The Jewish-Presbyterian World of the Coen Brothers

I don’t write much about movies on this blog—aside from my numerous Disney posts—mostly because I haven’t seen enough of them to have much of value to say. The exception to my general ignorance, however, are the films of the Coen Brothers. I’ve seen all of them except this year’s A Serious Man (which I’m dying to see and which I will probably use in my dissertation once I do), and I like them all, even The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty.

The complaint you frequently hear about the Coens is that their movies are all style and no substance. They’re not—critics must be thinking of the beautiful but vapid work of Tim Burton. The Coens’ work is ripe with profundity, even as it defies analysis; they’re fond of playing tricks on the audience, throwing out red herrings and, presumably, laughing as the bad analyses pour in. (A few examples: the claims that O Brother, Where Art Thou is based on The Odyssey and that Fargo is a true story, both of which they’ve later denied.)

No, the meaning of the Coen movies are hidden beneath the flash and glitter of the cinematography (always perfectly planned and perfectly executed), beneath the complicated dialogue that almost never fits the characters, beneath the layers of postmodern “clues” that lead nowhere as surely as a Thomas Pynchon novel. The meaning, furthermore, belongs as much to John Calvin as it does to the Coens’ secular Judaism, to the first point of his famous TULIP, total depravity.

Calvin, as is obvious to anyone who’s read him or anything about him, is no fan of humanity. God has implanted in each of us an inborn religious drive, but it is “either smothered or corrupted, partly by ignorance, partly by malice” (Institutes I.IV). Man is totally depraved, which, despite the occasional defenses of Calvinists, does indeed mean that every single part of every single human being is tainted and untrustworthy.

This is not an optimistic view, to understate the obvious, and it becomes even darker when one disregards the other four points of TULIP, which serve to lessen and mitigate it. The Coens are forced to disregard the other four points, of course, since they all (unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints) require an active and gracious God. The Coens’ God, best I can tell, is absent and/or cruel, in the tradition of the darker books of the Hebrew Bible, and so there’s no room for election or grace in their theology. (Apparently A Serious Man makes this even clearer; someone should buy me tickets to this movie.)

But they’re almost wholly on board with total depravity. Their dramas, in particular, all feature a force of unrelenting and unexplainable evil. No Country for Old Men’s psychotic serial killer, Anton Chigurh, is the most obvious example, even though he was created by Cormac McCarthy. But all the dramas feature a similarly evil character—think of Gaear Grimsrud in Fargo, or Julian Marty in Blood Simple—that is almost unstoppable by the other, more sympathetic, characters. The amazing thing about the Coens, however, is that these figures of evil never lose their humanity; they maintain the image of God, however perverted and corrupted by violence it may be.

Of the dramas, Barton Fink has the most sophisticated and interesting portrayal of evil. No character in the film is good—even its protagonist, whom we’re set up to like given his similarity to the Coens themselves and his name’s presence in the title, proves himself a patronizing and pompous fool. He’s a “friend of the common man,” as Pappy O’Daniel will be nine years later, but he’s completely blocked out the stories around him.

No, the most likeable character in the movie is John Goodman’s Charlie Meadows, a traveling insurance salesman who lives next door to Barton at the Hotel Earle. He’s a big, gregarious guy, a little stupid perhaps, but he has a good heart and is the “only person in Hollywood [Barton] can talk to.” Problem is, Barton doesn’t listen to him; when he finds out his new neighbor is a writer, Charlie repeatedly declares that “I could tell you some stories,” but before he has an opportunity to do so, Barton launches into rant after rant on the state of American drama, which should belong to people like Charlie instead of “the fifth earl of Bastrop and Lady Higginbottom and . . . Nigel Grinch-Gibbons.”

So the audience likes Charlie Meadows much more than it likes Barton Fink, and that’s why it comes as such a shock when [SPOILER ALERT] he turns out to be the notorious serial killer Karl “Madman” Mundt, who “likes to ventilate people with a shotgun and then cut their heads off.” He’s done just that, it turns out, to a woman with whom Barton has slept—and he’s somehow done it silently, as Barton slept next to her.

The obvious question, of course, is, How could Barton have slept through a murder committed six inches from him? The answers are suggestions rather than statements. The movie takes place in 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor necessitated U.S. involvement in World War II and several years after Hitler’s death camps became known. So one possible answer comes in the form of another question (in the Jewish tradition): How could the United States, and in particular the Jewish liberals in Hollywood and on Broadway, have slept soundly while millions of people were being gassed?

That’s the political answer. The theological answer is that we’re not quite sure that Karl Mundt committed the murder. He seems genuinely shocked when Barton goes to him for help, after all, and he doesn’t seem to have a key to the room, nor could he move silently through it. Barton claims he didn’t kill his lover, but he could have done so unconsciously, in his sleep, which would certainly fit with the Coens’ dim view of humanity. Charlie gives Barton a head-sized box just before he skips town; we never find out if it contains Audrey’s head or not, but when Barton is asked at the end of the film if it is his, he can only reply, “I don’t know.” He finally recognizes depravity—not just around him in individuals or in social structures, but in himself.

Evil is less obvious in the comedies, perhaps, though it’s still there in the form of Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona or Sidney J. Mussburger in The Hudsucker Proxy. More often, however, the Coens show the darkness of human nature in their comedies by flat-out stupidity. The three convicts in O Brother, Where Art Thou have to be three of the dumbest people ever to be projected onto a movie screen, for example; and nearly everyone in The Big Lebowski is so stupid they’d be ejected from a public kindergarten (and probably were).

