Despite their popularity, very little has been written on crime
comedies. Crime comedies are more often classified as comedies
(films people laugh at) that happen to be about crime
than as crime films (films about crime) that happen to be comical because
comedy is a stronger, more broadly recognized genre than the
crime film. This is despite the fact that comedy has been notoriously
difficult to define without circularity (comedies are movies that make
people laugh; movies make people laugh because they’re funny; people
feel free to laugh at things that might not otherwise seem funny
because they know they’re watching a comedy) ever since Aristotle’s
theory of comedy, a companion piece to his Poetics, was lost.1
No one complains that Hamlet is not a tragedy if it does not produce
tears, but most audiences define comedy in terms of their own laughter,
and not every audience laughs at the same things. Philosophies of
humor dating back to Aristotle have been dominated by three models
proposing variously that people laugh because they appreciate some
incongruity in a joke, or because of their sense of superiority to the
butts of comedy, or because they enjoy a sense of relief after being
wound up by the tension that is released by a punch line.2 But none
of these models – incongruity, superiority, release – has succeeded in
explaining all comedy. Literary and dramatic theorists have attempted
to circumvent this problem by proposing theories of comedy based
on structural models, but the arguments of comedy they propose, to
use Northrop Frye’s phrase, do little to explain why audiences laugh
at comedies.3 Hence comic theory continues to be divided between
two groups of analysts – literary theorists, who focus on what comedy
is, and philosophers of humor, who focus on why people laugh – who
often resemble blind men talking about elephants.
Although crime comedy is more widely considered a subgenre of
comedy than of the crime film, it depends on the conventions of the
crime film in one inescapable way. Comedy lacks its own distinctive
subject matter because there is no subject that is intrinsically funny.
So comedies of any sort are parasitic on the conventions of other
genres like the action film, the romance, and the crime film. Crime
comedies in particular tend to recycle the plots and characters of apparently
straightforward crime films, not only in parodies like High
Anxiety (1977), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), and Jane Austen’s
Mafia! (1998), but in films like Throw Momma from the Train (1987), a
virtual remake of Strangers on a Train (1951) turned into a comedy
largely by casting Danny DeVito as the importunate killer, Billy Crystal
as the man he begs to murder his overbearing mother, and Anne Ramsey
as the imperishable victim. Innumerable crime comedies begin
with potentially dramatic situations and then add one element that
turns them comical: the crooks’ need to steal an entire bank in Bank
Shot (1974), the ineffectuality of both the embattled Mafia widow’s
suitors in Married to the Mob (1988) [Fig. 67], the choice of a hit man’s
high-school reunion as the place for a murderous showdown in Grosse
Pointe Blank (1997).
However different their primary impulses might seem, comedies
and crime films both depend on outraging the establishment within
the film and viewers’ expectations about the film. Assuming that viewers
wish to laugh at criminal outrages that fulfill their own dark fantasies,
and will do so if they can be released from the moral decorum
that demands they condemn criminal behavior, many crime films
work to establish a decorum of acceptable outrage, just as noncomic
crime films might rely on a decorum that accepts mob killings or vigilante
cops as normal.4
The obvious way to establish a decorum of acceptable comic outrage
is to present victims who are comical because they are inconsequential,
despicable, or incapable of suffering serious harm, like the
eight murdered relatives all played by Alec Guinness in the Ealing
comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and the blustering criminals
who end up dying instead of their innocent intended victims in The
Ladykillers (1955) and Charade (1963). Audiences will laugh even at serious
crimes, however, if they are investigated by comical detectives
like Buster Keaton’s daydreaming amateur sleuth in Sherlock Jr. (1924),
the incompetent detectives played by W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick
(1940) and Groucho Marx in The Big Store (1941) and Love Happy
(1950), Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the Pink Panther movies (1964–
93), and Axel Foley in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise (1984–94). Finally,
criminal threats can be defused and rendered comical if the criminals
themselves are played for laughs, like the maiden-aunt killers of Arsenic
and Old Lace (1944); the oblivious couple who commit the murders
in Eating Raoul (1982) in hopes of financing a restaurant; the aspiring
standup comic of The King of Comedy (1982) who kidnaps a
talk-show host in order to break into show biz; and the mob boss in
Analyze This (1999) who consults an unwilling psychiatrist when he
unaccountably loses his appetite for killing [Fig. 68].
Although it might therefore seem that crime comedies are simply
crime films with comic relief added, like whipped cream on a sundae,
it would be a mistake to conclude that comical victims, avengers, and
villains are simply extraneous to the plots whose melodramatic force
they deflect. Instead, comic caper films, mysteries, and parodies display
the same thematic contradictions as their allegedly more serious
counterparts but use these contradictions to provoke laughter rather
than perturbation. In The Pilgrim (1923), Charlie Chaplin, as an es-
67. Married to the Mob: The embattled Mafia widow (Michelle Pfeiffer) and
her ineffectual police suitor (Matthew Modine).
caped convict masquerading as a country parson, plays not only a
comic villain whose plans to fleece his new congregation keep going
astray, but also a comic victim and a comic avenger. The opening
scenes explore the relation between apparent innocence and criminal
guilt by dramatizing how uncomfortable Chaplin is in his assumed role
as he keeps reverting to criminal habits, holding onto the grate at a
ticket window as if it were the bars of his prison cell and stowing away
on the train even though he has bought a ticket. But when he meets
an old lag (Charles Riesner) who worms his way into the same household,
Chaplin’s imposter is forced to find increasingly ingenious ways
to thwart Riesner’s plan to steal the mortgage money from their kindly
hostess (Kitty Bradbury) and the daughter (Edna Purviance) for
whom Chaplin has fallen. From beginning to end, the film is organized
around a series of provocative jokes about the contradiction between
the title character’s criminal habits and his ever more noble instincts.
