Mel Brooks: Stupidly Smart Comedy

There are plenty of people who would be quick to tell you the same old adage: “you couldn’t make a Mel Brooks movie these days”. That’s true, but it’s likely not for the reason they believe. 

Auteur theory, the notion that a filmmaker can have a style so distinct that it defines their body of work independent of the studio, that one behind the rotating lines of set designers and prop makers and composers was always one common denominator, is often saved for makers of dramas such as Hitchcock and Kubrick. When the odd comedic filmmaker makes an appearance, on the even rarer occasion that it’s not Woody Allen, it’s always a humorist of a subtle persuasion. But Mel Brooks, molded by years on the Borscht Belt slapstick and crude gags is just as worthy of serious study, as is his cultural legacy. Why can’t just anyone make a Mel Brooks movie?

Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Melvin Kaminsky quickly learned to use humor to cope with life’s hardships, from the early death of his father to his family’s poverty to his own poor health for which he was frequently bullied. Drafted into the army in 1944, Kaminsky spent his service defusing landmines and staging performances to boost troop morale. 

Like many young comedians at the time, Kaminsky, now going by his stage name, found work performing resorts in the Catskills, a region jokingly called the “Borscht Belt” due to its historic association with Jewish performers. It was on the Catskills circuit he forged friendships with an array of renowned comics, including Sid Caesar, who hired him for his first television jobs writing for the Admiral Broadway Revue and later Your Show of Shows, the latter of which also featured the writing of Carl Reiner. Both Jewish New Yorkers with a shared sense of humor, Brooks and Reiner collaborated on The 2000 Year Old Man, a semi-improvised comedy sketch that blended innuendo, political jabs and liberal Yinglish to create a work that one can easily recognize as distinctly Brooks. Traces of 2000 Year Old Man’s 10-gags-a-minute style can be seen clearly in Brooks’ feature films, just as the success of  Get Smart, his first original television and a comedic lampooning of the James Bond series, paved the way for Brooks to delve further and further into genre parody. 

In line with auteur theory, the Mel Brook cinematic oeuvre can be characterized by several shared elements, most notably casting decisions, comedic style and pace, and subject matter, albeit the latter can appear fairly broad at first glance. When considering Mel Brooks’ casting choices, one may first think of Gene Wilder, who appeared in The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, the last of which he co-wrote with Brooks himself.

An interesting casting decision Brooks consistently makes is not casting Richard Pryor— although the two comedic contemporaries collaborated on projects like Blazing Saddles in the writer’s room, every role initially considered for Pryor was, for a number of reasons, given to another actor, be it Cleavon Little, Gregory Hines, or Eddy Murphy.

A Mel Brooks cameo is perhaps the best indicator of a Mel Brooks movie, but with the exception of his last feature, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, never in a major role. Brooks consistently prefers depicting characters with brief appearances but memorable gimmicks, perhaps most notably the Yiddish-speaking Native chief in Blazing Saddles, which serves to exacerbate the movie’s purposefully loose grasp of historicity.  

 No, no, zayt nisht meshuge! Loz im geyn!

Humor, in style, speed, and its relationship with mise en scene is likewise a reliable identifier of a Brooks work. 

His comedic style is defined by the rapid pace of his punchlines, crude innuendos and puns laced often with deeper, heavier implications. The label “high-quality low comedy” is one that is well earned.   

The humor is never limited to dialogue, how characters interact with their setting is crucial. The bookcase scene in Young Frankenstein combines witty banter with prop comedy, and the legendary ending of Blazing Saddles would not work without the complete destruction of its Spaghetti Western set.

Piss on you! I’m workin for Mel Brooks!

