What the F is going on!?! Part Four: The Humor of it

Who knew the world going to shit could be so funny? Heavy satire of current events is hardly a new concept and doing it in film isn’t exactly new either. Probably the greatest instance of art mocking reality would be Charlie Chaplain’s The Great Dictator from 1940, before the US was even involved in World War II, he was making fun of Hitler and the Nazi’s. Names and symbols were changed, but the silliness of Chaplain’s not so veiled shot at Hitler were obvious, dangerous and hilarious. His depiction has lived through the decades on lists of the greatest comedies of all-time. 

When I first started making a list of movies that reminded me of the times were are in, I didn’t always have a theme to those movies, nor did I always have a specific reason off the top of my head for why they fit with the times, either. Four Lions is a movie where I wasn’t exactly sure why I felt it fit. I think I wanted to have movies that told a story of Israel or Palestine or Iran or the Muslim World, and this movie about a sleeper cell of Islamic Fundamentalists in England seemed like it fit but also felt wrong in that regard. This is one of the darkest comedies ever. It’s wildly funny but also depicts hate-filled people carrying out a mass casualty attack on civilians. But it was still one of the movies that really stuck with me. I think what relates to our current world isn’t even that they are Islamic Fundamentalists, it’s that they are disillusioned, dumb, and dangerous. Oddly, they are like the people mentioned in the War Game documentary as the followers of a religious extremist group attempting to take over the US government. The sleeper cell here reminds me more of QAnon followers, the types that were Jan 6ers or plotted to kidnap Governor Witmer. Additionally, this is such a cutting satire that it feels like it lives on the Mount Rushmore of the other movies in this post.

The Death of Stalin might be one of my favorite movies of this decade. This is the only satire in this group that’s based on actual events that portrays real people. Every beat of this is a series of events where stupidity, brutality and conniving cycle over and over again. The story is just as simple as it says in the title, we see Stalin on his last night, and the next morning he collapses alone in his room where he slowly dies… or is slowly declared dead. The men around him go from kissing ass to stay as close to power as possible to wrangling to put themselves into as much power once Stalin’s death creates a power vacuum.  This movie is hilarious, yet it ends on a dark note, almost playing out like The Oxbow Incident where the lesser of two evils successors have their own Ender’s Game moral conundrum that they face in a rushed execution of the most brutal member of the clique. This might be a darkly fitting satire of the circle of idiots around Trump, brutal, misguided, flat out stupid, and all hungry for power. Trump’s people might be ideologically more all over the map, which is more of a consequence of Trump not having much of a firm philosophy himself, but the narcissism and fear carry through and may ultimately doom his legacy as it did with Stalin. The Bullwork put out a video this week going into further detail of the parallels between The Death of Stalin and the Trump administration.

It feels like a cliche to say that Idiocracy is a bit too close to reality, but holy shit we really are stuck with Trump because of low information voters who didn't want to be called “gay" for voting for a woman. I didn’t want to admit it for decades that this mentality of ignorance and tribalism could take over the country, but here we are, with the dumbest people in charge, nominating incompetent people for their cabinet, and every policy seems to be “what the other people want is gay, let’s do the opposite.” Through DOGE cuts, a terrible budget bill and department heads with intents to dismantle their departments, we are losing institutional knowledge within the Government, brought to you by Carl’s Jr. I have been holding off on admitting that we are living in Idiocracy but the announcement of a mixed martial arts event on the White House lawn on the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country really goes over the top. It’s not like we don’t have another summer sport that is considered our nation’s pastime that happens to also have experience fielding special event games in unique places. We are at the point of “it’s got what plants crave” rationale at HHS, so Presidentially sponsored gladiatorial fights at the White House make absolute sense in the world of Idiocracy.

As I was watching through these movies I felt like I was leaving The Interview out of my watchlist. Along with a lot of the films on this watch list, there are a lot of parallels with fascist governments and in watching many of those movies I found a lot of parallels with North Korea and this satirical/alternate reality telling of an assassination of Kim Jong-Un. I also have another alternate history film on my list, Inglorious Basterds, although it’s hard to pinpoint that as satire or humor in the same way, but it is very closely aligned in the story and concepts of both films. However, The Interview is one of just a small handful of movies whose release was affected by politics, in this case the Sony hack that nearly killed the movie and resulted in the filmmakers releasing it streaming because not as many theaters were willing to release it. I would say the other film to get this kind of political brushback was The Hunt, which was meant as a bit of satire, of wealthy liberal hunting conservatives in a Most Dangerous Game situation. I didn’t include that movie because it wasn’t especially good of a movie, and it was blackballed out of fears that it was dangerous to conservatives, which is really ill-informed reading of the movie. With The Interview, the interesting themes that aren’t necessarily the assassination, but the psychological profile of Kim Jong-Un and his vengeance against anything he disagrees with, his charm in one on one situations, and the propagandist fixation on appearances all ring true with Trump. His administration is presenting itself as well as the three hour plus cabinet meets that only consist of ball washing rather than a briefing on policy. Oddly enough, Trump and North Korea were in the news today as it came out that during his meeting with Kim Jong-Un in 2019, Seal Team 6 was sent to a North Korean beach with a mission to plant listening devices in the country, they encountered a ship on while in the water, killed all on board, punctured their lungs so the bodies would sink, sank the boat and aborted the mission. It turned out they were not North Korean military but civilian fishermen. This on the heels of the Trump admin bragging about blowing up a speedboat from Venezuela with eleven people on board (not leaving much space for the purported drugs to run), on their way to the United States 1200 miles away (which would require five fuel stops). I don't think this recent event with a boat gets the benefit of the doubt that they didn't kill more civilians.

It’s the cutting and dangerous jokes of these movies that make them among the funniest films I have seen. I’m not one for edgy comedy for the sake of its edginess, but these are films that care about the jokes. They make you laugh, they don’t expect you to laugh along to the cadence of comedy. And in the cases of most of these, they are terrifying at times, even if they also provide the surprise of heavy laughter. In the case of our real world, it’s pretty terrifying, but it’s so stupid that it’s almost comical as well.