It is not sufficient, therefore, to say that films like The Pilgrim take what
would normally be a straightforward dramatic problem typical of
crime films and present it with a twist that makes it comical – the victims
are eminently dispensable, the detective clumsy and incompetent,
the criminals a pair of harmless maiden aunts – because comedy
itself is a mode of dramatizing these problems, not an escape from
them. The peculiar paradox of crime comedy is that the decorum its
twists undermine prescribes a normal, predictable round of violent
lawbreaking and summary justice. Crime comedies, which present a
world whose decorum is broken both by crime and by laughter, therefore
interrogate in a particularly pointed way the very possibility of
social and perceptual normality. Just as gangster films and private-eye
films present not so much a breakdown of social logic as its displacement
onto a world in which criminal behavior is a given, comedy interrogates
the fallacies of normality through a logic of its own.
This logic operates at its simplest in animated films, many of which
would be readily classified as crime films if they were not classified
as cartoons. The submerged generic affiliation of Walt Disney’s first
animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), for instance,
as a period crime film with musical interludes emerges clearly
in Howard Hawks’s two updated, nonanimated retellings of the Snow
White story, Ball of Fire (1941) and A Song Is Born (1948).
A still more straightforward model of the crime cartoon comedy is
provided by Warner Bros.’ Road Runner animated shorts. The sevenminute
stories, each of them presenting several of Wile E. Coyote’s
unsuccessful traps for Road Runner, are so repetitious, both individually
and as a series, and feature such a small cast of characters and
so few possibilities for motivation and incident that their violent plots
become reassuringly ritualized. Audiences who know that the coyote
will never catch his innocent prey can relax and enjoy the complexity
of his traps and the certainty that he will be caught in them himself,
usually in ways unique to the drawn universe of cartoons. When the
coyote steps over the edge of a cliff in his enthusiastic pursuit of Road
Runner, for instance, he will never fall until he notices that he is in
danger; he will have plenty of time for a farewell to the audience; and
he will never suffer lasting damage from his well-deserved misadventures.
The violence of the series, as the cliché “cartoon violence” suggests,
is inconsequential. The ritual repetitions of highly predictable
plots, spiced by the playful physical inventions, transformations, and
impossibilities proper to the logic of the cartoon universe, at the
hands of a villainous agent who will never grow out of his obsession
or develop anything but a drolly ad hoc self-consciousness, all work
in the service of a comically selective imitation of the real life of criminals,
natural predators, and physical reality.
68. Analyze This: The iconic mob boss (Robert De Niro) and his unwilling
psychiatrist (Billy Crystal).
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) extends and complicates this cartoon
logic by crossing it with the logic of a carefully calibrated homage
to 1947 film noir. The combination of live-action and animated
characters in the same scenes produces a universe that combines features
of both genres. In physical terms, Roger casts cartoon shadows
that look drawn, but can have apparently photographed shadows cast
over him; he drinks real liquor and reacts to it by bouncing around the
room in antic cartoon fashion or spitting a live-action stream; yet he
can be knocked unconscious with a frying pan, and threatened with
total annihilation by the evil green “dip” of Judge Doom (Christopher
Lloyd). In moral terms, Roger is an irrepressibly madcap hero, the
only rabbit among the protagonists, but also a devoted husband distracted
and depressed by jealousy of his wife, Jessica, who is playing
pat-a-cake (literally, as it turns out) with live-action entrepreneur Marvin
Acme (Stubby Kaye). The film repeatedly plays for laughs the conflicts
between the mock-noir logic of its live-action world, from its
moody lighting to its period costumes, and its cartoon world, jammed
with puns, pratfalls, and cameos of Disney and Warners cartoon characters
– as when Jessica (voiced by Kathleen Turner), in the film’s
most famous line, tells private eye Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), “I’m
not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” The implication is not only that cartoon
logic can be adapted to live-action situations, but that live-action
logic itself is less monolithic, more multifarious, and in its different
versions more parochial and generic and subject to transformation
than it might appear.
The logic developed for cartoons can be readily be projected onto
live-action comedies like Blake Edwards’s five Pink Panther films. The
animated credit sequence for A Shot in the Dark (1964), for example,
shows a fireplug Clouseau, shining a flashlight on a succession of dark
screens and disclosing, along with the cast and production credits, a
series of guns and bombs that shoot him or blow up in his face, leaving
him annihilated until the next shot, when he returns intact. This
cartoon logic governs the film’s live action as well. No matter how often
Clouseau (Peter Sellers) is threatened with similar dangers, he survives
unharmed, leaving his audience free to enjoy his inventively geometric
pratfalls, his ritualistic incompetence, his failure to notice the
effects of his clumsiness on himself or others, and his laughable non
sequiturs.
