| Vincent Cheng |
The Heartbreak Kid plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, May 9th, through Sunday, May 11th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
CONTEXT
What creates the sensation of personal discomfort when watching comedies, and what is the value of that discomfort? To answer these questions, I’d like you to first close your eyes and imagine something funny. Undoubtedly you pictured, as I did, a man stepping onto the claw end of a rake lying hidden among the stalks of a windswept prairie. The downward force of the man’s step forces the pole of the rake suddenly upward, striking him in the face. His bowler hat flies off. Now he is on the ground, devastated.
Yes, this is funny. However, barring some extraordinarily relevant moment of past trauma, it is unlikely that any given audience member would find it uncomfortable to watch. We can imagine the physical sensation of pain, but the abstracted circumstances surrounding that pain limit our empathetic response.
Imagine, now, the same situation, except the person the man most desires to impress is also standing right there, watching it all go down. Perhaps the observer is his greatest crush, or his father, or the late Princess Diana (d. 1997). Regardless, the result is the same. The rake nails him in the face. And maybe his pants slide down a little as he falls, revealing the crack of his ass and also a bit of toilet paper he put in the back of his pants to make his ass seem fuller, more supple. Graciously, his observer turns away.
But we, as audience members, do not have that luxury. The private pain has now been converted into public embarrassment. We imagine three things at once: How the man must feel, how his observer feels watching him, and how the man is responding to the fact of his situation being observed. The empathetic gap has narrowed. We are now able to relate to the man through the universal human emotion of humiliation. We experience both the sense memory of being embarrassed as well as the corresponding desire to not feel embarrassed. This is the beginning of comedic discomfort.
That feeling of discomfort can now be intensified in two ways. The first involves exaggeration. This nearly always entails magnitude (e.g., stepping on a rake in front of your entire family) or frequency (e.g., stepping on a rake three thousand times in a row). Because exaggeration bends toward absurdity, this scaling eventually results in more sympathy than empathy. We can understand why the character’s experiences might be especially embarrassing, but we don’t otherwise relate to them beyond that. This is why such an effect is valuable for the related fields of cartoons, slapstick, and prank shows.
The other method of increasing discomfort involves closing the distance between the character and ourselves. Imagine, again, our man in the prairie. This time, however, he’s accompanied by his fiancé. They have a healthy relationship, but he’s fallen in love with someone else and he’s planning to break up with her. Right as he’s about to do it, he steps on the rake and falls backwards. He farts a little as this happens and you can tell because loose stems of prairie grass fly up around him. The man’s fiancé laughs, more out of shock than anything, and immediately he weaponizes this against her. “I just feel like you’ve never taken me seriously,” he says, as he surreptitiously slides tissue paper back into his pants. “Maybe if I’m just a clown to you we should break up.” We all know what’s happening: He’s trying to put her in moral debt because he desperately needs the high ground for what’s about to happen. He’s being an asshole, but we know why. The gap between us and him has closed, but we’re relating to him in a way that feels bad. The more specifically we identify with a character’s upsetting actions and desires, the more personally painful it becomes to watch them enacted on-screen. Then, once the character because a proxy for the viewer, the target of the discomfort becomes us. We’re still laughing at them, but we’re also laughing at ourselves. And that means that everyone else watching is laughing at us too. The laughter comes with a real personal cost, and that cost creates the satirical effect.
Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid is a singular work of satire because it maximally creates and sustains audience discomfort. May does this through intentionally avoiding what I will describe as Escape Devices: formal moves that allow us to avoid identifying with the protagonist, reducing the satirical effect. Therefore, by analyzing The Heartbreak Kid, we can discover why the current state of satire is so weak, and what can be done to fix it.
ESCAPE DEVICE #1: UNAMBIGUOUSLY JUSTIFIED BAD BEHAVIOR
The relevant details of The Heartbreak Kid, for the purpose of this essay, are simple. Lenny and Lila, both in their early 20s, marry after a brief courtship. They embark on a road trip to a resort in Florida for their honeymoon, during which Lenny grows very annoyed with Lila. At this resort, Lenny meets a Minnesotan named Kelly, who, like so many Minnesotans, is Cybill Shepherd. She expresses what seems to be romantic or sexual interest in him. The rest of the story follows naturally from there: Lenny has to 1. Divorce Lila so he can 2. Pursue Kelly.
At that level of generality, you likely feel that you’ve seen some version of this movie a hundred times before. Switch around a few key nouns and the premise is hardly distinguishable from, say, Sleepless in Seattle. But few people would describe Sleepless in Seattle as “pitiless.” So what’s different about this movie?
It begins with the fact that Lila is genuinely annoying—but not unbearably annoying. She eats a Snickers bar in bed after she and Lenny have sex for the first time. She’s a bad singer in the same way that basically all of us are, and she announces that she has to “go pee pee” when she uses the bathroom. The worst thing she does to Lenny is inconvenience him by receiving an agonizing sunburn. In other words, Lila encompasses much of what makes someone endearing when we’re attracted to them and a pain when we aren’t.
