By Walker Zupp
The great misconception about satire is that it should make you laugh. Any satirist worth their salt knows that humour is more of a by-product than an intention; often, the humour comes as a result of the absurdity of the material. But absurdity and humour are two very different things, and I certainly think that satire is aligned with the former. This is also the reason why so many people find satire repulsive, or in bad taste. It is difficult to aesthetically enjoy a thing that is totally self-aware, since at the same time it should be making you self-aware. As such, the perceived shortcomings of satire are more to do a testy audience than anything else. Satire is very much like the Horror genre: it is not always a case of ‘enjoying’ the film; rather one should open oneself to it, and what it is trying to say about you. For many, what art has to say about the individual is often slightly more than the individual can handle. Is there an explanation for this phenomenon? I’ve thought about it for some time, but I do think that people do not like being helped. And satire is a bitter medicine: much like revenge, it is a dish that is best served cold.
The revenge comparison is part of the problem. For most people, the satirist is a person who is fed up with a particular element of their society, and who wants to rub everyone’s face in their own faeces so-to-speak. Those who would argue this are only three-quarters right: the very first person to rub their face in any sort of communal dog-shit is the satirist. Many reading that previous sentence will dislike the phrase ‘dog-shit’ because it is obscene. But they miss the point. It’s not like there is nothing obscene on television, or in films and magazines. I think that quite a few perfume advertisements are obscene—But given a choice, I think the general public would much rather look at the perfume advertisement than a piece of satire about the perfume advertisement. In many ways, the obscenity is in us, or how we choose to see things.
The great satirists play with our perception of the world. Some are more successful than others, and success often depends on how long you can keep your audience engaged without making them uncomfortable.
The Andrei Tarkovsky film ‘Stalker’ (1979) is one of the great satirical films of the 20th Century. What makes it so remarkable is its satirical scope: whereas ‘Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ (Kubrick, 1964) takes aim at a very narrow part of our political establishment (one that affects all of us, but narrow nonetheless), Tarkovsky’s film takes aim at human consciousness, and our systems of belief. You’d think that that would be an impossible task, but Tarkovsky—along with the source text ‘Roadside Picnic’ by Boris and Arkady Stugatsky, who also wrote the screenplay—pulls it off.
Making a film in Soviet Russia in the late seventies was no easy task. Censorship and budget cancellations were commonplace. After the Kodak 5247 stock footage of the initial outdoor scenes of ‘Stalker’ were shot, the film was poorly developed, and the Soviet film board threatened to pull the movie completely. Even after the film had been completed (which happened three times, incidentally), the State Committee for Cinematography hated how slow the film was, to which Tarkovsky replied: ‘The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.’ I do think the latter part of that response involving the term ‘main action’ is some serious bluffing, but I guess he had a point.
But what that strange Tarkovsky style manages to do, in many ways, is to slow your responses to what is going on in the frame. Yes, the film is about the latter period—and death knells, frankly—of Russian communism, religion, and those bizarre areas in the world that have been abandoned because of impending natural disasters, or impending natural disasters that never happened. And yet, one never senses the anger of Tarkovsky, or the anger of the Strugatsky Brothers, or even that kind of collective social warrior fury, which is so commonplace in Soviet cinema: ‘Come and See’ (Klimov, 1985) is certainly exemplary of that. ‘Stalker’ is, oddly enough, a very neutral film that doesn’t seem to have an opinion on anything, even though it clearly does. For this reason, Tarkovsky should be commended as one of the great satirists of the 20th Century, and if there is any by-product of humour to be found here, it is that Tarkovsky worked in a country that invariably blacklisted, or jailed satirists. He got the last laugh, which is kind of funny.
As anyone will tell you, ‘Stalker’ has very little humour in it. Unless you’re one of those weird academics who laughs out loud during the philosophically self-aware bits of deconstruction that so often occur in Soviet films – that is weird. But for the rest of us, ‘Stalker’ isn’t funny because it doesn’t aim, or need to be funny to get its point(s) across. What it is so brutal about it is its demonstration of people; you’ll be hard pressed to find another film about human thought that is as didactic as ‘Stalker’. But it comes across as sincere, and never condemns, or praises for that matter.
There, in that last point, we find the crux of the problem with satire. For those who do not like satire, it is not because the satirist has decided to condemn, but because they refuse to praise, or accept certain things in our world that we would otherwise hold to be true, and good. As the character of the Writer in ‘Stalker’ points out while nestled in a patch of moss, ‘A man writes because he’s tormented, because he doubts.’
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