Cinema Junkie 243
Tackling Tactical Frivolity, Part One
TRT 23:20:02
NOTE: This is an automated transcription and may contain inaccuracties.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Welcome back to Midday Edition. I'm Andrew Bracken in for Jade Heinemann. Since current protests have taken on a decidedly more theatrical, even humorous tone, our Midday Movies Critics wanted to explore the notion of tactical frivolity as a tool. We see it demonstrated in the Portland protestors wearing inflatable costumes, and we will look into how tactical frivolity is played out in films. Joining us once again, our KPBS cinema junkie, Beth Accomando, and Moviewallas’ podcaster, Yazdi Pithavala. Welcome back to Midday.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Thank you. Thank you.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Great to have you back. So, Beth, let's break it down. Start by defining tactical frivolity.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Sure. So I'm someone who really does love, like rebellion and pop culture and humor. And when all that mixes together, like with the Portland Frog, this guy who's in an inflatable costume standing up against ICE agents, it takes on this level of absurdity and performance that really intrigued me and inspired me. I grew up in the '60s, so I saw a lot of very weird protests, and some very successful ones. There's a thing called the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army that came out in the 2000s. I discovered this website called Beautiful Trouble that has this tool box where you can look for theories, principles, practices of things that will help you in a protest and maybe get you more attention by doing something unconventional. One of those tools is what's called tactical frivolity, which is epitomized by the Portland Frog. I spoke to L. M. Bogot, who wrote a book called Tactical Performance: Theory and Practice of Serious Play. Here are some of the things he said about tactical frivolity.
L. M. BOGAD
It's about a refutation of the authority's version of events, refuting their story in a playful way and telling our story in a playful way, while being just disarmingly charming, because how mad can you be at a frog in Portland. So tactical frivolity is a lot of things. It's been going on a long time, and it is the use of a thoughtful version of being ridiculous. And I refer to this as radical ridicule. It makes people who are angry We may be a little less angry, or at least less able to act violently on that anger. I like to say it's politically more expensive to club a clown than to club a regular person. It is a thing that raises the cost of repression, and it is a thing that raises the cost of repression, and it your story in an inviting and playful way. I like to think of it as serious play because you're taking the problem seriously enough to work harder and be funny. I like to think of tactical frivolity as an element of charismatic action, action that attracts more people.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Beth, let's bring it back to film. You want to start off with a film that's gotten quite a bit of attention in the last few years, even though it came out decades ago at this point, and that's Mike Judges' Idiocracy. Here's the setup.
CLIP Idiocracy
As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction, a dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
ANDREW BRACKEN
That's the intro there of Idiocracy, framed as a documentary there. But Beth, tell us how that's an example of cinematic tactical frivolity.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Sure. People joke about this having been a comedy and now going like, Oh, no, it's really a documentary. It was totally prescient. So this is Mike Judge, who people may not remember, but he created Beavis and Butt Head as well as Office Space. So he knows how to use humor to push buttons, and he knows how to make it ridiculous and absurd, but also still touching on the things we all feel we know about the work environment or young people, whatever it is. He has this nice blend of absurdity and realistic edge. And one of the keys to tactical frivolity is to also be able to make fun of yourself. So in idiocracy, those yuppies, the yuppie couple who wants to be very smart and plan for their family, he makes fun of them as much as he makes fun of the red neck family that's reproducing like rabbits. So that ability to make fun of both sides, I think, is key to this also. And the other key is just ridiculous extremes. So this takes the notion of the world has become so stupid that this dumb guy from the present day is the most intelligent person. These people do not even know you have to water crops to make them grow.
ANDREW BRACKEN
They use Gatorade, right? Yeah.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And they have President Camacho, who's Terry Crews, who is hilarious. But there's a lot of things buried in this also that feel like, oh, my God, you were making fun of stuff that now feels like it's part of in your life today. I think that's part of the key to why this is tactical frivolity, is he does have a political message he wants to make, but he is coming at it from this roundabout ridiculous manner where if you don't get the message, that's fine. But he is presenting this picture of absolute absurdity and saying, Is this where we're heading?
