Sometimes Things Need To Be Reset

Anyone who has ever worked in the service industry knows the dread associated with the entrance of a group of teenage boys. No other animal has the same mixture of cocksure ignorance - the arrogance of one who has it all figured out. Why doesn’t the rest of the world just live off of mommy and daddy, drink cheap beer and mock anything that threatens to hold value or meaning? In THE COMEDY, we are confronted with a particularly scathing portrait of this generation. Coming of age, once relegated to those teenage years, can now be pushed further and further into the future, until fully grown men elicit only disgust and exasperation from those who were forced long ago to actually abandon childish things. Clothed exclusively in cutoffs, button-ups, plastic sunglasses and irony, they are unable and afraid to drop their guard and be caught in anything resembling an actual moment of connection or emotion. They speak with a detached cadence and much of what they say has the rhythm of humor, but to laugh would be to convey a feeling, to betray the indifferent façade they struggle so hard to maintain.

Spoilers and my every tenth thought after the jump.

 

Swanson (Tim Heidecker) comes from money. Our introduction to him, following a brief unclothed beer soaking, consists of him personally insulting his comatose father’s personal male nurse while noisily eating cookies and drinking liquor. He seems nonplussed that the nurse is not amused by his every word, his lame attempts at wordplay, and his graphic definition of a prolapsed anus. This is the first of many collisions between Swanson and the working class - he cannot fathom that others wouldn’t find him as amusing as he finds himself. He often sort of play-acts at adulthood, seeking jobs that he doesn’t need or experiences that simulate real life without the inherent baggage. He joins a crew of landscapers in his father’s affluent neighborhood to sloppily plant a tree, but leaves hastily when the homeowners aren’t outraged by his antics. He pays a cabbie hundreds of dollars to drive his cab for twenty minutes, only so he can drunkenly speed and attempt to pick up women he calls whores. Eventually he does get a job washing dishes, but he seems to spend most of his time brushing his teeth in the sink and insulting a waitress.

 

He and his friends drink constantly, either booze or the cheapest beers possible, and are usually surrounded by equally affectless women that shouldn’t be interested in these overweight bearded man-children, but who don’t care enough about anything to actually reject their advances. At times they veer dangerously close to emotion, but this is quickly tempered with off-color jokes and indifference. Toward the end of the film, Van Arman (Eric Wareheim) shows his friends some slides from his childhood, and the group makes a few lazy jokes before completely detaching and allowing their eyes to wander. Swanson views everything with the same lack of expression, be it family photos or a girl having a seizure. Even Van Arman, who does have some interest in his own slide show, has peppered in pornographic shots to prove that he doesn’t care that much.

 

 

I’m glad that there is no attempt to explain why these people are so empty; it is just presented as endemic of this entire generation. Swanson cannot be bothered to show his father any affection outside of a few thumps on the head. He seems bothered by anyone who can sleep soundly and cannot help but torment them. There is mention of Swanson having a brother in rehab, but his only reaction is to attempt to bed his sister-in-law. The one event that seems to elicit any kind of response at all is Swanson cutting his hand open while washing dishes. While in the hospital he seems a bit shaken up, perhaps because he actually felt something, even if that something was just physical pain. He finds himself in an elevator with two children. They have pulled the age-old prank of pushing all of the elevator buttons. Finally confronted by people with a lower maturity level than his own, he exits the elevator rather than give them the satisfaction of the angry reaction they sought. For once, he has been forced into the role of the exasperated. Wandering the hospital halls, he enters the room of an elderly, unresponsive man. Continuing his tradition of prodding those who cannot react, he begins to comb the man’s hair. Then something unexpected happens - a nurse enters. For a second, he thinks he has been caught violating this stranger’s dignity, but instead the nurse mistakes him for a relative caring for his bedridden loved one. He is caught in the worst of all predicaments. He can admit that he was making a fool of someone defenseless, or he can have a stranger think that he actually cares about something. Tim Heidecker plays the moment masterfully, allowing so much to play on Swanson’s face in a tiny window of screen time.

 

 

I have heard this movie referred to as a ‘coming-of-age’ film. Not much of anything really changes, unless you look closely. Throughout the film, Swanson is surrounded by water. He lives on a boat, anchored in the middle of the sea, but he has no drinking water on board. He washes dishes for a ‘living,’ but duct tapes dish gloves to his hands. He asks a neighbor of his father to use their pool, but he never goes. He is instructed to keep his cut hand clean and wash it daily, but he ignores the instructions. His father’s own pool is drained dry. The climax of the film finds Swanson at the beach. He strips to the waist and finally immerses himself in the water. He is then confronted by another small child, another person at his level of comedic maturity. They splash each other and run around, they chase each other on the beach rolling and laughing and sharing in the smallest shred of joy.