The Face Knife

My review of Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko has just been posted to The Movie Binge, which you should be visiting anyway, because a lot of very fine and very funny writers including the contributors to the The Summer Movie Comparison Chart 2007, which as you know is so effing funny, post reviews there. Tell your friends about the Binging.

Tomorrow: Sicko added to the chart (for reals!) and Fido review posted (double for reals!). Come back!

The most satisfying thing about Grizzly Man was the realization that the tone of voice, the verbal tics, the odd concerns and methods of expressing them of Timothy Treadwell were pitched so closely to those of an Andy Dick creation that our favorite bisexual drug-casualty comedian would not be able to add anything to the comic absurdity of Treadwell’s life were he to distill the film into a satirical sketch. After receiving this epiphany about half-way through the film, it was impossible to watch the rest of the movie without Dick on my mind. I think this actually made me enjoy the film more than if I had tried to engage it on the terms I suspect it was intended.

Werner Herzog ends Grizzly Man with a look at Treadwell’s unexceptional nature footage and a rumination that although there may not be an inner world or an inner nature of bears that is accessible or unalien to human beings, Treadwell’s life and “work” can illuminate the human condition. I don’t think that Herzog was being ironic, but that’s the only way I could take that statement. Treadwell was very clearly a disturbed man whose existance was predicated about making huge category errors - not that he’s alone in that - but he’s clearly not an example of normal human drives in behavior except in an extremely negative way.

Like a lot of people interested in the arts I can get wrapped up in stories of the obsessive or borderline personalities that inhabit the worlds of genius, but I don’t think that their examples can tell us anything about anything except for themselves. Treadwell was not a genius - nowhere near a genius - just a sad, possibly exploited man who had the misfortune of acquiring a video camera and a taste for nature.

I think part of the reason stand-up comics like “The Aristocrats” joke so much is because the titular “family act” is pretty much a metaphor for the community of stand-up comics: It’s an incestuous pool of talent, and they’re constantly kissing ass or giving each other (verbal) blow-jobs, but nothing is so funny to them as when one of their peers shits (bombs) all over the stage. The only person in the film who came close to making this point was the universally beloved shill CarrotTop, whose version of the joke cut off with “wait, this isn’t a fucking prop act, is it?” a remarkably self-aware comment in a movie filled with banal observations about the motivations behind the persistance of the joke.

The best the irrelevant George Carlin, who is apparently someone’s idea of an intellectual could do to venture a justification of the fascination with the joke is that it allows an excuse for the comedians to “play”, and one of the other (nearly all middle-aged, nearly all male, and nearly all white) talking heads postulated that you can tell a lot about a comedian’s personality by which “taboos” (shit, incest, whatever) they include in their variant of the joke. But psycholanalyzing individual comics is a child’s game.

The Aristocrats the film (if you can call it that, because the filmmaking craft is strictly amateur) purports itself to be a deconstruction of the comedic process - a seminar on craft - but you’re not going to learn how to tell jokes from it. The funniest bits are sublimely weird stuff, like Whoopi Goldberg’s peek-a-boo foreskin dance version, or, going the other way, entirely a matter of delivery, as in the funny Gilbert Gottfried. There’s not really a replicable process that can be extracted from this film, unless you want to be a frat-hack comic telling jokes about runny poop.

In the end, where The Aristocrats fails is a lack of self-knowledge, something odd coming from these supposed far-seeing demystifiers like Carlin and Penn Jilette. The film doesn’t know what it’s about. Is it a history, is it a showcase, is it about the creative process? What the film should have focused on was the subculture of the professional comic, what they’re like when they’re not onstage. Michael McKean mentions these private comedian parties Chevy Chase and Michael O’Donohue used to throw centered around the joke, and the thought of what goes on their is a hell of a lot more interesting that anything shown in the film. Stand-up comics are odd people, functioning in a very odd, very ritualized society, and a documentary about THAT could be riveting. The Aristocrats is not, and the level of filmmaking makes it barely watchable.