ANDREW BRACKEN
And you're right. It does touch upon this reality. I'm actually rewatching Silicon Valley, which was Mike Judges' of California's tech scene, right? And a lot of it's truer than it seems like it should be. But Yazdi, what are your thoughts about Idiocracy?
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Yeah. So like you, Andrew, I watched it recently as well. And what I like about the movie is it's a satire. There's a lot of jokes about how we might be 100 years from now. The original title of the movie, by the way, was supposed to be 3001 for the year in which the movie transpires. But I think it's very serious about it the entire time. There isn't much of a wink. All of that stuff is played very seriously, and I think that's why it holds up very well. It does seem pretty prescient in terms of predicting our current world where education or science is not held to a high standard. And the movie is also very resolutely anti-intellectual, right? So in that future world, being intelligent is frowned upon. In fact, 20th Century Fox, which released Edeocracy, they did not want to do a very wide release for the movie precisely because of its anticommercial, anticonsumerism messages. But I think the film Skashe has grown over the years.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Immensely, it seems like. Yeah, right?
YAZDI PITHAVALA
And you can especially tell from the last act of the movie where it's particularly contempluous of dumbing down at the government level.
ANDREW BRACKEN
So using humor, Beth, to comment on politics, it's not new. One of your favorite sources of this goes all the way back to the Marx Brothers.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yes, I love the Marx Brothers. And like Monty Python, they're all about anarchy. There is nothing sacred in the world of Monty Python or the Marx Brothers. So the Marx Brothers made fun of anything that remotely touched upon authority. And that's where I think that notion of their frivolity comes in, because there is nothing sacred. And so they were at their peak in the 1930s. Groucho was an incredibly verbal and hilarious comedian. And so here he plays Rufus T. Firefly in Duck soup, and he is happy to sing about the corruption in his administration.
CLIP Duck Soup
The last man nearly ruined this place. He didn't know what to do with it. If you think this country's bad off, now just wait till I get through with it. The country's taxes must be fixed, and I know what What's your plan? I got to do with it. If you think you're paying too much, now just wait till I get through with it. I will not stand for anything that's crooked or unfair. I'm strictly on the up and off, so everyone beware. If anyone's caught taking graft, and I don't get my share, we stand them up against the wall and help goes the weasel.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So the target of a lot of their humor in this film is countries going to war over ridiculous reasons. And there's a long battle scene at the end in which Groucho, in every scene, has a different uniform. So he's Confederate, he's Union, he's British. It doesn't matter. He gets accused of shooting his own men at one point and then bribes the guy to keep it quiet. So he is making absolute fun of all this structure we have, this thing that tells us this is the right side or this is the wrong side or you're fighting for your country. I mean, all of that comes under attack.
ANDREW BRACKEN
During a time of a lot of nationalism and obviously leading to World War II, right?
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yeah, because this was in the early '30s. So, yeah, it's a fabulous film. It holds up 100 % their humor. I strongly believe that when you make of authority, your humor will never go out of style.
ANDREW BRACKEN
It's a timelessness to it, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, Vyazdi, you have another classic on your list, this one from Charlie Chaplin.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Yeah. So The Great Dictator, I think, is simply one of the best movies ever made. Charlie Chaplin plays a double role in the movie. He's a poor Jewish barber who is drafted off to war and who suffers amnesia as a soldier. And the other role is this megalomaniac dictator, Hinkel, of the fictitious country, Thomania. And so Chaplin could have made a movie which was very serious about his growing concern about the approach of the Second World War, but his taking all of it in a humorous way makes all the difference.
CLIP The Great Dictator
Brunettes are troublemakers. They're worse than the Jews. Then wipe them out. It's too small. Not so fast. We get rid of the Jews first, then concentrate on the brunettes. We shall never have peace until we have a pure alien race. How wonderful. Turmania, a nation of blue-eye blondes. We're not a blonde, Europe. A blonde Europe, a blonde Asia, a blonde America? Blonde world. And a brunet dictator. Dictator of the world. Why not? Out Caesar, not Nullus. The world is in feet, worn out, afraid. No nation would dare to oppose you. Dictator of the world. It's your destiny. We'll kill him. We'll start with the invasion of Austerlitz. After that, we won't have to fight. We can bluff. Nation after nation will capitulate. Within two years, the world will be under your thumb. Believe me, I want to be alone.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
And since you can't see this in the clip you're about to hear, let Let me just tell you, Chaplin is a little child, almost as Henkel as he's playing with this globe and floating it up in the air and almost being wizardly about it. And you can see that he's comical, even as he's literally thinking of the world eventually becoming his own possession.
