Psychological Comedy

Beginnings are always difficult, muses the protagonist of the 1932 Ernst Lubitsch film, Trouble in Paradise (1932). In this post, I argue the movies of Ernst Lubitsch are a precursor to self-conscious cinema and contemporary television’s intimate biosphere of knowingness. His films reflect a central element of modernity: all is artifice, and therefore knowledge is above all the elaborate con act of a well-crafted opaque surface.

Hollywood in the 1930s and '40s materialized the dream of a new industry in a new state in a new country. What we find at the heart of the American imagination as depicted in early Hollywood cinema is a phantasy of Europe as a fallen state and thus the evanescence of greatness. By its very existence, the industry suggested that the old world only maintained its cultural superiority on the strength of an elaborate sham.

By upsetting expectations and breaking through the superego shell so as to toy with the assumptions and desires of the id as rendered in our hidden pleasures, fears, and gross titillations, Lubitsch’s movies are revelations in the form of comedy. The famous "Lubitsch touch" is a direct transfer from the self-consciousness of Brechtian theater to Hollywood from the Marx brothers to Billy Wilder, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and the excruciating psychological swordplay of Larry David, Fleabag, and various animated pastiche satires like South Park and Bob’s Burgers.

If escape is the raison d’être of cinema, the screen of representation is the surface through which transformation is rendered. While Brecht played with the self-consciousness native to theater, Lubitsch’s medium was the self-consciousness of identity so central to modernity. Like those who followed him, Lubitsch was fascinated with surface as depth. The more shades to hide behind or mirrors to peer into, the more Lubitsch developed the language of the comedy of manners. The transgressions of, say, Harpo Marx in A Night at the Opera (1945) or Larry David now are only possible in a world where manners matter. To be self-conscious in a social situation is largely to be aware of what is done and what is not done. This sense of the appropriateness of behavior indicates the artificiality and yet crucial importance of manners. Lubitsch was the portal through which the modernist play upon the conventions of manners became the subject for intelligent laughter.

Ernst Lubitsch movies are besotted with make-believe, with the delusions of the imaginative mind, whether it be the unlikely (and unknowing) pen pals James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner (1940) or the lovers who find themselves on the opposite sides of ideology in Ninotchka (1939). Interestingly, in the latter movie, ideology is portrayed as a matter of determining the proper amount of pleasure. Greta Garbo finally laughing, the Leninists and Trotskyites falling for the soft, romantic glow of Parisian light—these moments typify Lubitsch in his love for the transgressive play of thought itself, of the sweet lies we tell ourselves.

Lubitsch is the portal. His is a cynical world, a grand, eloquent comedy of manners that may be used as a bluff through class, nationality, ideology, and even love. In these movies, to live in reality is passé, an archaic mistake or an unfortunate character flaw. Modern art in That Uncertain Feeling (1941) is itself portrayed as hopelessly esoteric and impenetrable as if taking too seriously the stage, or the picture frame, or the museum, the piano sonata, or the movie house, for that matter, was a stance so foolishly pompous as to reveal nothing but the tragic flaw of a con-man. Reality is so unbearable to the theater troupe of Warsaw in To Be or Not to Be (1942) that they throw themselves into acting, dressing up as the oppressor. They do not become the Germans, but they do play through them the inescapable knowledge of the banality of power. Likewise, Melvyn Douglas’ pantomime is also his charm, is also the angle that cuts through to Garbo as Ninotchka. As if he is winking at us through the performance, the proscenium, and the dense spectacle of cinema.

We live now in an age where celebrities have to play the game of identity at various levels of knowingness. They can be acting always. The insider comedy of The Larry Sanders Show, for example, allows us to see into and through the mechanics of showbiz. The device of the cameo represents a fissure: Is this Carol Burnett playing herself? Contemporary humorists employ the frame of celebrity, of showbiz to explore the way we turn to entertainment to assuage our emotions. The thrill here is watching the surface illusion of the mirror of entertainment in the mirror-house of celebrity. As shown in Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2014), L.A. is itself a celebrity. The neighborhood of Hollywood is then a valid stage set in Curb Your Enthusiasm, on which well-known actors play themselves through the knowing conceit that actors run in the same social circles, and live in the same neighborhoods, an ur-Toontown.

Lubitsch showed us various mirthful insider takes on our infatuation with identity and its transformations. The comedy of manners and the subsequent conjuring of self-consciousness is a hallmark of modernity. Contemporary comedy has taken the formula into further psychological territory. This was made possible by the cult of publicity, celebrity, and influencer culture. Essentially, the Lubitsch touch was the creation of a portal that gave us the ability to laugh at ourselves in the roles we are implored to play in society. It is a drama of mind games, this recurring juxtaposition of manners, layered, torn down, built up, scuttled. The light he shines on the predicaments of the modern self is blindingly bright since viewers have become too knowing of the play of illusion in identity construction as they engage in and mirror this activity in their own social media personas. If only we could learn like Garbo to laugh again at the simple pratfalls at the heart of the human comedy.