Forgiving Date Night

As listeners to the Overthinking It Podcast know, a problem has been bothering me since Saturday night, when I went third-wheeling (or, as I like to call it, ATVing) with two of my friends who are engaged to one another.

The stated premise of Date Night failed to step up and make sense, but this offended me a lot less than it does in other movies.

Why is it so easy to forgive a disposable romantic comedy like Date Night, when I wouldn’t offer the same forgiveness to, say a disposable action movie like Van Helsing?

Is it just that the story of a semi-estranged married couple making up made me all mushy? Eh, being third wheel, I doubt I was so sympathetic to the problems of couples.

The truth has more to do with the structure of comedies, the disruption of reality and social order, and when the part of your insides that don’t change during the action sequence matters more than the part of your outsides that doesn’t catch on fire …

My basic take on comedy and drama

I’ve said this before in podcasts and even written about it before in articles, but this is my basic take on the supergenres of comedy and drama. I by no means take credit for it myself, many smarter people have said as much before me:

• Drama is about people changing
• Comedy is about people not changing

Dramas end in deaths and departures – permanent changes. Comedies end in marriages and gatherings – promises of future repetition. This is reductive, of course, and means there are a lot of hybrids, but that’s fine. No reason there can’t be hybrid genres. I tend to think that classifying arts in shades of big categories is more useful than making lots of little categories, because you can still see the moving parts.

The most important, obvious place where the difference between comedy and drama is evident in each piece is the characterization. Dramatic characters and comedic characters are inherently different, and which is most obvious when encountering an obstacle.

Here’s an example: One of my favorite all-time comedic characters is Frank Drebn of Police Squad! and the Naked Gun movies (if you haven’t seen the Naked Gun movies, find them now. I know a lot of OTI fans are young, but that’s no reason for you to be deprived of such unmitigated brilliance.).

Drebn is a parody of Joe Friday and other super-serious TV policemen, and he shows how close unflappability is to the ridiculous – Joe Friday is dramatic because you test him and test him with challenges, and he changes so little as he overcomes each obstacle that he draws out the tension in scenes and stretches the drama. Joe Friday is pretty awesome as a dramatic character — watch him in action:

But Frank Drebn doesn’t change at all, and, as a result, he gut-punches the tension out of every scene. Let’s look at how Frank Drebn handled a few obstacles. In each case, a big part of the joke revolves around Frank Drebn staying the same when the circumstances go to extreme lengths to suggest he might want to try a different approach:

This scene is great, and the joke is very simple. Frank Drebn is in this widow’s home – she’s just sobbing and sobbing, but he is so deadpan and absorbed in his police work that he’s entirely oblivious to how upset she is, so, while trying to help. he just makes her cry harder and harder. He’s also so self-centered in how he delivers his non-sequitur noir police monologues that he uses the same dry, macho style to refer to inappropriate things – like, in this case, his homoerotic feelings for an old roommate.

One of the funniest things a character can do is say something with total honesty that everyone knows is true when it isn’t expected. I love the line, “We would have come earlier, but your husband wasn’t dead then.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LOTovO7oqM

In the above scene, Frank Drebn’s method in fighting all these legendary foreign leaders is funny because it is exactly the same way he approaches fighting a bunch of random thugs. The thoroughly inappropriate music reaffirms who Drebn is and his unwillingness to be changed even a little bit by circumstances. It’s hard to think of a more hostile environment or more dire obstacle to put in front of him, and he stays the same throughout.

And his callbacks to the Three Stooges and other physical comedy classics are further comic reaffirmations – even in this foreign, hostile environment, he’s doing the same stuff people in this sort of movie have been doing for seventy years.

In the above scene, the joke is both that he is so deadpan serious walking into such a silly, cliché scene, and of course in the repetition of “locksmith,” which confirms expectations about the world and how it works in a surprising way. Speaking of “one of the funniest things a person can do is say something totally honest that everyone knows is true when it isn’t expected,” everybody knows that locksmiths open locked doors. The comedy of truth being confirmed and things not changing.

This is also, by the way, why satire isn’t nearly as subversive as people think it is, and why suppressing it is so foolish. Good satire is funny because it surprises people with things they already think are true – the more surprising and truer, the better. Candide doesn’t create in people the idea that politics is wasted effort or that the world is chaotic, brutal and cruel to oblivious, decent people who don’t know any better – but because people already know these things – even if they suppress them or try to believe they are false – it is funny.

Imprison the satirist, and all you do is deprive yourself of a way of knowing what people are already saying behind your back.

Heightening

One of the basic ways to build a comedy is to take a character or a relationship that isn’t going to change and set it up against bigger and bigger obstacles that you would think would force it to change, and instead just keep confirming and confirming it.

Keep confirming things that people think are true no matter what else happens, and then at the end, reward the characters for getting through this wilderness and breakdown in the proper order of things with a big party. You’ve got your comedy.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Date Night?