CLIP The Great Dictator
O Caesar of Noolus, Emperor of the World.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
So obviously, Hinkel earlier, stands in for Hitler. But in addition to the frivolity that was at display in most of the movie, there's also very dark material here, and it's pretty serious for a movie made in the 1940s. In the movie, Hinkel orders a purge of all the Jews in the country that he oversees after a prominent Jewish banker refuses to fund his invasions. And amidst all the tumult that follows, the poor barber gets mistaken for the fascist Hinkel. And he's asked to take the leadership of the country. And the poor Barber is, of course, initially flummoxed, but he goes on to make an impassioned speech, and that's how the movie plays out at the end, and it's a speech for the ages. We'll listen to a clip.
CLIP The Great Dictator
Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill that promise. They never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslaved the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite.
ANDREW BRACKEN
So piece of real sincerity there after that ludicrous, as you mentioned, the scene with the and everything that's so famous in that great film.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Absolutely. He made the movie in 1940 before the approach of the Second World War. I didn't even know that when I first watched the movie because I thought this was satire done after the end of the Second World War. But this was his commentary on what he saw approaching. And he famously said that had he known how the Second World War actually played out, he would have never made this movie because what actually happened was so much worse than what was depicted in the film.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Beth, these types of movies aren't just relegated to the era of World War II and earlier in the century. You have a more recent film that uses a dictator as a central character. Tell us about that.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yes. So this is a film called The Dictator, and it stars Sasha baron Cohen. Now, he lives his life as tactical frivolity. He impersonates or he creates characters for himself that he goes out into the world as and never makes a distinction that he's playing a role. You can even find a clip of him as his hip hop journalist, Ali G, interviewing Trump and Trump getting frustrated with him and not even realizing the whole thing is this like con, this whole setup. So in 2012, he collaborated with Larry Charles on The Dictator. And this is a speech where he's playing a generic Middle East dictator, and he wants to keep his country safe from democracy. And so this is a speech where you may feel like you want to both laugh and cry.
CLIP The Dictator
Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes and bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wire tap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests. I know this is hard for you Americans to imagine, but please try.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Yeah, really. It hurts. I think. Yeah, a lot there. Yazdi, you love a comedy that's not overtly political, but makes fun of a real dictator in Hitler.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Yeah, we just talked about the great dictator and Charlie Chaplin's attempt at tactical fevulity there. But Mel Brooks did his own version in the Original Producers, which came out in 1967. It was Brooks' first film as a movie director. He also wrote the script for it. And it's about a theater producer who finds a $2,000 discrepancy in his accounts for the last play he did. And he forces an unwilling accountant to devise a scheme where he plans to mount a play so awful that it is assured to be a flop. And so he can write off that discrepancy. So he writes a play that is a love letter to Hitler, and it's titled Springtime for Hitler. And let's listen to a clip from Springtime for Hitler.
CLIP The Producers
Springtime for Hitler and Germany Winter for Poland and France. Springtime for Hitler and Germany. Come on Germans, go into your dance. I was born in Thusseldorf, and that is why they call me Rolf. Don't be stupid. Be a smartie. Come and join the Nazi Party.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Mel Brooks satire, of course, is on point because it comes to pass in the film that the audience, actually, instead of being bald and horrified, which they are initially, they come to recognize the play to be trench in tumor and a great satire, and the whole play becomes a huge hit. But I truly believe that nothing serious that Mel Brooks could have written could been more effective at condemning Hitler than his version of the producers.
