Zack Mosley [Film Festival 10.15.12] drama



It's impossible to evaluate The Comedy in a traditional sense. You know how people will often describe a movie as having "no plot"? Most of the time they're just describing a slow pace, or minimalistic storytelling. There are very few narrative feature films that genuinely have "no plot". Sure, there are experimental pieces like Michael Snow's Wavelength. There are foreign arthouse slow death trials of patience like Police, Adjective or your Bela Tarr film of choice. But how often do you see an otherwise traditional feature film that stubbornly refuses to engage *any* narrative conventions whatsoever? Even a movie like Greenberg, in which the protagonist's stated goal is "to do nothing", ends up with a character irrevocably (if subtly) changed by the events of the story. There is no such progress for the hero of The Comedy, who remains the same dissociative asshole throughout. This film is not simply plotless, it is aggressively anti-plot.

Swanson (Tim Heidecker) is a Williamsburg trust fund hipster. With a comatose father, an incarcerated brother, and a huge mansion to himself, he has inherited a lifestyle that entitles him to do absolutely nothing. Swanson and his friends drink a lot of whiskey and spray Pabst Blue Ribbon on each other while they dance in tighty whities and tuck their dicks between their legs and generally behave like chromosomal mistakes. Swanson's conversational repartee ranges from anal prolapse to the merits of Adolf Hitler. Occasionally Swanson will work (whether anyone has hired him or not is irrelevant), but his motivation for working seems to mostly consist of fucking with the working class. He also seems to get off on forcing non-whites into awkward, racially-charged confrontations. He walks into a church with two friends (one of them is Eric Wareheim) and makes a scene, perhaps out of sheer boredom. Lack of libido notwithstanding, he manages to apply his ironic anti-charm and woo affectless female hipsters back to his houseboat on two separate occasions. Swanson sports a three-week beard, an imposing beer gut, and the same thrift store button-up shirt and cut-off Dickies for 90% of his waking life. I can't help but to make some of these points sound plotty. Trust me, they're not. Any time one of these meandering episodes threatens to turn a beginning into a middle and/or an end, Swanson bails.


Tim Heidecker gained notoriety as one half of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! a similarly off-putting sketch comedy show that makes you feel like you've stumbled across a public access television station from an alternate reality where America lost the Cold War. He is appropriately cast here, and I certainly can't imagine many other comic actors "pulling it off". But amidst all the anti-comedy of Tim and Eric I still sensed a genuine desire to entertain. One of my soft spots is intentionally stupid humor, so I can grok a fake commercial for a product that allows you to take a shower in a public bathroom urinal. I dig Steve Brule's unflagging concern for my health. I sense no such desire to entertain in The Comedy, however. Rather, I sense a genuine desire to punish. This is a film that is designed to waste your time. Each scene is pushed to the limits of its tolerability, each Swansonism more obnoxious than the last. Anti-entertainment is the point. And The Comedy makes this point well. Mercilessly, unpleasantly well. How else do you capture sheer apathy? An apathetic approach to narrative might be the only approach that makes sense.

Alas, this film does capture a generation. Not every individual member of the generation in question, surely, but a prominent social sub-strata. As a 28-year old white male who is wearing plaid and an ironic mustache and drinking craft beer as I type this I can (un)comfortably say that there is a lot of surface truth in this portrait. Are we at a creative dead end? Is this all we have left to offer? This and Lena Dunham and Bellflower? Hipster angst, upper class entitlement, white privilege, sociopathic disregard for normal human interaction? Why expend effort on anything, when our forebearers already blazed the trails? The only way to be ironic when everyone has already done everything is to not do anything. So now we have a generation of filmmakers doing as little as possible. Point a camera at people existing, and presto, you have a mumblecore film. If we don't watch it, one of these lazy efforts will end up being our Easy Rider. What would be the most ironic title you could apply to a total tragedy? You guessed it, it's The Comedy.

Perhaps The Comedy occupies a certain theoretical space that justifies its existence as a piece of art. But I pose a question to the filmmakers, and anyone of a similar "fuck you" artistic mindset. If you hate narrative and don't care about entertaining an audience, why are you making movies?

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Alex Bald Knob, Jr. (6 months ago) Reply

I don't think film should only serve the purpose to entertain/provide the audience with a narrative. In fact, I find it pretty refreshing when talented directors do away with that notion altogether. Film's a bottomless medium with no rules so expand your mind and transcend with me, my lord.

mr. mike (4 months ago) Reply

The Soviets would never make anything as shitty as the Tim and Eric show.