Cartoons provide only the most obvious model for the logic of
crime comedies. The leading characters in A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
are each assigned a different place in the film’s more capacious comic
logic. Otto (Kevin Kline) is a cartoon villain, precise and mechanical
in his movements, implacable in his enmity, comical in his obsession
with Nietzsche and his two refrains, “Asshole!” (to the drivers he repeatedly
sideswipes) and “Don’t call me stupid” (to the romantic
trysters he interrupts in more and more incongruous ways). Ken (Michael
Palin) is a cartoon hero, the bemused innocent whose love for
both Wanda the woman (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Wanda the fish is so
pure that when he tries to kill Mrs. Coady (Patricia Hayes), the imperious
witness to the robbery (another quasi-cartoon figure) and succeeds
in his first two attempts only in killing her dogs, viewers can
readily sympathize with his frustration and heartbreak at the animals’
deaths instead of condemning him as a killer. Wanda is the film’s object
of universal desire, the bringer of fertility and sexual healing who
promises a comic resolution to whoever is lucky enough to possess
her at the fade-out. The barrister Archie (John Cleese), whom Wanda
tries to seduce in the hope of extracting information about where her
accomplice George (Tom Georgeson) stashed the crucial safe-deposit
key, is the unlikely romantic hero most in need of Wanda if he is to
escape the stultifying life represented by his legal profession and his
killjoy wife Wendy (Maria Aitkin) and survive Otto’s jealous death
threats to blossom in the light of Wanda’s sexual promise. Once these
characters establish the comic tone of the film, the noncomical George
emerges as the straight man whose function in hiding the key from the
other gang members is to set up their schemes, remind them by example
of how much they have to lose, and attack Wanda in court when
she declines to testify on his behalf. Because George has been set up
as a straight man who never does anything funny, his rage when he
trashes the courtroom (in an inversion of Witness for the Prosecution)
becomes a comic release, undercutting both his dignity and the majesty
of the law. A Fish Called Wanda suspends Archie between two staples
of comedy: the improbable cartoon threats represented by Otto
(and ultimately visited on Ken) and the improbable romantic rewards
represented by Wanda, in order to supplant the potentially pathetic
story of the criminal gang’s breakdown with the comical story of the
virtuous hero’s rescue from his life and inhibitions.
As the core cast of A Fish Called Wanda attest, there are as many
ways of integrating comic and criminal conflicts as there are crime
comedies. Woody Allen, for example, has returned to the genre repeatedly
in films united only by their affection for the crime melodramas
they parody. In Take the Money and Run (1969) and Small Time Crooks
(2000), he casts himself as an robber. In the earlier film, a parody of
crime films from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) to Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) that marked Allen’s directorial debut, he is fated to
fail at even the simplest robberies; in the later film, he is rescued from
a life of equally inept crime by the runaway success of the cookies his
wife is baking as a cover for his criminal activities. In Manhattan Murder
Mystery (1993), a valentine to The Thin Man (1934), the crime he
and his wife are nominally investigating is little more than a backdrop
to their trademark connubial bickering. In Bullets over Broadway
(1994), he casts John Cusack as a younger version of himself, a naïve
playwright whose first Broadway production is invaded and rewritten
by a gangster with an unexpectedly literary bent. Most recently, The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) internalizes the conflict between
cops and robbers in a farcical version of Wilkie Collins’s Victorian
whodunit The Moonstone (1868) by casting Allen as a private eye who
is hypnotized into carrying out a series of robberies.
Despite their different strategies, all these films work by defusing
the intractable problems crime films tackle through laughter. Billy Wilder’s
Prohibition transvestite comedy Some Like It Hot (1959) shows
the range of ways strategic displacements can make crime comical.
Although the film’s comic tone is established early on by numerous
dialogue jokes and the banter between its two heroes, sax player Joe
(Tony Curtis) and bass player Jerry (Jack Lemmon), they begin the
film by losing their jobs, their coats, and their safety when they witness
the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and are pursued by the killer,
Spats Columbo (George Raft), and every gangster in Chicago. The film
displaces this serious threat at the hands of murderous criminals onto
a series of increasingly comical threats that will maintain the energy
of the initial conflict while defusing its consequences. Joe’s and
Jerry’s exhilaratingly unlikely masquerade as female musicians Josephine
and Daphne does not so much decrease the story’s tensions
as turn them comic, especially when Joe, on their band’s arrival at the
Seminole–Ritz in Palm Beach, takes the nubile Sugar Kane (Marilyn
Monroe) away from Jerry by dressing as Sugar’s beau ideal, a bespectacled
oil heir who talks just like Cary Grant. The melodramatic threat
of Spats Columbo is eclipsed by the friends’ comic threats against
each other and by Jerry’s danger from another quarter: Osgood Fielding
(Joe E. Brown), the much-married old roué who has taken a fancy
to Daphne.
Just when the film seems to have wandered furthest from the criminal
threat that got it started, Spats and his gang, arriving at the Seminole–
Ritz for a gangsters’ convention, reaffirm the death threats that
had been displaced onto successively more innocuous threats. Although
the criminals take themselves as seriously as ever, the film’s
prevailing comic mode sweeps them up in a series of visual parodies
of Scarface (1932), The Public Enemy (1931), and Citizen Kane (1941)
before killing off Spats and delivering Joe and Jerry and their lovers
from the surviving gangsters. As Joe protests that he is not worthy
of Sugar, and she rapturously responds, “Go ahead, talk me out of it,”
Jerry brings up one obstacle after another to his marriage to Fielding,
all to no avail. When he finally tells reveals himself as a man, the unflappable
suitor replies, “Nobody’s perfect.”