Blazing Saddles, considered by many to be Brooks’ magnum opus, is perhaps most exemplary of the director’s fondness for genre parody, and, furthermore, using parody to create social satire. The shoddiness of the set in Blazing Saddles comments on the artifice of the western genres, and, as is made clear as the brawl continues to the studio lot, the movie industry as a whole. In The Producers, the creation of a deliberately terrible musical parody ultimately highlights the low standards of the audience. Spaceballs’ lambasting of the Star Wars franchise derides the capitalist system that propelled it to success. In Spaceballs, as in Blazing Saddles, slapstick humor and deliberate breaking of the third wall is used to highlight superficiality. Physical comedy is used in a manner that ends up incorporating and deconstructing the set. Brooks will not just break the third wall, he will have his characters pick up its pieces and throw them at one another.

 Merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs: the T-shirt! Spaceballs: the Coloring Book! Spaceballs: the Breakfast Cereal! Spaceballs: the Flame Thrower! 

Dracula: Dead and Loving It, although considered by many to be one of Brooks’ weaker movies, utilizes its set and its framing for the same comedic effect as his earlier fare. In Brooks’ introductory scene as Van Helsing, he is performing an autopsy with a small crowd of medical students behind him. The camera focuses on Brooks’ expression, both allowing for physical comedy through facial expressions and allowing the audience to use their imagination to fill in what state the cadaver is in. The only clue we receive comes in the form of a prop intestinal tract, which Brooks nonchalantly pulls into view, causing all the students to faint in disgust. This gross-out is not the scene’s final punchline, however. That would come seconds later, when Brooks, standing alone in a medium shot, proudly declares that he is still standing, only for one student to pop out from behind him and reveal that is not the case. Even in Brooks’ “worst” films, elements of his comedic style, namely the desire to play with audience expectations, remain on full display.

Don’t worry, there’s plenty to go around!

You couldn’t make a Mel Brooks movie today, but that’s not because of higher standards or political correctness gone mad. Mel Brooks is an auteur with a style which, love it or hate it, is fully unique to him. The only person who could make a Mel Brooks movie is Mel Brooks.

References

Breihan, Tom. “Blazing Saddles Punched up-Knocking out Horses and a Racist America in One Swing.” The A.V. Club, November 1, 2019. https://film.avclub.com/blazing-saddles-punched-up-knocking-out-horses-and-a-ra-1839370209.

Bonnstetter, Beth E. “Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin): Comedy and Burlesque in Satiric Film.” Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1 (2011): 18-31.

Ott, Brian L., and Bonnstetter, Beth E. “‘We’re at Now, Now’: Spaceballs as Parodic Tourism.” Southern Communication Journal 72, no. 4 (2007): 309–27.

Stevens, Brad. “Mise En Scène: Dead and Loving It… Some Notes on Mel Brooks,” June 9, 2011. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/feature-articles/mise/.

Glory: A New Angle

To what extent is historical fiction obliged to represent history accurately, or, at least, how it is understood? In recent decades, there has been an increasing demand for a greater focus on historical accuracy in period pieces and historical dramas, as cinema itself has a history of taking liberties in favor of crafting compelling stories and appealing to certain demographics. This is a long winded way of say that movies, at least “mainstream” fare, have long been made with only white viewers in mind, and this has shaped how cinema reflects on history in the context of race. Glory, directed by Edward Zwick, operates in a middle ground between striving for accuracy and striving for dramatic appeal, and in this sense serves as a solid case study of the genre of historical dramatization as a whole.

Glory is, is the simplest sense, indeed based on a true story, one of the formation of the first Black regiment of the Union Army. The 54th Infantry Unit was real, and was indeed established by Robert Shaw. The choice to establish Robert Shaw as the protagonist of the film is not an entirely neutral decision. Although this movie could be said to represent Black history, it is still viewed through the lens of a white hero. Although the members of the infantry are shown in a sympathetic light, the frequent use of wide shots to show Black crowds seems to turn them into a mass free of individual identities. When Shaw first addresses the infantry, he is positioned high on a horse (and from a low angle) looking down at them, and the camera too showing the men from a high angle shot. This establishes Shaw as an authority in the film’s universe as well as in the mind of the viewer.

