Funny (Objectivist) Movies


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I do not mean that you laughed when Moe ran the saw over Curley's head. If you know The Romantic Manifesto, then you understand the challenges.

My first nominee is SLEEPER by director Woody Allen. The plot is "a man wakes up in the future to find himself in a dictatorship." The theme is "human nature does not change with technology."

Fielding Melish (played by Woody Allen) is a victim. He goes into simply surgery only to wake up 200 years in the future. The America of this time is a dictatorship. He has been found by rebels who want to use his lack of identification to have him assassinate The Leader. He has a hard time understanding that, but eventually comes around. However, he is captured, brainwashed and made a member of this society.

As it happens, he has met and befriended a previously frivolous artist, Luna Goldberg, played by Diane Keaton.
Although she turns him in - as a good citizen would - Luna is associated with Melish and declared "contaminated by the alien." She narrowly escapes and meets a different underground coterie seeking to assassinate The Leader.

Eventually, she is reunited with Melish and the two are sent into the breach...

The humor runs thoughout by juxtaposing our expectations of the future as a better time in every way against the fact that history unfolds along unexpected paths. In his previous life, Melish ran a health food store in Greenwich Village. The scientists of the future are dismissive: "No red meat… no deep fried foods, no chocolate cake?" "Yes, exactly the opposite of what science knows today." As the scientists attempt to explain the world to Melish, they seek to calm him by offering him a cigarette: "Suck down deep. It's good for you."

In every scene, the thematic argument is consistent. While we perceive what we initially expect - a gay couple, for instance - we are presented with the humorous caricature (their swishing robot servant). We are warned of a powerful and ruthless dictatorship, but the police blow themselves up with their rocket launcher. Ultimately, the plot is not to actually assassinate The Leader - that was attempted. Instead, Melish and Goldberg must kidnap his nose (the only remnant of the explosion that killed him) before it can be cloned into a new leader.

Along the way, Luna has a crush on Erno, the leader of the underground rebels. To Melish, she is making the same mistake as the larger society. The take-away line: "Political solutions never work. Six weeks from now, we'll be kidnapping Erno's nose."

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Fielding Melish is the name of Allen's character in 1971's Bananas, which also touches on the theme of political solutions not working. In Sleeper he is Miles Monroe.

Luna: Would you like to perform sex?
Miles: I don't know about perform, but maybe we could practice a little.

One reason that comedy does not figure in Rand's literary theory is that the genre is not suited for the presentation of heroic man or ideal man, which, in Rand's view, is one of the goals of art ("things as they might be and ought to be"). But in Poetics Aristotle says that comedy requires

imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.

America's great film comedians were anything but heroic or ideal: Abbot and Costello, Woody Allen, John Belushi, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Robin Williams.

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I permit myself one laugh per day, by medical endorsement and only at ARI-approved funny men.

(FF on his Rand one-trick pony took me over my limit for the day).

There is laughing AT, and laughing WITH - there is a fine distinction. One is a cynical snigger at anything which resembles the heroic (or laughter at the genuinely ridiculous) then there's sympatico with our human condition in a telling, humorous performance.

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Francisco, thanks for the correction. I wrote that ad lib and should have checked, of course. Ayn Rand did enjoy the humor of Prof. Irwin Corey. Also, I think that it is important to parse the humorists you cited. By analogy, while the entire genre of Saturday Matinee Action Adventure does offer bootleg romanticism, clearly, some are better than others. Anyone can talk like a pirate. The writing makes the movie: integration of plot and theme - or lack therefore.

I never liked Abbot and Costello because Bud Abbot was abusive toward to Lou Costello in a way that Moe never was to the other two Stooges. Moe never denied their humanity. Bud was just plain mean to Lou all the time. I also find Bob Hope and Bing Crosby to project a cynical sense of life. (In real life, Bing Crosby struck his household servants.)

The only Danny Kaye film I know is The Court Jester. Funny as it was, he did not write it; so, any comedian could have done it. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin wrote and directed his own works. Modern Times is probably the essential Chaplin film. Across every scene as the plot unfolds, the theme of innocence against adversity is portrayed. Those challenges are consistently random, arbitrary, unexpected. In other words, while the deck seems stacked against the Little Guy, it is not because "people are evil" (though some clearly are). Rather, as Rand maintained, the adversities we face are metaphysically unimportant.

The other view from Chaplin was The Great Dictator. There, evil is perpetrated by evil people. Chaplin used comedy to reduce them, to deny their self-proclaimed status. Unfortunately, the film is flawed because it lagged in production and then was rushed out. Had it been completed on schedule, it might have had significant impact. That said, neither the original ending nor the final production brought the narrative together. That being so, it remains that each scene in the plot (a barber impersonates the dictator) carried the theme (dictators deserve derision, not admiration).