This is in keeping with Calvin’s view of total depravity, in which God’s presence in the world is blocked not only by evil but by human ignorance, or, as Calvin prefers to call it, stupidity. And this stupidity is exacerbated by vanity: “their stupidity is not excusable, since it is caused not only by vain curiosity but by an inordinate desire to know more than is fitting, joined with a false confidence” (Institutes I.IV.1). If there’s a better description of Ulysses Everett McGill, I don’t know what it is—he even uses his limited knowledge of history, science, and society, to declare that the age of religion has passed, even as God clearly saves him and his friends from execution. The hardened and ignorant human heart denies the presence of grace.

The Coens are not completely committed to total depravity, however, as a viewing of Fargo demonstrates. Frances McDormand, who is married to Joel Coen, plays small-town sheriff Marge Gunderson, whose politeness and kindness are very real (as opposed to every other aw-shucks Minnesotan in the movie) and whose detective abilities save the day. I spent the entire movie waiting for the very pregnant Gunderson to be savagely murdered, but it never happens; indeed, she performs the coda of the movie, the moral, a speech that demonstrates the way in which she accepts but can’t quite understand the depravity of those around her. (Fargo is to some extent Melville’s Billy Budd with a happy ending—Marge is as innocent as a lamb but as crafty as a serpent. She can recognize evil but refuses to participate, whereas Billy can scarcely believe it exists.)

This is in the end a very different vision of depravity than Calvin’s, in that it holds out the possibility of a human-based redemption or exemption from the big T in TULIP. (The Coens, who are getting bleaker as the years progress, may go back on it when they cast McDormand as the truly vain and vapid Linda Litzke in Burn After Reading, a comedy so black that it may be darker than No Country for Old Men.) They don’t hold out hope for a God who intervenes, at least not in benevolent ways, and so if there’s to be hope in this world, it must come in the form of genuinely “good people” like Marge Gunderson. Still, Calvin might approve their oeuvre with reservations. Out of the hundreds of characters in their fourteen movies, we’re given only one who is neither debased nor stupid—hardly a good sign for the human redemption of humankind.

Friday Links

• The last vestige of the Brontës.
  
• The seven types of bookstore patrons.
• Why Western culture is so morally outraged.
  
• Where the Academy went wrong.
  
• An interview with the man who's going to save 2-D animation.
  

Deep in the Big Black Heart of the Sunshine State, Pt. 2

In my last post, I discussed the deep, fundamental anxiety of the early Disney movies—and how that anxiety has largely disappeared since the Second World War. I didn’t bother making a hypothesis as to why that was the case, but I suspect it had something to do with the cheery attitude toward American destiny in the 1950s. (Why things didn’t change back in the 1970s, I have no idea.)

I claimed before that the reason Pixar movies are so artistically successful is that they recapture the spirit of anxiety that Disney largely left behind after Bambi. Now, I suppose, it’s time for me to defend that claim. Spoilers follow, including ones for Up. Consider yourself warned.

I’ll confess it’s been too long since I’ve seen the two Toy Story films and A Bug’s Life for me to talk about them, but I’ll say that (a) if internet rumors are any indication, next year’s Toy Story 3 will feature a gaping hole at its center, as Andy goes off to college and Woody, Buzz, et al, find themselves alone and unwanted; and (b) the Animal Kingdom/Disney’s California Adventure 3-D movie It’s Tough to Be a Bug certainly poses a threat to its audience, especially to children, whose screams of terror have made it hard to hear the show every time I’ve ever seen it.

So instead, I’ll start with Monsters, Inc., which taps into a very specific but universal childhood fear: the monster in the closet. Never mind that most of these monsters turn out to be essentially good people—the operative point is that there’s a deep-seated need in Monstropolis for children to be afraid. If anxiety is defined (as it is by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and others) as fear without an object, that’s certainly what we’re dealing with in the world influenced but outside of the movie. Children are afraid of monsters, which deep down they know do not exist—therefore, they are afraid of nothing, of an empty space in their closet. Monsters, Inc. plays off of this fear, exploits it before finally putting it (no pun intended) to bed.

That Monstropolis eventually moves beyond its need for children’s screams of fear in favor of their screams of laughter makes no difference; the movie is very clear that there are monsters (we meet two of them and must assume there are more) who scare for the sheer pleasure of it—monsters who would never listen to reason, who are out to get us for the sheer evil of it.

Finding Nemo, on the other hand, begins with a reference to and amplification of the central terror in Bambi. Here Marlin’s wife dies a terrible death just as they’re planning their life together, and the Barrucuda who eats her also goes ahead and takes out all but one of her eggs. Marlin—understandably, although the film doesn’t seem to acknowledge that!—becomes a picture of anxiety, protecting his disabled son (a nod to Dumbo, though Nemo doesn’t get the brutal mocking that his elephantine counterpart does) from the world that took his wife with little to no warning.

Marlin is right—it’s a big, cruel world out there, one that does not particularly care about you, one that’s happy to eat you alive, and though the movie takes a few steps back from the fullness of his anxiety, it largely still paints a picture of a world where something terrible is going to happen to everyone. Marlin and Nemo thus become pictures of what Paul Tillich calls courage, acting in the face of their own anxiety.

The Incredibles has, I believe, the honor of being the first Disney animated feature to be rated PG. The MPAA says it’s for “cartoon violence,” and yes, it deals relatively openly with death, with Syndrome murdering every superhero he can get his hands on—and worse, the blame gets planted squarely on Mr. Incredible’s broad shoulders, since all this death is the product of his coldness decades before.

