Produced by: Sean Baker, Shih-Chihg Tsou, Alex Saks
Starring: Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Suzanna Son, Shih-Ching Tsou, Parker Bigham, Brenda Deiss, Ethan Darbone, Brittany Rodriguez, Judy Hill, Marion Lambert.
‘Why are you here?’
Bruised and sleeping on a bus, Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) is back in Texas.
He fronts up at his ex’s mum’s house – ‘What are you doing here?’ asks Lexi (Bree Elrod). Because she knows Mikey way too well.
But Mikey knows which buttons to press. He’s a fast talking, ex-porn star who’s ‘been blessed’ with a decent package and good looks. And no moral compass.
He’ll say and do anything to survive.
He’ll f*#k his ex-wife just to sleep in a bed, deal pot to make money. And seduce a seventeen-year-old girl because she’s smoke’n hot.
Meet, Strawberry (Suzanna Son). Sweet and not-so-innocent, she’s a young girl who ‘likes men not boys.’
She doesn’t stand a chance. Because Mikey has decided he likes her. He’s going to make her famous.
‘What did the donuts do on their first date?’ Mikey asks Strawberry – she works at a donut shop.
‘They glazed into each other’s eyes,’ he smiles.
I could kinda get behind this guy down-on-his-luck. But when he starts to charm this young girl, I started to cringe.
There’s a glib lightness to the film but underneath there’s a dark reality.
‘Your mother hates me.’
‘She hated you. She died,’ says Lonnie (Ethan Darbone). He’s the nextdoor neighbour.
It’s a sad place, with smoke stacks of oil refineries blowing pollution into the air virtually in the backyard. The emergency test announcement can be heard in the bedroom.
It’s like this chancer brings light into the lives of these people because they have so little and he’s so nice and polite. They don’t see what’s happening at first because he lifts them up, shines a light. Until suddenly they see how much he takes. When it’s too late.
I didn’t find the film funny or light. Like Mikey, there’s a dark layer underneath shown in a-day-in-a-life style of filming that’s really about prostitution, drugs, sickness, poverty, betrayal, fake valour, selfishness and complete blindness and lack of empathy.
Not that Red Rocket is a badly made film. The casting is brilliant. But it was like it was up to the audience to decide how things were going to work out, depending if you’re an optimist, meaning, Strawberry will be OK. She’ll be discovered as a musician. Someone aside from Mikey will see her worth. Or not, only the worst is to come. And I lean towards the cynical these days making me see only bad things to then realise how dangerous and blind this character Mikey is as he continues to politely destroy.
It was disconcerting because the film is from the point of view of Mikey. So I could see what he’s doing is wrong but he can’t see the damage, so I got angry at this douche bag and wanted to yell and kick him in the guts. He turned up
He turned up with bruises and you get to know why, well pretty much straight away.
I get the layers of the film, but it annoyed me and in the end, I was left feeling angry.
Sound: Guillaume Le Braz, Alexis Place, Gadou Naudin, Cyril Holtz
Starring: Jean Dujardin, Adele Haenel
French with English subtitles
‘I swear never to wear a jacket as long as I live.’
Deerskin first introduces Georges (Jean Dujardin) wearing a green jacket with three plastic buttons. He parks on the wrong side of the petrol bowser. And looking at his reflection in the car window he frowns at what he sees. Then he flushes the jacket in the public toilet.
Yep, Georges is losing it.
The music flares.
And I think to myself, I already like this movie.
The film is character driven and continues to follow Georges. But there’s another character in this movie. A jacket. We meet the beast. The new jacket: 100% Deerskin.
The way the film flashes to a live deer in the wilderness seals it somehow. Just how cool the jacket is. But It’s not. It’s made from the skin of this beautiful innocent animal (see previous flash to said deer in the wilderness). And, it’s got… fringes. But Georges LOVES it: ‘Style de tueur (Killer style),’ he says, looking in the mirror.
It just makes me grin.
After that Georges keeps driving.
‘You’re no-where Georges. You no longer exist.’ That’s what his ex-wife tells him, over the phone.
