The King of Comedy (1983)

WHY NOT ME?  WHY NOT?

by Chad Perman

One simply has to wonder what a man like Rupert Pupkin would do with today.  With American Idol and America’s Got Talent, The Biggest Loser and Storage Wars, YouTube and Twitter. With our 24 hour celebrity culture, reality TV, social media bombardment. With everybody’s mythical 15 minutes of fame happening all the time, all at once, all around us. Everyone a star in their own little world. A nation full of Pupkins.

Pupkin, the unhinged, obsessive character who drives the uncomfortably awkward and dark heart of The King of Comedy, desperately wants to be a star.  Or, more specifically, to be a TV talk show host along the lines of his hero, Jerry Langford (a Johnny Carson/Bob Hope amalgam, played by Jerry Lewis). Unfortunately, his dream is not simply or only a dream: he’s absolutely determined to become famous. In his mind, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’. His misguided attempts at achieving this fame ultimately lead him (and fellow stalker Sandra Bernhard) to kidnap Langford and demand, as ransom, that Pupkin be allowed to do ten minutes of his stand-up comedy routine on The Jerry Langford Show.

Rupert Pupkin is every bit as obnoxious as his name would suggest. When first we meet him, he is forcing his way into the backseat of Jerry Langford’s (Jerry Lewis) limousine, under the guise of helping protect him from an overzealous fan. Turns out, though, that Pupkin’s the one who ought to be feared. Not because he is particularly intimidating or imposing - physically he appears harmless as a fly - but rather for a far more insidious trait: his absolute inability to take no for an answer.  Pupkin is naive, inept, annoying, clueless, and largely untalented, but his single-minded perseverance, in the end, is able to overcome each and every one of these deficiencies. And not in a feel-good, Rudy type of way, either. In fact, not a single thing in this film ever feels good. It’s part of what makes it so disarmingly, uncomfortably brilliant.

The fifth collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro - and the one given the rather daunting task of marking the pair’s follow-up to Raging Bull - The King of Comedy is often, and unfairly, overlooked. At the time of its release, it was a complete failure; whatever it was that an audience was looking for in 1982, it wasn’t this. They wanted an escape but were instead left with a mirror: a darkly satirical look at the nature of modern popular culture, how we buy into it and feed off it, and how it destroys us in the process.

At first, The King of Comedy doesn’t feel like a Martin Scorsese film.  For one thing, the camera stays still, pinned down and motionless within the frame despite Scorsese’s known penchant for roving cameras in, out, and all around his characters, often dazzlingly so. This film’s frames, though, offer no escape.  No flashy filmmaking bravura to make even a single second of this film any less awkward or uncomfortable for us. We are stuck with Rupert Pupkin (whom Pauline Kael once referred to as “Jake LaMotta without fists”) from beginning to end.

De Niro crafts the vexatious Pupkin from the ground up, from gait to mustache.  He inhabits his skin in a way that gets under ours. We cringe as he bumbles over people’s personal boundaries, takes an obvious brush-off line by Langford (“Come by my office some time”) as an open invitation, sits in his mother’s basement hosting a pretend talk show with life-size celebrity cut-outs all around him, shows up unannounced and unwanted - with a guest no less! - at Langford’s vacation home. Even by today’s standards, when comedians like Ricky Gervais and Larry David have all but made an art form out of social awkwardness, De Niro’s Pupkin still manages to stand head and shoulders above the pack, a tour-de-force of ungainly inappropriateness.

The toughest part of watching Pupkin is how naked he often is, how openly he wears his intentions, and how misguided they usually are. He is one of those people who just don’t get it, and never ever will, even if you were to sit him down directly and tell him exactly what “it” is. For “it”, to Pupkin, will always be fame - a magic something that can annihilate all his nothingness; a gift that, once bestowed, can fix his miserable little life. He could be liked, respected. He could get the girl. He could prove all of them wrong. His life, finally, would matter. In celebrity there would be grace. There would be love.

In one of the film’s several fantasy sequences, Pupkin imagines himself appearing as a guest on The Jerry Langford Show. And it is here, in this moment, where Scorsese directly lays bare Pupkin’s thinly disguised motivations, the fuel propelling his relentless drive toward stardom, toward mattering. Langford “surprises” Pupkin by bringing out his old high school principal, now a justice of the peace, who proposes an impromptu wedding take place live on the show between “the king of comedy and his queen” (a woman who, in real life, all but loathes Pupkin). As the wedding begins, the principal launches into an apology on behalf of everyone who has ever failed Pupkin by not believing in him:

Dearly beloved, when Rupert here was a student at Clifton High School none of us - myself, his teachers, his classmates - dreamt that he would amount to a hill of beans. But we were wrong. And you Rupert, you were right. And that’s why tonight, before the entire nation, we’d like to apologize to you personally and to beg your forgiveness for all the things we did to you. And we’d like to thank you personally, all of us, for the meaning you’ve given our lives. 

It’s a disquieting moment in a film full of them, a reminder that we all carry our wounds with us everywhere we go, try as we might to bury them under various forms of striving and achievement. Rupert Pupkin wants to make something grand out of his life because, otherwise, he’s stuck being himself.

Chad Perman is a freelance writer and the editor-in-chief of this site. He lives in Seattle.

Hugo (2011)

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM.

by Chad Perman

I go to the movies because of movies like Hugo. I believe in movies because of movies like Hugo. And not to put too fine a point on it, but this entire site basically exists because of movies like Hugo.

