12
Oct
American Beauty by way of Henri Bergson
[“Beauty Americain” by Matte Scott, for Production- Summer 2010.. based on the following essay written for Physical Comedy, Spring 2010]
American Beauty by way of Henri Bergson
“Assuming that the stage is both a magnified and simplified view of life,” Henri Bergson writes in the beginning of chapter II of his essay Laughter, “we shall find that comedy [on the stage] is capable of furnishing us with more information than real life on this particular part of our subject [the comic element in situations and the comic element in words],” (Bergson p. 104).
For Bergson, an audience’s emotional distance was necessary to produce laughter. And while he wrote in the days before cinema, we know that film’s early comedy stars cut their teeth on the Vaudeville stage, that breaking the “4th wall” of dramatic realism is still a comic staple (even if this is done simply through a high-key color palate and lighting), as is making fun of cinematic conventions in a way that often belies the sour-grapes of the theatrically trained.
Where films that want to be taken seriously must spend increasing amounts of money on creating and immersive fictional world, as soon as that spell is broken we have comedy. As soon as we are reminded of the theatrical aspect, the pro-filmic event has lost its dire importance. Having been made aware of the performativity, the audience can see what clichés and conventions being over-used in serious dramatic work.
Bergson couldn’t have known this, but a writer, director, actor, set designer, or whathaveyou from the world of the stage must look upon all cinema as a collection of artifice- just dying to point out all the seams.
Well, after ten years of directing stage productions, Sam Mendes made his cinematic directorial debut withAmerican Beauty (1999). As a dramedy, the film makes sudden shifts from seriousness to comedy. Mendes uses, abuses, and combines cinematic conventions of creating serious, realistic, ambiance and obviously staged comedy. To help hold together this covertly meta-textual and trans-generic masterpiece, the protagonist Lester Burnham is played by star of stage and screen, Kevin Spacey, and the screenplay was written by Alan Ball (a graduate of the theater arts and at the time writing for the General Nonsense Theater Company of Sarasota, Florida).
While each mood is cued by the mise-en-scene and then followed by an unsettling performance, these two are often at cross-purposes. Bergson writes that “a situation is invariably comic when it belongs to simultaneously to two altogether different series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time” (123). The scenes which end surprisingly highlight the ruts most Hollywood productions have fallen into, how dependent “continuity” is for mood- and by extension how automatic our expectations and reactions have become. But it is inevitably the actors’ performances which turn an ominous scene comic or vice versa. So, more than other films which use redundant lighting, color, dialogue, and wardrobe, the performances in American Beauty carry the scene. As his comfortable foundation, Mendes, Ball, and Spacey have American Beauty’s performances of physical comedy follow Bergson’s theatrical prescriptions to the letter. That the film’s most inspirational dialogue sounds as if it is paraphrasing Bergson’s optimism about the significance of comedy to humanity and its ultimately liberating purpose- may just be a coincidence.
American Beauty tells the story of the last year of Lester Burnham’s life…well, strictly speaking- since Lester begins and ends the film with undead flashback narration, he really tells his own story, beginning by voicing over a helicopter shot of his cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood[1]. The camera finds Lester a year before he died and became a narrator, waking up, putting on his slippers, jacking off in the shower[2]. The narration emphasizes the routine.
Being undead and some kind of omniscient omnipresent time-traveling profilmic image controlling spirit gives the narrator Lester a certain distance from the depicted living Lester- the distance necessary for comedy. Had the story been told from the point of view of the still living Lester, this routine would have been more depressing than funny, and we probably wouldn’t have been shown him, “jacking off in the shower”. Bergson understands this retroactive dualism in a footnote: “when the humorist laughs at himself, he is really acting a double part; the self who laughs is indeed consciousbut not the self who is laughed at,” (155). Lester is telling a story and so understands that the person in the shower is not “real”.American Beauty’s use of narration tries to get its viewers to also understand that this character is not “real”. As it is, each shot is sparsely decorated, lit with “morning light”, and contains only one actor and action- this is simple and light.
Routine is emphasized to make Lester’s actions appear mechanical. Lester even narrates his wife and foil, Carolyn’s (Annette Benning) cutting the roses as performing a routine. This absentmindedness is made fun of, should be made fun of, according to Bergson. Lester should invite ridicule, lest we turn out to be a “sedate” everyman like him. His character arc will be to learn how to loosen up and then gain the respectable amount of free will and agency that every human being is heir to. Too look good naked and to smile. And then he dies. But he dies smiling so its ok. And he doesn’t really die- he transcends. But I’m getting ahead of myself- until he dies (or after he dies and then is able to look back), we can laugh at, with, this metamorphosis.
Bergson’s best known prescription for comedy is the mechanical encrusted upon the living. He was writing only a few years after Marx and a man acting like a machine was supposed to be so absurd and socially significant as to cause laughter. American Beauty explores “the mechanical encrusted upon the living” in almost as many ways as Bergson hypothesizes.
Literally, Lester’s voice comes out of a drive-thru window speaker box so “encrusted with mechanical” static that even his wife doesn’t recognize. Lester’s younger neighbor, Ricky Fitts, films several things with his camcorder and plays them back on his TV screen. Lester calls his daughter’s friend and hangs up, but his actions are exposed through the magic of “star sixty-nine”. Though these uses of technology offer some of the few clues to American Beauty’s temporal placement (contemporary), the information which was obscured by technology is of great narrative importance in both short and long terms, these encrustations are not particularly laughter-inducing. Instead, these encrustations allow the situation to be “interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time,”- one way includes us and the omniscient narrator and the other includes some unfortunate character who is privy to only some information. Tension. When these two realities collapse, when Carolyn pulls up to the drive-thru and Lester nonchalantly offers “special Smiley sauce” (pun intended) to his oblivious wife kissing the man in the passenger seat. Comedy.
