FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (14)
By:
September 21, 2024
Some years ago, HILOBROW friend Greg Rowland pointed out that the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves ought to be regarded as a sentimental remake of the 1970 revisionist Western Little Big Man. The series FIRST TIME AS COMEDY will offer additional examples of this recursive (and often, though not always middlebrow) syndrome.
FIRST TIME AS COMEDY: SUPERDUPERMAN vs. WATCHMEN | WILD IN THE STREETS vs. PREZ | EMIL AND THE DETECTIVES vs. M | THE SAVAGE GENTLEMAN vs. DOC SAVAGE | GULLIVAR JONES vs. JOHN CARTER | THE PHONOGRAPHIC APARTMENT vs. HAL | HIGH RISE vs. OATH OF FEALTY | JOHNNY FEDORA vs. JAMES BOND | MA PARKER vs. MA BARKER | DARK STAR vs. ALIEN | SHOCK TREATMENT vs. THE TRUMAN SHOW | JOHNNY BRAVO vs. ROCK STAR | THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS vs. THE MATRIX | CAVEMAN vs. SASQUATCH SUNSET | LITTLE BIG MAN vs. DANCES WITH WOLVES | THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO vs. BE KIND REWIND | LEN DEIGHTON vs. LEN DEIGHTON.
Sasquatch Sunset (2024, d. David Zellner and Nathan Zellner) is categorized as a Comedy/Adventure, so this installment in the FIRST TIME AS COMEDY series isn’t pukka, I know. Still, the movie’s absurdism is extremely rarified.
According to the “critics’ consensus” blurb at Rotten Tomatoes: “For audiences attuned to the Zellners’ utterly unique wavelength, Sasquatch Sunset offers a moving — if often inscrutable — look at our relationship with the natural world.” Does that sound like a comedy to you? Also:
“Farcical gross-out notwithstanding, the film has a poignant, lyrical spirit underlined by its soundtrack of mock-folksy flute and guitar. It is majestically shot by Mike Gioulakis, capturing the luminous vistas you might associate with Terrence Malick.” — Jonathan Romney, Financial Times
“Sasquatch Sunset is a gloriously vulgar film about made-up monsters from children’s stories — but it is also a terribly melancholy adult story about the violence of progress. What a remarkable, unique, sad little cult oddity it is.” — John Nugent, Empire Magazine
“Consistently weird and frequently wonderful, “Sasquatch Sunset” uses its high-concept premise to consider a host of themes: collective living, coexistence with nature, longing stirred by seclusion.” — Natalia Winkelman, Boston Globe
“A little bit of Bigfoot lore goes a long way (it really does get gross), but the beauty of Sasquatch Sunset is how it depicts humans as mysterious intruders in their world, not the other way around.” — Peter Howell, Toronto Star
‘Are we looking for the human in the Sasquatch? Or for the Sasquatch in us? The movie works either way, but in its refusal to hew to a familiar plot trajectory, it holds up a mirror to our own narcissism.” — Amy Nicholson, Los Angeles Times
“[Piles] on enough quirkiness to almost get on your nerves before suddenly swerving headfirst first into the sublime, rinse, repeat.” — David Fear, Rolling Stone
It’s funny that the alpha male sasquatch — under the influence of a poisonous psychedelic mushroom — attempts to mate with a mountain lion. But then the mountain lion kills him! It’s funny that the gentle, contemplative beta male — played by Jesse Eisenberg — gets stuck under a log in the river (an unintended consequence of humans logging the forest). But he drowns! This is the sort of humor that one finds in Norse sagas, Spartan history, and Native American mythology. It’s concise to the point of mystery; it’s ironic in a non-Seinfeldian manner.
Perhaps the absurdist Samuel Beckett can help us to understand. In Watt, we read:
“Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us, I mean the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless. They correspond to successive… how shall I say successive… suc… successive excoriations of the understanding, and the passage from the one to the other is the passage from the lesser to the greater, from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form. The laugh that now is mirthless once was hollow, the laugh that once was hollow once was bitter. And the laugh that once was bitter? Eyewater, Mr. Watt, eyewater. But do not let us waste our time with that. . . . The bitter, the hollow and—Haw! Haw!— the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout—Haw!—so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—silence please—at that which is unhappy.”
One gets the impression that the makers of Sasquatch Sunset are laughing the mirthless laugh. The “highest” form of ululating non-laughter laughing. Beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsehood. The film style — the movie’s often sentimental, elegiac sound design, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and I think direction too — tends to undercut this effort.
Is Sasquatch Sunset, perhaps, then, an example of quatsch? One tends to suspect that, in fact, it is.
My one-word review of the movie, then? “Sasquatsch.”
Caveman, a 1981 movie written and directed by Carl Gottlieb and starring Ringo Starr, Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long, and Barbara Bach, is — in stark contrast with Sasquatch Sunset — a slapstick comedy.
The plot of the two movies are more or less along the same lines: A small band of primitive hominids attempts to carve out a subsistence living in the wilderness; a beta male pines for the alpha female, and is bullied by the alpha male — who eventually gets his comeuppance.
I saw this movie when it had just come out, while visiting Paris with my father at the age of 13. Unlike other movies I saw during that trip (Blue Lagoon, Rocky II), this one wasn’t translated into French. That’s because there wasn’t a word of English spoken in it. Another thing that Sasquatch Sunset and Caveman have in common.
This is a lowbrow entertainment with only the mildest amount of sentimentality — Atouk (Ringo) will eventually choose the kind-hearted and loyal Tala (Shelly Long) over the pneumatic but vapid and cruel Lana (Barbara Bach, the Bond Girl whom Ringo met on Caveman and married in 1981).
Richard Moll, who a few years later would play the imposing bailiff “Bull” on Night Court, shows up briefly here as an Abominable Snowman — a cousin, perhaps, to Jesse Eisenberg’s sasquatch.
There’s also some drunken hijinks in Caveman. In order to rescue Tala from a claymation T-Rex, Atouk feeds the creature some fermented fruit, and he becomes delightfully tipsy.
Caveman is stoopid! But quite charming. I’ll choose that over quatsch any time.
MORE FURSHLUGGINER THEORIES BY JOSH GLENN: SCHEMATIZING | IN CAHOOTS | JOSH’S MIDJOURNEY | POPSZTÁR SAMIZDAT | VIRUS VIGILANTE | TAKING THE MICKEY | WE ARE IRON MAN | AND WE LIVED BENEATH THE WAVES | IS IT A CHAMBER POT? | I’D LIKE TO FORCE THE WORLD TO SING | THE ARGONAUT FOLLY | THE PERFECT FLANEUR | THE TWENTIETH DAY OF JANUARY | THE REAL THING | THE YHWH VIRUS | THE SWEETEST HANGOVER | THE ORIGINAL STOOGE | BACK TO UTOPIA | FAKE AUTHENTICITY | CAMP, KITSCH & CHEESE | THE UNCLE HYPOTHESIS | MEET THE SEMIONAUTS | THE ABDUCTIVE METHOD | ORIGIN OF THE POGO | THE BLACK IRON PRISON | BLUE KRISHMA | BIG MAL LIVES | SCHMOOZITSU | YOU DOWN WITH VCP? | CALVIN PEEING MEME | DANIEL CLOWES: AGAINST GROOVY | DEBATING IN A VACUUM | PLUPERFECT PDA | SHOCKING BLOCKING.