Certain inaccuracies in the movie are easy to point out. Most of the infantry members were free men from birth, not former slaves. The regiment was formed in 1863, not 62. There are instances where the stretching of truths has deeper implications. The first time a Black character is given a low angle shot it is Morgan Freeman looking down at Shaw, who has been injured on the battlefield. This angle gives Freeman’s character a sense of authority, but not a physical one. Combined with the glare of sunlight peering out from behind his hat, the visual language here screams divine intervention, calling to mind the archetype of the “Magical Negro”. Visuals show Shaw as a political authority, but his Black cohorts as spiritual authorities.

When it comes to discussions of representation, the people behind the camera are as relevant as those in front. The director, producer, and screenplay writer of Glory are white, as was the author of the historical novel on which it was based. There is nothing inherently wrong with white people telling stories about Black people, but the demographics of those behind a project will shape the frame of reference used, how elements, be they based in reality or not, are implemented. The historical details can all be there, but everything can change with the simplest of framing decisions.

The Thin Blue Line: Reality is Never Black and White

As non-fictional works, documentaries are generally understood to be attempts to convey objective facts. But objective truth can never be fully captured by film, even in a documentary. Errol Morris understands this fact, and his film The Thin Blue Line embraces the hyperreality of documentary filmmaking by using dramatic reenactments and calculated visual presentation of narrators to transform the true story of a botched criminal investigation into a postmodern film noir. Morris consciously ties the filmmaking style to the subject matter, as both are explorations of the difficulty of separating truth from fiction.

This documentary does not clearly adhere to any singular documentary mode as described by Bill Nichols. It could be said to most closely adhere to the participatory mode, where the relationship between the filmmaker and the film subjects forms the core of the narrative. Morris considered the importance of performance in documentary filmmaking, and its subjects are characterized not only by how they tell the story, but how their disparate accounts are edited together to compliment and juxtapose one another.
Consider the film’s first major reenacted scene, in which a Dallas police officer is shot, supposedly by a drifter named Randall Adams. The purpose of this scene is not to realistically and neutrally convey how this confrontation went down according to testimonies. Rather, it serves to establish the overall tone of the film as well as to serve as engaging narrative intrigue. The framing of the events by the camera is deliberate. The officer is shown first with an eye-level medium shot, establishing him as a figure of authority and order, which gives the scene a sense of order as well. A high-angle shot with his shadow stretched before him conveys mounting tension, and a rapid sequence of close ups of a gun firing at different angles, interspersed with police reports of where the officer was shot convey the carnage that ensued without directly depicting it.

Eisenstein would love this

Someone familiar with montage theory can see how these two unconnected visuals come together to create meaning. The use of montage and juxtaposition is present throughout the film.

This does not apply only to the dramatizations of events. Careful use of framing, juxtaposition and use of mise en scene are also apparent in the talking head interviews. Testimonies that are contradictory will be presented side by side, creating a sort of emotional whiplash. Something that becomes very apparent in these interviews is how color design serves as characterization and even a narrative tool. Randall Adams, the man who stands accused, is dressed in white, a color often associated with innocence. Even without his testimony, this element conveys to the audience that something here is not right. Reds are used to denote lawyers and judges, blues unsurprisingly are associated with law enforcement. Interestingly, David Harris, who testified against Adams, is shown in orange, the same color as a prison jumpsuit, which also calls into question who in this story can be trusted.

What does the color white signify in our culture?

What about orange?

All of these elements, likely on purpose, make the film feel more like a modern take of the film noir than a crime documentary. The visual language is highly reminiscent of the genre. Of course, The Thin Blue Line‘s reliance on color as storytelling is incongruous with the style of early black and white noirs. The film’s non linear nature is in line with the noir genre, which frequently employs flashbacks as a form of storytelling. The use of film language to create a feeling of disenchantment is perhaps what makes The Thin Blue Line more noir-y (noir-esque?) Than anything else. The conflicted anti hero of the past turns into disillusionment with the justice system in the present.