Some Like It Hot displaces its criminal threats so completely that
many viewers do not consider it a crime comedy at all. Yet the film
consistently uses comedy to explore problems its criminal plot first
raises – problems of power, social role-playing, injustice, and victimization
– by projecting the conventions of crime melodrama onto the
comical but far more volatile territory of gender politics. Joe’s unlikely
romance gradually transforms him from a user of women, a sexual
criminal, to a suitably empathetic mate for Sugar, and Jerry turns into
a victim of the same sort of predatory male he and Joe have been. Just
as the decorum of criminal outrage in crime films reminds viewers
how naïve they are if they assume that the normal world is noncriminal,
or that criminals, victims, and avengers represent mutually exclusive
categories, the decorum of comic outrage in crime comedies
like Some Like It Hot represents not a swerve from the authentically
serious tone proper to the crime film but a dramatic mode that shows
the fallacies of assuming that the normal world is not comical.
The intimacy between criminal outrage and comical outrage is even
clearer in films like Heathers (1989) that reverse Some Like It Hot’s trajectory
by beginning as comedies and gradually darkening to melodrama.
Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder), a student who aspires to
membership in the coveted clique of Westerburg High’s three Heathers
(Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, Kim Walker), nonetheless believes
that since they are responsible for setting the school’s bitchy,
cruel, remorselessly competitive tone, “killing Heather would be like
killing the Wicked Witch of the West.” Veronica’s dark but nonserious
fantasies come true when her friend J. D. (Christian Slater) encourages
her to play a prank on the lead Heather that turns lethal when he
secretly spikes Heather’s hangover remedy with drain cleaner. From
that moment on, Veronica struggles to reconcile her continuing hatred
of that Heather, who becomes more iconically powerful than ever in
death, with her remorse for killing her and her implication in the murders
of two football players that follow. At the players’ joint funeral,
where they are laid to rest in their football helmets, Veronica’s giggles
at the mourners’ vacuity and hypocrisy are cut short by her look at
one of the dead boys’ little sisters, quietly weeping in his team jacket.
The rest of the film makes Veronica pay for her comically murderous
fantasies by forcing her to recognize her kinship with the genuinely
sociopathic J. D. so that she can withdraw not only from his plot to
murder the entire population of Westerburg High (in an eerie prefiguration
of the massacre at Columbine High) but from her own flippancy.
Instead of moving toward comedy in order to explore the broader implications
of social aggression, like Some Like It Hot, Heathers begins
by taking the universality of that aggression, and the comic response
to it, as a given and then gradually retreats from its implications by
confronting its heroine with consequences that are more authentic
than her comic attitudinizing. Comedy is presented as one more antisocial
response the heroine needs to outgrow if she is to distinguish
herself from a criminal.
Heathers’s drift away from comedy might suggest that crime comedies
must decide in the end between comic outrage and criminal outrage,
laughing at crimes or putting aside the impulse to laugh in order
to take them seriously. In a world in which purportedly serious action
is ineffectual, however, laughter may be the most serious response of
all, as war comedies from To Be or Not to Be (1942) to Love and Death
(1975) suggest. Stanley Kubrick, the director and cowriter of the blackest
of all war comedies, Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb (1964), told film critic Joseph Gelmis that he
had bought Peter George’s 1958 thriller Red Alert intending to make a
serious film of it, presumably along the lines of the contemporaneous
Fail-Safe (1964), but that after a month of discarding ideas “because
they were so ludicrous,” he realized that “all the things I was throwing
out were the things which were the most truthful,”5 and brought
ribald comic novelist Terry Southern onto the project to heighten the
comic elements he had been downplaying.
Why would a film about nuclear annihilation keep veering toward
comedy? An early scene suggests why by showing the pained response
of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) to the news
of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) that the country
is now in a shooting war: “Oh, hell.” For not only is Mandrake’s response
comically inadequate to the threat of nuclear annihilation; the
scene suggests that any conceivable response would be inadequate,
however heroically films like Fail-Safe might struggle to dignify the alternatives.
Because it threatens not merely particular people or nations
or cultures or ideologies but the whole future of humankind, allout
nuclear war, which in Kubrick’s nihilistic account spares no one
from utter defeat, makes every possible reaction into the stuff of black
comedy. Kubrick’s audience ends up laughing, not at the enemy or the
service or war itself, but at the ironic denial of human power and freedom
by the magnitude of the dehumanizing, but all-too-human, drive
toward self-destruction. Kubrick’s comedy emerges as the engine of
horror and perception. As Pauline Kael has remarked in opposing
Brian De Palma’s telekinetic thriller The Fury (1978) to Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): “With Spielberg, what
happens is so much better than you dared hope that you have to
laugh; with De Palma, it’s so much worse than you feared that you
have to laugh.”6
Of course, you don’t really have to laugh, and not everyone does.
Few viewers laugh out loud at Dr. Strangelove, and even fewer at The
Fury. But Kubrick and Kael help explain why so many viewers have
laughed uproariously at the most unlikely moments in Pulp Fiction
(1994): when Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) literally springs back to life
after her terrified date Vincent Vega (John Travolta) injects a shot of
adrenaline into her heart; when prizefighter Butch Coolidge (Bruce
Willis) returns with a samurai sword to the pawnshop basement to
rescue his enemy, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), from the redneck
rapists who had taken them both prisoner; and when Vincent, turning
around in his car seat to ask Marsellus’s underling Marvin (Phil La-
Marr) whether he believes it was a divine miracle that protected Vincent
and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) from a hail of bullets,
accidentally shoots Marvin in the face. They laugh because they are
witnessing a miracle of resurrection, because Butch’s nightmarish ordeal
has won him a heady dose of freedom and power they are eager
to share, because Marvin’s gratuitous death is the perfect punch line
to a discussion of the role of miracles in the modern world, and because
they realize that the violent, unpredictable world around them
is always potentially, explosively funny.
