[...SPOILERS FOR Dancer in the Dark, Eraserhead, A Clockwork Orange, Breaking the Waves... etc]

I watched Let the Right One In last night, and it’s undeniably brilliant. I’ve got no idea where I’d place it in a favourites list – or if it would even make it, though I’d be surprised if it didn’t – because I need time to look at it properly, but definitely, very very very good.

A question that’s been bugging me a lot about movies; how much value is entertainment, really? How much should a movie try to entertain you? And is it wrong if a movie doesn’t, or more rewarding?

This goes back to when I described movies as being a synthesis of entertainment and art (though not in those terms); that every movie is artistic in some way, and entertaining in some way (by definition), but each individual movie occupies a different spot on the spectrum of art <--> entertainment, if you see what I mean.

For instance:

ART <- Eraserhead <- _ -> -> ENTERTAINMENT

Okay, that’s a pretty shit graph (in fact, the middle ground looks like an Ice the Frosty Cat facial expression [don’t ask]), but I only just whipped it up in a second, in Word. So, you know. The idea is that even though Eraserhead leans closer to art – because of the way it’s shot, constructed, conceived and realised – it’s not exclusively art. Definitely, there’s entertainment to Eraserhead. Even... dare I say it... humour.

The best movies, therefore, are a perfect mesh of art and entertainment that can be appreciated on both levels, in the same way that you can get carried away in the pure emotion/atmosphere of a song and then later appreciate the individual workings of it – the lyrics, etc.

The problem here is that I’d classify Eraserhead as one of the most perfect films ever created, but therefore, by my own definition, it supposedly fails. Or it would, to those who don’t find it entertaining.

Clarification! Entertaining does not mean “fun”.

And by the same token, “humour”, or even “comedy”, does not have to mean “light-hearted”. In fact, throwing this into the genre of comedy, some of my favourites, whilst undeniably light-hearted in the sense that they go for the jokes and funny side of things more often than not, are built on serious premises too. Shaun of the Dead’s a good example, being about a zombie plague and relationship issues, but just being genuinely very funny about it throughout. Or Life of Brian, or Dr. Strangelove, which are equal parts gloriously silly slapstick and gloriously clever satire.

It’s interesting in itself what is expected from comedy. Lachlan Willis – Ugmoer, etc. – said just yesterday that he didn’t really like watching comedies, because at the end he’d think, “That was entertaining, but so what?”. It’s a hard one to argue against, because for all that comedy is about setting a frivolous mood... it’s very hard to keep that mood up. Perhaps it’s just that happiness is something shared, whilst depression isn’t; it’s much easier to carry away a feeling (namely, depression) from Dancer in the Dark or Requiem for a Dream than it is to carry away a feeling (namely, humour) from Life of Brian. And even if you did, with friends, it’d be hard to talk about the serious intent to the movie. Discussions about Monty Python, I’ve found, tended to always be quoting the movies – which is absolutely fine, to an extent. I mean, I quote The Exorcist (and Blue Velvet, and... oh, too many) films constantly. But I will also talk about the brilliance of their direction, the power of what each film is saying, etc. I’ve never heard anyone in real life talk about how clever Life of Brian really is. Perhaps it’s just too hard to talk about that in a group dynamic. It’d be like being at school again.

And for Lachlan, films are more a solitary experience, like listening to an album. It’s the difference between what Samurai Clinton (don’t ask, again) would classify a good song, and what Lachlan would; the former makes you get up and dance, and the latter envelopes you personally and through the senses. You can’t share that with another person like you can share dancing, in the same way that you can’t ever make someone truly feel your depression, but you can make them feel your joy and happiness.

So comedy is very... it’s very easy to look down on. In fact, thinking about it, I do, to an extent, as well. Bluntly, if a comedy doesn’t tell me anything beyond, say, “poo is funny”, then I might laugh, but I’ll end up rating it terribly low. Because movies should communicate something, whether it’s an intelligent idea, or just a feeling.

Good god, that last sentence looks silly when you imagine Kurt Van Houten saying it. “Piiii... can I borrow a feeelliiiinnng...”

