Introduction

Abstract

My central thesis is that film depicts decay and, further, that they have no choice in the matter (though I cannot say they had no choice in the matter). The present-day ontological realities of film itself necessitate that even films that end happily (i.e., affirmatively) do so ironically, by way, that is, of presenting a world dead to us and past, to be received passively. Movies cannot show us the future—or, perhaps, if they want to be taken seriously, a dystopic future (the sort parodied in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, as Scorcher I–VI)—dystopic because, as I will go on to argue, film reveals, in the fullest sense of the Fryvian use of “revelation” (meaning “apocalyptic”) its hands as bare. The revelation is that there is nothing to reveal—a cause either of scandal or empowerment depending on how you view things. Through the reading of seven films that makeup, but do not exhaust, a genre I loosely call, in lockstep with the Stanley Cavell, the comedies of nihilism, I want to emphasize that film, for whatever reason, has been made to show its hand as bare. The possibilities of the art form are not to be explored here and the possibility of recovery—say, of possibilities for, or of, the medium lost—only tentatively expressed. This project is a continuation of Cavell’s treatment of comedy (which, incidentally, follows his reading of Shakespearean tragedy [King Lear and Othello, anyhow])—more specifically, of comedy as depicted on film.