But the deepest anxiety in the film comes from the suburban ennui the superheroes experience when they attempt to reintegrate into society. It reminds me of the American existentialist novels of the 1950s and 1960s—Mr. Incredible becomes Rabbit Angstrom. Having experienced greatness on the basketball court or in the world of crimefighting, our heroes can’t lower themselves to the “normal” world. It’s no wonder Mr. Incredible steps out, and it’s telling that Elastigirl thinks he’s having an affair.

In this, then, The Incredibles may be the darkest and most anxious of the Disney canon because its anxiety exists in our world. We’re all afraid of losing our parents, ala Bambi or Finding Nemo—but that loss is inevitable. What’s scarier is the notion that we are not special, that we’re going to go through the world in a cubicle, our souls buried beneath TS reports and fluorescent lights. This is a fear that can hardly be named, the essence of anxiety.

The next feature, Cars, takes that nightmare and expands it to cover an entire town. Radiator Springs, too, was once an exceptional town, an adorable little tourist trap, but when Route 66 falls into ruin, so does the town and its people. Anxiety sets in—how can everyone drive right past our lives? How can we be this insignificant?

Last year’s Wall*E, in my opinion the greatest of the Pixar films thus far, is about the dizziness that ensues from the combination of freedom and responsibility, ala Jean-Paul Sartre. The human race has exercised its freedom in a predictably ugly way, by completely destroying the planet and then avoiding its responsibility by vacating the planet for an extended cruise-ship life of overeating and sedentariness.

Our hero is a model of responsibility, a robot left to clean up the entire mess who accidentally learns agency but still does not abandon his responsibility. When he manages to teach that responsibility to the humans on board the cruise ship, deep pain ensues—they’re forced to work, to think, to connect in ways that are difficult and hurtful for them. The movie is in many ways about the end of anxiety, but the characters have go through the swamp to get to the dry land.

Finally, we come to Up. The film lightens up considerably after the first half-hour or so, but the first act may be the darkest thing ever released in a mainstream cartoon. We meet Carl and Ellie Frederickson when they are only children and are treated to a beautiful—and then brutal—wordless tour of their lives together. They’re the happiest couple you can imagine until Ellie gets pregnant and has a miscarriage. (In a movie that children all over the country are flocking to in droves!)

At this point, they come up with the idea of having an adventure in Paradise Falls, South America. Life intervenes, and it never happens. To some extent we have here the image of suburban ennui in The Incredibles, but it’s never implied that Carl and Ellie stand above or outside their society. They’re just normal people who love each other and whose dreams have been crushed by the contingencies of life.

Finally, Carl buys two tickets to Paradise Falls, and as he’s about to give them to his wife, she collapses. Then she dies. All of this is in the first eight minutes of the movie, and yet we feel that we know this couple, and her death is earth-shattering, horrible, and ugly. Carl’s life turns gray and bleak, and he decides to sail his house on 10,000 multicolored balloons to Paradise Falls—presumably to die. The film is built on a death wish built out of deep loneliness.

Now—all this darkness serves to make the brightness at the end of each of these films brighter, in a way that a movie without it—let’s say Brother Bear, my favorite whipping boy in the Disney stable—isn’t bright. My point is not that Pixar creates dark films that will disturb children. As I said last time, I wasn’t disturbed by the similarly dark early Disney films as a child. Rather, this anxiety is something they’re doing right, and I suspect that as long as they keep it up, we will be able to merge our lives with the characters’, and Pixar will stay on top.

Deep in the Big Black Heart of the Sunshine State

I saw Disney/Pixar’s latest, Up, this weekend, and I continue to be impressed with the depth of these guys’ imagination. I can’t imagine how anyone came up with this storyline—an old man loses his wife, attaches balloons to his house, flies to South America, and somehow manages to fight off a pack of angry, trained, electronically talking dogs—but I’m glad they did. It’s a beautiful and moving film, as every Pixar film is, and if it’s not quite as good as Wall*E or Monsters, Inc. or Finding Nemo, it’s a worthy addition to their catalogue.

It’s no secret that Disney needed to be saved, at least in terms of animation. (Disney theme parks are also in need of some touching-up, especially, it seems, Disney’s California Adventure, but that’s another story, and I hate to badmouth Walt Disney World.) After 2004’s commercial bomb, Home on the Range—and the three commercial bombs that preceded it, Michael Eisner noted the success of the Pixar films and made the baffling decision to shut down the 2-D animation program at the Mouse.

Problem is, the reason no one likes, say, Brother Bear is not because it’s hand-drawn—the animation is absolutely gorgeous in that film, some of the best hand-drawn work ever done—but because no one could care less about the story and the characters. Disney ended up with what we can name “Michael Bay syndrome”—the technology doesn’t matter if your story’s a dog, and as The Island’s financial returns demonstrated, you can’t fool your audience forever. That’s why I can’t remember the name, much less the personality, of a single character in Brother Bear (I’ve not seen Home on the Range), whereas I can sing “Pink Elephants on Parade” from Dumbo or even “How Do You Do?” from Song of the South, a movie with its share of problems but with very strong characters.

So you have to care about the pixels on the screen; you in fact have to forget they’re pixels, have to allow yourself to fall in love with Princess Aurora or to want to be best friends with Aladdin. (You can insert your own examples there.) You have to have something to go home with. That’s why when Disney shifted to 3-D animation, it didn’t fix the problem. Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons are forgettable, just as forgettable as Brother Bear and Atlantis, because they lack story, not because their animation is or is not cutting-edge.

I’ve blogged before about how much I love John Lasseter, how his position as head of the animation department and his decision to (thank you, God and John) reinstate 2-D animation, is going to save Disney as an artistic entity. We’ve already seen signs of it. Last year’s Bolt was not a classic, exactly, but the characters were real in a way that no Disney character has been for nearly a decade; this year’s (2-D!) The Princess and the Frog looks even better.