Martin Scorsese’s first truly family friendly film (yes, really; Taxi Driver this ain’t) is a cinematic love letter to those of us who’ve ever been fortunate enough to have been bitten by the film bug. For so many of us, Scorsese included, it happens at a young age and things are never wholly the same. The magic of childhood bumps up against the wonder of a vast screen filled with stories and dreams and something inside of you never recovers, endlessly chases that same high again and again, in theaters and living rooms, through countless bad movies and a handful of treasured ones, from 7 to 97 years old. Movies become a balm, a fix, a cure, an escape. A bright wall in a dark room.

Hugo tells the story of a young Dickensian orphan trying to make his way through the life in early 1930s Paris. His world is large and small all at once: he lives out each day almost entirely within a Parisian train station, where he works to keep the clocks running from inside the clock tower which he calls home, but from his window at night, he can see the whole of Paris.

Left with a drunkard of an uncle after his father’s unfortunate death in a fire, Hugo is sad, lonely, and lost. His dad was his entire world and now that world is gone. The only remnant he’s able to hold onto from his old life is a broken-down automaton that his dad brought home from the museum where he worked shortly before his death, a project the two worked on together, in between reading Jules Verne books, endlessly tinkering to bring the machine back to life.

Now, by day, when he’s not scavenging or stealing food from the shops in the train station to survive on, Hugo is collecting spare tools and parts to continue the work they had begun together. The young boy is convinced that the automaton somehow holds within it a secret message from his father, some kind of clue about how to get through life without him. With each new tinkering, Hugo is getting ever closer to this final connection to his father, but an elusive heart-shaped key remains unfound and, without it, the automaton will never work.

We are guided through this opening act with all the grace and skill of a long-time master craftsman given a brand new tool (3D) with which to build. Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson take full advantage of the medium, with long, sweeping, intricate shots of the bustling and vibrant Paris our hero calls home. We move in and out of spiraling staircases and cavernous towers from a child’s point of view, are fully immersed in the experience of a Parisian train station with its hundreds of passengers and workers, its scattered orphans working to survive and evade the grasp of the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his loyal dog.

You can literally feel Scorsese’s joy and enthusiasm through the lens, as his cameras swoop up, down, and all around the teeming train station and any other world Hugo inhabits. At times it feels almost magical.

And if that were all Hugo was, if that were all this film ever did well - its gorgeous 3D canvases and Oliver Twist-ish first act - it would likely be enough to be declared a great success. But that this opening hour is a mere set-up for the film’s real story, the precursor to a second act filled to the brim with a glorious and glittering celebration of the magic and power of art, the sheer awe and wonder of cinema itself, well, that’s what makes the whole thing feel like such a gift to any true film lover. Hugo turns out to be much, much more than a slice-of-life orphan-makes-good tale. It slowly evolves into a fable, a quest, a mystery, and finally, a heartfelt love letter to the transformative power of the movies.

Hugo finds the heart-shaped key, hung around the necklace of his fellow adventurer and confidante, Isabelle (Chloe Moretz). The automaton works. The two gather around the mechanical being as it slowly beings writing out the message it was programmed to record. But instead of words, it draws a picture. A picture of a rocket crashing into the eye of the Moon. The same image Hugo’s father would tell him about seeing once in a film many years ago. In its final flourishes, the automaton signs the drawing with the name of George Melies.  

Melies, one of the pioneers of early cinema, has been long-forgotten and presumed dead by those who thought about him at all. But George Melies is alive, having abandoned cinema after the first World War when he could no longer afford to make pictures, relunctantly forced to sell the only prints of many of his films to a company that melted down the celluloid to make heels for women’s shoes. A much stuffier, stern, and embittered Melies (Ben Kingsley) now works in same the Parisian train station where Hugo runs the clocks. It’s a small world after all.

Scorsese uses Hugo and Isabelle’s quest for more information on George Melies’ career as a way to open up the film itself, allowing Scorsese to create what is, essentially, an inspired tutorial on the early years of film history (including brief scenes from Keaton, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and more, as well as plenty of moments from Melies’ work). Again, one can sense Scorsese’s well-documented enthusiasm for the medium, as well as his oft-argued plea (barely disguised here) for film archives and preservation. And, for a film geek, it’s manna from heaven: sitting in a darkened theater, watching vintage films flash by on the screen.

When I switched my major to Film Studies shortly before my junior year in college, many around me were perplexed. Why would you want to go and do a thing like that? they’d wonder, plodding diligently away towards their business or science degrees; degrees that made sense, degrees that would “open doors” or, at the very least, provide some sort of career path upon graduation. I didn’t have a simple answer for any of them, least of all my well-meaning but frustrated parents or my supportive but confused girlfriend. I had, instead, a feeling that I felt I had to chase, something stirred up in me by Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and a hundred other directors. Something that I could no longer ignore. I simply had to face facts: movies were what did it for me. I had been bitten by the film bug and it wasn’t going away. It’s where my heart was.

Try explaining that to any serious, career-minded person.

But now I don’t have to. Now I have Hugo. Now I can say: sit and watch this. This is why I chased movies in college, and why I still chase them today with all the free time I can carve out in my life. This is why I started a film site and pour countless hours into it, writing about and being captivated by movies, even though I have ever dwindling amounts of time in my life and often miss out on much-needed sleep as a result. This is why all of that is worth it, and more than worth it, really. Necessary. Among other things, art makes one feel less lonely. It makes life more worth living.

And so, as Hugo and Isabelle bring George Melies back to life - both as a man and a filmmaker - a huge smile began to form on my face. In heartfelt scenes that easily rival anything out of Cinema Paradiso (that other great love letter to cinema), we watch as Melies and his wife (and long-time co-star) remember and relearn the wonder of the movies. They have found themselves again, and Hugo has found a family.

“Films have the power to capture dreams,” says Melies, as we near the end. Hugo reminded me of my own, and then some.

Chad Perman is a writer living in Seattle, and the editor-in-chief of this site. He can find magic in most any film, if he looks closely enough.