James Lileks had some interesting thoughts this morning about film, specifically about the subjective nature of comedy, and how well (or how poorly) a film plays to an audience a couple of generations removed from the intended one.
He’s discussing one of the later Marx Brothers movies when he says:
Watching the movie, I was reminded how much I don’t get the humor of the 40s. It just isn’t funny to me… But the audiences [of the 40s] thought it was. Its almost as if they thought it was funny because it was supposed to be. So it was. Either they had all agreed to find certain styles, conventions, gags and set-ups as funny, regardless of whether they were funny, or these things truly were funny — but not any more.
A little of both, maybe. Styles change. We move on. Some things are funny forever – the pratfall of a king will always be funny. [Buster] Keaton doesn’t date, or at least will take longer to date than others. (As much as it pains me, the durability of silent films may suggest that Mime is the only humorous skill capable of transcending the passage of time.) But most styles of humor are particular to the times. Some eras prize clever arid wordplay; others wallow in puns. Some humorists are lashed to the mast of their time, and when the wind goes out of the sail their reputations drift, becalmed. Airplane, a very funny movie, would have completely baffled people in 1917. It’s all so subjective that it’s hard to believe anything can be established empirically as FUNNY, in the sense that it’s amusing to most people in most places in most times. Some day, eventually, the Marx Brothers will be NOT FUNNY, just a strange manic artifact full of allusions to conventions we’ve lost and forgotten.
I was deeply intrigued by the thought of something being funny because it is supposed to be. Case in point: my mother loves watching nightly re-runs of I Love Lucy on one of our local PBS affiliates. For a long time, I did, too. I thought that Lucy was worth my attention because it was groundbreaking and historically important and a classic. But a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that, while it may be all of those other things, the one thing it is not is funny. I realized that Lucy’s voice actually annoys the hell out of me, and if I were Ricky Ricardo I probably would’ve dumped the dingbat long before Little Ricky came along. The show is shrill and abrasive and it turns around ludicrous misunderstandings that anyone with a milliwatt of mental power could see right through. And Lucy and Ricky are downright cruel to each other, enough so (to a modern viewer, anyway) that it is occasionally disturbing to watch them. I realized that I just don’t like the show anymore. I wonder if I ever really did, or if I just laughed at it because I thought that I was supposed to laugh.
I also responded to Lileks’ notion of historical context, the idea that a movie is funny (or otherwise effective) in the time in which it’s made, but it gradually loses its power as we get farther away from that moment. Anne said something to me the other night that touched on this idea. We were talking about one of the classic films of our youths, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and she wondered if kids today even know about Ferris and if they would think he’s cool and funny like we always have. I told her of course they would, that it’s a timeless film. But is it? Or do we just laugh because we grew up with it, because we were there in the ’80s and we remember the hair and the clothes and the music and the rhythms of the language and a million subliminal things that are completely lost on modern kids who were born during the grunge years? Maybe my mom still laughs at Lucy for the very same reasons, because she remembers the 1950s and I don’t.
Of course, the ability to enjoy something is not entirely dependent on having lived in the time that produced it. I love old movies, from the silent era right up to the now. Every decade of the Motion-Picture Age has produced something that I enjoy and I take great pride in owning films that range across an entire century of cinema, but I have to admit that occasionally there are elements of even my favorite movies, the ones I know very well, that pass by me completely. For example, I don’t fully understand the symbolism of Claude Rains trashing the bottle of Vichy Water at the end of Casablanca. I know, of course, that he is rejecting the collaborator French government in favor of the nobler anti-fascist cause, but I don’t really feel the power that this scene must have had in 1942. Similarly, I understand the fear of communist infiltration that informs the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but only in a clinical, intellectual sense; I’ve never felt that fear myself, and it seems kind of silly to my modern, post-Cold War eyes. As much as I love these movies, as well-informed as I am about the times that produced them (better informed than most viewers today, I’d wager), I am still missing something.