So here’s what Pixar gets that Disney hasn’t understood in a long time. Here, in other words, is what makes Pixar in 2009 closer to Disney in 1941 than Disney in 2009 or even 1992. All of the early Disney features—for our purposes, let’s define “early” as prewar, which would allow us to work with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi—are shiny and beautifully drawn, but all of their prettiness only serves to hide the deep, existential dread at their cores.

I didn’t realize this as a child. I don’t remember being frightened or upset by any of the Disney movies I watched—and I watched nearly all of them. But my re-watching these films as an adult makes me weep and fear for my life. Take Snow White. We all know that the wicked queen attempts to have Snow White killed and, when that fails, she slips her a poison apple. What I didn’t remember is that this apple was never meant to kill her. We’re given the real plan by the queen herself. She turns to the camera as she’s brewing up the poison and says “She’ll be buried alive.” She laughs, and repeats herself, then laughs again. It’s the viewer that’s threatened here—threatened directly in fact.

Pinocchio repeats the trick and makes it even more disturbing by drenching the entire movie in pathos. Gepetto, as we know, is a clockmaker who desperately wants a son. But in the Disney movie, he’s overwhelmingly sad—a man who’s so lonely that he calls his goldfish his “little water baby.” (I can’t type that without my heart metaphorically collapsing in on itself.) This is a deep, ontological loneliness, one that you don’t expect to find in a children’s film.

When Pinocchio is “born,” Gepetto loves him instantly and unconditionally, even insisting that he is a “good boy,” a label based on nothing that corresponds to reality. Pinocchio abandons his father twice, showing no remorse that I can see, and nearly costs Gepetto, his “little water baby” and his cat, the adorable Figaro, their lives in the belly of a whale. If Pinocchio is our hero, if he is an everyman of some sort—and I figure he must be, with his name in the title—we’re indicted here. It’s a Calvinist vision of a certain sort.

That part is sad. It gets scary and disturbing once we see what happens to Pinocchio in show business. Stromboli, whom Christopher Finch calls the most evil of all Disney villains, locks his cash cow in a cage and says—again, to the camera—that when the puppet is no longer profitable, he will simply chop it into firewood. When Pinocchio escapes, of course, he’s again recruited by “Honest John” and sent to Pleasure Island. The proprietor of the island laughs to John that “The boys never come back…as boys.” At this the camera swoops to the front of his face, as he is completely transformed into a devil.

Here we have an image of evil for its own sake, something that does not merely threaten the characters on the screen but threatens the audience as well. This evil, we’re told, exists in the real world, and the villains in these films do not feel like cartoons. They’re something real, something threatening, something horrible.

I’ve written in another post about the darkness at the center of Fantasia, so I’ll touch briefly on Bambi and Dumbo, each of which paints life in ugly and frightening terms. Dumbo is taken away from his mother after she spanks a teenager who pulls on her son’s enormous ears—and the other elephants shun him because of his supposed disability. The “Baby Mine” scene of the film, in which Jumbo, stuck in the “mad elephant” trailer, touches her son’s trunk with her own through the bars of her cage. (No wonder Dumbo gets loaded afterwards!) And I doubt I need to talk about the senseless killing of Bambi’s mother—no doubt the source of nightmares for many a young Disney fan—though I’ll point out that his father also refuses to take care of him.

After the war, though, things changed. The bad guys got more cartoonish, funnier, and even though the animation got more technically sophisticated, the dread disappeared. We’re not the slightest bit afraid of the buffoonish Captain Hook and his even dumber sidekick, Smee. And when villains are more realistic, like Lady Tremaine from Cinderella, we don’t feel personally threatened. We may feel for Cinderella, but there’s not a sense that we’re next.

About the only exception I can think of in the period from 1945-1989 is the rat from Lady and the Tramp, which clearly sends the message that children—and adults, for that matter—shouldn’t sleep easy, for fear something will eat them alive, bite by bite.

The much-vaunted Disney renaissance of the ‘90s moved closer to the original vision of the films, but not all the way. What we see in the ‘90s films (and I’m including 1989’s The Little Mermaid in that list) is a sort of cartoon version of Shakespeare’s villains, as in Jafar/Iago or Hades/Macbeth. In the case of Mermaid’s Ursula, we actually get a cartoon version of a Shakespearean actress, a washed-up old hack with little use in the modern world. The exception is The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s humorless murderer, Frollo—that’s Disney’s darkest film, even if it tacks on a happy ending to the original novel.

So the kind of existential dread embodied in the wicked queen or Stromboli has been absent from Disney films since 1945. This post is getting long, so I’ll talk about how Pixar has brought angst back in a later post.

Interlude: A Brief Meditation on "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"

1940's Fantasia is a high-water mark in animation history--Disney has rarely topped it, and no full-length animated film from any other studio has even come close. Nearly every moment of the film (at least the animated portions, all of them wordless or nearly wordless) is sublime, and the concept--introducing children (and the rest of us) to classical music via animation--is brilliant.

All of the segments are gorgeous, but none is more beloved than "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," set to the Dukas classic and starring Disney's flagship character, Mickey Mouse. It is unusual in Mickey's canon in that he is something of a troublemaker and a screw-up; these traits were common in early shorts like "Plane Crazy" and especially "The Galloping Gaucho" (in which our hero gets drunk and starts a bar-fight!), but the 1930s found Mickey becoming increasingly bland, an everyman for obedient children.

