The death of tragedy
Friday, October 10th, 2003 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerWhen I was young, I was a big tragedy fan. I lapped up Shakespeare's tragedies, both in print and on stage (I can still remember seeing King Lear at Stratford before I read it and feeling my stomach drop out when Lear returned carrying Cordelia's body). I also enjoyed novels which closely followed the classical tragedy formula, such as Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge or (stretching a point) Conrad's Nostromo.
Soon after, my tastes ran more to tragi-comedy, plays like Measure for Measure or Troilus and Cressida, or Timothy Mo's superb novel, Sour Sweet (whose title says it all). Then I did a degree in English Literature and thereafter vowed to read nothing but science fiction, horror stories and detective novels.
Now what I see more and more is a genre I hate, which I could call comi-tragedy (as in comi-chef, perhaps). Allie McBeal is a good example. I like this programme, but sometimes it leaves me spitting fire like one of its celebrated animated hallucinations. In tragi-comedy, the author takes a tragic situation, exploits its irony and twists it into a happy ending which still leaves you a little disturbed. Comi-tragedy aims to provide light relief, but leave the viewer with a "heartwarming" experience which let's them laugh at life but still feel that they are a good person because they shed a tear at its sorrows.
This is not a bad attitude to have to life in general (apart from its self-congratulatory side) but as television it is manipulative. In one episode, Allie is hired by a boy dying from leukemia who wants to sue God. The scenario is excellent dark comedy, and the episode has some genuinely funny moments, but they ruin it with schmaltz. At the end, after all the funny courtroom scenes, the boy dies. Of course he dies, he had leukemia, or as Ling put it "The kid had leukemia, get over it." But then we see the super-bitch Ling leaving the hospital dashing tears from her eyes. Cut to cemetery, yah-de-dah.
I don't want to get all Marxist here, but I can't think of a better way to describe this than "petit-bourgeois sentimentality." This is not tragedy, this is kitsch. It is tolerable when it honestly portrays itself as such, like those programmes on the Hallmark Channel about the "heartwarming" story of a crack-addicted single mother with AIDS struggling to bring up her paraplegic child - we can look at the TV guide, see that it is televisual masochism, and watch something different. Disguising it as comedy, however, is both deceitful and pretentious. Deceitful because when people tune into a comedy programme, they expect comedy, not tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy - it's like turning up at the amphitheatre for Aristophanes and getting a bit of Sophocles every twenty minutes. Pretentious, because there are a few great writers and directors who can mix tragedy and comedy and get away with it; Kurosawa springs to mind. None of them are on network TV, with the possible exception of Joss Whedon.
Soon after, my tastes ran more to tragi-comedy, plays like Measure for Measure or Troilus and Cressida, or Timothy Mo's superb novel, Sour Sweet (whose title says it all). Then I did a degree in English Literature and thereafter vowed to read nothing but science fiction, horror stories and detective novels.
Now what I see more and more is a genre I hate, which I could call comi-tragedy (as in comi-chef, perhaps). Allie McBeal is a good example. I like this programme, but sometimes it leaves me spitting fire like one of its celebrated animated hallucinations. In tragi-comedy, the author takes a tragic situation, exploits its irony and twists it into a happy ending which still leaves you a little disturbed. Comi-tragedy aims to provide light relief, but leave the viewer with a "heartwarming" experience which let's them laugh at life but still feel that they are a good person because they shed a tear at its sorrows.
This is not a bad attitude to have to life in general (apart from its self-congratulatory side) but as television it is manipulative. In one episode, Allie is hired by a boy dying from leukemia who wants to sue God. The scenario is excellent dark comedy, and the episode has some genuinely funny moments, but they ruin it with schmaltz. At the end, after all the funny courtroom scenes, the boy dies. Of course he dies, he had leukemia, or as Ling put it "The kid had leukemia, get over it." But then we see the super-bitch Ling leaving the hospital dashing tears from her eyes. Cut to cemetery, yah-de-dah.
I don't want to get all Marxist here, but I can't think of a better way to describe this than "petit-bourgeois sentimentality." This is not tragedy, this is kitsch. It is tolerable when it honestly portrays itself as such, like those programmes on the Hallmark Channel about the "heartwarming" story of a crack-addicted single mother with AIDS struggling to bring up her paraplegic child - we can look at the TV guide, see that it is televisual masochism, and watch something different. Disguising it as comedy, however, is both deceitful and pretentious. Deceitful because when people tune into a comedy programme, they expect comedy, not tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy - it's like turning up at the amphitheatre for Aristophanes and getting a bit of Sophocles every twenty minutes. Pretentious, because there are a few great writers and directors who can mix tragedy and comedy and get away with it; Kurosawa springs to mind. None of them are on network TV, with the possible exception of Joss Whedon.
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Date: 2003-10-10 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2003-10-10 10:56 pm (UTC)I just came back from a community theater production of Flowers for Algernon, which was turned into the movie Charly -- about the retarded guy who gets a brain operation that turns him into a genius, which in some ways really ruins his life, and then he goes back to being a tardo. Completely sentimental eyewash (and derivative -- he carries around a rabbit's foot from a bunny that was probably inadvertently squashed by Lenny in Of Mice and Men) and it's not improved by the fact that it was made B.G. (Before Gump). But it KNOWS that tearjerking is its purpose, and doesn't try to gussy it up with the gimcracks of the shallow souls populating Screenwriting 101 these days.