The leading practitioners of this mode of crime comedy – whose comic
elements do not follow Arsenic and Old Lace and Some Like It Hot
in displacing the threatening aspects of the criminal plot but, rather,
intensify them – are Joel and Ethan Coen. No two of their eight films
to date are quite alike, but virtually all of them are crime comedies
ranging from light gray to pitch black. The Coen brothers borrow a
central paradox from animated cartoons: The banality of criminal impulses
as inescapable as Wile E. Coyote’s is recorded by a spectacularly
baroque audiovisual style and an equally baroque use of crimegenre
conventions.
The Coens established their trademark sensibility with their first
film, Blood Simple (1984), a noir update tracing the murderous doublecrosses
that ensue when suspicious Texas husband Julian Marty (Dan
Hedaya) hires shady private eye Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill
his wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), and her lover, Ray (John Getz).
The cross-plotting gains a darkly comic edge from the lovers’ ignorance
of Visser’s existence, and their panicked belief, right up to the
film’s last line, that the husband they thought they had killed and buried
is still dogging them. Raising Arizona (1987), a knockabout comedy
about the efforts of inept bank robber H. I. “Hi” McDonnough (Nicolas
Cage) and his childless cop wife Ed (Holly Hunter) to kidnap one
of the quintuplets of furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson)
[Fig. 69], covers similar material in a more humorous tone established
by Hi’s deadpan narration and the film’s frantic camera work. The
Coens’ third film, Miller’s Crossing (1990) is a bleak fantasia on themes
from Dashiell Hammett’s 1931 novel The Glass Key, and one of only
two of their films to date with no important comic elements (the other
being The Man Who Wasn’t There [2001]).7 These films established
not only the Coens’ fondness for convoluted crime plots, ironic reversals,
and a wildly inventive visual style, but also their working methods.
All three were produced by Ethan Coen, directed by Joel Coen,
and cowritten by both brothers. All three were photographed by Barry
Sonnenfeld and scored by Carter Burwell with an emphasis on systematically
distancing effects. After Miller’s Crossing, Sonnenfeld left
the Coens to direct his own series of loopy dark comedies, from The
Addams Family (1991) to Men in Black (1997) and Men in Black 2
(2002), and the brothers replaced him with Roger Deakins, who has
shot all their films since. Given the stability of the Coens’ core personnel
– their works have been written, photographed, scored, produced,
and directed by a total of five technicians, and they have returned repeatedly
to cast such favorite actors as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi,
John Turturro, and Joel Coen’s wife, Frances McDormand – it is
no wonder that their films have been so distinctive.
Barton Fink (1991) marked the brothers’ critical breakthrough [Fig.
70]. The film, reportedly begun when the Coens were stuck on the
screenplay of Miller’s Crossing, is a horrifying comedy about politically
committed Broadway playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro), who,
bound for Hollywood “to make a difference” by writing films about the
little people nobody notices, checks into a nightmarish art-deco hotel
that is the center of a net of mediocrity, depravity, and homicide at the
hands of one of the little people he has presumed to patronize. The
film’s hallucinatory intensity won it an unprecedented three prizes at
the 1991 Cannes Film Festival for best film, best director, and best actor.
Buoyed by their success at home and abroad, the Coens turned
to a big-budget project, The Hudsucker Proxy (1993), which larded the
rise-of-company-mailboy story recycled in models from Horatio Alger
to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967) with hundreds
of allusions to earlier movies and an all-star cast (Tim Robbins,
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, Charles Durning) that edged out
all their regulars except for Buscemi, and disappointed both their core
audience and the wider audience they had aimed for.
It was at this point that the Coens began work on Fargo (1996), their
signature black comedy about hapless car dealer Jerry Lundegaard
(William H. Macy), who, desperate to cover the money he has embez-
69. Raising Arizona: The inept kidnappers (Holly Hunter, Nicolas Cage) welcome
home the baby (T. J. Kuhn) they have snatched.
zled from his father-in-law’s dealership, hatches the idea of hiring two
thugs to kidnap his wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd), so that her father,
Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell), can pay a ransom Jerry will split
with the kidnappers. So far, the story could easily have served as the
basis for a madcap crime comedy worthy of Wilder or Preston Sturges,
but Jerry’s plot spins rapidly out of control when the kidnappers, with
70. Barton Fink: The writer hero (John Turturro) is blocked, but not the Coen
brothers, in their breakthrough film.
their victim tied up in the back seat, are pulled over for driving with
an expired registration, and taciturn Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare)
brutally kills the police officer, then chases down two witnesses who
saw the corpse as they were driving past and murders them as well.
Four more victims will follow, dispatched in increasingly hair-raising
ways, until Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand,
in her Oscar-winning role), investigating the murders, surprises
Gaear as he is feeding the leg of his late partner, Carl Showalter (Steve
Buscemi), into a wood chipper, producing instead of chips a haze of
bright blood.
