It's icky but Capra knew the taste of American audiences. Think of all those unlikely, "little" heroes and heroines who overcome the odds and achieve fill-in-the-blank, the Rockys and Norma Raes and Erin Brockoviches who show that the "wrong" man is really the right man. The idea that someone who is socially a "nobody" can accomplish anything is central to American identity, of course. But movies like It's a Wonderful Life and Rocky transmongrelize irony back into romance--a sentimental version of the modern romance of meritocracy. I'm all about meritocracy, but what I object to in these movies is the packaged way they celebrate the little guy's triumph, as if whatever he's accomplished isn't enough on its own terms but has to be pumped up so we can really feel how much it matters. These movies are built moment to moment out of realistic details but they falsify them in the very act of capturing them. That's the "magic" by which they get audiences to cheer.
Zwigoff's Bad Santa, from a script by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, starts out as brashly comic irony and keeps the needle in the groove nearly to the end of the record. It's an antidote to Miracle on 34th Street in which the Macy's Santa turns out to be the man himself. Billy Bob Thornton's Willie T. Soke, a professional department store Santa, is doubly fake: he not only isn't Santa, he and his hotheaded, foul-mouthed partner and front man Marcus (Tony Cox), a dwarf, hire on to a new store every winter and use their position as insiders to empty the store safe. (Marcus's wife spends December strolling through the store with a notepad in order to give him a list of specific merchandise to grab in addition.)
Willie, however, is a fall-down soak who couldn't be worse cast as the 19th-century Germanic-kitsch icon of the holiday. He's lean as a coyote and sports a permanent scowl under his stubble. He smokes and swears and staggers. The only thing that radiates off him (besides fumes) is a self-loathing so total it encompasses the entire population of the world and all possible experience. The only thing he appears to enjoy is anal sex, which Marcus has made him promise to restrict to the big-size ladies' dressing rooms. Most important, Willie is the least paternal Father Christmas imaginable--he allows the brats to tell him one thing they want, responds with barely concealed disgust, and shoves them on their bewildered way. And the kiddies don't even have to piss in Willie's lap because he's alcoholic enough to do that himself.
Article comments
1 - Al Barger
Really outstanding and thoughtful analysis, Alan. It's definitely got me thinking backwards through the Chaplin movies.
I tend to think of irony as a subset of humor, but your explanation of it doesn't seem to imply that at all. Most intriguing.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment. Irony has a lot of overlap with comedy, esp., I think because it works by incongruity, which is one of the main tools of comedy. Double Indemnity is a classic American example of the wrong man for the wrong job with the wrong outcome model of irony, is an ironic version of a tragic situation, and feels like a nightmare while it's happening, but when I think about it afterwards I always feel that I'm laughing with Billy Wilder at MacMurray's foolishness. Irony is also on a continuum with satire: irony is the more reticent, mysterious end, satire the more explicit end. Irony can also be grouped with comedy over the issue of the protagonist's status with respect to the audience: in irony and comedy we tend to look down at him whereas in tragedy and romance we look up at him. It's all pretty fluid, though--all the genres are constantly spilling over into each other. Makes it more interesting to think about.
3 - Eric Olsen
Thanks as always Alan, the book looks very impressive, feel free to link it from Amazon.
4 - Frantic Freddie
NO THANKS!