comedy and the impossibility of tragedy

Reading about Robert Altman’s masterpiece Nashville and the contemporary responses to it in this useful book.

One can analyze Nashville by splitting it into two impossible to separate but analytically useful levels of form and content. At the level of form Nashville is a film of laughter, a comedy—see the role played in it by contingency and cacophony, the loosening of the narrative and the relaxation (and oscillation) of the individual parts that compose it, amounting to a kind of comic carnival. At the level of content, however, we encounter something completely different. It is not comedy, but rather the impossibility of tragedy that is at the most immediate level the substance of this film. The impasse of any tragic affect is clearly the meaning of the last scene: “It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me//You might say that I ain’t free//But it don’t worry me,” where even the realization of the subject’s absolute lack of autonomy fails to produce at least a minimally sublime tragic breakdown and instead turns into an idiotic country song that spreads across the general panic of the collective. Incidentally, this second dimension, the impossibility of tragedy and the impasse of the sublime, is what Deleuze must have had in mind when he claimed at the end of Cinema 1 that New Hollywood films do not liberate us from clichés, but rather offer a kind of metacommentary on their all-pervasiveness.

Now, we can identify at least four possible reactions to this basic situation created by Altman’s film (comedy as form; end of tragedy as content). And insofar as Altman is symptomatic of a broader historical situation, these responses might also outline for us some more properly political or social orientations. (1) The arch-conservative is, of course, horrified by all this, and his immediate and panicked solution is to reaffirm tragedy and sublimity in the face of their utter impossibility (most of the time this has deadly consequences). In Hollywood, this is the attempt at once again giving birth to myth, embodied by the reorganization of the entire film industry around the blockbuster; in politics, it is the project for a New American Century, which starts to take shape around the same time. (2) The opposite position to the one of arch-conservatism is the liberal one. A liberal laughs, or rather giggles, but his response can be entirely contained by the level of the film’s content. That is, what amuses the liberal, and what a liberal will defend almost to the end (until only an arch-conservative can save him), is the failure of tragedy through which the world has to drag itself along, rather than the formal comedy of this world’s entire situation. In this, the specifically liberal form of moralism and the exclusively negative way in which all things sublime register in the liberal attitude can be recognized. Which, of course, also means that from the liberal side there is no positive or affirmative response to a film like Nashville. The collapse of everything tragic is the liberal’s ideal and native land. (3) The third position to identify would then be the one situated between these first two dominant positions: a position of liberal conservatism (or what in the US is typically called libertarianism). This is a position that is simultaneously dissatisfied with the failure of tragedy and yet impotent in its attempt at tragic reinvention. What it ends up doing, resentfully, is turning the comedy itself into a function of the failed tragic. A liberal conservative pretends to focus all of his energy on the operation that will unmask the sublime as essentially ridiculous, while in fact he hangs on to the sublime in its diminished form of prepackaged sentimentality in order to at the end pull it from his sleeve as some kind of a magical trump card. An example of this sort are the despicable “comedies” of someone like Adam Sandler. In his films the conservative content and values are mocked and ridiculed, and yet somehow manage to survive and come out on top, submitting and overpowering comedy, as the comic leash is pulled back just in time for a happy ending, and for the family, patriarchy, property, and class domination to be saved and justified. Sandler is the true inheritor of the world’s stupidity—insofar as submitting one's principle of form to the disavowed exigency of one’s content is precisely the mark of a truly stupid person. (4) Finally, one can imagine a fourth position, and this is perhaps the position of Altman himself in his other masterpiece, Short Cuts, which, on the contrary, attempts to turn the failure of tragedy into a function of a comedy of geological and planetary proportions. It seeks to reorganize the content (the impasse of tragedy represented by contemporary L.A. and its inhabitants) by submitting it to a formal principle that, while seeming rather close to it in its nature, is in fact its effective opposition. It is as though one were able to produce sublime effects by purely comical means. That, at least, seems to be the emancipatory promise of this fourth possible response.