Thoughts on Satire in Film (Patreon)

The critical problem that I've always felt with the genre/description of 'satire' is that the best satires are often simply good exemplars of what they seem to ridicule. A satirical war film is often among the best war pictures (Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Colonel Blimp, etc.), a western which takes shots at cowboys is actually pretty common to the foundation of that genre, and so on.

But isn't the entire perceived aim of a satire to be 'subversive', to in some way set out a program to denigrate or destroy that which it's making fun of? Or is the point of a satire that it is the 'honest' version of its object, the version that uses ironic distancing and a winking smile to let you know that its self-awareness is part of a project to confront us with an unvarnished rendition of what might otherwise be taken for granted? What is common to both attitudes is that there is not only an expected emotional removal from the material on the filmmaker's side, even as they create their work, but also the audience is expected to be removed, even as they are attempting to engage with the art-object as an example of the very thing it is working against -- so we have a situation where no one is really wanting to directly immersing themselves with what is being presented as the film.

The four outcomes can be derived in short order:

1. The filmmaker is being satirical, and the audience engages with the work as satire.
2. The filmmaker isn't being satirical, and the audience engages with the work as satire.
3. The filmmaker is being satirical, but the audience doesn't engage with the work as satire.
4. The filmmaker isn't being satirical, and the audience doesn't engage with the work as satire.

No. 4 is the mode of most works of art (at least I hope?), so it is the least interesting for what we're exploring here.

No. 1 is the 'intended' result of the filmmaker's intention matching up with audience expectations, and generally is the province of pure comedy.

No. 2 is 'ironic' viewing, where the audience feels the need to treat the work of art as something so much itself that it transforms into parody, the vulgar sister to satire -- this is the 'so bad it's good!' nonsense, the hate-watching, the disavowal of an artwork's integrity by viewers who want to erect a wall between themselves and anything that might 'contaminate' them from the film's earnestness.

No. 3 is what gets discussed the most: satires that miss the mark. Every single year there seems to be a version of this with Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, pick your poison: films in which satire seems so obvious that people just take it for granted as a non-satirical representation.

2012's Dredd is an underrated example of this phenomenon. I am not an expert on the original 2000AD comic series, but broadly it fits within a storied British tradition of hyperbolic satire: Judge Dredd is the ultimate fascist super-cop, a Dirty Harry for the post-nuclear future who battles against archetypal examples of chaos and disorder, an ultra-potent teeth-stomper with an iron stick up his ass for his whole existence, adhering to the strictest and most lethal definition of meeting out justice, the only way he knows how -- from what I've read of this character and his adventures, he is basically a Frank Miller protagonist but without the endearing quality of pent-up angst and alienation that Frank specialized in.

The Pete Travis/Alex Garland film, on one hand, is very close to the letter on this: their Dredd is all those qualities, a man whose inhumanity makes even the violent and selfish anarchy surrounding him seem more relatable to us as a logical expression of human behavior. And yet -- by giving him a young recruit sidekick to accompany his mission, the burgeoning psychick Cassandra Anderson, we as an audience are brought alongside him, we are like her, new to this harsh world of law enforcement in a dark future, and as she learns from Dredd's example, so do we. At no point in the film does Cassandra seriously challenge or rebel against Dredd's behavior and actions (outside of 'failing' the mission in minor ways) and in fact she 'goes to the school of hard knocks', and loses the innocence that she began with -- not becoming disillusioned with Dredd himself, but turning in her badge to the corrupt Judge organization after earning a successful assessment, and we are led to believe that she will pursue another kind of justice, just not according to the dictates of the Judges.

So what we are left with isn't a film that satirizes the Judges, or Dredd, but shows the validity of hardcase tactics to persevere against enemies within and without -- Dredd is in effect a hero whose heroism is simply in harmony with the law, whereas Cassandra finds her own path, yet now burdened with the violent necessity of her abilities and her education. 2012's Dredd is in essence the same sort of film as Dirty Harry, about the lone wolf badass who is incorruptible and 'does what it takes' despite anything to the contrary -- the 'satire' has become co-terminal with its source.

Why does this happen? And is it even a 'bad' thing? The definition of satire as being 'subversive' carries with it the assumption that something needs to be subverted in order to service a particular political end -- yet does not Dirty Harry already contain within itself the contradictions that the Judge Dredd comic merely draws in black-and-white shades? You can make the critique of Judge Dredd simply by doing a close-reading of the direct source, yet Judge Dredd's obsequious distance from something like Dirty Harry and other super-cop fantasies allows one to equally miss the mark for the same reason that Dirty Harry is seen as an uncomplicated power-trip: the logic of satire is that of 'insiders' who are able to engage in text beyond the text, to read past the direct imagery with an eye for esoteric details which 'give away' the intention of the author, or simply by reading the author's direct statements regarding the project, so that satire is always meta-textual, always striving for the use of art as a vehicle for a message, and in this case it is the stealing of another vehicle and smuggling something inside of it.

Yet -- if the audience lacks the necessary curiosity, or simply misses the required mark on what to not take seriously -- or if the directors fail to provide any obvious indicators of what they're doing -- then satire just reaffirms that which it claims to go against, as is the case with 2012's Dredd: what seemed bold and cartoonishly exaggerated on the comic page is rendered with fervent realism and real-time empathy in the cinema. Dirty Harry translated into Judge Dredd translated into Dredd means the film becomes a film once again, but now with the aesthetic baggage of satire, which then gets put in service of straight-forward portrayal again: Dredd is a less human, less tolerant, less nuanced portrayal of the super-cop type than Harry Callahan was, yet both are given the same treatment of serious action movie tonality.

This is why I don't think satire 'works' really, it doesn't function consistently according to its aims -- every satire will be taken seriously by somebody, somewhere. No matter how silly 1997's Starship Troopers gets, it still basically functions exactly like every Big Damn War film, and because Verhoeven is a master at what he does, the action is gargantuan and gorgeously constructed -- so if it looks like a duck and quacks like one, we can't be surprised when fascists and right-wingers look at Starship Troopers or Dredd and see a validation of their deranged worldview.

I want to caution myself and say that this doesn't mean that Starship Troopers and Dredd are 'bad' films -- I love them both. But they betray a certain contradiction in satire, a desire to surpass the object of its ridicule by doubling-down on what the previous version did, and assuming that by engaging in this exaggeration, the audience will understand the ridiculousness of the original conceit. But what actually often ends up happening is that the audience readjusts to the exaggeration as their new 'normal' -- which is why the history of genre filmmaking is a history of satires becoming the new 'standard', like how The Long Goodbye makes fun of The Big Sleep, but then The Long Goodbye serves as the standard for future noirs like Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice -- what is 'subversive' quickly transforms into a classicism that in turn is subject to a new round of satire, and thus the wheels turn.

Does this make the category of satire pointless? I don't think so, but I also don't believe that just because something is attempting to be a satire makes it intrinsically elevated above the 'straight' source material -- and, on average, I tend to prefer honestly naive works to ones which try and entomb themselves within walls of irony or analysis, because a director making a satire must necessarily become her own audience member and ask if her film works upon her as a satire -- which isn't any proof that the film is good or bad, but simply goes to show whether or not a self-conception of a work of art mirrors its conception. And I don't think that self-conception is up to the director to control -- it belongs to the audience members, and they care less about intention and more about execution. Because of this, I personally am more interested in films which settle for a direct, but nuanced execution of material, rather than trying to twist themselves into an indirect, cartoonish version of someone else's work.