This leads me to an absolutely horrifying thought: maybe it isn’t possible to produce a movie or TV series or even a novel of lasting value. The further into the future we travel, the less meaningful the entertainments we love become. Kids today reject the original Star Trek as sexist, when it was really nothing of the kind… at least when you compare it to other TV series made during the 1960s. I just watched The Terminator tonight and experienced the same old chill I always feel at the end when Sarah Connor realizes the doomed inevitability of her life’s story. To me, that’s immensely moving and realistic — but then I remember the feeling we all had in the 1980s that a nuclear war wasn’t just possible, but probable. How does that film’s ending work for a kid who didn’t grow up during a time when it really seemed likely that everything could end in a heartbeat, just like Reese describes it to Sarah? It was a time when the phrase “the finger on the button” needed no explanation. But that time is over now. We have new threats and fears, true, but I doubt if global thermonuclear destruction is very high on anyone’s anxiety list these days. Kids today would probably ask, “what button?” And so I’m guessing that, for them, The Terminator doesn’t have quite the same resonance that it did for us in the ’80s. And that makes me feel unexpectedly… sad. The generation gap suddenly appears to be a very tangible barrier, one that only grows more and more divisive with each passing year.
Maybe all the art produced by any given generation is doomed to gradually fade, like a photograph left in the sun, until it becomes blank and meaningless. How’s that for chilling? As an aspiring novelist and someone who stubbornly clings to the things I loved as a child and wants them to endure, it scares the hell out of me.
I’ve been told many times (too many?) that if you have to explain a joke then it isn’t one. I perfer my art the same way–able to stand alone. I’m still defining what type of art I like and I like to learn about the time it was made and other information which helps me to understand it, but I still perfer that it can stand (or at least hang) alone. If it needs context to be appreciated then I consider it more of a social commentary or such than a lasting piece of art. I can still enjoy and like these social commentaries, but often they have their limited time of applicability and then they fade. Many times their applicability not only is limited by time, but also by the perciever. I was all but crushed by Orwell’s “1984” when I read it in high school. Now I might not find it interresting enough to finish. At that point in my life, it was very revelant, but now… In high school, Feris BDO was one of my favorite films, now I question if I’m really willing to shell out any money to own it.
I guess my point is that many things have their place, few things stand the test of time as works of art. The issues surrounding Mona Lisa’s smile may be lost to the ages and many of Shakespeare’s jokes and word plays are lost, but they still stand a works of art without the context of the time in which they were produced. On the otherhand Doonesbury is hard to understand a couple years after the fact unless one has a perfect memory of the context.
Good point about our perceptions being shaped by the moment in which we first encounter a particular work. I remember being bored silly by Hemingway when we were forced to read him in high school. Then in my twenties I went through a phase where I couldn’t get enough of him, and now I’ve kind of cooled toward him again. Things definitely speak to us in different ways as we age.
In the case of Ferris Bueller, I will concede that it no longer has the same kind of spark for me that it did in high school — I no longer want to be Ferris Bueller, for instance — but I do still laugh at it. But I question if I’m laughing because it’s still funny, or because I remember it being funny? Is my response to it genuine or conditioned? I’m not sure, although I tend to lean toward genuine.
For contrast, I recently watched the Bill Murray movie Stripes, which I remember cracked me up when it first came out. Bored me to tears this time. Changing perceptions and tastes.
As to your examples of art that stands the test of time even though the context has been lost, I wonder. The Mona Lisa hangs in a museum, and we’ve heard about it since we were small children. We know what it looks like before we ever see it, and we’re conditioned to accept that it’s one of the great works of all time. Is it really though? Or has it just had really good press over the centuries? If it was removed from the museum and hung in a home somewhere, and someone came along who (somehow) had never heard of or seen it, would it have any effect on them at all?
Same with Shakespeare – does it really mean much to an uncoached modern audience, or do you need to have a certain amount of education about language and history for it to make any sense at all, or even be interesting? I’m not disputing that these are great works of art… but then I’ve been taught to accept that they are, so are my perceptions of them valid?
Is there any such thing as art that can “stand alone,” removed of all context? This was something I argued about in one of my college lit courses — I’m not sure I believe that art can ever be entirely removed from context and still retain its meaning.