What could possibly make such a festival of carnage funny? Far
more than the Pink Panther movies or Some Like It Hot, Fargo depends
for its humor on its ruthlessly stylized visuals. The film’s opening sequence,
which picks up Jerry’s car as it is heading down a snowy road
to the Fargo bar where he is meeting the kidnappers, sets up the conventional
expectation that the film will move from generally expository
shots of an inhospitable outdoor environment to warmer, more
intimate and comforting interiors; but this expectation is repeatedly
undermined [Fig. 71]. Except for the home of Marge and her husband,
71. Fargo: Indoors, the emotional temperature of the opening scene between
Jerry and the thugs (Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare) he wants to hire is no
warmer.
Norm (John Carroll Lynch), none of the film’s interiors is warmly lit.
Its bars are dim but not monochromatic, its other public spaces – hotel
lobbies, restaurants, Wade’s office, Jerry’s car dealership – neutrally
blue-gray with prominent picture windows showing the snowscaped
outdoors. When the characters do roost indoors, the object
most likely to capture their attention is the blue-white light of a television
set. Moreover, a surprising number of the film’s key scenes – a
fatal roadside stop after the kidnapping, Marge’s initial investigation
of the resulting three murders, the parking lot where Wade brings the
payoff money to Carl and the two of them trade shots, the cabin exterior
when Gaear shoots Carl and is feeding his body into a wood
chipper when Marge captures him – take place outdoors. Most of
these exterior scenes are extravagantly bleak, showing cars’ headlights
approaching from a seamless whiteout or their taillights threatening
to vanish into undifferentiated darkness. Even in its interiors,
however, the film persistently withholds facial close-ups that would
encourage intimacy with the characters. It is as if the Coens had sat
repeatedly through Basic Instinct and determined to make a film whose
visual style was precisely antithetical, since the film gives off exactly
the opposite aura – chilly, detached, and composed within an inch of
its life – in order to root its characters more fully in a self-enclosed
physical world and abstract them from an audience free to laugh
heartlessly at their misfortunes.
Many viewers, of course, declined to laugh anyway. The film polarized
citizens of the North Dakota locations where parts of it were shot.
Many of them complained that the Coens were casting their birthplace
as a Grand Guignol house of horrors and the natives as yahoos whose
laconic response to almost every utterance – the flat midwestern
“Yah” – made them look like idiots. But many other viewers, whether
or not they lived in North Dakota, found the film’s exaggerated regionalism
a hilariously matter-of-fact counterpoint to its tale of kidnapping,
fraud, and homicide. Certainly the innocuousness of so much of
the dialogue, in which repetition is so persistent that the speeches
gravitate toward the condition of music, emphasizes the ironic contrast
of the gruesome plot even as it increases both suspense and
comedy by forcing impatient audiences to wait for the placid witnesses
to come to the point. In one of the film’s best-known sequences,
Marge questions a pair of teenaged hookers (Larissa Kokernot, Melissa
Peterman) who spent the night before the kidnapping with Carl and
Gaear, hoping to get descriptions of the pair. After establishing that
one of them is a graduate of White Bear Lake High School (“Go Bears,”
she helpfully volunteers), Marge asks what the two suspects looked
like, provoking the following exchange:
HOOKER: Well, the little guy, he was kinda funny-lookin’.
MARGE: In what way?
HOOKER: I don’t know. Just funny-lookin’.
MARGE: Can you be any more specific?
HOOKER: I couldn’t really say. He wasn’t circumcised.
MARGE: Was he funny-lookin’ apart from that?
HOOKER: Yah. . . .
MARGE: Is there anything else you can tell me about him?
HOOKER: No. Like I say, he was funny-lookin’ – more ’n most people, even.
Still another effect of the heavy overlay of regional dialect is to emphasize
the static nature of the characters, locked into unchanging humors
as completely as Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Jerry never
realizes that his early hope of averting the kidnapping by persuading
Wade to put up the money for a land investment is doomed to failure
because Wade is such an incorrigible shark and Jerry such a hopeless
loser [Fig. 72]. Having offered an Olds Cutlass Ciera as the down pay-
Fargo and the Crime Comedy 281
72. Fargo: The incorrigible shark (Harve Presnell) and the hopeless loser
(William H. Macy).
ment to his wife’s kidnappers, Jerry, the eternal car salesman, naturally
begins their first conversation, just after they have abducted his
wife and killed three people, “How’s that Ciera working out for you?
. . . How’s Jean?” Much later, during Wade and Carl’s confrontation
over the ransom drop at a snowy parking lot, they shout at each other
with no hope of changing each other’s minds; only shooting each other
can make much of an impression on either one, and Carl, who kicks
Wade’s supine body after he has killed him and been wounded himself,
clearly believes in some way that their discussion is just warming
up. En route to the Lundegaard house in Minneapolis, the exasperated
Carl begs Gaear, who has said nothing but “Nope” all the way from
Brainerd, to make some conversation, and when Gaear does not reply,
says, “I don’t have to talk to you either, man. See how you like it. Just
total fuckin’ silence. Two can play at that game, smart guy. We’ll just
see how you like it. Total silence.” Carl is no more capable of shutting
up than Gaear is of making small talk.
