Charlie Chaplin’s observation, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot” is bland relativism. The idea that the nature of the spectacle depends on who is watching and what they want is patently false. If “the show must go on”, then it’s not because the audience is waiting, in tireless anticipation, but because without the fantasy that they are, the impresario would never be able to raise the money for their next production. Artists don’t care what their fans want, which means Chaplin probably had his producer’s hat on when he made his tragicomic statement.
If Chaplin had said, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but artists mostly settle for comedy in long-shot”, or “artists aim for tragedy but invariably end up in comedy”, then he might have been nearer the mark. It’s a motto which has surely taken root in the world of contemporary arts and entertainment, to the detriment of any original artistic endeavour, and manages to keep the wheels greased on a conveyor-belt of mundane trivia. Artists themselves surely wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m not making any grand claims when I say “original artistic endeavour”, and simply mean “any art consistent on its own terms”, if that makes any sense.
There are numerous practitioners of the tragicomic, and without further explanation let me say who I deem to be the most notorious of the bunch. I propose to banish the following four individuals from the world of showbiz. This won’t be a thesis or fully elaborated argument. However, it’s not a capricious or trivial wishlist either, more a serious attempt to dispel Chaplin’s false dichotomy.
First, Quentin Tarantino. I’ve written elsewhere in a scholarly fashion about his cartoon violence. The American film director is on the blacklist for his gratuitously overinflated opinions of his own cinematic output. This is amplified by his stable of actors and the fan cult that grew up during his lengthy association with Harvey Weinstein, and whose brand loyalty remains undimmed. The switch from the plot and dialogue-driven suspense of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, to the at best mediocre, at worst vulgar and offensive B-movie dross of almost everything since, is sufficient reason for artistic condemnation.
We might ask whether a causal relation exists between Tarantino’s cartoon violence and the real-world violence of Weinstein. A. O. Scott describes 2015’s The Hateful Eight as “an orgy of elaborately justified misogyny”. Is the cinematic orgy a symptom of Tarantino’s affected ignorance of Weinstein’s professionalised orgy of violence against women? Did Tarantino, who “knew enough to do more” to call time on his former producer’s behaviour, ever trawl the Weinstein circuit of serial abuse for his source material?
What is striking about this sordid affair is that, despite Tarantino’s no doubt genuine sense of remorse over Weinstein’s criminal antics, in his very next film, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (an insufferable shaggy dog’s tale of minor celebrities), the orgy of elaborately justified (and meticulously researched?) misogyny is still proudly on show and conspicuous by its presence. In May 2018 Weinstein was charged and in February 2020 convicted of rape and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Next, Ricky Gervais. In fact, we can deal with him and Noel Gallagher together, because owing to acute Tarantino Syndrome both have been dining out on early career success and critical acclaim for more than fifty years combined. Let’s give Tarantino his dues. He was possessed of some artistic originality at the start, which either deserted him after his first three features, or which he had no qualms about deserting once his reputation as an indie trailblazer was assured, with Pulp Fiction walking off with the Palme d’Or in 1994.
Unlike Tarantino, Gervais has done nothing to justify his outsized reputation. Following the 2001—02 BBC TV series The Office a global marketing and franchising operation began, helped along by Gervais’ follow-up sitcom Extras, which, through the involvement of HBO, would consist largely of Hollywood stars indulging their egos, hamming it up and “playing themselves” for fun. Gervais’ comedy stand-up routines and compering of the Golden Globes in 2010 and 2011 marked the creative peak of a career in provoking woke outrage and the drunken laughter of celebrities.
Gallagher, the guitarist and principal songwriter of Oasis, merits a word for a fleeting career overshadowed by manufactured sibling rivalry and public feuds, an invitation to meet Tony Blair following Labour’s 1997 General Election win, but most of all his affable self-promotion. His fall from grace, precipitated by a scandalous endorsement of recreational drug use in 1997, was as swift as his elevation from indie to mass market popularity. (Sony bought out Oasis’s record label Creation in 1992, two years prior to the release of the group’s debut album.)
