Satire and parody are both modes of comedy that typically offer pointed critiques of their targets. As King notes in this week's reading, while satire calls attention to social and political issues that are circulating within the public discourse, parody deconstructs form and aesthetics (107). Parody comes from the Latin root "para," which means beside, but also against. With this in mind, parody typically borrows formalistic elements from its source references, using these conventions to set up audience expectations for the inevitable reversal of the punchline. In doing so, parody effectively makes fun of its source while also paying it a form of tribute. In other words, parody is indeed beside and against that which it parodies.
When Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker wrote Airplane!, they used the script for the film Zero Hour as a template, basically just taking each scene and rewriting it as a comedy. The underlying narratives were actually so similar that they ended up buying the rights to Zero Hour just to avoid any potential copyright claims. Keep in mind, disaster movies were still extremely popular at this time, but after Airplane! exposed some of the clichés that were the bread and butter of this subgenre, this type of movie quickly faded from popularity. In a similar respect, it can be argued that the Austin Powers movies effectively forced the James Bond franchise to take itself a bit more seriously by calling attention to some of the more absurd elements contained within these films.
In this sense, parodies form part of a system of checks and balances that help keep the industry from relying too much on formulaic conventions, and this type of motion picture has been around for nearly as long as film itself. Back in 1903, Edwin Porter's landmark film The Great Train Robbery offered a significant step forward in the evolution of what a film could be, and two years later, Porter made a parody of his own movie called The Little Train Robbery, which was basically the same idea but with children in all of the principle roles. Similarly, in 1916, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. starrred in a Sherlock Holmes parody called The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, in which he plays a detective who is far more interested in consuming cocaine and opiates than he is in solving crimes. Back in 1916, hardcore drugs were apparently hilarious.
Parody generally requires some knowledge of its source material, but not always. We don't need to know that Fairbanks is dressed like Sherlock Holmes or that Holmes was also a heavy cocaine user (which he referred to as his "seven percent solution" in the books) but to possess such knowledge only deepens our appreciation for the parody. Similarly, you don't need to have seen the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (or the similar scene in The Untouchables) to find humor in its parody as it appears in Naked Gun 33 1/3, but it certainly makes the scene all that much funnier.
On the other hand, sometimes knowing the source material is kind of the joke in and of itself. I'm looking at you, Family Guy. The same could be said for any number of recent parody films, including some of those mentioned in the text, such as Meet the Spartans or Scary Movie. These movies are scattershot approaches to parody in which virtually every joke is a reference to some other product of popular culture. Scary Movie is a particularly interesting example because it is essentially a parody of Scream (among other films), which is itself a parody of the teen-horror film subgenre. Each of these examples functions on the assumption that the audience shares a common knowledge of these pop culture references. They are all in on the joke, so to speak.
King briefly discusses the relationship between postmodernism and parody, suggesting that these films have particularly found resonance in what is sometimes referred to as the postmodern era. This term requires a bit of explanation.
To understand postmodernism, we must first discuss modernism, which was a movement in various forms of art (and the criticism of these arts) in the early twentieth century. Modernism championed the subjective over the objective (how we see is more important than what we see), and it rejected traditional ideas of what art was supposed to be. Modern art was intended to challenge its viewer, just as the works of authors like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were meant to intellectually engage (and sometimes frustrate) the reader through literary devices such as unreliable narrators and stream-of-consciousness prose. Modernism had a tendency to demonstrate an awareness of its own artificiality and a celebration of form over content. This is particularly evident in the works of the surrealists and dadaists. It was "art for art's sake" (which happens to appear in Latin above MGM's logo as Ars Gratia Artis). As a movement, modernism was a product of the Enlightenment, which was basically the idea behind most of western culture: that human beings can improve their standard of living through the attainment and proliferation of knowledge. By sharing our various understandings of the world, we can all move forward in pursuit of some absolute truth.
That said, the "modern" age in this sense is often thought to have ended when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan. To many, this was a Pandora's Box that once opened, it can never be closed. Rather than being used to promote a greater good, human knowledge, as manifested in the creation of this incredible weapon, could in fact prove to be the end of humanity. With the project of modernism declared dead at the scene, we entered the era of the postmodern.