So how much you enjoy films on an entertainment level, rather than an artistic one, comes down purely to, I suspect, how often you enjoy watching films with friends. That probably makes the artist seem like a terrible loner, but it’s not exactly that. It’s more that it’s easier to talk about comedy than it is to talk about serious ideas: try and tell a dirty joke in real life, complete with pelvic thrusts and exaggerated tone of voice, and it’s easy to make the other person laugh; try to tell a person your thoughts on God and life, which seemed so clear in your head, is near-impossible, because you end up sounding like a pillock when you say it in real life. And you struggle for words, too. The telling is much harder.

But – but but but* – humour is important. Even in serious films. I mean, granted, not every artistic film has to be funny to work, but to an extent, I feel that you need that balance sometimes. It’s about the art of not taking yourself too seriously, and this is the thing; if you’re going to attack the world and its injustices in a serious film, then not having humour to back that up is an incredibly risky thing, because the film is then in danger of falling on its own po-faced, erm, face. Because real life isn’t just depressing, and sad, and devastating – it’s also, at the same time but from another angle, ludicruous, ridiculous, laughably insane. Unspeakable acts by dictators are funny in a “I can’t believe anyone could actually think that was acceptable” sort of way (I’m being frivolous here, but hold on a second). And in that way, sometimes – particularly in the language of film – acknowledging the stupidity, idiocy and slapstick lunacy of the horrors of the world can actually make them far more horrible.

Example: All Quiet on the Western Front’s first half is about schoolboy antics and pranks. Full Metal Jacket’s first half is about swearing and fat jokes. Therefore, the second halves of both films are more immediately powerful: All Quiet has convinced us these are real kids, and so what happens to them is horrifying; Full Metal has shown us how ridiculous the army is, so a platoon being held at bay by a lone woman with a gun isn’t just, by that point, believable, it’s also ludicruous... and also fucking scary, if you think about it.

I’m not sure what it is that makes humour so important – to me, particularly – but trench humour is the closest I can get to explaining it; if mankind didn’t also acknowledge how silly its problems were, then we’d all collapse in on ourselves and die of depression. And movies have to follow suit, and so...

...and so, when, say, A Clockwork Orange is accused of being pretentious, and when Eraserhead is accused of being pretentious, humour is the counter-argument. Pretentious implies being up its own rear end, to the point where it can’t see that what it’s showing us is as equally ridiculous as it is fascinating and disturbing. So with that in mind, a pretentious film is actually something more along the lines of yer-latest-obligatory-action-film, all explosions, serious guys with cool glasses, and – actually, no. Proper example; The Matrix is a pretentious film. Because it has ideas – even if they’re not terribly original – and the ideas are treated seriously, but so is absolutely everything else. Kubrick would’ve made a joke about bullet time, or about “following the white rabbit” being such a silly literary reference, or about the pills – but Kubrick didn’t direct The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers did. And – V for Vendetta included – I’m yet to see them, through their films, admit that they’re getting a bit out of hand and up their own arse. And that is pretentious.

(Note: I haven’t seen Bound... even though it’s a lesbian film, so I should be interested. Also, I actually like V for Vendetta. At least, in V, you have a character who – while not funny – is charming and suave, which is closer to wiping away the pretensions than anything in The Matrix is)

Meanwhile, in A Clockwork Orange, you’ve got droogs, you’ve got “a bit of the old ultra-violent”; it’s as stylised as The Matrix, it’s shot with an incredible eye for detail, and it inhabits its own world with intensely serious ideas. But then... you’ve got Alex having a threesome to the ‘William Tell Overture’. Or, to play along the same idea, you’ve got him raping a woman whilst singing, well, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. This makes him more immediately disturbing, and more real, and it also has the effect of therefore feeling like the real world. That is, even though it’s set in the far-future, and it meticulously constructs that, we can still believe that these are people, and it still says something about us, because of these brief details. Alex is far more a real person than anyone in, say, Star Wars is. Or The Matrix, for that matter.

And Eraserhead is the same. As are all of Lynch’s films, come to that. Eraserhead has got the bizarre freakiness of the X family, and it’s got a tap dancer deliberately squishing sperm with her feet. It’s far removed from reality, but it’s ultimately hilarious and therefore more real a world. No, really; the fact that Eraserhead is both atmospheric/moody and frequently funny means that Lynch truly has made it a real place.