Mickey is here the everyman for all of us, particularly those of us in the West with a vested interest in science. Perhaps no man believed in progress more than Walt Disney, a subject I've written about more-or-less extensively elsewhere. But progress has its dark side. One day I will complete my dream project about Walt's conflicted attitude toward technological progress, but for now I'll advise you to take a look at the much-maligned but well-beloved (in my family, anyway) Carousel of Progress, in which the more things change, the more they stay the same--the technology keeps breaking down, and the show ends with a Smart Oven nearly burning down the house.

And so we come to 1940, one year after J. Robert Oppenheimer began his Manhattan Project, the research opportunity that would eventually level two Japanese cities and burn their citizens' shadows into the sidewalks. I am not sure about the public awareness of the embryonic atom bomb in the early 1940s, but nuclear awareness was on the rise, with the American military frightened about a possible Nazi bomb.

That growing public awareness of the split atom shows up in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," perhaps the darkest short Disney has ever released. (My fiancee is deathly afraid of it.) It's anarchic in a way that Disney is rarely anarchic, frightening in a way matched only by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' wicked queen (who, let us not forget, wants Snow White to be "BURIED ALIVE!!!") and Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent, one of film history's greatest villains.

But the revolution is that the villain in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is Mickey Mouse himself, the blandest and best of all everymen--perhaps foolish but ethically above reproach. (Walt Disney noted that Mickey wishes to share the spotlight with his friends, introducing and then playing second fiddle to Donald Duck and Goofy.) In this short, however, he commits Satan's cardinal sin, the absolute worst thing a mouse or a man can do--he plays God. He puts on the hat reserved for the Sorcerer, and he climbs the mountain and controls the seas. He splits the atom. He introduces an incredible evil into the world, an evil that cannot be stopped or controlled, an evil that multiplies indefinitely until only God or the Sorcerer can halt its march.

And so with the nuclear age. The tragic realism of the atom bomb (I'll not take a stand on whether Truman should have ordered its use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) gave way to the nuclear hysteria of the 1950s and '60s. It created a world of horrible possibility, a world that, as many a historian has noted, we could destroy for the first time ever. And maybe the Sorcerer will save us with minimal punishment (he just swats Mickey on his behind, almost lovingly)--or maybe he'll let us drown.

Fantasia seems to anticipate this terrible progression. And so I must again suspect that Walt Disney was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation--perhaps even a prophet of sorts, envisioning not only the great interstellar flight of mankind but our capacity (and maybe desire) for self-destruction.

Two and a Half Things That Aren't Funny

I'm no expert or anything (Adam Carolla says that everyone believes themselves to have a great sense of humor and only 10 percent of people actually do), but I've been watching this season's Last Comic Standing, and it's a bleak bunch. Other than Iliza Shlesinger--and even she's more hot than funny--and that bald British guy who plays the double bass, no one makes me laugh. The contestants on LCS fall into two traps of modern comedy, both of which are getting more and more popular. These two things are not funny:

(a) "OMG THAT'S SO RANDOM." Really, I think this mistake is the product of overshooting. Detail is funny, no doubt. One of my favorite commercials right now is the Cars.com spot where the woman tells the salesman that she mixed up brownies with horse laxatives. The detail makes that joke funny. "Horse laxatives" is 50 percent funnier than just plain "laxatives." (The joke would be even funnier if it were "donkey laxatives," both because "donkey" features the komedy k sound and because donkeys are inherently funnier animals than horses.)

But there's a limit, and once a joke begins getting too detailed, it moves into "OMG THAT'S SO RANDOM" territory and stops being funny. One of the contestants on LCS, for example--I can't remember his name, but it's the guy with the "creepy stalker" persona--said that he can't get any laughs because he "smells like old squash." That joke doesn't make me laugh because it's not tied to anything in reality--it's a detail that could have been funny if it came from something real, but it doesn't. "Smells like failure" would be funny because the comedian actually does.

The most overrated comedy on television, Family Guy, does this all the time. Think of the psychotic monkey that lives in Chris Griffin's closet. That running gag assumes either that we think monkeys are funny in and of themselves or that we'll be amused by the "randomness" of the reference. Neither is true, at least for me.

For even more examples, look at Napoleon Dynamite--which I truly and utterly abhor--or that Chuck Norris website that was so popular until Chuck tossed his support behind Mike Huckabee.

(b) The Straight Reference. We've seen an increase in this type of "humor" with the Date/Superhero/Epic/Disaster/Scary Movie franchises. There are some fantastic parody movies out there--The Naked Gun and Airplane! being the two best--but this recent crop of comedies aren't really parodies because they deal with recognition rather than with humorous change. That is, they just present us with the reference as if our recognition of a bald Britney Spears is funny in and of itself. It's not.

In stand-up comedy, impressionists are more often than not guilty of this. Marcus on LCS gets way too much mileage out of his stock Christopher Walken impersonation. (News flash, professional comedians: Since everyone can do Walken, Jimmy Stewart, and Arnold Schwartzeneggar, they are no longer useful or entertaining impersonations.) A good impressionist can make me laugh until my sides hurt, but doing the impression is worth nothing without snappy writing. Marcus isn't smart or snappy, and so he comes off as a frat-boy douchebag. He entertained the Playboy Bunnies (and I knew he'd get the immunity), but a good rule of thumb should be that if the Girls Next Door think you're the funniest thing ever, you ain't.

Hey, once again, Family Guy is guilty of this. The show frequently just presents us with unchanged references to pop culture. There's the time the Griffin kids sing "Sixteen Going On Seventeen," and then there's the time Stewie sings "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face." I kept waiting for the joke, and one never came. But the show filled two minutes with each of these bits.