Georges ends up in the bar of a small village, where he meets the barmaid, Denise (Adele Haenel). She’s been burnt by love too. But Georges is a brand-new man in his deerskin jacket. He tells Denise he’s a film maker.
It makes sense to say he’s a film maker. He’s been recording film all day, so it’s kinda the same. ‘No it’s not,’ says the jacket.
Instead of getting to know an available woman, Georges gets to know the jacket as his relationship with this 100% deerskin jacket becomes the subject of Georges’ movie to be.
Killer style indeed.
Director and writer Quentin Dupieux says, ‘I wanted to film insanity.’
And Georges has lost it. But wow, he’s really enthusiastic about it.
The way Georges insanity is shown is somehow shocking and hilarious.
It’s the same dark humour used in, The Lobster, but less confronting even though there’s more killing… And this whole jacket business is just so ticklish.
Jean Dujardin (who plays Georges in the film) explains it’s Quentin’s use of space that creates the comedy, ‘It’s in those moments of hesitation that the comedy and drama blend. You’re right on the borderline. All those scenes, for example, in which Georges demands money, or can’t pay. Quentin takes the time to stretch out the sense of malaise, to allow for some lingering doubt. Is Georges going to turn violent? Weep? Laugh? You never know what will happen. Time stands still for a moment, and those little agonies make me want to die laughing.’
Then there’s Georges dream in life – for him, it’s all about wearing this deerskin jacket. To be the only person wearing… a jacket. It doesn’t make sense. But from the perspective of Georges, as he makes a film about his dream, it kinda does.
The character Denise gets it. She reckons the jacket is like a shell to protect the wearer from the outside world.
I think it’s because Georges hates who he used to be, wearing that green blazer with the three plastic buttons.
Or perhaps Deerskin is just a weirdo movie that’s put together in a way that somehow makes sense.
Whether you analyse the layers or not, I was thoroughly absorbed and entertained from start to finish.
I’ve been thinking about writing this article since watching the thought-provoking horror, Us (2019).
Featuring doppelgängers, the film shows the horror of a reflection taking the place of our self. Scary stuff. But what I enjoyed most about this film was the humour.
The film juxtaposes normal behaviour set in a bizarre world where a copy of self is killing all the other selves.
Seeing a family fighting for their lives to compete to sit in the front seat of the car, the winner based on who has killed the most people/doppelgängers? Hilarious.
There’s also the additional delight of husband Gabe with a tissue stuck up his bloody nostril stating things like, ‘Almost looks like some kind of fucked-up art instalment.’
Director, writer and producer Jordan Peele states, “Horror and comedy are both great ways of exposing how we feel about things […] The comedy that emerges from a tense moment or scene in a horror film is necessary for cleaning the emotional palate, to release the tension. It gives your audience an opportunity to emotionally catch up and get prepared for the next run of terror.”1
Winston Duke really nailed the father character, Gabe; and I appreciated this layer of bizarre humour to lighten the strange – as Jorden states above, to, ‘clean the palate’.
But what does this ‘clean the palate’ actually mean?
And what is it about gallows humour that I find so funny?
An article published in Nature Reviews / Neuroscience, ‘The Neural Basis of Humour Processing’ (Pascal Vrticka, et al (2013)) concludes there are, ‘two core processes of humour appreciation: incongruity detection and resolution (the cognitive component); and a feeling of mirth or reward (the emotional component). Whereas the cognitive component seems to rely principally on activity in the [temporo-occipito-parietal junction] TOPJ, the emotional component appears to involve mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic pathways and the amygdala.’ 2
Yu-Chen Chan, et al summarize and further research the comprehension-elaboration theory of humour in their article, ‘Segregating the comprehension and elaboration processing of verbal jokes: An fMRI study’ (2012)3. Highlighting that ‘not all situations involving the detection and resolution of incongruities are humorous.’
They go on to quote Wyer and Collin’s comprehension-elaboration theory of humor (1992), where ‘The elaboration follows comprehension, involves the conscious generation of inferences of features not made explicit during comprehension as well as further thoughts stimulated by the newly understood situation, and elicits the unconscious or conscious feeling of amusement. These elaborations effectively involve appraising the stimulus event for their humourous content.