All these scenes are carried off in the same deadpan style by characters
obsessed with the Coyotean question of how to carry out their
individual plans yet trapped in a universe utterly indifferent to their
cares. Because they are so oblivious to their own limitations or the
plans of others, both the violence and the comedy of the film erupt
with shocking suddenness. When Jean fights the menacing Gaear by
biting his hand, the hitherto inarticulate Gaear abandons his pursuit
of her to look in the bathroom cabinet for “unguent,” leaving viewers
wondering where he learned the word. Moments before Gaear attacks
and kills him with an axe, Carl, who has hidden away practically all
the unexpectedly large ransom from his unsuspecting partner, cannot
resist haggling with him over the Ciera (unwittingly echoing Jerry’s
earlier decision to ask Wade for a much larger ransom than he intends
to pay the kidnappers), climaxing his diatribe with the incredible announcement:
“I’ve been listening to your fuckin’ bullshit all week!”
In the most gratuitous and ambiguous of the film’s many comically
obsessive tangents, the hugely pregnant Marge, in Minneapolis to
interview Jerry, has dinner with her old school friend Mike Yanagita
(Steve Park), a Japanese-American midwesterner whose “yahs” are as
broad as hers. After she briskly turns away his attempt to sit on her
side of the dinner table, he suddenly breaks down in tears and pours
out the heartrending tale of his wife’s death from leukemia as Marge
stares stricken at him. Not until a later phone conversation in which
a friend tells Marge that Mike’s wife is alive and well does the film raise
the question of why the episode was ever included, and the corre-
sponding suspicion that perhaps Marge consoled Mike with sex and
is now finding out why she shouldn’t have; but this can be only a theory,
for the film never returns to resolve the question.
In fact, ambiguity and irresolution are at the heart of Fargo’s comedy,
which, unlike that of cartoons like Road Runner or comedies of
displacement like Some Like It Hot, works by systematically depriving
viewers of any single privileged perspective from which to interpret
its outrageous events. Hence the film’s wide-open spaces and motivic
long shots provide a theater that imposes no particular meaning on
any action except to reduce it to insignificance. The statue of the legendary
logger Paul Bunyan that welcomes visitors to Brainerd, Minnesota,
is shown three times, in different lighting conditions that make
it look by turns comical, menacing, and familiar, though always grotesque.
The statue is a representation of a mythic figure, an attempt
to visualize someone who exists only as a point on which to project
iconic significances that can shift with each new context. When Carl
and Gaear arrive in Brainerd, they resolve their disagreement about
the evening’s entertainment by going out for pancakes, then picking
up the hookers with whom they are shown coupling, with a placid unconcern
for privacy, in a single hilariously disengaged long shot of adjacent
double beds. A fade to black is followed by a straight cut to the
same camera setup showing them snuggled down like a pair of suburban
married couples to watch Johnny Carson, with only the flickering
light from the television indicating that the tableau of four stationary
bodies is not a freeze-frame.
Later, Marge, examining the starkly dramatic scene of Gaear’s third
murder, bends over in the snow, and Lou, an officer at the scene, asks
if she sees something. “No, I just think I’m going to barf,” answers
Marge, then, after straightening up: “Well, that passed.” The gesture
whose meaning is so obvious from the generic context could mean
something completely different, like Mike’s fictional tale of love and
loss. It could be simply a black-comic confession of inadequacy, like
Carl’s Strangelove-like underreaction to the tableau of his partner
blowing a hole in a police officer’s head only inches from Carl’s face:
“Oh . . . whoa, daddy . . . oh, daddy.” In fact, it could mean anything at
all, like the statue of Paul Bunyan or the hooker’s description of her
“funny-lookin’” client, or nothing at all, like Gaear’s silences or the
film’s ubiquitous “yahs.” Nonetheless, the interlocked genres of crime
film and comedy the film invokes encourage the audience to mine its
hardscrabble surface for meaning, though it does not always reward
them for doing so.
Burwell’s otherworldly music, plaintive and balladic, suggests an
epic, legendary dimension to what the film’s opening credits insist is
a true story, and the film’s outrageous bursts of violence and comedy
together indicate how arbitrary and fragile is the zone of normalcy
they take as their point of departure. The criminals and their victims
are destroyed by their comical, yet thoroughly logical, inability to surrender
their grasp of normalcy in the interests of what must seem to
most viewers blindingly obvious generic cues. Jean, watching a man
in a black ski mask who stands outside her sliding window with a
crowbar, does not react to the menace he patently represents until
he releases her from her assumption that the moment will pass by
smashing the glass. The long moment of suspension between her apprehension
and her reaction to the threat is an echo of the corresponding
moment in Pulp Fiction when the Pop-Tart that Butch Coolidge
has put in his toaster pops up, jolting him out of his stasis by
giving him permission to shoot Vincent Vega.8 In both cases, the percussive
sound gives viewers permission as well to expel their breath
and react, as many of them do by laughing. The scene continues to
wobble between terror and slapstick comedy, as Jean’s eminently sensible
reactions to the intruders – she locks herself in an upstairs bathroom,
attempts to phone the police, then hides in the bathtub after
opening a window to make them think she has climbed out – are repeatedly
undermined by Gaear’s ferocity and her own realistic panic,
which sends her hurtling out of the tub tangled in the shower curtain
to fall down the stairs.