Overall, I always found Laurel and Hardy too glacially slow to follow, but what little I have viewed was benevolent. The boys overcome adversity. One scene I remember - and I do not recall the film - was just brilliant in its writing especially for the time. One Friday night, they find a baby on their doorstep and bring it in of course. I think (not sure) they spend the weekend trying to find a parent or an agency, but meanwhile caring for the infant. Come Monday morning, they both get ready for work.

Oliver: Where are you going?

Stanley: To work.

Oliver: You have a baby to take care of.

Stanley: What about my career?

Oliver: You should have thought about that before you brought a baby into our home.

The Marx Brothers never impressed me. Again, I never watched much. I probably saw piece of Night at the Opera and Duck Soup a couple of times while channel surfing. I do recall some funny scenes, but those were Chico and Harpo. Groucho was just mean and cynical. I quickly disliked him.

(Tony: thanks. Pretty much, I agree.)

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Fielding Melish is the name of Allen's character in 1971's Bananas, which also touches on the theme of political solutions not working. In Sleeper he is Miles Monroe.

Luna: Would you like to perform sex?

Miles: I don't know about perform, but maybe we could practice a little.

One reason that comedy does not figure in Rand's literary theory is that the genre is not suited for the presentation of heroic man or ideal man, which, in Rand's view, is one of the goals of art ("things as they might be and ought to be"). But in Poetics Aristotle says that comedy requires

imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.

America's great film comedians were anything but heroic or ideal: Abbot and Costello, Woody Allen, John Belushi, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Robin Williams.

Heroic and ideal apropos what? Let's say the same about Ayn Rand, not a comedian. We easily can. I can ID a lot of heroes from your list, however. Now, switch over to heroic posturing of fictional heroes by their creators. Does the posturing make the hero? There was nothing heroic about John Galt until the bad guys got a hold of him. Ragnar's piracy was so abstract to be mostly discountable. Good thing or he'd have been a murdering bastard. Instead, nobody's hair got mussed. Dagny and Hank were heroic until the virtue of the passive-aggressive finally penetrated their thick skulls and they retired from the hero business. All those strikers were giver-uppers. They weren't really Americans. They were somewhat like Russians--victims of tyranical communism. The same for the American society they occupied: Russo-American. Rand mixed up Russian psychology with American and gave us "Atlas Shrugged." When you redact that Russian the novel collapses.

Rand, btw, did a lot of posturing, an ironic reverse off the fact that it wasn't necessary for it was a real hero trying to represent herself as such to protect in turn the heroism of her fictional heroes and the non-reality parts of their worlds. She stood with them. You can't do that if you bed a man 25 years your junior. The world was ready for her novel; not for that--and she knew it.

Hero is as hero does, but when the non-hero does the heroic the heroism ironically ramps up. The feedback then makes the non-hero the hero. It's a continuous, life-long process. Thousands of small choices informing the big ones with the wrong choices causing negative consequences--so it's struggle back onto your feet. For Ayn Rand it peaked, however imperfectly, with the finishing of her last novel. Her real heroism had two phases: the heroism of her youth and getting out of Russia and then the heroism of her career. For her public that's enough, I'd guess. But for the likes of me I want to understand her better for I got so swept up in the Atlas Shrugged-save-the-world of it all, I needed rescue from what buried me at one time in my life: the heroic illusion as heroism instead of the substance. The lazy hero is a contradiction in terms. Students of Objectivism as students were generally lazy. They ate at Rand's table, but didn't provide any of the eats. They weren't suppose too, of course. The chef wanted praise not help. She did deserve not just need such a reward. Objectivism, as someone else has remarked, was her gift to Nathaniel Branden. Powered off the base of Galt's speech it really had not to do with the proverb I understand they both cherished so much: "Take what you want" said God, "and pay for it." There is no reconciling the Nietzsche in Rand with that speech or Objectivism. After two years of writing it she had no compulsion to elaborate on her elaboration so she passed the baton.

--Brant

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Ninotchka is always a hit with Objectivist audiences, though Rand herself expresses mixed feelings about it in the Mayhew Q&A book. Ernst Lubitsch, the director, was the movies' great master of high-style romcom. He seems to be Rand's model for the hot-tempered director in Her Second Career.

Trouble in Paradise is my other favorite among his movies. It lacks the star (Garbo) and the political satire of Ninotchka, but it may be a better piece of moviemaking. Monte Carlo is worth watching for the Blue Horizon sequence.

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