The amount of humour elicited is a function of the amount of elaboration of the event and its implications that occur subsequent to its reinterpretation.
The affective feeling of humor results from, and may overlap with continued elaboration of the event.’
So, humour in the setting of a horror evokes further elaboration not just because of the incongruent, it’s the nature of the incongruent: normality in a setting of the horrific.
The elaboration, further cognition of the joke makes the humour darkly funny.
In the setting of a horror film, there’s also a layering to dark humour that sparks the cognitive on the foundation of a previously evoked response, like fear.
As stated in the article, ‘The role of the amygdala in human fear: automatic detection of threat’ (Ohman. A (2005))4, ‘Behavioral data suggest that fear stimuli automatically activate fear and capture attention. This effect is likely to be mediated by a subcortical brain network centered on the amygdala […] When the stimulus conditions allow conscious processing, the amygdala response to feared stimuli is enhanced and a cortical network that includes the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula is activated. However, the initial amygdala response to a fear-relevant but non-feared stimulus (e.g. pictures of spiders for a snake phobic) disappears with conscious processing and the cortical network is not recruited. Instead there is activation of the dorsolateral and orbitofrontal cortices that appears to inhibit the amygdala response. The data suggest that activation of the amygdala is mediated by a subcortical pathway, which passes through the superior colliculi and the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus before accessing the amygdala, and which operates on low spatial frequency information.’
This is interesting with the view that further processing of a scene in a scary film, provoked by an incongruent behaviour, will break the activation of the amygdala and be, ‘mediated by a subcortical pathway, which passes through the superior colliculi and the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus’ and would give the effect of tension relief (‘cleansing the palate’) and therefore, humour.
The article goes on to describe the activation of the fear response, like increased heart-rate and respiration (as we’ve all experienced in particularly scary movies): ‘The amygdala consists of several separate cell groups (nuclei), which receive input from many different brain areas. Highly processed sensory information from various cortical areas reaches the amygdala through its lateral and basolateral nuclei. In turn, these nuclei project to the central nucleus of the amygdala, which then projects to hypothalamic and brainstem target areas that directly mediate specific signs of fear and anxiety.’
You can imagine sitting in the cinema, immersed in a scary scene that has evoked the fear response: the rapid heart-beat, sitting on the edge-of-your-seat. That automatic response has kicked in.
So, those jumps you get in a horror are from that ingrained automatic response – like a reflex.
With conscious processing the fear is either enhanced through a clever script that gives layers to the idea of the horror (mediated through the amygdala), or is consciously processed as being, just a film (activation of the dorsolateral and orbitofrontal cortices that appears to inhibit the amygdala response): this isn’t real.
So either the data is further processed, where, ‘a cortical network that includes the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula is activated.’
Or isn’t: ‘the initial amygdala response to a fear-relevant but non-feared stimulus (e.g. pictures of spiders for a snake phobic) disappears with conscious processing and the cortical network is not recruited.’
I think dark humour occurs somewhere in this cognition. In the further elaboration.
The fear response is already activated, through something that automatically evokes the fear-response, doppelgängers for example; then the data is further analysed when the setting is incongruent to the behaviour of the character, leading to a release of tension on the background of an already evoked fear response. With further cognition and elaboration the incongruent is resolved by processing through memories, past experiences, so the data is personally related in the context of a horror making the humour: darkly funny.
So, humour instead of a fear response including that extra processing leads to tension release and to a layered emotional response giving a fear response, mirth, therefore creating dark humour that tickles because of its complexity, its, elaboration.
But dark humour isn’t just humour in horror.
Dark humour can be satire. Dark humour can be about a cop trying to perform a dance in memory of his lost mother… At her funeral.
I recently reviewed the film, Thunder Road (2019), finding the performance and script from writer/director/lead, Jim Cummings genius. I’m still giggling about this cop falling apart because the character is so sincere and so tragic, it’s funny.