Even after Carl and Gaear bring her to the isolated house where she
will die off-camera for no particular reason, Jean cannot bring herself
to give up hope: bound and hooded, she darts around the snowy yard
aimlessly, even though she cannot see where she is going and has no
chance of escape. Is the hope to which she clings a sign of her unquenchable
spirit, or of her witlessly mechanical behavior? Or does
it simply attest – like Carl’s comically futile attempt to mark the burial
spot of the ransom money alongside a fence that stretches for mile upon
identical mile by sticking a tiny snow scraper into the snow above
it – to the universal impetus, however vain, to set one’s activities apart
from the bleakly uncaring world figured by the film’s elemental miseen-
scène of blandly anonymous interiors surrounded by acres of
trackless snow?
Fargo might be read as the Dr. Strangelove of crime comedy, a film
that mocks its witless characters’ banal responses to their peril as
hopelessly inadequate while darkly suggesting that their peril is so ir-
284 Crime Films
rational and extreme that any response whatever would be equally,
comically inadequate. The film’s deepest outrage is neither its outbursts
of violence nor its cruel laughter but the air of normalcy it
establishes, for example, by the casting of affable William H. Macy as
Jerry Lundegaard, the casual extortionist who seems to think that
none of the problems arising from the disastrous kidnapping he has
masterminded is proof against a really nice smile. It is not the snowballing
errors, comic or melodramatic, that represent a deflection
from the normal state of affairs, but Jerry’s own laboriously composed
facade of normalcy, which hides the monstrous egoism that allows
him to announce wearily to his shocked, grief-stricken son, “I’m goin’
ta bed now,” instead of returning the call from Wade’s office that would
tell him Wade has been shot dead. The film’s eruptions of crime and
comedy mark a return to the normal state of chaos vain human attempts
at social normalcy have simply obscured.
Against this reading of the film stands the good-natured normalcy
of Marge herself, the earth mother whose loving marriage to unglamorous
Norm offers such a reproach to Jerry Lundegaard. Returning to
interview the desperate Jerry a second time, Marge cuts through his
doubletalk by calmly repeating her questions about a missing vehicle
until his voice rises, and then telling him, “You have no call to get snippy
with me. I’m just doin’ my job here,” her gravity so unnerving Jerry
that he announces his intent to check the inventory immediately, then
drives off as Marge murmurs to herself, “For Pete’s sake. He’s fleein’
the interview. He’s fleein’ the interview.” Jerry’s smiling hypocrisy,
Carl’s snakelike scheming, and Gaear’s dull brutality are no match for
Marge’s adherence to police routine, her impervious good humor, and
the moral certitude she displays in her climactic lecture to Gaear after
she arrests him and takes him to task over the matter of “your accomplice
in the wood chipper”: “There’s more to life than a little money,
ya know. Doncha know that? And here you are. And it’s a beautiful day.
Well. . . . I just don’t understand it” [Fig. 73]. But Marge is literally correct:
Having far too little imagination to understand Gaear or Carl or
Jerry, she can only cuff the survivors and lay down the law to them,
then retreat to her own connubial bed. There, before the ubiquitous
television, she congratulates her husband on having had his painting
chosen to illustrate the three-cent duck-hunting stamp, and echoes his
incantatory closing reference to her pregnancy: “Two more months.”
Marge represents Fargo’s moral center, but the film refuses to put
her and the unexceptionable moral values she stands for at its formal
center. Instead it merely suggests that the normal world Marge repre-
sents poses as direct an affront to the criminal outrages perpetrated
by the kidnappers as their outrages do to the ideas of normalcy represented
by Jerry’s smile, Paul Bunyan’s statue, and the film’s endless
wastes of snow. Nor does the film show either side able to comprehend
the other, either in individual collisions or at the fadeout; it mere-
73. Fargo: Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) – good-humored earthmother
or unimaginative dolt?
ly shows that each exists in the other, like yin and yang, so that the
criminal world is as comically normal as the normal world is comically
outrageous.
In the end, Fargo, however differently than Some Like It Hot, works
by consistently displacing viewers’ expectations. Despite its title, only
its opening scene takes place in Fargo, even though the exterior shooting,
originally planned for Minnesota, had to be moved to North Dakota
when Minnesota was struck by its most snow-free winter in a hundred
years. The assurance with which the film begins – “THIS IS A TRUE
STORY” – is even more misleading than its title, since the Coens later
admitted that it was false.9 The most subversive aspect of the film,
however, and the one that links its crime most closely to its comedy,
is its refusal to establish the sort of unmarked governing tone that
makes Arsenic and Old Lace so reassuring, A Shot in the Dark so antic,
Trouble in Paradise (1932) so cynically sentimental about its world of
thieves and their equally corrupt victims, the Coens’ succeeding films
The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and The
Man Who Wasn’t There so surrealistically laid back in presenting the
adventures (respectively) of a naïf sucked into a world of kidnapping,
bowling, and impossible dreams come true [Fig. 74], or of a trio of
Fargo and the Crime Comedy 287
74. The Big Lebowski: A naïf sucked into a world of kidnapping, bowling, and
impossible dreams come true. (Jeff Bridges, John Goodman)
escaped convicts unwittingly reenacting the Odyssey, or of a smalltown
barber observing, as if from another planet, the nightmarish impact
of the murder that has come to define his life. Instead of establishing
a leading tone from which the film’s episodes can diverge in
order to shock the audience into laughter or pathos or fear, Fargo is
nothing but a collection of tangents. Everything in the film, especially
its most banal details, is off kilter – a reminder that the outrageousness
of crime comedy, as of comedy and crime films themselves, is as
normal as any alternative genres and the ways of seeing they provoke.
Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org
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