Make ’em Laugh

I like to have repeated experiences in a movie theater. There’s a handful of films that I got to watch in an actual cinema for more than a couple of times. Sunset Blvd. and Singin’ in the Rain, Casper classics, I’ve seen at least four times (and had seen many more on TV). Two for the Road, a little less. The Godfather, too. Vertigo and a couple of Hitchcocks. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. 2001 and The Shining. The Rules of the Game. Last Year in Marienbad. Kane (yeah, fuck me). Some of them were more commercial; The Last Jedi and The Dark Knight. The last Harry Potter.

Most of the times, I watched them repeatedly just because why not. I hardly refuse a rare screening, especially if it’s free. In other occasions, instead, I’m actually required to see films more than a reasonable amount of times; that comes with being a film student. Some weeks ago, I saw Get Out for the third time in about 3 months — two of them in a theater, for class.

It’s curious to compare different cinematic experiences. I first saw Jordan Peele’s horror film in an arthouse in Brazil, with Brazilian friends. The second time I saw it with my mom at home. The third and fourth were for different courses I’ve taken in the last few semesters — in the US, surrounded by a mostly American audience. No matter what context, one thing happened in all of these screenings:

People laughed out loud. Constantly.

Ok, so Get Out is a horror film. It was marketed like that, and the premise of the story pretty much tells you what it is. A black guy travels to the suburbs to meet his white girlfriend’s parents. Once he gets there, things become creepy. As fuck. You have weird servants — black servants — who seem menacingly tame. You have old white guests who are described as people who “have never met a black person that didn’t work for them”. You have surgeries and hypnosis sessions. You have the Sunken Place. An eerie atmosphere. Jump scares and all the tropes. There’s no doubt that it’s horror — though no one ever said it was the scariest ever made. (Nor does it have to be.)

But it won the Golden Globe. For Best Comedy.

That’s obviously unusual. Comedies and horrors are popularly associated with completely different effects. Yet people had a reaction compatible with both styles once they saw it. Not because Get Out was a parody of a horror film. There was something else in it. Not only simple mortals, even the critics were writing about the comicality in Peele’s little experiment, and not rarely praising it.

But Jordan Peele himself didn’t laugh.

In fact he complained about the laughter. It started when the Globes picked it as a comedy. Apparently it was submitted as one by the studio, and Jordan didn’t know it. He vocalized that the film was about a serious subject and that he was trying to portray something that African-Americans felt on a daily basis. That the struggle was real. The film was a documentary.

I’m very sympathetic to his argument. But he wasn’t right.

You don’t define a film’s genre based on what it’s about. You define it based on how you deal with the theme and the story. You could recut Annie Hall and make it a melodrama. The story definitely has the potential for that. That’s not how it works, though. In the simplest way way to phrase it: if movie haunts you, it’s a horror; if a movie amuses you, it’s a comedy. (That goes waaay beyond cheap laughter and involuntary screaming — jump scares are to horror what fart jokes are to comedy: they can work, but only in very specific occasions, and mostly they suck.)

And Get Out both amuses and haunts.

Jordan was right that what the film is about was not a laughing matter. True, it isn’t, that’s why what we laugh about when we see Get Out isn’t Chris’s struggle — we laugh because of how ridiculous the whole situation is. Daughter: “My dad will tell you he’d vote for Obama’s third term”. Dad: “I’d vote for Obama a third time.” Seriously? Old guy sees black man: “I love golf! I have even met Tiger!” Stylish. Random old fat white dude: “Black is in fashion”. And of course, there’s the official comical relief embodied by Chris’s black TSA friend, who makes fun of clueless white people who “don’t see race”. Honestly, the critique there is very clear.

And it’s done with humor. Dark humor.

Peele was worried that the label of comedy puts his film in a smaller box. But it actually adds to it. Chris goes through hideous things — subject. There is an underlying tension that is the cause of that hideousness — target. It’s different to have a joke propagate racism than to have racism as an element that composes the joke. And dark humor is subversive. It exposes the seriousness of the message that Jordan values so much, and mocks precisely that what the director denounces. For him to state that comedy is limiting is just disappointing. Negating that a joke is a joke and that something funny is funny just from sheer political correctness is very questionable. It’s almost like he‘s afraid to recognize his own achievement. Get Out is very unique, and much of it comes from the laughter. Sincere laughter. I mean, it’s almost Spike Lee-level cynical. You gotta love it.

Racist jokes are bad. But here and there, racism jokes are very welcome.