Like how a load of alien warriors in sci-fi always feel ridiculous... because there’s no sense of humour to them, and therefore no personality. Whereas Eraserhead throws a baby alien at us and expects us to believe it’s the progeny of Henry, and... and I do, because even if it doesn’t look like a baby, it has personality and it interacts like a normal life form would. It’s not a cipher, in other words.

Of course... it does seem very perverse of me to suggest that every good film really needs a sense of humour to be good. But mostly, I can’t think of any films I think are really special and brilliant that don’t have humour, in some shape or form. Whether that be simple slapstick, or completely bizarre freakiness. Come to that, Gilliam’s best work tends to be incredibly funny, as does Lynch’s, as does Kubrick’s (Paths of Glory isn’t funny at all, and ends up, despite the brilliant last few scenes, saying a lot less about war than Full Metal Jacket does).

Even Lars von Trier, for chrissakes, although his sense of humour is the hardest to pin up sometimes (mind you, I haven’t seen The Idiots). Since his films often feel improvised, laughs are more natural and not manufactured, and therefore they’re easier to miss. But daringly, von Trier isn’t afraid to make his nastiest and most depressing scenes half-funny, too. In a sense, Dancer in the Dark is actually a very funny film, it’s just that the humour is so dark, so evil, so nasty, that it’s difficult to laugh (I didn’t laugh more than once). The most obvious example – and of course the easiest to laugh at – is the ‘Scatterheart’ song, where Bjork sings about a man she’s just killed, and the dead body joins her for a duet. But... but towards the end of the film, as each musical number grows closer to reality and continually threatens to strip away the delusions Selma is experiencing, it also grows increasingly more ridiculous. ‘107 Steps’ is bad enough, as she sings bravely about her death march, but when we get to ‘New World’ (as it’s called in Selmasongs, but really it’s just Bjork singing the main theme with lyrics), it hits its zenith. Suddenly, with a noose tied around her neck, Selma sings; and for the first time, we don’t see what she’s imagining. And consequently, she looks pathetic, in the same way that seeing an OTT villain ranting in a back alley without dramatic music would look pathetic rather than powerful. And that’s what makes the last scene harrowing, the fact that von Trier strips bare her delusions and shows us how lame she really is. Utterly depressing.

...is that why Breaking the Waves didn’t work for me, because it wasn’t funny enough? It sounds silly when I put it like that (ironically, I guess), but... but perhaps the lack of humour really is key. I don’t ever remember feeling that Emily Watson or Stellan Skarsgard were capable of the slightest bit of joy or laughter in that movie – despite scenes that showed just that – and I think that’s what didn’t work, for me. They’re supposed to be real people, and it’s supposed to be a candid, personal film for the characters... but they’re characters, not people, because they can’t find happiness.

It could be argued that that’s why it’s so brilliant, that they can’t find happiness; but when it seems to me that they don’t even know what happiness is, then them searching for it doesn’t make much sense. You can’t hurt unless you’ve laughed.

It’s funny, this; my least favourite of my favourite directors’ films tend to be their least funny. Twelve Monkeys is my least favourite Gilliam to date – though admittedly it can be funny, it’s just that it rarely is. Rebecca is by far my least favourite Hitchcock, even though it’s an incredible achievement; the problem is just that, with no laughs or real joy to it, I couldn’t really care about any of the characters. Lack of humour = cipher, in my opinion.

Well... it’s a bit more complex than that, but that’s really just it. It even applies to villains; the best tend to have some sort of humour to them, be it juvenile weirdness (Frank Booth, or Pazuzu for that matter), suaveness (nearly any Bond film), or insanity (the Joker is the best example here). Even if the villain doesn’t realise that he’s funny, but the film points it out, that can work as well.

And as I’ve said before, this also tends to reflect my favourite Batman films, and why the Joker instantly makes Batman and The Dark Knight the clear best of the two, with Forever following just behind for me (then Begins close behind, then & Robin... erm... a while back, and then Returns way at the end).

*What a dirty joke!

At the end of the day, I guess what I’m trying to say is that movies like The Matrix are just nope not funny bz.