Oh, and a bonus warning: Parody can be very funny, but only if you use it to get at the truth. I loved "Weird Al" Yankovic growing up, and he's fantastic at this. "Smells Like Nirvana," for example, is funny because of what it says about the source song--it crawls inside of it and understands it. Likewise, "Living with a Hernia" (a parody, of course, of James Brown's "Living in America") is great not only because of the research Yankovic must have done into hernias but also because of the way it plays with James Brown's mannerisms. Maybe his screeches and shouts are the result of a medical condition.

God's Pottery, mercifully eliminated from Last Comic Standing, got an obscene amount of laughs from people who have apparently never met an evangelical. The evangelical virginity movement is ripe for parody, it's true (King of the Hill has a wonderful and insightful episode called "Luanne Virgin 2.0"), but God's Pottery has a tin ear and no affection for the movement. (Parody doesn't work as well if it's mean-spirited.) They seem to have formed their impressions of Christians from Rod and Todd Flanders from The Simpsons. Rod and Todd are funny characters, but not because they're like most Evangelicals; they're funny because they are exactly the type of child Ned Flanders (who, while exaggerated, is much more rounded and true-to-life character) would have.

Once again, an example from Family Guy: The Griffin family moves to the Southeast with the Witness Protection Program. The writer of the episode had obviously never been south of Rhode Island because the episode doesn't ring true with anything in reality. One bit that made me particularly livid was a throwaway line: The radio DJ says, "That was Merle Haggard, with 'I Kissed My Sweetie with My Fist.'" Obviously, the writer has no understanding of or affection for Haggard in particular or country music in general. There are very few country songs promoting spousal abuse (and almost none since the '40s), and Haggard is exactly the type of singer who would never sing one. Parodists with a tin ear for their topics end up being aggressively unfunny.

A Brief Prose-Hymn to John Lasseter

Lasseter is, of course, the head of Pixar and the new head of Disney animation. He directed Toy Story and Cars, among other movies, and more importantly, he's the one who's bringing back Disney's 2D animation department. (Leave it to the man who brought computer animation into the public consciousness to bring back the old style.)

And so the first 2D Disney film in half a decade is coming next year--The Princess and the Frog features 1920s New Orleans, a Randy Newman soundtrack, the directors of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, and the first-ever African-American Disney princess. I'm geeking out.

Oh: Lasseter's other awesome move is to feature animated shorts before films, the way Disney did for decades and the way Pixar always has. I am not sure if these shorts will appear before live-action films, but I hope so, and apparently National Treasure 2 featured a classic-style instructional Goofy short.

I love you, John Lasseter. Here's to you and the new Disney Renaissance that you are certain to bring on.

Last Year's Model

I've resisted computer animation for years; it lacks the depth, ironically enough, of traditional 2D animation; too often, it ends up looking hollow and insincere, and its practitioners and apologists--many of them, anyway--are so infatuated with the technology that they end up leaving by the wayside insignificant things like story and character development. I've not seen Space Chimps, for example, nor do I plan to, but it looks like a perfectly unholy combination of poor writing and hollow effects. As for the bafflingly acclaimed Shrek series--it confuses cynicism with a legitimate critique of Disney mythology, and it features the most grating voice acting I've ever heard. It's clever without being smart, an attack on franchising that turned into a franchise itself. I hate these movies, I truly hate them, and Disney's own Enchanted, a much more affectionate tweaking of the princess trope, really shows how petulant and juvenile the Shrek movies are.

Disney screwed up, too, though--as movies like Brother Bear and Home on the Range foundered at the box office, Robert Iger and company shut down the Mouse's 2D animation department, only to produce Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, themselves greeted by tepid commercial reception. Disney apparently fails to understand that the third dimension doesn't help anything if the writing isn't there. This fall's Bolt, starring John Travolta and Miley Cyrus, looks pretty terrible but may surprise me. I hope so.

The exception to the general artistic failure of computer animation are the Pixar films, all of which--especially 2003's Finding Nemo and 2004's The Incredibles--have been whip-smart, innovative (both visually and thematically), and genuinely emotional in a way that DreamWorks features consistently fail to be. Pixar also has a penchant for choosing voice actors who are not huge stars, or at least not at the top of public consciousness, to great effect. Think of Craig T. Nelson anchoring The Incredibles or Albert Brooks as the emotional center of Finding Nemo or Don Rickles gruffing his way through the Toy Story movies. Pixar casts its actors because they're right for their parts, not because they want to capitalize on star power. These actors don't overplay their roles or use goofy voices for no reason--I'm looking at Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers, respectively--and so the films end up with an understated tone, and understatement is where the real emotion is.

I was certain Pixar's latest, WALL-E, would be an artistic success and a commercial failure, though. The cartoon-going public, after all, made the Shrek films hits, and I doubted their patience and ability to appreciate a film with limited dialogue--the main character, after all, says only about seven words the entire movie. Also, giving emotion to robots is notoriously difficult (as we learned from the Futurama DVD commentaries). But I didn't doubt Pixar's ability to make it happen--just the public's ability to do the work to identify with the robots. But my predictions, thankfully, turned out to be dead wrong: The movie opened at number one and made $23 million its first weekend, and it's still at number six a month after its release (ahead of Wanted, Kung Fu Panda, and Space Chimps). It's not going to be the studio's most successful feature, but it's going to do well.

More importantly, it's their best movie, and one of the best cartoons I've ever seen. The animation, particularly in the first half hour, is breaktaking, and the backgrounds are particularly well-done. (Backgrounds in animation are to some extent like bass in a rock band, in that most people don't pay a huge amount of attention to them but they subtly make the entire experience. Pixar's famed attention to detail makes them great at backgrounds, and WALL-E utilizes the talents of Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon, late of The Simpsons, two of the best in the biz.) The animation loses some of its majesty once the humans show up--3D animation has a hard time making non-creepy human beings, though it worked well in The Incredibles--but the robots always look good and are beautifully designed.

