Cinema on LSD
Up until now I've always made "comedies," and I'm thinking of venturing next into drama. But the lure of the comic form still looms large. I had some thoughts about what a comedy is that I wanted to jot down before I move totally into drama and forget what I was thinking.
When I first became interested in comedy as a form is when I was reading about "modes" in Northrop Frye's brilliant book Anatomy of Criticism. He states simply that in a comedy the hero is integrated into his society, and that in a tragedy he is isolated from his society. The classic integration is often through marriage, but it could be a misfit that gets accepted, or any number of kinds of integration. Having it put this way really excited me, because I could see all sorts of ways to enact this fantasy of integration, which is basically a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and at the same time tap into levels of irony and complexity that would make my stories completely unique.
This has worked for me up until now, but I am starting to fear that if I have to make a movie in a conventional way-- that is, delegating tasks to others, and within a reasonable time limit-- I can't afford to make a comedy. The reason comedy is more expensive is that if you want to keep people laughing, you have to surprise and delight them at regular intervals. This is difficult if not impossible to do with dialogue alone, no matter how funny the writing or how good the actors. You have to surprise them by any possible means--by changing the locations, the sets, the colors, the characters, keeping things moving visually as well as in the storyline.
The key in comedy is movement. The silent film geniuses Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin knew this. Elaborate sight gags and stunts are one way to achieve movement, action scenes are another, and changing the locations often is another. So I've been thinking: the best way to keep things moving, and therefore comic, is to combine all types of movement together. Have the camera moving, the actors moving--on motorboats, trains, airplanes, running, waterskiing, racing, on horseback, etc.--have the story moving, the sets changing, the story shifting, new surprises all the time. It's like those fairy tales where there's one room that opens into another, and another, and another, to infinity. Then when there's a locked room and you can't enter, that's tragedy. That's Pandora's Box, Bluebeard's Castle, sin, death, destruction. That's why low-budget movies almost always feel so abject. You are locked in these little rooms, these little spaces, and you can't get out. That's not comedy. That's horror. You need lots of sets for comedy.
The other thing that works in comedy is recognition. If you recognize someone's plight as something you've experienced yourself, then you laugh. If it doesn't seem real to you, you don't laugh. So comedy has to be very psychologically real. The actors have to be very good to pull it off, and it takes a lot of rehearsals. Also, incongruity works. And traditional gags seem to work, if the audience recognizes them as such. A classic example of this is, a man in a gorilla suit mugging for the camera. Everyone knows he's a man in a gorilla suit, but we've become accustomed to the gag, so we laugh.
My idea of comedy is to make every single thing in the frame create recognition, without distracting from the story. That's why I like to do period stuff. The next time I do a comedy I want to collect all of these movie clichés, things that we experience only in movies, and stick them together. So we have the gorilla suit...the Victorian beauty galloping across the English moors...the long sea journey...the couple on the motorboat falling in love as the shore recedes behind them...the trapeze act without a net...a film within in a film...etc. So, anyone who's seen classic movies will recognize everything that happens. A patchwork of different movies thrown together, in a mad kaleidoscope of movie history. Cinema on LSD.
When I first became interested in comedy as a form is when I was reading about "modes" in Northrop Frye's brilliant book Anatomy of Criticism. He states simply that in a comedy the hero is integrated into his society, and that in a tragedy he is isolated from his society. The classic integration is often through marriage, but it could be a misfit that gets accepted, or any number of kinds of integration. Having it put this way really excited me, because I could see all sorts of ways to enact this fantasy of integration, which is basically a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and at the same time tap into levels of irony and complexity that would make my stories completely unique.
This has worked for me up until now, but I am starting to fear that if I have to make a movie in a conventional way-- that is, delegating tasks to others, and within a reasonable time limit-- I can't afford to make a comedy. The reason comedy is more expensive is that if you want to keep people laughing, you have to surprise and delight them at regular intervals. This is difficult if not impossible to do with dialogue alone, no matter how funny the writing or how good the actors. You have to surprise them by any possible means--by changing the locations, the sets, the colors, the characters, keeping things moving visually as well as in the storyline.
The key in comedy is movement. The silent film geniuses Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin knew this. Elaborate sight gags and stunts are one way to achieve movement, action scenes are another, and changing the locations often is another. So I've been thinking: the best way to keep things moving, and therefore comic, is to combine all types of movement together. Have the camera moving, the actors moving--on motorboats, trains, airplanes, running, waterskiing, racing, on horseback, etc.--have the story moving, the sets changing, the story shifting, new surprises all the time. It's like those fairy tales where there's one room that opens into another, and another, and another, to infinity. Then when there's a locked room and you can't enter, that's tragedy. That's Pandora's Box, Bluebeard's Castle, sin, death, destruction. That's why low-budget movies almost always feel so abject. You are locked in these little rooms, these little spaces, and you can't get out. That's not comedy. That's horror. You need lots of sets for comedy.
The other thing that works in comedy is recognition. If you recognize someone's plight as something you've experienced yourself, then you laugh. If it doesn't seem real to you, you don't laugh. So comedy has to be very psychologically real. The actors have to be very good to pull it off, and it takes a lot of rehearsals. Also, incongruity works. And traditional gags seem to work, if the audience recognizes them as such. A classic example of this is, a man in a gorilla suit mugging for the camera. Everyone knows he's a man in a gorilla suit, but we've become accustomed to the gag, so we laugh.
My idea of comedy is to make every single thing in the frame create recognition, without distracting from the story. That's why I like to do period stuff. The next time I do a comedy I want to collect all of these movie clichés, things that we experience only in movies, and stick them together. So we have the gorilla suit...the Victorian beauty galloping across the English moors...the long sea journey...the couple on the motorboat falling in love as the shore recedes behind them...the trapeze act without a net...a film within in a film...etc. So, anyone who's seen classic movies will recognize everything that happens. A patchwork of different movies thrown together, in a mad kaleidoscope of movie history. Cinema on LSD.
1 Comments:
You know what they say:
Tragedy plus time equals comedy.
Have you noticed the recent rise of the dramedy? We seem to want it all in a neat package...as long as the laughs come every 19 seconds and after it's over we can go, "hmmm."
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