What strongly unites Gervais with Tarantino (although hardly at all Gallagher) is a vehement hostility towards all and any form of criticism. In the minds of the filmmaker and the comedian, the perfectly legitimate allegations of Tarantino’s misogyny and Gervais’ anti-wokism are nothing but sour grapes. Both resort to the “freedom of speech” defence, which in Gervais’ case moves on to the attack (in the name of “freedom of speech”) against anyone daring to assert a rival freedom of speech. This “freedom” in the name of anti-wokism is not only a rhetorical strategy. It has evolved into the very substance of Gervais and Tarantino’s creative occupations.
In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Tarantino’s invention of an implausibly mute Sharon Tate is intended to provoke accusations of misogyny, which the director then responds to by defending his “freedom” on purely artistic grounds. Gervais employs identical hypocrisy. His “comedy”, most of which is now conducted on X (for “X-rated”), consists straightforwardly in contriving the most gratuitous insult possible in order to provoke the most outraged backlash possible, which he then jumps on as evidence of woke persecution.
Gallagher’s run-ins with the spectre of woke are more or less non-existent, as far as I can tell, for the simple reason that he has never been particularly bothered by other peoples’ opinions of him. Why would Gallagher, having sold 22 million copies of his second LP (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, be remotely concerned with what critics have to say? He even accepts the standard criticism that the record was a bland and lacklustre follow up to Definitely Maybe, while countering with rival platitudes, namely, that Oasis is a phenomenal live act, an unprecedented cultural phenomenon, etc.
And yet it goes without saying that in the guise of self-appointed spokesman for a generation of working-class youth, Gallagher would become, at the height of his success, a one-man personality cult. From mass hysteria to religious observance, to the paranoid ravings of the demiurge, Gallagher in the late 90s was the castrated oracle, somewhat in the mould of Tarantino, who by the decade’s end would also find himself recovering from an intense period of creativity. By the turn of the millennium Gallagher and Tarantino were generational spokesmen, while both being struck down by writer’s block.
An investigation remains to be carried out into the (botched?) cultural revolution of the period, focusing on these high-profile figures, but which also considers the profound impact of Napster on the recording industry, and on music, film and culture in general. It may be the case that we have to indict Gallagher for his role in a conspiracy of cultural mediocrity, the death of tragedy and rise of comedy, which of course will reach one of several peaks/troughs with Gervais in the 2000s. But for his endorsement of Blair and New Labour, his corresponding silence over the Iraq war, his idiotic hostility to Jeremy Corbyn’s “communism”, and above all his career-defining mimetic nostalgia, let Gallagher be banished from our Republic once and for all.
This brings us to the final member of the four horsemen of cultural apocalypse, Brad Pitt, whose evolution into one of Tarantino’s principal leads may seem incongruous, until one recognises that the kind of international blockbuster that Tarantino has been making for the past 25 years could have only been achieved thanks to Pitt and his fellow Hollywood A-listers. Yes, it’s ultimately their fault. In fact, where Tarantino began his career as an indie screenwriter with the ability to raise finance and revive careers for low budget movies, he soon yielded to industry pressures that dictated the casting of A-list talent as the take-it-or-leave-it condition for getting his increasingly threadbare scripts into production. There is absolutely nothing in Tarantino’s cinematic output of the past 25 years that persuades us that any of it succeeds on the strength of the writing. Much as the director is keen to pay lip service to Blaxploitation and the indie underground, the reality is that Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie have neither the charisma of that tradition or, crucially, the scripts, whose racial animus would no doubt alienate Tarantino’s overwhelmingly white male audience. Note simply that Django Unchained (2012), a film supposedly about black slavery in the Antebellum South, was produced by Harvey Weinstein, not Melvin Van Peebles.