Jim was interviewed on a Podcast by Giles Alderson, and he talks about his intention to straddle both the tragic and humour of this cop having a breakdown, stating the audience will reward you when more than one lobe of the brain is engaged.5
The writing and performance of this film is brilliant because of the empathy evoked by seeing this guy grieving against the incongruity of his abnormal behaviour.
It’s the processing involved while seeing this super-nice guy, doing his absolute best in the worst of circumstances, then just lose his grip that tickles: standing, about to throw a child’s school desk, the teacher subtly pocketing the school safety-scissors included.
His mother is dead, his siblings don’t show at the funeral, his wife has left him, his daughter can’t stand him and is acting out, making statements like, ‘I hope I get mum’s boobs.’ And his job as a cop is emotionally draining and stressful.
His life is eating him alive.
But Jim continues to try to do the right thing only to end up with ripped pants.
Don’t get me wrong, the humour here is subtle and complex – like the way Jim is described, ‘Everyone grieves differently. Everyone’s unique.’
You can just see it – how the nice people describe someone losing the plot at a funeral.
I’m still giggling because the film shows how difficult life can be and how ridiculous.
So based on the same principle of processing the incongruent on the foundation of a fear response, here the emotional centre is engaged, in empathy for this guy at his mother’s funeral.
The humour is based on the incongruent because this guy is not functioning as a normal human being.
Then the nature of his behaviour is elaborated, because of the sadness and tragedy and empathy for this guy doing his absolute best.
The sadness and tragedy is modified by the incongruent behaviour, leading to further cognition, coming back as humour on a foundation of sadness that leads to elaboration creating that dark humour.
It. Just. TICKLES.
Taking the idea further: if there’s not enough tension for humour to release through incongruity, or if the difference isn’t enough; and if there’s no attachment to the character (leading to further elaboration), the attempt at humour will miss the mark.
The response will be flat: it’s just more data that flows through, marking time.
And if the humour doesn’t require further processing, and really misses that tension relief, it becomes simple. Like slapstick. And that’s if there’s a good performance from the actor.
If not, the end result will turn the audience against the storyline because the film will be a boring experience or the laughter will be directed at the film, not with it.
Watching a film that gets dark humour just right, for me, is a genuine pleasure – who can forget the gloriously funny, bad luck of, O. B Jackson (James Parks) in The Hateful Eight (2016)?!
Tarantino is definitely one of those writers and directors who knows how mix up the violent, the unexpected warmth and intellect with the incongruent.
Think about the relentless violence in John Wick 3 (2019) that saturates to the extent it’s funny.
It’s the unexpected bloody action happening to a well-liked character that absorbs with the incongruent of a deadly killer who loves his dog making John Wick a memorable and likable character adding those touches of joyful dark humour.
I acknowledge that not everyone enjoys this style of (sometimes bloody) humour – and there’s further research about the different theories of humour; think of humour used as aggression (and why people will feel superior and laugh at a movie, perhaps) and humour used in sexual selection (I found that funny too! Maybe we should go out…).
As a side note, the sexual selection theory is a concept well illustrated in the Coen Brothers’ film, Burn After Reading (2008), with the character Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) taking online matches to the movies to see if they laugh at the same joke.
A nice illustration and frankly, not a bad filtering method to find the right partner.
Whether you like dark humour or not, I’m sure all would agree that those added complicated interactions of cognition and emotion make watching a film a more rewarding experience, and one that certainly keeps me coming back for more.
2. Vrticka P, Black J. M. and Reiss A. L. 2013 ‘The Neural Basis of Humour Processing’ Nature Reviews / Neuroscience, Science and Society PERSPECTIVES 14 860 – 868.
3. Chan Y, Chou T, Chen, H and Liang Kl 2012 ‘Segregating the comprehension and elaboration processing of verbal jokes: An fMRI study’ NeuroImage Dec, 61: 899-906.
4. Ohman. A, 2005 ‘The role of the amygdala in human fear: automatic detection of threat’ Psychoneuroendocrinology, 10: 953-958.
5. Giles Alderson (2019) ‘Jim Cummings On Writing, Directing and Starring in Thunder Road’, The Filmakers Podcast May 29, available at: apple.co/2EydVIz
