Rick Alverson's 2012 film
The Comedy screened at Sundance last year and was On Demand before it ever reached theaters across the country. This isn't an uncommon fate for low budget, independent films, and, in fact, this film probably fared better than most of its ilk. That said, its scope was still tiny and its audiences selective.
The Comedy, though, is an important film in a certain sense, and its recent release on Netflix will make it more accessible than it has been since its release. I have to qualify its importance because it's overtly aimed at hipsters (I'll spare all of us the debate about what actually makes a hipster, the resistance to the label by the people to whom it applies, etc), and while these people only make up a tiny fraction of the population, the appropriation of the hipster image is in full force right now, and while we get thirty second portraits of happy couples in scoop beanies driving across the country with Siri guiding them,
The Comedy provides a satisfying foil to this kind of peaceful, attractive portrayal. This reflection may be a year late, but
The Comedy remains a peripheral-at-best work despite the dearth of critiques of how the hipster image has been commercialized and idealized in recent years. Hipster culture has moved from the periphery closer and closer to the center of our pop-culture consciousness: Arcade Fire and the Black Keys win Grammies, Justin Vernon teams up with Kanye,
Moonrise Kingdom opens in theaters nationwide, etc. In the past three years, HBO has given us
Girls and
Bored to Death, two hispterized, Brooklyn-centric comedies that were met with relative praise and popularity, and while it's fun to watch Ted Danson and Jason Schwartzman smoke pot in the bathroom of a posh private art gallery, there's a vacuousness that leaves me feeling empty, even in the picturesque Park Slope collection of brownstones and brick front townhouses.
The Comedy changes the terms of hipster representation. By shrouding the film in a fog of detachment, irony, and caustic wit, Rick Alverson actually situates the stakes of the film on a deeper level than we've seen in this context.
The Comedy is about what happens when irony and sarcasm become so deeply ingrained in a person's worldview that they eradicate the substance of that person. Tim Heidecker, somewhat surprisingly, deftly portrays Swanson, the thirty-five year old trust-fund Williamsburg hipster whose empty existence the films tracks for about ninety minutes.
From the opening scene we know that this won't be glamorous portrait of Brooklyn life. Swanson sits next to his comatose father, sipping whiskey and talking about prolapsed anuses with his father's nurse. The film progresses by oscillating between this type of semi-vulgar, aimless dialogue (which, with a few exceptions, is very well crafted) and Swanson's anti-climactic romantic exploits and adventures through Williamsburg. There isn't a beginning, a middle, and an end in this film, we're just given a brief window into Swanson's life that seems pretty constitutive of what he's been doing and will be doing. The conflict that should provide the climax of the film is mellowed to the point that it's not immediately identifiable and then stretched out to span the entire ninety minutes. Ultimately, this is the real story of Swanson's life: he exists in extreme, trust-funded comfort that in turn makes him continually uncomfortable, and we as viewers are privy to all of the emotional and intellectual layers he places on top of this discomfort. While a show like
Bored to Death was able to create what most all good TV shows create--a sense of comfort in the bases of the show, in that case Schwartzman's loft and Danson's penthouse--in the ideal hipster locale,
The Comedy does the opposite. The two bases here are Swanson's house boat and his friends' loft, and the most cringe-worthy moment of the film takes place in Swanson's bedroom: he brings a girl back, they flirt and are in the initial throes of hooking up when the girl has a seizure. Swanson just sits and watches the girl seize with a blank look on his face. The sequence continues for much longer than what is needed to prove the point, and the viewer is left with alternating shots of Swanson dazedly looking on and the girl in the midst of a seizure. Beyond the very aggressive ways a scene like this induces discomfort in the viewer, this is also the moment that the film was leading to: the moment where the irony that Swanson blankets his life in becomes detestable, and how totally Swanson is submerged in it becomes apparent. He's been so sucked in to this detached, caustic worldview that there is nothing that can draw him out of it. In films and TV shows that capitalize on the trendiness of the hipster image, there's always a latent acknowledgement that the characters are still human, that skinny jeans and irony are a gloss they put over insecurities or boredom as an act. Swanson is a character whose identity has been so ingrained in this cultural figure that the image has taken over the substance: his caustic, offensive dialogue and his aimless trysts aren't a facet of his image, but the substance of his character.
Now we come all the back to where we started,
The Comedy as a comment on the way the hipster image has been exploited in popular culture. Swanson parades around Williamsburg in clothes that are two sizes too small for his rotund figure, he isn't a struggling artist or a young man consumed by existential wanderlust, but a trust fund kid who never found a path in life. He wears the clothes, listens to the music (the film is scored almost entirely by artists on the Jagjaguwar label), lives in the hip place, is friends with James Murphy (even he isn't ever identified as such), and embraces the irony, but he doesn't fit with what we've seen in Brooklyn-centric movies or shows. You could never use Tim Heidecker in short shorts to sell iPhones. He is the flip-side of the Brooklyn coin. In parsing out my reaction to this film, I was struck by how much I ended up caring about what happened to Swanson (more than he could ever care), and that is maybe the most compelling aspect of this film: it provides a convincing critique of the space occupied by hipster culture in society, but it manages to rope its viewers into the characters as well. This is also a film about someone who has been utterly unable to find his way in life, and has retreated instead of grown. The closing scenes provide some hope that Swanson find his way back to authenticity, but it is immediately undercut. One of Swanson's friends puts on a slideshow of images from his childhood. The mood is somber and the group looks on with wistful looks and their faces, but this moment of ostensible self-reflection is punctured when the slides begin to alternate between pornographic images and the pictures from childhood. The reflective air deflates and we're back where we started. The final scene muddles this structure but proves to be just as frustrating. Swanson rides his fixie from Brooklyn to the beach, heaving and coughing the whole way. He arrives exhausted and sweaty and jumps into the ocean next to a small child. The film then ends. I think it would be too easy to make the reading of this scene into some sort of moment of change. It seems, rather, that this is just another thing he does, just like he helps a team of landscapers for no discernable reason in the second scene. We can hope that there is indeed some kind of Christian imagery involved in the staging of the final scene, but the film tells us throughout that change is illusory and redemption doesn't exist. In the end, though--if it wasn't apparent from this review--I found myself rooting for Swanson, who is, by all standards, a hateable character, and this attests to the power of the film and the pervasiveness of what it sets itself against. So, if you find yourself nauseated by the flannel and facial hair in cellphone commercials,
The Comedy is a satisfying and well crafted foil, and you probably haven't seen it.