A central, though unspoken, conflict in the movie involves generational technology, particularly the difference between WALL-E and the rest of the robots. WALL-E is a 1960s vision of the future, the kind of thing you might find in Tomorrowland. He's perhaps a little clunky, a little out-of-date, and he appears to malfunction on a semi-regular basis. The newer robots, on the other hand, look like iPods--they're coated with glossy Apple white and are all curves and smooth edges. They certainly work better than WALL-E, but the movie suggests that their efficiency is to their detriment. To put it briefly, WALL-E's malfunctioning gives him a soul; he's so poorly designed that he develops a personality. (This makes him human, of course; Nietzsche suggests in "On Truth and Lying in an Non-Moral Sense" that human consciousness is a similar accident of evolution.) But WALL-E's personality, in the ultra-modern world he will briefly inhabit, makes him something of a liability, as he's in trouble as soon as he sets his suitcase down. At the very least, he seems old fashioned once he gets to the space cruiser. His job performance (he's a garbage-bot, a rolling trash compactor left to clean up the mess evacuating humans have made of Earth) is not peak, as he spends a good part of each day collecting artifacts with which he decorates his sad and lonely apartment. He spends his nights watching a videotape of Hello Dolly, an old musical set in an even older time and stored on what is in the 22nd century a ridiculously outdated technology. He's learned from Dolly that life's greatest pleasure is holding hands, and he practices on himself. If humanity has an essence, say the existentialists, it's alienation; and so WALL-E is human, alone on a deserted planet with only Babs Streisand and a cockroach for company. (Leave it to Pixar to make those two palatable!)

The new robots are not evil, exactly, not even the Autopilot device who serves as the movie's de facto villain. But they're efficient, ruthlessly so,; they're programmed to get the job done, and such a mission has little room for personality. The new robots aren't dehumanized--they'd have to be human for that--but they're kept from attaining humanity. At least until they meet WALL-E. Last year's model shines a light on every robot he meets, starting with EVE, who's a ruthless killing machine until WALL-E gives her a nickname. And when she retreats into her mission and becomes totally non-responsive, WALL-E sits with her for days in the rain and the heat, watching over her. Once she sees her own security footage of his sacrifice, bam, she's human. Something similar happens to the valet robot who angrily cleans up after WALL-E; when the latter shakes his hand and asks his name, he gains a personality in a way he didn't formerly have one. Carl Jung talks about the zeroes who make up most of the world and the ones who bring them into the clear light of day; WALL-E is certainly a one, and probably the only one in the movie, at least until he starts making ones from zeroes.

If the new robots are ruthlessly efficient, the humans in the movie are disgustingly sedentary, completely unable to make a move--they are so alienated that they are completely unaware of their alienation. They ride around their cruise ship on recliners, watching television and drinking their food so they won't even have to exercise their jaws. They're so wrapped up in their chair-mounted screens that they don't even know they're sitting by a swimming pool. WALL-E's status as a Jungian one is reinforced when he knocks John Ratzenberger off his chair and turns off Kathy Najimi's screen--the two make a legitimate human connection (they hold hands, of course) and become heroes in their own right when utopia turns to dystopia.

The people who criticize the film's supposed attack on the obese miss the point (indeed, at least three of the film's stars--Ratzenberger, Najimy, and captain Jeff Garlin--are pretty overweight, and so is Pixar head John Lasseter). The film is not a criticism of obesity in and of itself; it uses obesity as an image of alienation. After all, the futuristic humans are not just fat--they are sedentary, and in being sedentary they are unable to make any connections, be they intellectual, emotional, or spiritual. WALL-E's heroism comes from his old-fashionedness; he seems to exist in an era where folks were industrious without being ruthless, where human connection was the main thing, where technology did not run our lives for us. Whether that era existed or not, I can't say, but WALL-E does a great job of making us believe it did, and in doing so, it eases our alienation for a little while. It makes us move, makes us want to hold hands with someone or maybe everyone.

The Age of Reason

Question of the day: When did Western culture shift from privileging age to privileging youth? Socrates takes it as a given that "the elder must govern, and the younger be governed" (Republic 412c). But look at the discourse surrounding Barack Obama (and Kennedy before him): He's young; he's HOPE FOR AMERICA! (The most common criticism of him, of course, is that he's inexperienced, but that gets lost in the shuffle.) When did youth in and of itself become a positive?

I suspect it was during the Romantic era, with its elevation of childhood, or else during the 1960s, when age became a signifier of The Man. You can't trust anyone over thirty, after all.

This continued and expanded in the popular culture of the 1980s and '90s. Michael Medved (whom I usually can't stand) points out in Hollywood vs. America that films of the era--particularly children's movies--feature kids who are far more noble than their parents. Think about Disney's The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel is intelligent and open-minded, while King Triton is an unpleasant bigot who opposes interracial marriage. Family sitcoms of the era feature an idiot father and his brilliant kids, The Simpsons being the worst offender. (The only post-Cosby Show counterexample I can think of is King of the Hill. Hank is clearly the most level-headed and intelligent character, and his son needs a good deal of guidance.)

(When we discussed this earlier today, V. pointed out that most sitcoms are now vehicles for male comedians, who play up this boneheaded angle. But Cosby was a comedian, too, and he was never dumb on his show--he was silly, but he was a great father figure, the kind of father most of us would appreciate. I suspect part of that was that because it was a "black" sitcom that featured upper-class African-Americans, he felt he had to be an example.)

