Wednesday, August 26, 2015

On My Mind: The Art of Meta


Yesterday, I reviewed the movie Kingsman: The Secret Service. In short, it is fantastic. It is also very aware of itself. Very quickly, it finds itself among my favorites of one of my favorite types of film: films that are clearly in on the joke with the audience. I am much more lenient with these types of movies. There are lots of them. If you've come across anything I've ever written about Wes Craven's Scream, you know how highly I think of it. In my opinion, it's my favorite slasher flick of all-time, by a substantial margin. This is coming from someone who is a fan of such movies. Pretty sure I've seen well over a hundred of them. I was practically raised by Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. Why Scream?

Looking across genres might provide at least part of the answer. Similar films are among my favorites in a number of them. Disaster flicks? Airplane! Western? Blazing Saddles. Police Procedurals? The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! Blaxploitation? Black Dynamite. The list goes on. These movies fall under the broad umbrella of films categorized as spoofs. However, any old spoof won't do. I've seen a few of the Wayans Brothers efforts like Scary Movie, Dance Flick, A Haunted House, and a few others that they inspired. Over the last few years I have tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to stay away from those. The ones I love have some things in common. They know the rules of whatever they're making fun of, yet breaks them on purpose while still telling its own story within them. Another important factor is that the movie lets the viewers know that it is fully aware of what it is doing, allowing us to play along.

Scream: A bunch of friends watching a movie while in a movie.
The Wayans Brothers spoofs that I mentioned are some of the most self-aware movies around and gladly let the audience know this up front. Despite this, they fail miserably. Even for people who love them, they fade from memory shortly after the closing credits. The reason is they forget the most important of the traits laid out in the previous paragraph. They neglect to tell their own story. This is integral to making a good spoof because it gives us characters to root for and against in the movie we're watching. Sidney Prescott of Scream and its sequels is an iconic horror protagonist. The romance between Frank and Jane in The Naked Gun franchise is a great one. In lieu of giving us anything to call its own, the Wayans' spoofs just retell the story of some other movie people already love. Honestly, they don't even retell the stories as much as they just have them playing while they try to inject jokes along the way. The people making these movies don't seem to care what happens in them, as long as it's funny. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because the primary purpose of a comedy to make us laugh. Unfortunately, they have little to no idea how to fulfill even that most basic requirement.

In an attempt to create humor, the Wayans' spoofs take a much appreciated all-out approach, employing any number of gross-out gags and blatantly sexual innuendo. Some of these can be, and are, funny. However, even the best of these is limited by the overwhelming number of similar jokes, the lack of a compelling narrative, and their reliance on the audience to have seen too many specific films. That first one is self-explanatory. The jokes happen in such rapid succession, it becomes a kinetic assault on the audience, invoking disgust, exhaustion, and laughter in varying measures. The narrative void causes that reliance on other movies. This is their biggest problem. With better spoofs, the viewer merely needs a working knowledge of the genre in question. One need not be an expert in slasher flicks to enjoy Scream. You only have to have seen a few random ones to have a grasp on genre tropes to recognize when they're being sent up. To get the most out of Scary Movie, for instance, the viewer needs to have watched dozens of specific films because it makes very direct references to all of them. By direct, I mean entire scenes are lifted with a few seconds of supposed humor tacked on. Scary Movie is doubly frustrating because the movie it pilfers from most, the oft and aforementioned Scream, is already a spoof. This means we have an entire movie trying a make a joke out what is already funny. Both films play fast and loose with genre conventions. The difference is that Scream is a skillful navigation of them, utilizing some, circumventing others, and always having a reason to do either. Scary Movie haphazardly discards them all. A mess is left in its wake.

It doesn't have to be this way. The Wayans themselves know how to make an excellent spoof. They did it way back in 1988 with I'm Gonna Git You Sucka That movie emulates and pokes fun at Blaxploitation within the telling of its own tale. To "get it" the viewer doesn't need to have seen any particular film, only have a basic understanding of the genre. This makes the gags feel self-contained even though many are clearly inspired by movies such as Shaft, Cleopatra Jones, The Black Six, and Mean Johnny Barrows. Direct references to those, or any other films, doubles the enjoyment for those who have seen them. In Scary Movie, and similar titles we get the opposite affect. They are so dependent on specific knowledge that not having it renders the viewer lost. The different approaches yield vastly different results. I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a work of art inspired by and simultaneously skewering what came before it. Scary Movie takes a pre-existing work and draws a "funny" mustache on it.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka: When the Wayans got it right.
Moments directly referenced to and/or ripped from other films can work, if done properly. the buddy cop/action flick inspired Hot Fuzz does this brilliantly. It apes an iconic, if nonsensical, moment from 1991's Point Break. The joke works because Hot Fuzz spends practically the entire movie prepping the audience for it, rather than suddenly throwing it at them. By the time it happens, you needn't have seen Point Break at to get it. Another way to work in direct references is within the conversations characters are having. Scream does this on a fairly constant basis. Most famously, it completely spoils the ending of the original Friday the 13th. Here, in 2015, Kingsman: The Secret Service does it less often, but similarly accomplishes the task of letting the viewer know that the people in the film "get it." The hero and the villain meet for dinner. Each is aware of the other's role, and possibly aware that the other one knows their role. Their topic of discussion: how such meetings play out in Bond movies. It is an ingenious moment of self-awareness pointing out the absurdity of what happens in the Bond flicks as well as what's taking place right in front of us without forcing us to have seen a specific Bond movie to understand this. It only requires we have a basic understanding of how those films work.