The Final Girls: The Life and Death (and Life) of a Genre

The creation of a new genre is not a task undertaken by creators alone. Genres do not spring straight from texts and images; they are formed out of how readers and viewers interpret these works, how they contextualize them in time and space and how they compare and contrast them to prior works. The slasher film was popularized in the 1980s through a combination of artistic ingenuity on the part of creators and enthusiastic reception on the part of viewers, not unlike the musicals of the 30s and 40s, or science fiction works in the late 70s. The increased ability to identify a genre’s trappings and tropes often leads to it being reanalyzed, deconstructed, or parodied outright, as is the case with The Final Girls.
All art is, to some extent, influenced by the art that came before it, and in this sense most genres can be connected to predecessors. The slasher, itself a subgenre of horror, has cinematic roots in the Universal Monster movies of the 1930s. Slashers share some of the DNA of ancestral works: spooky settings, shocking deaths, overly dramatic acting and special effects. A subgenre, just like genres above them, are truly formed when these recurring motifs are recognized and connected on the part of the audience; if certain works agreed to all be within the same genre themselves share more specific elements (in this case, think cars as murder scenes, stereotyped teenaged protagonists, last survivor versus the killer, ect.) expect a subgenre to form.
The reaction to a genre, in the form of deconstruction, reinterpretation and parody, usually occurs when it is at its peak in popularity, or when it has faded to a pleasant nostalgia, no longer relevant, but recognizable nonetheless. Consider the American Western. Following its heyday in the 1930s and 40s, cultural disillusionment turned audiences against these overly simplified stories of conflict, of clearly defined heroes and villainous “savages”. Come the 60s and 70s, the genre reemerged in a new form: the Anti-Western. All the aesthetic trappings remained, but things once taken for granted, the simplified morals, the glorification of expansionism, came into question. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the genre was critically examined. In Blazing Saddles, it was incessantly mocked.
The Final Girls can be said to fall in the middle of these extremes. A parody of the slasher genre, it deliberately draws attention to and pokes fun at its cliches, but it does not shy away from using these overdone elements to achieve a greater level of sincerity than one expects from a film of its ilk.
The film’s genre-savvy protagonists, finding themselves transported to the world of the campy slasher Camp Bloodbath, take on the task of rescuing as many sex-crazed teenagers from a bloody end by exploiting the movie’s cliched logic. The characters inhabiting the film world are informed completely by stereotypes, and as the main cast grows wise to the killer’s predictable moves, they are confident they can take him on. The only wrinkle in their plans is a strange ethical conundrum facing The Final Girls’ protagonist, Max: Camp Bloodbath’s protagonist, in this world, just as in reality, is portrayed her late mother. When it becomes apparent that defeating the killer rests on Max being left as the film’s “final girl”, the narrative, in any other context a schlocky, overacted gorefest, is brought down to earth with tangible narrative weight. The Final Girls teeters between irony and sincerity because it understands the humor that lies in genre conventions while also shying away from what makes them appealing.

Scent of a Woman: Al Pacino is No Blind Asshole

To call Al Pacino a prolific actor is to call the wheel a pretty nifty invention. His role as Lt. Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman, as such, does not disappoint, but it does call into question just how far one’s skills can be pushed for a role, both in terms of talent and ethics. Pacino’s performance is gripping, but it also begs a crucial question: to what extent do we value authenticity in acting roles, and how much work are we actually willing to put into achieving it?

“You understand? I’m in the dark!”

In Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino plays Frank Slate, a cantankerous, hard-drinking and sharp older man who lost his vision due to trauma during his time in the army. Bold and bossy, Slate operates almost oblivious to his lack of sight, refusing outright most offers made by Charlie, a private school student tasked with watching over him during Thanksgiving break, to help him, though he will not hesitate to give orders. In many ways Slate seems stuck in his army days, barking commands at those he views as his underlings, surprising for someone whose primary handicap is the direct result of combat. Slate fears nothing and nobody, he will just as casually tell off the headmaster of Charlie’s school as he will discuss his plan to kill himself over a nice meal. Pacino practically melts into the role. Even someone well versed in his filmography will find themselves forgetting that he is in fact not the lieutenant. He is a true method actor, striving and achieving a remarkable level of authenticity.