Figuratively speaking (this is what Bergson spent the most time on), we see countless examples of people acting out routines like machines or “humble marrionettes,” (112). Carolyn plays the same “Lawrence Welk shit” over dinner every night. When a motivational tape commands: “repeat after me…”, she does. Their daughter, Jane is (one of many) cheerleaders who perform a perfectly rehearsed routine. “In one sense,” Bergson writes, “it could be said that all character is comic, provided we mean by character the ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable of working automatically,” (156). Lester is an everyman who works in a cubicle, Carolyn is a working-woman but still very domestic, Jane is a “typical teenager”, and they all live in predictable suburbia. These characters are established by their routines- easily identifiable because they are over-used. These characters, all characters in American Beauty, are emphasized as clichés. But again, it is not when the film highlights these routines as routines that is necessarily comic. Exhale in recognition maybe, but not laugh. Routine as routine simply establishes the character on screen as a character- distancing him from reality and thus allowing us to laugh at some future point. The laughter comes when this routine is interrupted- the joy comes when this interruption is sustained.
As the examples of rigidity mentioned in the last paragraph were more or less conscious choices made for the benefit of socialbility (and caricatured in the film to comedicly criticize society), some attention must be paid to the automatic behavior that is not conscious- American Beauty’s exploration of Bergson’s claim that “the deeper the absentmindedness the higher[3] the comedy,” (155). Twice when Lester is eves-dropping and then might get caught, he panics and runs away down the hall. When he is drinking and told surprising news- there is a spit-take. At these moments, Lester is reduced to the animal parts of his brain, the mechanical parts- and reacts. We too do not need to think to laugh, in fact that might ruin it. When Lester is smoking pot in the garage and his daughter’s car pulls up, he again panics, but this time it is not as funny because the action is bookended by Lester’s ominous neighbor, Colonel Fitts (Chris Cooper), watching Lester from the shadows, through the rain.
But understanding the point at which Man (both on screen and in the audience) is most automatic allows us to appreciate comic and narrative purpose when American Beauty reverses Bergson’s claim; and animates the mechanical. Beginning with Lester’s spit-take, mentioned above- the spit lands perfectly in the sink. Later, a pillow he throws bounces and lands perfectly on another chair. Without even looking, he drives a remote controlled car into his wife’s foot. Here, these “in-human” objects have taken on what seems to be, not a life of their own, but certainly behavior surpassing their supposed abilities, that “there’s this whole secret life behind things,” as Ricky Fitts describes a floating plastic bag. When noticed, these animate objects inspire hope about Lester’s increased control over the inanimate and mechanical parts of himself. And subtly, as Ricky gives this speech about a bag he recorded with a handheld digital camera,American Beauty comments on the medium and conventions of film itself. The laughter comes, as Bergson claims (though he spoke of funny hats), when surprising proof of the filmmaker’s craft exceeds our own rigid expectations of conventional objects, including movie scenes.
Then to the most noble purpose of physical comedy in Laughter and American Beauty- when the performance and performer embody an automatic, occupied, or sleep-walking state of life, these are set-ups. American Beauty emphasizes Lester’s rigidity, and the film is, if nothing more, the comedy of his re-agency. When Lester is most mesmerized- in the middle of sexual fantasies or smoking weed, he is (the movie is, and we the viewers are) interrupted suddenly by Carolyn. By reality, by social obligation, by her “needs too”.
Compared to the theater go-er, the film audience has a greater potential, I think, to be hypnotized by the diegesis of a performance. When Carolyn bursts into the alley to catch Lester and Ricky smoking, when she interrupts his masturbating by asking- “what are you doing?”, she is acting as, “the jack-in-the-box” (105).
So too, American Beauty disrupts its viewer’s complacency- not only with the sudden appearance of Carolyn, the sudden shift in tone, but also by interrupting the physical form of the filmstrip itself. Mendes takes the slow, low-lit trip of Lester’s hand up the leg of an ingenue and ELIPTICAL CUT!- repeats the same footage. This “triple jump-cut” (Mendes on Commentary track) is done in all four fantasy sequences and once in “real” life[4]. This real life elliptical cut comes just before Lester is startled to hear that the ingénue is a virgin. He then does not sleep with her. He has been startled out of finishing what would have been an automatic process.
So If Lester is a clown whose trials we are meant to learn from, then American Beauty is comedy meant to remind cinema of its physicality, melodramas of their predictability, and viewers of their own and their world’s mechanisms and rigidity.
But American Beauty goes further. When Bergson wrote Laughter, mechanization was young and he was writing about comedy of the (live) theater. But in the last hundred years, we have grown more accustomed to seeing humans behaving mechanically and cinema viewers have adapted mechanical viewing processes or adopted concessions for the mechanics of the medium and the rigidity of its conventions. I won’t hazard a guess as to whether the ultimate purpose of comedy has changed fundamentally since Bergson’s time or if it has merely evolved. As encrusting the mechanical upon the living seems, in film, to be a little redundant, its funny that with the secret to American Beauty’s comedy is mechanic interruptus.
[1] In the DVD commentary, Mendes said he would have shown Lester flying, but that “would have made it a Coen brothers movie”.
[2] I won’t say American Beauty is making an underhanded comment about the ease of Hollywood’s “establishing shot, medium shot, close-up” way of beginning a story, but that is a prudent frame of mind to be in with regards to these filmmakers.
[3] Bergson believed comedy could be measured on a qualitative scale according to traditional understands of “high” and “low” art.
[4] everything on screen is a flash-back within a movie.