dead funny insignificance
Jeff and I watched Nicholas Roeg's Insignificance last night. Roeg's a director whose films I always put off watching and then wish I hadn't (Performance and The Man Who Fell To Earth took me a long time to get around to and were well worth it, but my favorite by far has been Bad Timing). We watched it, in part, to get a better handle on the work of its writer, Terry Johnson, whose play Dead Funny he and I saw just two nights earlier. Third Rail is putting it on (right now if anyone's interested).
Dead Funny is an interesting little beast, a 1994 play deeply entrenched in Britishisms. It revolves around a group of wealthy 40/50-somethings men who worship a certain kind of old school comedy and are devastated by the death of Benny Hill, and includes innumerous reenactments of sketches by Hill and his peers, often at inopportune times. It's also got a fair amount of darkness and some of the better acting I've seen on stage in Portland, though I admit I was more like one of the main characters in the play, Richard, whose wife accused him of not laughing when it's funny: "I've seen you," she told him. "You sit and you nod and you say things to yourself like, 'Oh, that's good,' and 'Hm, very funny,' but you never actually laugh at the jokes." She accuses him of mere appreciation, which in her words is a sort of fatal detachment from real life, maybe even (to take it a step farther) a fear of dirtying himself up by embracing life. The truth is, that was me -- not just that night, but all the time. Ask most of my ex-girlfriends. It's a problem.
But, ahem, this isn't about me, it's about a play, and a movie. Let's stay on topic.
The play threw me; I didn't know what to make of it. Its entire first act centers around the comic and tragic elements of a man who does not want his body touched, even by his loving (horny) wife. Sometimes the scenes worked and sometimes they didn't (two scenes in the first act involve nudity, including the actor fully naked and being touched all over by his wife's nervous hands; these were two of the best scenes in the whole play, actually), but they all revolved more or less around the dynamic between husband and wife. All she wants is more lovin, and all he wants is none. The very last moments of Act One (and that second, though more passing, nude scene) changes everything, when [SPOILER 1] he very casually begins to fuck his best friend's obnoxious wife Lisa. The first act has to be reevaluated slightly during the break in light of this new information -- it basically forces you to abandon a sympathetic stance of one character in light of another. You simply can't continue liking Richard once you watch the toneless nonchalant infidelity, not after listening to an hour's worth of speeches about how he wishes he liked being touched at all but he doesn't, and about how he loves his wife and it's not her fault. The second half has even more reveals, some of them darker, and culminates in everybody's secrets coming out to everybody else during a poorly attended party, a "send off for Benny." (My biggest complaint about the play's story is just how easily and mechanically these secrets become public, but alas.)
So everything I've described sounds vaguely Sam Shepardy, even to me, but you've got to remember: every scene is punctuated with the broadest of broad British comedy, including over the top racism, sexism, classism, and bad one-liners delivered with such affection that they're charming. Actual sketches are reenacted by the players, and the end of the second act has everybody in almost clownish costumes as homage to various Benny Hill characters. [SPOILER 2] The play ends in a pie fight that immediately follows the discovery that Richard is fucking his best friend's wife and is the true father of her child. It's not light-hearted... it's more like tension-breaking. The whole thing, for all of its topsy-turvy tone, is handled well, written well, and acted well (even the deliberately-grating Lisa, with the breathy voice and the vapid IQ, is actually a good performance by the end -- which is exactly true of Theresa Russell's performance as the Actress in Insignificance, by the way). But I had a hard time deciding what to make of it. On the one hand, I felt that the humor which acted so wild and racy was actually somewhat tame -- the internet has, sadly, taken all the shock and punch out of a good sex joke. I blame goatse. On another hand, it definitely toyed with expectations and played into, through, and back out of stereotypes interestingly. But I just wasn't sure what it was about. (Jeff suggested infidelity, but I don't think so... it didn't really have anything to say about infidelity, it just used it as a stepping stone. So where was it stepping us to?)
And then we watched Insignificance.
Insignificance tells the story of four characters, never called by name (The Professor, The Actress, The Senator, and The Ballplayer), all of whom are living icons of their time. They are pretty recognizably Einstein, Monroe, McCarthy and DiMaggio, and how each of them deals with their own super-fame, and how each of them deals with each other, is where the story goes. Naturally I couldn't help but look for parallels between Insignificance and Dead Funny, and I came up with two major ones:
First, both are about iconic celebrities and, in different ways, relate them to human people and to common tragedies (bad shit happens throughout Insignificance, different from the bad shit in Dead Funny but rivaling it for badness). The stories each spend a lot of time on what these celebrities mean to people, deconstructing a myth so to speak. They also utilize famous scenes or elements of the iconicism (DiMaggio's baseball cards, Monroe's skirt scene, the theory of relativity, or Benny Hill's Misundestood-Chinaman sketches) as a short cut to express bigger things, to layer the story. Jeff compared it to Last Days, Van Sant's Kurt-Cobain-But-Not-Kurt-Cobain biopic that many hate and I love. It's very different, but I think it's apt. Both use the symbols in our modern myths to tell their stories.
Second, both tell stories where every single character has his or her own crises and traumas and catastrophes and demons, and their own problems consistently get in the way of understanding (or even recognizing) anyone else's. The way the story comes out, I'm not sure anybody else actually knew they weren't the only one having trouble during the story. I guess the Professor knew about the Ballplayer and the Actress's marital troubles, but he was never privy to their individual troubles which were causing this.
So Terry Johnson tells stories using icons, and he tells stories about people whose lives are too fucked up to notice that everybody else's lives are also fucked up. But he makes the stories charming.
And I can't walk away from this post without mentioning that, although I'm not a fan of that era's cinematography tricks (the zooms, the wide angle, the tight framing and jumps from CU to WS), I am a huge fan of how Roeg makes a story come together, with telling but actually unobtrusive jumps to other times, locations, like flashes of memory that fill in gaps in who are characters are and how they got there. His stories are never quite literal and never quite metaphoric/expressive, just hovering somewhere in between. Take it as you like. As long as you like complex, choppy narratives. Oh! Also, there is a sequence at the end -- you won't miss it -- when the Professor is imagining terrible things and the Actress is caught in his imagination which was so well done, even by today's standards I'm not sure how it was pulled off. Impressive and beautiful, and a little unsettling. (What more could you ask for in a special effects sequence?)
So that's basically it. I liked the movie, and it helped me like the play.
Now, why aren't I writing?
I didn't work out last night. I lazed about instead. Sorry, body.