This got me thinking again about films that lie along the continuum between mild political incorrectness and outright nihilism — refusing to offer a comforting moral or to tell those old untruths: that everything always turns out for the best, that the wicked are always punished.
Take the Malayalam film Mukundan Unni Associates. It has its heart firmly in the wrong place (I mean that as a compliment), being a celebration of an amoral man who cares only about getting ahead – and is not made to account for his sins. I wasn’t thrilled by the film – it relied too much on voiceovers, and could have gone further in its final stretch. But it came as a relief, at a time when people are always looking for positive ‘takeaways’ to experience something so cynical.
I have also been thinking – with all the attention garnered by Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin – about McDonagh’s screen debut, the 2008 In Bruges, a magnificent example of how savage humour, when done well, can shine a light on the darkest corners of human nature, and still allow glimpses of the moral structures we have built for ourselves.
At times the In Bruges screenplay is like a compendium of insults directed at every group you can think of. A short list of things said by the protagonist Ray (a character we are meant to care about) includes ‘Youse are a bunch of fucking elephants’ (said to three fat – or as the Dahl bowdlerisers would have it, ‘enormous’ – American tourists) and ‘Would you ever think about killing yourself because you’re a midget?’.
Ray also gratuitously uses the phrase ‘like a big fat retarded black girl on a seesaw’ and the derogatory ‘poof’ (slang for homosexual). He offends a local girl by telling a Belgian joke about the country being best known for child molesters. Elsewhere, a character, in a fit of rage, screams ‘YOU’RE a fucking inanimate object!’ at his wife, before apologising and then heading off to kill someone. (That clicking sound you hear? It’s a hundred woke reviewers using the well-worn phrase ‘toxic masculinity’.)
The black humour of In Bruges won’t be to all tastes. But for those who do appreciate it – and the film has a big cult following – how does any of this work? Well, apart from the fact that it is plain funny (and the parts of our brains that process humour don’t necessarily cooperate with the parts that handle morality), there is the context that Ray is a melancholy, suicidal man. He is as vulnerable as the Michelle Williams character Cindy was in Derek Cianfrance’s 2010 Blue Valentine when she told a droning, deadpan joke about a child-killer. However nasty Ray gets, it’s hard to see him as gloating. But equally, there is the sense — for anyone who doesn’t let outrage interfere with the characters’ inner realities – that this is honest behaviour, and even the most tasteless lines reflect something perceptive about people, how they talk and behave and view others. And how even strong generalisations – the stereotype of the over-enthusiastic but boorish American tourist, for instance – can be based on kernels of truth.
This is a story with an ethical compass too. Nearly everything that happens is the consequence of a clear moral rule followed by a generally awful man named Harry. The cliche about everyone containing multitudes has rarely been as well realised as in this film about people who do and say terrible things but are also human, with many of their finer senses intact.
If the expurgators were to turn their attention to screenplays like In Bruges, they would destroy a narrative that tells us more about humanity (and redemption) than a number of sterile, inoffensive, life-affirming stories could.
