Lured into Laughter
Watching the film In Bruges as part of the Sydney Film Festival, I was forced to experience the affective consequences of mixed genres. Thriller/comedies are brutal to my nervous system and I leave the film weak at the knees - literally. I cannot defend against the callousness of the bloody murders by steeling myself because I am lured into laughter by the uncanny straightforwardness of Colin Farrell's character, and the bizarre mannerliness of the psychopathic hit-man boss played by Ralph Fiennes.
There may be no honour among thieves, but I have long been bemused by the blurring of morality and convention in the more psychopathically inclined. They might hand you a starched napkin to staunch the flow of your blood they have just occasioned.
It seems to me that the gales of laughter weaken and open me to the onslaughts of horror I feel at the killings. I've always thought the positive affects open you up to creative novel perceptions as the world floods in somewhat unfiltered, where more negative affects, like fear, leave you searching for and vigilant against the repetition of harm. In a cocktail of the (at least) two affects - the body is bewildered. Pumped for fear, the laughter is more explosive, but leaves you all the more bare for the next terror.
I think I should stick to comedies. I feel too much.
There may be no honour among thieves, but I have long been bemused by the blurring of morality and convention in the more psychopathically inclined. They might hand you a starched napkin to staunch the flow of your blood they have just occasioned.
It seems to me that the gales of laughter weaken and open me to the onslaughts of horror I feel at the killings. I've always thought the positive affects open you up to creative novel perceptions as the world floods in somewhat unfiltered, where more negative affects, like fear, leave you searching for and vigilant against the repetition of harm. In a cocktail of the (at least) two affects - the body is bewildered. Pumped for fear, the laughter is more explosive, but leaves you all the more bare for the next terror.
I think I should stick to comedies. I feel too much.
Labels: Affective cocktails, In Bruges
posted by Diorissi at 10:16 AM
3 Comments:
This begins to explain something I've long been thinking about ironic, "cool" films with a lot of violence (such as Reservoir Dogs) ... that we laugh at one violence, whereas underneath that, and beneath the layer of irony, lies a much more complex violence. You put this well in affective terms.
Oh I like that comment, Ib.
Now that's really interesting because irony did seem a good escape for Sisyphus, from an insoluble but(with irony) not intolerable situation. But those creating films with ironic depth, as you say, visit a deep-level violence upon us. They have us.
I wonder if they produce in us the circs that made irony come to work so well for them, as a way to make something bearable? Or a tangled pleasure too?
There is a reflective distance that irony and humour affords that seems like such a cheat to me.
I do say in my profile that I am unfashionably earnest. I'm just proving it!
I've discovered I'm not the only one who thought this a fairly violent film...
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