“JOKING, OF COURSE”: Three more quick thoughts about The Comedians and “Greeneland.”

1. Honky-Talk Heroes: It’s possible that you’ve heard the phrase, “What these people need is a honky!” It’s usually used to describe a particular kind of movie–I haven’t seen either of these, but Dances With Wolves and Avatar are pretty frequently cited as culprits–in which a nonwhite or coded-as-nonwhite culture can only stand up to its oppressors once it’s been shown the way by the white-ass honky man. He is the best rebel of them all!

The Comedians both exploits and subverts this cliche, and I’d say it’s about 30% exploitation and 70% subversion. So if you’re interested in how white-dominated/mainstream movies presented race in the ’60s, this is an Interesting Case. This is not the movie a black Catholic would make, and I think that’s pretty obvious just from the casting and assumed audience. But it’s still pretty intent on subverting this specific trope.

2. He Do the Priests in Different Voices: Graham Greene is really hard to take seriously. He gets overpraised by Catholics who envy the mid-20th-century moment when we seemed to be gaining the literary respect we really deserved in 1890. He then gets underestimated by people who think he’s just a catechism with moving pictures.

What he really is, I think, is good enough. The basic elements of the Greene novels I’ve read are: This world is absurd and cruel, and you are helpless against its cruel absurdity; England is Haiti is Africa is everywhere, there’s no geographical escape and white men are just scraped black men; justice is Hell; the Eucharist is mercy, but mercy must be accepted freely; the Catholic Church is the universal cynosure and everyone in the whole wide world thinks She’s important.

Some of these points are obviously controversial! And I get that the specific way in which Greene lays the Church on with a trowel alienates many readers. It often doesn’t work for me, because he tends to move too quickly from the character point–this actual character would say this actual prayer–to the symbolic. I’m hoping that I’ve learned from him, in my own Catholic novel (of which more in the next couple of days), how to integrate what characters do and what authors cry for.

But honestly–if nothing in Greene’s Catholicism moves you, I think you are missing some basic point of philosophy, some basic moment in what it is to be human. He is not a zoetrope catechism. He’s a Catholic man of the twentieth century, with all that implies. He’s a weird man who wants to be a weird saint but can’t figure out how; he’s a person who wants to be real.

3. Does Anybody Remember Laughter? I think I would pay huge amounts of money I don’t have to anyone who would compare and contrast the use of “comedy” and “comedians” in this movie, vs. the use of ditto in Watchmen. Because I’m honestly not joking (…of course) when I say I think they’re doing the same thing. Both works are, I think, assertions–in Greene’s case explicit, in Moore’s case denied–of meaning against the obvious sick joke of this world.

The punchline, which comes like a gut-punch, is: There is a God.

ETA: Argh sorry, that was overstated and misleading. Of course Watchmen is an atheist comic book and an anguished one. But I do think that among the various philosophical stances its characters put forward, there’s a strong assertion that justice is more than the exercise of will, and therefore meaning is given rather than created. And I don’t really think that stance makes sense without God, as I’ve said a bunch of times, even though again, Watchmen doesn’t go there. But anyway, just wanted to clarify what I meant. I’m more interested in the compare/contrast in the use of “comedian” imagery, & shouldn’t’ve overstated the rest of it….