Asian cultures, we're told, esteem and revere the elderly. I wonder if this system is changing in Japan with the influx of American pop culture. The fact of the matter, though, is that age doesn't make you The Man and that authority is not necessarily a bad thing. I'd definitely rather be sixty than nineteen, which, as the Old 97's tell us, "is not the age of reason." No offense to the nineteen-year-olds reading this (and I know a good deal of intelligent and thoughtful nineteen-year-olds), but it's the age of confusion, the age of incompetence, or at least the age of inexperience. Plato was right: Let's let the aged lead us, and let's stop making youth something to hold onto forever.

Old 97's, "Nineteen"

O Tinkerbell, What Have They Done Unto Thee?

A few years ago, when I bought the DVD of Disney's Peter Pan, I was a little surprised. I'd not seen the film since I was a kid (when, of course, I loved it, along with the rest of the animated canon), and apparently my personality has shifted quite a bit in the intervening years. Peter himself, for example, is wholly unlikeable--he's got no personality at all, save for a vague selfishness, and while every little boy wants to be him, no grown man ever should. (Likewise, I loved Holden Caulfield when I was sixteen, and now I just want to kill him.)

The only human character in the movie--by which I mean the only character who reacts to things more or less the way human beings would react--is that pin-up fairy, Tinkerbell. I recognize that Tinkerbell is problematic in terms of gender and sexuality; I get that she's a collection of stereotypes, from her sexy look to the way she examines her posterior, horrified by its size, in a mirror near the start of the film. But Tinkerbell rings emotionally true. She's in love with an idiot who doesn't appreciate her, who actually grabs her, holds her upside-down, and shakes her so that his new girlfriend can fly away with him. And when she's finally taken all she can stand, she gets so filled with rage that she actually attempts to murder Wendy. Tinkerbell is one tough broad.

Or she was. In an attempt to skew the horrible "Disney Princesses" line of merchandizing to an even younger crowd, the Mouse has just started its "Disney Fairies" line. Now, the Disney Princesses, as aberrant and horrifying as it is, at least makes sense. Little girls watch "Sleeping Beauty" and want to be Aurora. (Then they go to Disney World and get hair extensions and whore clothes and yell at their parents in line. Then my girlfriend almost kills them. It's a good system.) But Tinkerbell isn't the kind of role model I imagine most parents want for their little girls. She doesn't play nice, even if she proves herself capable of self-sacrifice at the end of the film. And besides that, she's really the only canonical Disney fairy--except for Flora, Fauna, and Meriwether, and they're not included in this line.

And so Disney has (a) completely changed Tink; and (b) given her an entire series of politically correct buddies, all of whom live in a magical place called "Pixie Hollow." (You can read more than you want to know about it at the official website.) The fairies are racially diverse but all have basically the same figure, of course, except for their teacher, an overweight matron named "Fairy Mary." I'd be a hypocrite for talking about the homogeneity among their body types because of my affection for the original Tinkerbell (whose figure is, after all, unchanged), and so instead I'm going to rant about the changes made to her character, the bowdlerization of Tinkerbell.

First of all: I don't think Tink would have friends. I see nothing in Peter Pan that suggests she plays well with anyone, and so it's pretty clear that her fairy buddies were created so that little Madison's parents will have to her buy fifteen backpacks instead of one. And oh, her friends are awful and have the types of names parents who give their children fauxhawks would like: Silvermist, Rosetta, Fawn, etc. In twenty years, are we going to have a rash of adult women named "Iridessa"? Count on it.

The fairies are, of course, precisely and cynically calculated to appeal to every type of little girl (except overweight ones). Fawn is the "rough and tumble tomboy." Silvermist is vaguely Asian and naively optimistic (at least she doesn't ride a dragon or something). There's even a fairy for little girls lost who haven't yet established a sense of self: Prilla, who has no idea what her talent is but loves the color pink.

Most of the other fairies get awesome occupations like animal-fairy or water-fairy. Do you know what Tinkerbell "loves" to do? She loves to repair pots and pans. Dirty pun aside, I'd love to know why come Peter Pan gets to never grow up and to bang mermaids and Indian maidens all day long while Tinker has to stay at home with a welding torch. And why such a domestic occupation? In the film, Tinkerbell wasn't particularly matronly--I get the feeling she only hung around with the idiot lost boys in the hopes that she could surprise Peter in the shower. Here, she's burdened with the responsibility of holding society together. No way the 1953 Tinkerbell would put up with that.

Tink's fact sheet claims that she's a social outcast, and interestingly, she doesn't appear in the lineup with the rest of the fairies but in her own circle off to the side. But in the excerpts from the book series provided on the website, she's friendly and helpful (two words that would never describe her in the film). She also talks.

Disney's mute characters are usually their most expressive ones. Think about Pluto, for example, who never says a word but runs the full gamut of emotions in his face--he's a much more dynamic and expressive character than Mickey Mouse, and he may even be more so than Donald Duck (always my favorite). Likewise, part of Tink's appeal in the film is that she doesn't have to speak the ridiculous dialogue the other characters get. She retains an aura of mystery, which only contributes to her being such a tough broad.

But she's not a tough broad anymore. She does people's repair work mostly because she's such a nice person (1953 Tinkerbell was not nice by any stretch of the imagination), and she's got a cadre of more interesting friends--outcast or no. In short, Tink's turned into a sororiety girl, a "perfect little flirt" who reinforces the status quo and doesn't seem to rock the boat much anymore. (She certainly isn't into murder these days.) I can't wait until my next trip to Disney World, when I will doubtless see eight-year-olds dressed in her outfit and will have to hold the vomit down.