But she is annoying, and once we feel this, the trap of the movie is set. Because Lenny is the protagonist, we’re forced at all times to ask ourselves: If we were in exactly the same situation as Lenny, would we want the same things he does? And haven’t we, at some point, already caved in to similarly selfish desires against the people who love us most?
What’s key here is that the discomfort of seeing Lenny squirm his way out of marriage would instantly disappear if May made Lila just a little worse. And this is, in fact, where most movies take the easy out. Think of all the abhorrent jilted exes in all the romance movies you’ve ever seen. It’s never really a question that leaving them is the right thing to do. This is an escape device. If we know anyone would do the same thing as the protagonist, there’s no shame in empathizing with them.
Critically, The Heartbreak Kid also avoids the opposite escape device: Lenny’s actions would no longer be uncomfortable to watch if his new love was so real that he would be a fool to ignore it. This is the single force underlying basically all romantic comedies, but it doesn’t exist here. The only real justification we’re given for Lenny’s sudden passion is that he thinks Kelly is unattainably beautiful. His desire never transcends pure selfishness and May makes this explicitly clear. The first time Lenny is given a chance to articulate to Kelly why he needs to see her he says, “Please. I’ve got to prove something to myself.”
ESCAPE DEVICE #2: UNBELIEVABLY BAD PROTAGONIST
Once our discomfort is linked to empathizing with the protagonist, we begin looking for any reason to sever that connection. Such a severing can happen when a movie has the protagonist do something obviously outside our own ethical boundaries. This is why the modern trend of complex antihero protagonists is a little bullshit: what makes them “antiheroes,” generally, is that they kill people, either professionally or recreationally. We get to identify with the parts of them that we find cool or appealing, safe in the knowledge that we’re also not the kind of guy that would murder a person.
In contrast, the damage that Lenny does to Lila stems from selfishness and cowardice, often under the guise of compassion. The movie is very quick to set this up. After an unpleasant night in bed, Lila asks Lenny at a diner if he’s feeling alright. Lenny says that he’s “always quiet in the morning.” The next night, also in bed, Lila senses Lenny pulling away and asks for reassurance. He tells her, “I’m always quiet at night.” It’s clear that Lenny’s already looking for a way out, but it’s also the kind of white lie we say to people all the time, especially people we’re beholden to.
This all blows up when Kelly comes along. Once Lenny knows that Kelly’s family is only in Florida for a brief window, the clock starts ticking. He says he needs time to let Lila down easy, he doesn’t want to be overly cruel in what he knows is their final moments as a couple. In framing it this way, May sets up a neat formal device: the amount of time Lenny dedicates to Lila before divorcing Lila represents (to him) the degree to which he thinks he really cares about her. From here, May exposes Lenny’s hypocrisy by continuously giving him a reason to abandon Lila in the critical moments preceding the divorce.
The lies that Lenny tells Lila in order to spend time with Kelly represent some of the funniest and most uncomfortable moments in the film. Part of this is because his lies are incredibly, desperately detailed. He feigns, at one point, barely surviving an automobile wreck and when Lila expresses skepticism, he bluffs by threatening to call the patrolman that allegedly pulled him out of the wreck. He says, “My God! You think I’m making this up?” In these moments, May ruthlessly squeezes out the possibility that Lenny cares primarily about Lila’s feelings. What we read earlier as the desire not to hurt someone is something less noble: the desire to avoid our own guilt and pain at doing something we know is wrong to someone who couldn’t possibly deserve it.
ESCAPE DEVICE #3: HIDING THE PAIN
The degree to which we’re forced to confront and identify with the potentially upsetting decisions of a protagonist is largely a product of what the director chooses to show us. This is perhaps most obvious in superhero movies. Any given Transformers film would be tonally incoherent if, after some massive battle, the movie cut to an immigrant family whose livelihood has been ruined by the top half of their building being thrown into the ocean by Optimus Prime. No longer having any stable source of income they are, like many other Americans, forced to crowdsource money for health insurance on GoFundMe.
This escape device makes sense for that kind of movie. And it makes sense in a Nora Ephron romcom where the fiancé is given a moment of grace by saying, “I completely understand why you need to leave me for Tom Hanks.” After all, both movies are a kind of fantasy. But it takes all the sting out of a satire.
May avoids this throughout The Heartbreak Kid. The scenes between Lenny and Kelly are shot exactly in the style of a breathless, “we’re falling in love” montage. In between all those scenes, though, May always cuts back to Lila, alone in the hotel, choosing to believe that Lenny is being nothing more than inconsiderate.
This technique is clearest during the movie’s remarkable centerpiece, during which Lenny gradually builds his way into breaking up with Lila over a dinner of lobster and pecan pie. The sequence begins as a kind of comedy of errors, in which Lenny fails to ease Lila into what’s about to happen. “We only pass through life once,” he says. “We can’t squander it.” To which Lila responds: “Oh my God, Lenny. You’re dying!”
