Manohla Dargis of the NYT (who should be fired — hey, why not?) equates comedy sans “gentleness” to sadism (she would likely think I a sadist for wanting her fired). (Click on the previous paragraph to link to the Dargis NYT article.)
In Dargis’s words, “Comedy needs fools with funny faces, but comedy without gentleness is often just sadism.” I’m uncertain if Dargis has taken in the TragiComedic elements of the Ancients, or the Elizabethan times (think Shakespeare). “Fargo” should also be sorted into that TragiComic shelf, although I think it’s referred to as Dark Comedy.
Some decades ago Freud put down more of his thoughts in a work entitled (from memory), jokes and the relation to the human unconscious, a book Guy Gibbon (currently at the U of Minnesota) referenced in one of his closing chapters on “The Sioux,” remarking that the AmerIndian’s capacity for humor displaces or helps them deal with the sting of reality. Gibbon doesn’t say this in trying to ascribe some outdated Racial aspect to the Sioux. Rather, Gibbon says this because the material wealth tends to be a little more less on many of the Reservations throughout the Dakotas, but they also tend to have much more depth to their geist than, say, many of the lawyers I bump into around town (my keyboard shouldn’t have to handle the abuse of a commentary on lawyers right now).
To return to the movie, though: the CIA operatives (the movie opens and closes on the Google Earth shot, which I thought helped symbolize how a singular conversation between two people in one particular building on earth can have massive influence on the world, or a group of individuals at large) chatted with one another, not really understanding the entire situation, and not really giving a shit about understanding the entire situation. This might be a slight the Coen Bros are leveling at the CIA of today, suggesting that they, the CIA/NSA/FBI, ought to ascertain better intelligence (and develop better ways to ascertain it) before meddling in domestic affairs (international affairs notwithstanding).
And I don’t know what the hell Dargis is saying about low-angle shots, because in the opening of the critique, Dargis complains about the over-used Google Earth (or high-angle) shot.
The Coen Bros make films about how careless humanity is for itself, but it is better than some bullshit romantic comedy (arguably a redundant phrase) that causes humanity to think that everything always works out hunky-dory, no matter what happens. Malkovich was good in the flick, and I thought his phrase (I may be getting it wrong) where he accuses the gym owner of being the leader of a League of Morons (a co-worker said it was a “League of Idiots”) was outstanding (“outstanding” meaning I howled when he said it because, well, we’ve all been in a similar situation, feeling a shitstorm is piling upon us, and unsympathetically though accurately accusing someone of leading a group of morons against us; or, perhaps, being accused of being the actual Leader of Morons).
At the same time, it also spoke TragiComic about the only two worthwhile people in the film: Malkovich, a highly-intelligent analyst; and the League of Morons leader, a very self-reflexive former Orthodox priest. They ultimately face off against one-another. Leading up to this, Malkovich, a Yale-trained analyst, is professionally demoted because some Mormon accused him of having a Drinking Problem. Malkovich, paraphrasing his words, said something to the effect of, “Next to you [the Mormon], everyone has a fucking drinking problem.” The former Orthodox priest’s character comes through also, as he tells his coworker she doesn’t need plastic surgery, and that he genuinely likes her the way she is — which he does. Yet these two central figures are lost in the realities that are the idiocy of life, and this fiction does more to symbolize those realities than make them appear, in the words of Dargis, sadistic.
Enough of this, though: I won’t spoil the outcome in case others haven’t seen it.