BETH ACCOMANDO
He got a lot of flack for creating that, being criticized for making fun of Jews and the Holocaust. And his defense was, I'm not making fun of any of the victims, and I'm not making fun or questioning anything about the Holocaust. But what I am doing is I'm bringing down this dictator and making him small through comedy. And he felt like that was a very valid way to make a critique of somebody who was so horrific that you have to take this backdoor comic approach to really shrink him or bring him down to size or ridicule him.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Beth, one of your favorite political comedies is The Death of Stalin. Tell us about this, because this is more recent. Obviously, The Death of Stalin happened decades and decades ago. But tell us why it just stands out to you.
BETH ACCOMANDO
I love Armando Iannucci. He's a brilliant satirist. He displayed this in the thick of It, which was a British show that made fun of British politics, and then he made fun of American politics with Veep. During the first presidency of Donald Trump, he quit Veep, basically shut it down. I had a chance to interview him, and he said, Comedy writers could not compete with the absurdity of the real world, and he felt like he had no place writing this show about contemporary politics. And that, I think, led him to do Death of Stalin. So you're going back in history, you're looking to the moment when Stalin did die. He cast a bunch of American-British actors. He makes no pretense at having fake Russian accents. He just throws them out there in this absolutely savagely, expertly written comedy. So you're just sucked into the shenanigan that are going on.
ANDREW BRACKEN
And they're all just stumbling over each other to see who can take control, right?
BETH ACCOMANDO
So it's just insane. It's the chaos that comes when this authoritarian figure dies and nobody is ready for who's next. And there are hilarious moments with people changing sides. They go like, he's from the left. No, he was from the right. He was from the right. And they just slip, slide into opinions with no hesitation. And there's this one scene, this one line that, again, it's this moment of brutally funny and utterly chilling and absolutely sticks with me. So here's one of my favorite dark lines from this film.
CLIP Death of Stalin
Shoot her before him, but make sure he sees it, or in this one, kill him, take him to his church, dump him in the pulpit, and I'll leave the rest up to you.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So the pettiness of this cruelty is both absurdly funny and absolutely horrific. And I love the way throughout this movie, he walks this line between extreme absurdity and absolutely trenchant, satyric points that he's making. So I urge you, if you have not seen this film, go see it. It's blisteringly funny. It's fast-paced, and there's just so many layers to the comedy. And I think by casting all these English-speaking actors, he was making a commentary on current politics but felt unable to use current politics as the foundation. So he had to step back in history to go like, All right, I'm going to go look at this. You guys draw your own conclusions, but take note.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
No, I'm envious of anybody who has not seen The Death of Stalin because you're in for such a treat. That film is just firing on all cylinders. It's excellent.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And the cast is so good.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Yeah.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Yazdi, you're going to take us out with one pretty extreme example of ridiculousness and frivolity, and that's South Park.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Listen, who does not love South Park? South Park style has always been that it gets to the dark themes. It has a lot of profanity, but it has equal contempt for everyone. It's ostensibly about four eight-year-old friends in the town of South Park in Colorado, but there's a whole community it builds around itself. And over 28 seasons since it started in 1997. The show has been really the bellwether for satire in the country. I mean, obviously, they had the South Park movie, which is a stand-alone piece of Marvel. But what I really like to see about South Park is that it initially started out trying to shock people and being more scatological in its humor. But with time, it's progressed into becoming more about social satire and political satire. So it's really matured. And as I mentioned before, no one is safe. It's an equal level of satire for everyone. And perhaps the most absurd was when the people living in South Park decide to blame Canada for what's wrong with the country. And here's a clip.
BETH ACCOMANDO
But what is the source? Oh, that's easy. Times have changed. Our kids are getting worse. They won't obey their parents.
CLIP South Park
They just want to fight and curse. Should we blame the government? Or blame society? Or should we blame the images on TV? No, blame Canada. blame Canada. Hold their beady little eyes and clap their heads on one more ride. Blame Canada. Blame Canada. We need to form a full assault. You can take your salt.
ANDREW BRACKEN
Well, that sounds like a great and frivolous way to end our discussion of tactical frivolity. I want to thank our critics, KPBS cinema junkie, Beth Accomando, and moviewala's podcaster, Yazdi Pithavala.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Thank you so much.
YAZDI PITHAVALA
Thank you.
CLIP South Park
It seems that everything's gone wrong since Canada came along. Ame Canada, blame Canada. They're not even a real country anyway.
