No Country for the Evil Dead

Curse you, suitemates, for introducing me to iTunes movie rental service. I may never work again!

On the surface, the Oscar-winning film No Country for Old Men and the Dora-nominated show Evil Dead: the Musical don’t seem to have much to do with each other, apart from lots of random violence and meaningless deaths. But I happened to see them in the same week. So watch me work the magic of segue and critical analysis.

First, No Country for Old Men. This was the second movie of the Sunday movie night here at Grad House, and, for the first time, the mini-theatre room was packed. Everyone wanted to see it; everyone sat through it in engaged silence. But, afterward, in line for the elevator, I overheard a large number of people complaining to their suitemates: “It had no plot” “It was so boring!” “I don’t get it – why can’t they just make movies everyone understands?”

Then, this weekend, my cool friend Diana of the frequent comments and her boyfriend, Jason, were visiting, and they invited me to come see the cult hit musical Evil Dead, based on the campy series of movies directed by Sam Raimi. You know a play is going to be intense when you can reserve seats in the “splatter zone” (which they did). Unlike most theatre audiences, the average age seemed to be mid-twenties; people cheered and whooped, and even yelled out lines as the actors were about to say them. Everyone seemed to be having a rollicking good time.

Now, aside from the fact that Diana and Jason and Jason’s friend Sandra (who also joined us) are awesome people, I don’t think there’s any lesson to “take home” from my night with the all-singing, all-dancing Evil Dead. Contrariwise, while I enjoyed No Country for Old Men immensely when I saw it and have been thinking about it since, I wouldn’t necessarily want to sit through it again. In our culture, there seems to be a perceived split between intelligent stories and entertaining stories: a movie made to thrill its audience shouldn’t have to make them think and vice versa.

In a broad sense, No Country for Old Men and Evil Dead: the Musical have the same plot: the main characters act in an immoral but human fashion. Their actions make them the target of an implacable force that kills everything in its path, without reason or remorse. You can’t argue with it or hold it captive or divert it from its purpose. All you can do is try to destroy it before it destroys you. And it can never be completely destroyed. So, basically, it’s the old problem: you can escape death for a while, but everyone succumbs in the end.

The trouble with trying to divide all media between the two categories of “intelligence!” and “entertainment!” is that all stories are responsible for both. As I’ve blogged about before, every story has morals, whether or not it’s supposed to “just for fun” or specifically aimed to improve the human condition. But every story also has to get people to watch it and/or read it, too. And, as if that weren’t enough, intelligence and entertainment aren’t mutually exclusive. Personally, I find symbolism and deep thematic significance more entertaining than the sort of stuff that’s usually touted as “escapist” – frothy jokes or boy-meets-girl romance. In a sense, I guess you could say I was more entertained by No Country than by Evil Dead, even though the latter was more fun.

And, because of the whole “every-story-has-morals” thing, I often find “escapist” stuff offensive. I’m not down with the Hollywood deal where every woman who’s into her work is really longing for the chance to meet a handsome man and let her hair down, or where it’s okay for heroes to leave a swathe of destruction in their wake as long as it’s in the name of a good cause*. So, while I thought the second act of Evil Dead was great, some parts of the first act gave me the skeevies. I know the original Evil Dead movie has a raped-by-trees scene, but I think one has to be very careful when adapting source material like that into explicit comedy, especially when you’re mixing it with silly jokes of a sexual nature – eg., “Look, a penis! Ahahahahahaha!”**.

On the other hand, No Country may not have had jokes in poor taste, but it also didn’t have jokes NOT in poor taste – or wicked blood-spraying machines, showstopping zombie dances (with a “bad Henry Winkler – ayyyyy!”), mind-blowing special effects, and hilarious songs like “What the F*** Was That?” and “Ode to an Accidental Stabbing”. In fact, No Country sometimes seemed endless as the bleak US countryside the characters passed through. You find yourself wondering, “Who’s that, again?” or “Wait, who killed that guy, and why?”, or even “Did I miss something?” And, while sometimes, yeah, you really did miss something, there were other times when you wondered, “Why couldn’t you just film this in the light? Or have that character explain what he’s doing?”. Ambiguity can add to the meaning of a film, but that doesn’t mean it always does. You have to pick the parts about which you’re going to be ambiguous and make sure you’re doing it for thematic reasons rather than because you think it’s automatic-profoundness-generator.

I don’t think there has to be tension between telling a thoughtful story and telling a fun one. (This is the reason why I love authors like Neil Gaiman, Jane Austen, Terry Pratchett, George MacDonald Fraser, and Alan Moore) Nor do I think that Evil Dead is totally devoid of fodder for interesting intellectual speculation or that there weren’t any scenes in No Country that set my heart pounding. But, despite this, Evil Dead and No Country are very different stories, even though they’re also very much alike. A gory death in the former is funny; a bloodless death in the latter is nauseating. An hour of the former can seem like a few minutes; a few minutes of the latter can seem like an hour.

In conclusion, THANK YOU, DIANA!!!!!, for inviting me to Evil Dead, because I enjoyed that. Thank you, Grad House, for putting on No Country for Old Men, because I enjoyed that, too. And, thank you, reader, for putting up with this long entry in which I didn’t really address most of the important issues, like how it seems that, despite not wanting to value one of intelligence or entertainment over the other, we still want to say that Shakespeare is “better” than the Babysitters’ Club even though the latter is way more popular today, and we still think that making a movie that depicts people of colour in a racist way is worse than making a boring movie.

* There’s an argument to be made that no girl watches, say, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and thinks, “Every beast is a man inside, so if my man is ‘mean and coarse and unrefined’, it’s probably my fault for not being accepting and loving like Belle.” Of course not. Fiction rarely offers specific lessons – it’s absurd to say that Hamlet is supposed to teach us, “If the ghost of your father appears on the parapets of your ancestral home and tells you your uncle killed him, kill your uncle as fast as you can”, or that the moral of the Harry Potter series is, “If you ever go to Hogwarts, ask the hat to Sort you into Gryffindor, and don’t pick fights with kids on the train.” But what fiction does do is teach us patterns of thinking. We identify with the characters we see on screen or on stage or in the pages of our literature, and we structure what we perceive as the story of our own lives to reflect the stories we know. Heroes and villains tell us what’s normal.

** I have nothing against potty humour per se; I just don’t find it terribly funny. But to each their own. I spent a while after seeing the musical wondering why I didn’t feel a twinge at the “teenage boys want to get it on with their girlfriends” jokes or the “ha ha, genitalia!” jokes (or at the “somebody’s tearing apart their girlfriend with a chainsaw” jokes, for that matter), but the running “gag” where the main character’s prudish little sister keeps getting verbally and physically harassed by the main character’s horny best friend, only to be pretend-raped by actors in tree costumes turned my stomach. I think it’s because we still live in a society where a significant portion of the men and women who suffer sexual assault don’t come forward because they fear ridicule, disbelief, or blame (“You were asking for it, dressed like that”, “Come on, you enjoyed it”, etc.). I’m not saying there will *never* be a funny joke that involves rape, just that, in general, the current social atmosphere makes it extremely unlikely right now***.

***Of course, with humour, there’s always the excuse “It’s not supposed to be serious!”. Personally, I think that’s a weak defence on its own, but I also don’t think the line between “taking legitimate offence” and “reading things into the text that aren’t there” can be so easily drawn. More on that next week.