience is now free to laugh whenever-and at whatever-it wants...
...When Pulp Fiction hit the scene in 1994, debate over the film's violence inevitably ensued...
...People in the audience at Bonnie and Clyde are laughing, demonstrating that they're not stooges-that they appreciate the joke-when they catch the first bullet right in the face...
...And it is no longer that uneasy chuckle we offer when watching Bonnie and Clyde...
...I didn't want to hurt him...
...Though the violence is agonizing, the comedy is mesmerizing-a troubling sort of relief valve that allows us to grin...
...And then those who have laughed throughout finally realize that the joke is on them...
...When our heroes' bodies are riddled with bullets, and the camera makes us watch for a long, long time, no one laughs...
...When the violence is blown full scale, it comes during a comic moment, as Bonnie, Clyde, and their new partner C.W (Michael J. Pollard) make an inept getaway...
...Watching writer/director Robert Rodriguez's now-mythic $7,000 debut, El Mariachi, we laugh readily when Rodriguez's hapless mari-achi has a letter opener thrust between his legs and is forced to sing for his life...
...Back in 1967, those who laughed freely at Bonnie and Clyde were still exposed in the end, for the final frames of the film leave no doubt...
...Thirty years ago, the juxtaposition served a different purpose, as Kael said: "The whole point of Bonnie and Clyde is to rub our noses in [the violence], to make us pay our dues for laughing...
...From the start of the film, Bonnie and Clyde (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) are portrayed as likable young characters with a fondness for mischievous fun...
...The combination of violence and humor in Bonnie and Clyde, as well as that used by Tarantino, is something else again, something more than a physical gag or a one-liner...
...However, just as with Bonnie and Clyde, it was not so much the explicitness or number of violent acts in Pulp Fiction that disturbed audiences, but rather it was the casual, comedic attitude with which those acts were portrayed...
...The ensuing argument between Vincent and Jules is classic comedic banter, only this time they aren't arguing over foot massages...
...When Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967, its unapologetic violence caused an uproar...
...Watch this scene with anyone who is experiencing Pulp Fiction for the first time and the unsettling nature of violent comedy becomes clear- that same cringe/grin that audiences expressed during Bonnie and Clyde will creep across their face...
...Swinging two guns toward his foe, the mariachi pumps him full of rounds, and the force of the blasts causes a gravity-defying feat where the attacker flies straight up in the air...
...At one point, a gangster named Mr...
...while disposing of someone with a giant drill (Total Recall, 1990), but we can at least recognize a weird, Brechtian joke at work...
...Writer-director Quentin Tarantino takes the violent comedy to a new level...
...From the often brutal slapstick of the Three Stooges (and to a lesser degree, of Buster Keaton) to the inane one-liners of Stallone and Schwarzenegger action films, the concept of comedic violence has always been around...
...In a shootout early on, an attacker leaps at the mariachi who lies helpless on the floor...
...the difference is that this time the audience finds it easier to laugh...
...Their life of crime begins in comedy (the first bank they try to rob is out of funds) and their introduction to violence begins in ominous surprise (after being attacked by a grocery store owner he was sticking up, a bewildered Clyde exclaims, "He tried to kill me...
...By Josh Larsen In movie theaters across the country, audiences are increasingly being encouraged to laugh at things no sane person should find amusing-at the sight of extreme, graphic, bloody, sickening violence...
...True, we may not laugh when Arnold screams "Screw you...
...Yet to credit Tarantino alone for this pleasure audiences take in violent comedy would not be fair...
...Today, comedic violence is back on the screen, only now it serves a different purpose: rather than waste time moralizing over the violence they depict, these films instead use that brutality as the joke itself...
...On cue, the audience laughs...
...With Desperado, a sequel/remake of El Mariachi, Rodriguez ups the ante higher still...
...A policeman tortured, his ear severed...
...When Vincent accidentally shoots a business partner in the head, exploding blood and brains all over the back of Jules's car, the scene is played strictly for laughs...
...Human brains all over the back seat of a car...
...While we are still chuckling from C.W.'s disastrous parallel parking job, Clyde instinctively shoots a pursuer straight in the face...
...One minute we are laughing at Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) as they argue over the sexual appropriateness of a foot massage, and the next we are gasping at their offhand execution of three young men...
...When we laugh at that body flying through the air, it is the same laughter we give up when Gallagher smashes a watermelon or David Letterman destroys a TV...
...Like Bonnie and Clyde, Pulp Fiction's heroes are crooks: likable, entertaining characters who just happen to shoot people in the face...
...The scene, brutal to watch, is played with a comic edge as the thief dances sadistically around his prey to the tune of "Stuck in the Middle with You...
...This uneasy juxtaposition of two polar elements has since become a popular convention of the modern film from Schwarzenegger to Tarantino...
...The trend began almost 30 years ago when audiences saw Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps the first American movie to combine scenes of slapstick with other sequences that depict shocking brutality...
...The violence is the comedy, the purveyors of violence are comedians, and the connection between the two is indissoluble...
...This juxtaposition of comedy and violence left audiences bewildered, wondering whether to let out an exasperated laugh or suck in a gasping sigh...
...Not knowing what to do in this state of nervous imbalance, the 1967 audiences either let out those uneasy laughs or protested in offended rage...
...The unnerving combination of comedy and violence in Bonnie and Clyde once again covers the screen...
...After a botched jewelry heist, the surviving thieves hole up in a warehouse where paranoia and suspicion lead to a violent end...
...Bonnie and Clyde was an unsettling hybrid film: not a dramatic comedy or a romantic comedy-both of which audiences had come to expect-but a violent comedy that punctuated its wisecracks with bullet holes...
...Oh man," Travolta bemusedly reacts, "I shot Marvin in the face...
...Josh Larsen is a free-lance writer living in Palos Heights, Ill...
...It may be a laugh of wonderment rather than humor, but it is still a laugh...
...Just when we thought it was safe to laugh, the brutal violence of Bonnie and Clyde sinks in...
...Hilarious, no...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 14
