Hilarious

It's strange what some people find funny. I remember seeing a review of Lolita which said how enormously funny the book was. Was that just a matter of nerve? Was the reviewer too frightened, too much of a moral coward, to be serious? Actually, maybe comedy should move beyond the reflex-response of making people laugh, and go for a high-wire act of not getting a single laugh from anybody. My favourite game as a kid was sausages. Whenever Gegen die Wand/Head On was funny, I felt mixed in with the laughter a kind of excitement, a jealous yearning to be there and belong inside the film. It's quite a dangerous feeling; it almost becomes a fan mentality, a sort of hatred. Wasn't it strange on the Bob Dylan documentary how hateful a lot of the fans were, how snidely mocking? I remember listening to a bootleg recording of a Nirvana gig - Kurt screams. "Louder!!" shouts the audience. He screams again. "Louder!" And then out comes the cello, and they start whistling and jeering. The moral compass of Gegen die Wand is the traditional singer we see right at the beginning of the film. As the film goes on she is too annoyed and frustrated to sing, and she sits down in a resigned refusal to join in with the mixed-up lives on the screen. She is honest and concerned, she is observant like the statue of a presiding goddess, but she is too self-contained to be jealous of the unhappy lives before her. She sings again at the end. There's something eerily philosophical in the way she sings and interacts with the film.

The other films I've been reviewing are funny as well. The funny scenes in The Mirror are mixed with anxiety, either for the child, or the integrity of the film. A Joe d'Amato film like Buio Omega is something that inflicts itself upon the viewer, it ruins one's evening like a piece of raw, drunken honesty. Should I laugh, or will it just get me beaten up? And the strange thing about Punishment Park is that although it is often very funny as well, the distraction of laughter doesn't unbalance the film's moral purpose, our laughter is never complicit and it doesn't blunt our outrage and anger. How does it manage that? There seems something miraculous about it, and the only thing I can think of to explain it is the moral goodness of the director.