In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pitt plays the avenging angel of unreconstructed white chauvinism. Off-screen Pitt’s persona perfectly demonstrates Tony Curtis’s famous statement that “I wouldn’t be seen dead with a woman old enough to be my wife”. Pitt (then 55) and his niggling flirtation with co-star Margot Robbie (28) on the film’s press junket is somewhat of a piece with his character’s on-screen “chemistry” with the hitchhiker (played by Margaret Qualley), whose offer to give him a blowjob while driving he graciously refuses on the grounds that she may be underage and risk landing him in trouble with the law. If only Harvey Weinstein had been blessed with Cliff Booth’s sense of decorum… The post-feminist casting couch, with women beholden to the good graces of sexual predators, is but a short leap from the male chivalry of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Some independent cinema.
Spare a thought for Black British director Steve McQueen. It was Pitt’s production company Plan B Entertainment that brought McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s black slave memoir to the screen. One might wonder then, notwithstanding the glittering success of 12 Years a Slave at the Oscars in 2014, whether McQueen’s encounter with Pitt explains the dramatic falling off a cliff of the director’s subsequent career. It rather looks that way, and the apparent refusal of McQueen to be Pitt or anyone else’s Negro may have reduced his future cinematic prospects to remakes and World War II melodramas.
Does the same tragicomic fate now await the celebrated South Korean director Bong Joon Ho? The omens don’t look particularly good. Like McQueen, Bong established his reputation in the 2000s as a writer-director of original screenplays. Like McQueen, his focus was on the modern and contemporary, charting South Korea’s post-1987 democratic (un)settlement through corruption, incompetence, collective amnesia and political exhaustion. Bong demonstrated the depth of his cinematic imagination with his adaptation in 2013 of Jacques Lob’s Snowpiercer (Le Transperceneige). Following the multi-Academy Award winning success of Parasite in 2019, Bong contracted with Plan B Entertainment to produce Mickey 17, which finally went on US release a year later than scheduled on 7 March.
The film, which eschews the contemporary for sci-fi escapism, has performed badly at the box office, and is predicted to lose money. For comparison, Snowpiercer’s production budget was $40 million, Parasite’s $11 million, whereas Mickey 17’s stands at $118 million. Scheduled for release in 2027, Bong’s next feature The Valley is described as “an animated drama film involving deep-sea creatures and humans”.
No doubt Pitt is proud of his commercial independence, his freedom to champion diversity and minority voices in an industry notorious for its cultural imperialism. Whatever. The fact that a third-rate William Gibson pastiche like Mickey 17 can be made in the name of diversity does at least go some way towards exposing Pitt’s charlatanism. Ironically, in the film Robert Pattinson plays an astronaut who signs away his human rights to a space colonisation corporation. They must have missed that one in the marketing meetings. I wonder if Bong’s image rights are protected so that, once deceased, Plan B will be prevented from using his AI avatar to direct more dross like this from beyond the grave (or perhaps he’s already signed the deal). In the 90s, this divine comedy of cultural appropriation would have been an actual film by Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. The fact that it’s not today and is unlikely to be in a world where Plan B exists, demonstrates the need to dispatch Pitt to an extraterrestrial world as soon as possible.
But a final word for Bong (I will return to him in the future). Grateful acknowledgement of his “underground” masterpieces, the social realism of Memories of Murder, the singularity of its places and characters in the “pinprick” of the South Korean landscape, and the final merger of the undecidable with the darkness of the railway tunnel. “Underground” is the theme and concept of all Bong’s cinema, of the sewers in The Host where the creature is born and absconds with its abductees, who like all Bong’s characters are political prisoners rather than victims. And of course, Parasite, with its negative dialectics of class struggle beneath the feet and behind the backs of the Chaebol dynasty. “Good luck keeps following me, it keeps clinging to me.”
Parasite’s most stirring moment occurs in the final scene, where during his son’s dream Kim Ki-taek exits the basement, where he imprisoned himself after his murder of the bourgeois patriarch, to reunite with his surviving family. But is it really them?
On the day we take the city, all you’ll need do is walk up the stairs.
Jason Barker is doing laps now.
Featured image: Still frame from Parasite (2019), a South Korean film directed by Bong Joon Ho.