May hardly cuts during this entire sequence. The shots remain claustrophobically tight on the two leads’ faces. The only time the camera looks away is to the faces of other disapproving patrons. And when Lenny finally drops the bomb on Lila, May is careful to sustain Lila’s pain at its highest level. Lila’s only response is to beg Lenny for a quarter to use the lady’s bathroom so she can throw up, but Lenny repeatedly prevents her from doing that because, “people are starting to look at us.”
This is important because if Lila were allowed to really chew out Lenny, or throw up, or even fully express her sadness, we’d be given some kind of catharsis. Seeing the protagonist genuinely bear the brunt of their bad actions would allow us, by proxy, to feel we’ve been adequately punished. This would be analogous to the way a jump scare, in horror movies, replaces all the building unease preceding it with shocked laughter. Instead, May avoids the escape device of letting the film scold us into contrition. Whatever discomfort we feel extends into our real lives.
The last time we see Lila, she’s resting her head on Lenny’s chest, crying, refusing to eat the pecan pie. After that, we never see her again. The fact of her pain is unresolved. It’s a note that lingers over the entire rest of the movie.
ESCAPE DEVICE #4: SHIFTING THE PROXY
When we have a reprehensible but relatable character like Lenny, the temptation is to have the narrative of the movie conspire to punish him. At some level, this makes satirical sense—these are the bad things that happen to people who act in a way that we find unacceptable. And in fact, we see this move all the time in weak satires. Think of Promising Young Woman, in which martyring the lead character leads directly to a kind of comeuppance for the movie’s antagonists. Or the seemingly endless amount of recent The Menu-style films which seek to reveal to us that rich people can be weird and evil. In both, the karmic balance has been clearly restored.
The problem is that this is an escape device. In movies, as in real life, discomfort is intolerable. Because of this, the moment the satirical target gets punished, we instinctively view the punishing force as our new proxy. It is obviously much more empowering to feel righteous than it is to feel exposed.
May goes to great lengths to avoid exactly this escape device by intentionally staring it down. Lenny is continuously forced to win the favor of Kelly’s father, who sees him exactly for who he is. But Kelly’s father tells him that he wouldn’t approve of him “if they hung me from a dream and put a lit bomb in my mouth.” During the climax of the movie, Kelly’s father throws larger and larger sums of money at Lenny to bargain him out of pursuing his daughter. In the process, Kelly’s father identifies all the things about Lenny that we’ve been feeling: that he’s a liar, a shameless opportunist, a bullshit artist.
It doesn’t work. Lenny arises from these confrontations with an even greater sense of purpose. “I didn’t come out here to negotiate for Kelly. I came out here to fight for her,” he says. “I spent three years in the United States army. I fought every goddamn minute of those three years. Unfortunately not overseas because of a minor back injury.” This is the opposite of cathartic. Not only does Lenny “win,” he’s also given a chance to aggrandize himself by turning down enormous sums of money for “love.”
The satirical necessity of avoiding this escape device also explains why Lila and Kelly seem almost unbelievably naïve. If either of them, in a real way, called out Lenny for who he is, they would become the hero of the movie. “That’s exactly how I feel,” we would say, and by extension: “That’s who I really am!” But that never happens. May never gives us a chance to extricate ourselves from identifying with Lenny. And so, when the movie ends and Lenny’s gone, we’re left with no alternative option but to contend with ourselves.
CONCLUSION
What’s perhaps most impressive about all of this is that Elaine May has no margin for error. Satire is a zero-sum game. If it works, we’re given an opportunity to consider and hopefully correct our hypocrisies. But if we get let off the hook, then we’re given a free pass to keep behaving that way in real life.
Critically then, the aesthetic and moral value of the satirical effects are inextricable. The discomfort is aesthetically valuable because it shows us something true about ourselves and other people. The attention it takes to notice this, and the work it takes to communicate this effectively, is compelling and funny. At the same time, recognizing the truth of this necessarily results in empathy for the protagonist. This feeling has dual moral purposes. The first is that it might induce us to address and hopefully change the parts of ourselves that we feel discomfort seeing represented on screen. The second is that it challenges any feelings of righteousness or distance we might have from such behavior. You can’t separate the two.
And yet, separating the two is exactly what we’ve collectively been begging for as an audience for decades now. You can go online right now and see comments like this for even the most lukewarm satires still available: This movie is problematic because the clearly evil character never got called out. This movie is problematic because the clearly good character got hurt. This movie rewarded a bad person for their bad behavior. This movie never makes its moral stance explicitly clear and thus I can’t support its existence.
We want children’s movies for adults. We want movies where evil billionaires are literally cannibals, and movies where IP-incarnate, belonging to some of the most powerful corporations on Earth, explain to us why patriarchy is bad. And so, at the end of all this, when the world has taken an awful turn into something we could’ve easily seen coming just from an honest assessment of the self, we’re forced to ask stupid questions like: How did this happen?
Edited by Olga Techpikova-Treon