Or is he?

There has long been debate over which actors can convincingly pull off certain roles. This often focuses on the ability of actors to portray characters with physical disabilities they do not themselves have. “Ideally, anybody should be able to play any body,” writes actor-director Mat Fraser, himself physically disabled, “but only when there is a truly level playing field of opportunity.” Many argue these roles as an opportunity for disabled actors to break out into the mainstream, while others argue that a disabled actor is required to play a similarly disabled character in order to achieve an accurate performance. So how well can a given person, regardless of visual faculties, judge the accuracy of Pacino’s portrayal of Slate?

Pacino met with members of the Lighthouse Guild to better understand how a blind man may go about things such as pouring a drink.

Pacino put a great deal of work into researching how to accurately portray a blind person. He met with a number of members of New York’s Associated Blind and the Lighthouse Guild, who instructed him on how a blind man may perform certain mundane tasks such as walking or pouring a drink. Beyond simply reciting the lines, Pacino’s role is one that required a great deal of physical dedication to simulate the appearance of complete lack of vision. But this of course once again begs the question, to what extent should Pacino be praised for a role someone with an actual visual impairment could likely do more easily? Is it inherently lesser because of this, or is the fact that Pacino is striving so hard to achieve this authenticity make it more impressive that a sighted man performed the role?

“You don’t know what outta order is, Mr. Trask! I’d show you but I’m too old; I’m too tired; I’m too fuckin’ blind.”

This is in no way meant to downgrade Pacino as an actor, and certainly not as a person. His acting chops are remarkably strong, and the performance he delivers in Scent of a Woman, for all the ethical questions it raises, is gripping nonetheless. Scent of a Woman simply serves as a good jumping off point for discussing these dilemmas, for which even I don’t have much in the way of an answer. Maybe the whole industry’s just outta order.

Murphy’s Heist: A Simple Plan and Genre Subversion

One could see Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan as Murphy’s Law: The Movie; anything that could go wrong does go wrong. Combine this with the makings of a “too good to be true” incident, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

A great fortune has fallen into our protagonists’ laps, a literal gift from the heavens, or, at least, a wrecked plane. When Hank, Lou, and Jacob, a trio of rural Minnesotans stumble upon four million dollars laying among the debris of a plane crashed in the winter snow, it seems nothing short of miraculous. Sure, they could turn the money over, but it would be just as easy to stash it away like nothing happened. Such a contrived idea could very well serve as the convenient ending to a more upbeat film, but with no rec center to save, the men are left to themselves to ponder what to make to of their newfound riches.

What? Would you pass this up?

But nothing is ever that simple. Not in real life, certainly, and oftentimes not even in fiction. A heist that goes off without a hitch is not one people are going to pay to see. Suspense, the possibility that everything could go horribly wrong at any moment, is what keeps the audience’s attention. What makes A Simple Plan unique, then, is just how royally everything does go wrong, and the knowledge of how easily it all could have been avoided had the characters not been at the mercy of genre conventions.

The first of the trio to confess to the crime is Hank, who tells his wife, Sarah, breaking the promise he made with the others to keep everything secret. Rather than pleading with him to fess up, Sarah takes on the role of a sort of Lady Macbeth, encouraging him to take pride in this actions. After all, she has a baby on the way, and the money she’s making as a librarian is just barely enough to feed two. On her behest, he does agree to go back and leave a bit off the money at the crash site to minimize suspicion. Maybe bring Jacob along. And maybe the two of you will kill an innocent farmer out of fear of getting caught while you’re out there, why not? You can always blame the whole thing on Lou.

And sure, you’ll ending up offing both Lou and his wife, and sure, maybe you’ll collude with a fake FBI agent, but at least he killed that sheriff that was getting wise to what you all did. It seems like what should’ve been, well, a simple plan has gone horribly off the rails, but anything for the money!

