Times New Viking is an Ohio rock trio that delivers raw rock ‘n’ roll. Jumping from different labels over the years including Matador and Merge, the band has released five proper albums in a little more than five years. On its last album, Dance Equired (Merge), Times New Viking dropped the lo-fi fuzz in favor of more melodious songs. These art-school grads from Columbus, Ohio, are still making music, and the band’s Elizabeth Murphy will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with her.
Murphy: You know that scene in Antichrist? Not that one. The one with the animatronic fox that interrupts the mind-numbing, slow-pan, hi-def darkness to inform you in all its Showbiz Pizza-like glory that … “chaos reigns!” It smacks with the hilarity and absurdity you have come to not expect from an art film of this ilk, pretentious, depressive, punishing … OK, OK, a Lars Von Trier film. But he threw us a bone here, a pitch-perfect moment to indulge in laughter as interrupted fear, a welcome gift of respite from the brooding couple’s power mope. If you are not emotionally set up to react when the moment hits, the scene operates as a laugh track turned inside-out and laughs for you. Don’t watch this decontextualized on YouTube, this format drains it of its impact. In fact, if you haven’t seen this already, don’t watch it at all. I recommend instead listening to Tombs‘ Path Of Totality. The fox scene inspired the first line, in the first song, in what turned out to be Decibel magazine’s number-one extreme-metal album of 2011. Fortified with self-awareness, metal is a superior safe house for unassuming humor.
In fact, it is more likely that no part of Antichrist was intended to be comedy of any shade. If you are laughing, you are laughing at it. It is unintentional black comedy. The shades of indecision in between this, “laughing with” and “laughing at me” were covered that same year (2009) in Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (both Werner Herzog) and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth.
Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans was the lighter Herzog fare of 2009, and that should say something. Herzog-as-divinity saves the “bad lieutenant” (played by Harvey Keitel) of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 version from a thoroughly depraved script. Employing Nicolas Cage as the reincarnate does half the trick; his trademark swagger breaks any fall of dejection. He is just as gloriously afflicted and wicked but plays it with enough slack to allow for heart. And just so you can be sure what is permitted, the film casts some silly creatures of its own, just the psychedelic sidekicks or side effects to cue laughter. We are “laughing with.”
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done remains undecided in this context. The typification of gripping, it informs this cliche and touches none other, inducing an hour and a half of hypnotic deliberation: Do I laugh or run away crying? This is especially impressive considering narrative tension is not used to hold your attention. Based on the true story of a matricide in Pacific Beach, Calif., we know the victim and the killer within the first few minutes. The scenes that follow are fatalistically awkward. Out of time, dialogue, ecstatic randomness and unabashed moments of silence and repetition make the redundancy devices of Family Guy its bitch and the “awkward” cast of a Judd Apatow movie appear as royalty. Legitimately disconcerting material runs in pace with stark humor, each obscuring the other at every turn of phrase and scene. No breath for nervous laughter nor room for a cordial chuckle. I loved every minute of it, and I am never doing it ever again. Highly recommended.
The monster laughing at you is the paternal figure in Lanthimos’s absurdist send-up of family life, Dogtooth. This unnamed tyrant and his presumably complicit wife have raised their children completely isolated from the outside world, crafting their lives with deranged improvisational make-believe. In the summer 2011 issue of Film Quarterly, Mark Fisher nails its comparison: “It is as unbearable as the famous Ricky Gervais dancing scene from The Office, but we are denied the release of laughter: the abusive situation and the genuinely pathetic quality of the two daughters prevent it. Besides, we are denied any point of identification, denied anyone on screen who could laugh with us—or whom we would want to share our laughter with.”
The Stockholm Syndrome at work in Dogtooth brings me to think of how it manifests in films. When you sit down to watch a movie you are a willing captive, buying into disbelief. But a film is bounded. And I happen to like my abject surrealism with an exit strategy in place.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp8w5m1H7dY