This was the position taken by thinkers such as Jean-Françoit Lyotard, who suggested that the Enlightenment itself was a "metanarrative," and as such, it was not a law of human nature but rather, a creation of human design. He did not believe that humans could not ever attain absolute truth, because such a thing did not exist. According to Lyotard, the only thing that we know for sure is that we don't really know anything. As you can imagine, postmodernists are a lot of fun at parties.
Jean Baudrillard, another French philosopher in the post-WWII era, took this a step further. He believed that we live in a culture of "hyperreality," in which representations of the real have replaced that which actually is. In other words, our sense of reality is entirely a human construct. To put this in perspective, imagine if you had never had buttered popcorn before and someone gave you a Jelly Belly that was that flavor. As far as you know, that jelly bean is buttered popcorn.
As a result of this immersive hyperreality, we have lost the ability to distinguish between real and illusion, because fundamentally, everything we know is an illusion. To Baudrillard, this notion is reinforced by the fact that our culture feeds upon itself, recycling the same ideas over and over, until these representations have come to replace the reality that they initially signified. There is no ultimate truth, because everything we know is a fabrication, a symbolic representation of the real.
This brings us back to parody. Filmmakers tend to go to great lengths to make their audiences forget that they are watching a movie. This is why lens flares are generally frowned upon and why editing is often treated as an invisible art; when done well, audiences don't even notice it. Filmmaking is, after all, the art of storytelling through illusion, and it is usually meant to be an immersive experience, not unlike reality itself.
These two ways of looking at parody are echoed in the King book, where he says that, "Theorists who consider parody in a postmodern context have been split as elsewhere on the question of whether parody has radical/critical deconstructive or uncritical/reactionary affirmative implications" (120). The question on the table is: does parody make fun of its source or celebrate it?
In most cases, I think the answer to this question is both. Sometimes, as in Hot Fuzz, it leans more toward the idea of paying homage; Edgar Wright is clearly a fan of the buddy-cop subgenre. Conversely, Airplane! is kind of ruthless in its deconstruction of the source material. As for I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, I'd say that this falls somewhere closer to the middle (especially compared to Black Dynamite, which is also a parody of blaxplotation films, but which seems to be paying tribute to its sources more than it is making fun of them). With any kind of parody, though, in order for it to be effective on that level, the filmmakers have to embrace some of the signifiers of the works that are being parodied. In other words, Airplane! functions as a parody largely because it looks a lot like an actual disaster movie, just as Hot Fuzz takes on many of the characteristics of the very action movies that it is parodying.
The films that we are watching this week all contain elements of satire and parody, and they are all, on some level, about the process of filmmaking. They are: The Player, After the Fox and Be Kind, Rewind. We could have an entire film course that just focuses on movies about movies, as this is only a very small sample of what is out there. It's probably not all that surprising to know that Hollywood likes making movies about itself. I think part of the reason for this goes back to the often misunderstood adage of "write what you know." We must not, after all, discount the value of imagination.
As discussed on week five, movies often form a significant part of our public discourse. Self-reflexive films like those that we are watching this week generally have something to say about how movies are made and/or received. With this in mind, please answer the following screening question, the response to which is due on Sunday, February 28 at 6:00 pm:
What are some of the elements of both satire and parody in the film that you chose to write about, and what do you think the filmmakers are trying to say about the filmmaking process?
Make sure that your response demonstrates an understanding of the difference between satire and parody. As for the second part of the question, this may require some outside research. As always, I highly recommend that you read this week's student blog posts as a starting point.
Enjoy this week's films. Don't forget to read chapters 14-20 in the Misch book (pg. 83-126).
The following students are exempt from responding to the screening question, as they are assigned blog posts:
Sam Bodette - Biography (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Paige Boos - Review of Reviews (Harold and Maude)
Isaac Bouyack - Review of Reviews (When Harry Met Sally)
Finn Burres - Review of Reviews (Punchdrunk Love)
Richard Cole - Biography (Nora Ephron)
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