Too bad you can’t spent any without it being traced back to the crash. Too bad you have to burn it all to cover your tracks. Too bad this was all for nothing.

“We try to pretend like nothing ever happened”

A Simple Plan‘s narrative is not built on suspense so much as it is built on the morbid curiosity of what horrible thing could possibly come next. It’s not a complete subversion of the heist genre, rather it takes the single trope, that of everything in the plan suddenly going wrong, and just keeps rolling with it, carrying it to its logical extreme. But, the alternative really would’ve been just to good to be true, so who’d want that?

Film Scoring and the Art of the Leitmotif

Sound design is an integral element of filmmaking, having been since the release of the first “talkie”. But even in the pre-audio era, one area of sound design remained integral: the score. Whether provided by a pianist to accompany a silent film, or an orchestra edited into the background of a Hollywood blockbuster, the music accompanying the visuals of a film play just as great a role in the establishment of mood, character, and narrative.

pianists provided silent films with musical scores in real time

A great example of this is the concept of the leitmotif. A leitmotif is a “short, recurring musical phrase” that is associated with a particular element of a work, be it a character, a setting, or a thematic concept such as love or revenge. Popularized by composer Richard Wagner in his 19th century operas, the concept predates cinema by several decades. Wagner’s Ring Cycle featured a number of leitmotifs, featuring musical motifs that would inform later musical phrases, most notably the use of brass instruments to represent the hero and his actions. The symbolic significance of brass and horn instruments can be traced back to the instrument group’s origin as a sign of conquest in hunting, as the first prototypes were literally the hollowed out horns of slain animals.
The purpose of a leitmotif, be it in theater or film, is to create a feeling of coherence between events, establishing a sort of narrative rhythm on a level that goes beyond what is written in the script.

In Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the heroic Siegfried is represented by horns

Leitmotifs can be found in a great deal of early works of synchronized sound film. The 1931 film M is considered to have one of the earliest examples of a reoccurring thematic phrase, in the form of a rendition of In The Hall of the Mountain King whistled by one of its characters. By the time the motif has been established, simply hearing part of the song’s melody alerts the audience to the character’s presence before he is even seen. 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood furthered the idea of leitmotifs as character themes, creating distinct melodies associated with the titular Robin and a number of other iconic characters.

Peter Lorre as Hans Beckhert in M, musically represented by a whistled rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King”

There are a good deal of leitmotifs that have transcended their original narrative purposes to become representational of the very films or film franchises in which they originated. For example, the classic “Bond Theme” was composed to accompany the opening credits of Dr. No. The song became so iconic, being used in every subsequent film in the James Bond franchise, that is became representational of not just the character, but the franchise itself.
A Simple Plan, while not featuring any particularly notable repeating leitmotifs, is notable in that it was scored by Danny Elfman, who has created a number of leitmotifs throughout his career, with one interesting example in the form of the titular theme of 1989’s Batman.
Remember when I mentioned the prominence of horns and brass in leitmotifs representing heroic characters? This became a cinematic staple when movies about characters such as Superman hit the big screen. (Considering how the visual aesthetic of American superheroes are based heavily on circus strongmen, the symbolic association with brass and marches runs even deeper than one may initially think- Entrance of the Gladiators, anyone?)

Early superhero designs were inspired by circus strongmen, which are also associated culturally with brass instruments

Batman’s theme features brass instruments as well, and resembles a march, but compositely slower in tempo and oddly muted. This musical flourish accompanies the titular superhero when he appears, both establishing his presence within the narrative while also clearly setting him apart stylistically from the other comic book heroes of his day. Those savvy enough to recognize the classic elements of a heroic leitmotif can easily tell how Elfman used the elements therein and flipped them on their heads to drive home how Batman defies the classic archetype. In this sense, we can see how leitmotifs can carry not only through a single film, but through entire genres, or even entire cinematic industries, as tropes become increasingly popularized and standardized.

**the inspiration for this post, and a jumping off point for some of these ideas come from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLweJucEPL0!