Film, Illusion & Spectatorship, Part 4: Just give me something I already know and already love.

In Part 1, we discussed how the slickness of Hollywood movies turns audiences off to movies with ambiguous endings.

In Part 2, we explored how audiences don’t like it when movies remind them that they are fake.

In Part 3, we examined how audiences react when either the acting style or the character depictions fall too far outside of the norm.

Now, in Part 4, we look at how non-realistic characters and situations can actually be enjoyable.

Certainly the most notorious and jaw-dropping John Waters film is Pink Flamingos.  The plot revolves around a group of people actively competing to be the “filthiest people alive.” One of my favorite moments in the film is when Babs (Divine) and her son Crackers break into the Marble’s house (where the Marbles are hiding a black market, lesbian, baby-making service in their basement) to filth-ify it.  Their method?  They lick everything in the house: the sofa, the knick-knacks on the coffee table, the banisters, everything.  Then, when Connie (Mink Stole) and her husband come home, they slip and fall down when they come into contact with any of their foes’ saliva: they slip off the couch, they fall down the stairs, their drinks slide off the coffee table.  Take a look:

Now is this realistic?  No.  Not in the least.  It’s absurd, but, more than that, it’s also incredibly pleasurable, in part, because it allows the audience to be co-conspirators – we all know that a normal person’s saliva would dry in just a few seconds. However, if you accept the idea that these people are filthy, so filthy that their saliva has achieved the consistency of swamp slime that multiplies and spreads its dirty slickness all on its own, then the actions take on a much larger meaning.  I’ve never encountered anything so sublime in a film like Revolutionary Road or Knocked Up.

I would argue that a lot of Godard falls into this category as well.  For one, many of his films are not about reality: they’re about movies or ideas.  There is a playful aspect to many of his characters and their interactions that is similar to the characters in John Water’s films.  Of course, in Godard the characters are more playful and childlike than crass.  In some films, it’s almost as if the characters are giant children as exemplified in the book insult scene from A Woman is a Woman:

Another filmmaker who delights in playful expressionism is Guy Maddin.  This, of course, is obvious as soon as you start watching his films.  Because he’s embraced the film tropes and styles of early expressionist cinema, there is no pretense that he is going to deliver characters or scenes that are in any way realistic.  Even in his biographical film My Winnipeg, Maddin’s sense of whimsy and play is in no way diminished by the use of archival video or photographs.  In fact, Maddin’s ability to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy only enhances the imagination, allowing the audience the freedom to reimagine their own lives and to ponder the relationship between their own mythical histories and their concepts of self and history.  This is particularly poignant in the Horse Story scene:

In the next, and final, installment, we will explore editing styles and our ability to be patient in film.