Understanding how their chosen genre works is key for good spoof. The best ones let the audience know it's all a ruse, but still gets them invested in the fate of the people on the screen. It takes skill, intimate knowledge of, and a healthy respect and love for whatever is being ridiculed to pull off such a feat. When all of these things magically come together, the people in the movie become more human because they are clearly part of the same pop-culture infused world we are. Their knowledge of being in a movie about precisely the thing they're making fun of injects them with a heightened level of sarcasm which I respond to and occasionally employ in my own life. It's no wonder my favorite part of my favorite play, Shakespeare's Hamlet is "the play within the play." In that scene, the protagonist becomes more real than at any other time. Sure, he is dealing with problems I couldn't imagine having. At that moment, though, he is just like me. He is just a guy watching a play.

Hamlet: "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

11 comments:

  1. Great post! I suppose my favorite 'meta' movies would be all the Scream movies except the third one, 22 Jump Street and Hot Fuzz

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  2. Well technically, Hamlet isn't watching the play... he's watching the King watch the play. ;-)

    GREAT piece, Dell! You are so dead on about the Scary Movie films and why they don't work as well as things like Scream and Hot Fuzz. It's funny, though, because they're basically aping the formula pioneered by Zucker Abrams and Zucker on Airplane! - take a pre-existing film, insert wall-to-wall jokes, profit. Except that they the missed the one really key element to that formula working: Zero Hour, the film upon which Airplane! is based, is a TERRIBLE film to begin with, while also being completely representative of its genre. The problem with the Scary Movie films is that the films they're basically remaking aren't really terrible. Well, that and the over-abundance of potty humor, which is at most only funny 50% of the time. There are scenes in the first one that I love (black girl at the movies) and some inspired moments (the "Safety" and "Death" signs in the opening scene), but especially after the first two films, in order to find them funny, you really had to not only know the films they decided to spoof, but not like them. That's not the way to do a good spoof.

    My favorite meta movie is Adaptation.

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    1. Very true on Hamlet!

      Also a great point about Airplane! The Scary Movies just totally miss the boat.

      I still need to see Adaptation.

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  3. Lovely post! I have a soft spot for Scary Movie 1 & 2, so I can't say they failed, but the rest of them did. There's nothing more annoying than an unfunny spoof. I watched They Came Together last year and it was terrible. I enjoy movies that are self aware, like Kingsman and Scream, but come on, if your a spoof, the least you can do is be funny. Most are not.

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    1. Haven't seen They Came Together. Guess I'm glad I didn't. And yeah, unfunny spoofs are the worst.

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  4. I've not thought about meta movies in a really, really long time... When I was reading your post I was thinking to myself that a common trait of movies that are self aware is subtlety but just obvious enough not to leave the viewer behind. However, that's just not the case with Airplane! which is excellent. There are so many possible genres, scenarios, it's hard to pin down a winning formula.

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    1. So true. Airplane! and Scream, for instance go about it two entirely different ways. Both get excellent results.

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  5. Excellent article, Wendell! Would you put Cabin in the Woods in this category?

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    1. Absolutely!!! I love that film as well as Shaun of the Dead and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, to name some more horror.

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  6. Great post. I agree with many of the points you made about what makes a great spoof. I particularly like the comment about how a great spoof doesn't require intimate knowledge of any one film to be enjoyed. That's one of the reasons I like Scary Movie (the first two at least). I hadn't seen Scream or many horror movies but I got what it was making fun of. The cliches of girls falling and horny teenagers being horny. Of course, not having seen Scream at the time might have helped because I had nothing to compare it to. Have you seen a film called Top Secret? It starts Val Kilmer and is a spoof of the spy genre. If you haven't I highly recommend it. There's one joke in it, that still gets me laughing to this day. I love a film with a bit of self-awareness. 22 Jump Street, particularly with its end credits, was one of the best self-aware films I've seen in a while.

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