Romantic “comedies?”

As I mentioned, most stories are hybrids between comedy and drama (and I think there are a few other related supergenres too, like epic, but I won’t get into that now). There are funny parts where the characters don’t change (which liberates you a bit from the psychic strain of an unknowable world), and serious parts where the characters change (which puts extra weight on you by putting what you think you know in question).

It is often assumed that romantic comedies are strictly comedies. They’re usually not. Most romantic comedies are hybrids with quite a lot of drama in them. Love Actually is a perfect example – each story arc has comedic parts, where the characters maintain who they are in the face of obstacles, but they also have dramatic parts – where people lose each other or make choices with permanent consequences, forcing themselves and others to change. There are parts of Love Actually that are quite sad and not comedic at all.

But, because it happens to have a happy ending, people think it’s essentially a comedy. And with Love Actually, they’d be right – Love Actually is “actually” a meta-comedy about the constancy of love across many human relationships – thus the real people in the airport and the video-mosaic at the end. The things that don’t change about people don’t change on a grand scale, greater than the characters in the movie.

But take something like Notting Hill. Notting Hill isn’t nearly as comedic. Yes, at the end, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts get to be together, but Julia Roberts’ character is forced to change a lot. She goes from being this glamorous movie star to being a contented English housewife. Unless you believed this is what the Julia Roberts character was really like and really wanted all along (which seems unlikely), that’s quite a bit of an arc for a comedy – and it’s reflected in the stolid, somber tone the movie sometimes wanders into. It’s a pretty dramatic romantic comedy.

Yes, you follow the usual romantic comedy track – couple meets, couple falls apart, couple reunites, but depending on the characters, this track doesn’t assure that your piece is going to always lean more heavily on comedy. A dramatic character can make a comedic plot dreadfully serious. What if there were somebody on Airplane! who was really sincerely scared at what was going on and cried a lot and wanted to go home? That would suck the wind out of your sails, so to speak. And airplanes don’t even have sails.

This is not to say being a drama is bad. But we’re not talking about a drama, we’re talking about a comedy. We’re talking about Date Night, remember?

And if Date Night were even a little bit more dramatic, it would be terrible. Whereas, instead, it is pretty decent.

Back to the subject

So, what does this have to do with Date Night?

Date Night is a comedic romantic comedy. The characters, played very vividly and sincerely by master comedians Tina Fey and Steve Carell, don’t change much at all throughout the course of the film. Despite the logline and the posters, they are never really all that estranged, and while their relationship faces a big potential obstacle and some smaller ones (two of their friends get divorced, which scares them – oh and also the shooting and car chases), the movie is more about how their sincere, couply relationship plays out against this backdrop than it is about them having marital problems.

This isn’t a movie like Stay Tuned, where you get the sense that the family really is in peril, the couple in it very well may get divorced or not survive, and where people need to rediscover why they have dedicated their lives to each other. In Date Night, Tina Fey’s and Steve Carell’s characters very sweetly love each other and treat each other well and respectfully through the whole thing.

And what you’d think is the premise of the movie – that a couple having trouble rekindles their relationship with the thrill of being thrust into desperately dangerous situations – isn’t the actual driving premise of the movie at all.

See, for those who didn’t see it, and that’s probably a lot of you, Date Night bills itself as a movie for both girls and guys. It’s for girls because it’s about love and relationships, and it’s for guys because it has mafia rooftop Mexican standoffs and other gunplay. It is for guys because scenes take place in a strip club, and it is for girls because Marky Mark is shirtless for much of it.

Yeah, whatever, right?

People assume this is reconciled in a sort of yin and yang kind of way – that the masculine side of the movie favors Steve Carell’s character, and the feminine side of the movie favors Tina Fey’s character, and the way they come together makes them a successful couple – but that’s not how it works at all. Steve Carell wants the same things Tina Fey wants — he even admits to man-crushing on Marky Mark. Steve Carell’s character and Tina Fey’s character are closer to mirrors of each other than  opposites. They’re on the same page about most of what they do in the movie.

The comedy is actually about this couple that maintains its own constant, parallel relationship – mundane closeness to one another, cuteness, trepidation and sincerity – in the face of wildly differing expectations for their behavior. The only dramatic moments are when they share with each other how spooked they are by their friends’ divorce, and how much neither of them wants to do it.

And the thrill helps their marriage more because the obstacles give them opportunities to be themselves around each other when people are trying to get them not to – not because there is a dichotomy between boredom and danger. They are never really “into” being part of the action movie – Steve Carell talks plenty of times about just wanting to go home.

For example, there is a great moment in the movie when Steve Carell and Tina Fey attempt to escape some assassins at a Central Park boathouse by stealing a motorboat. The only problem? The motorboat goes comically slowly.

This is the Frank Drebn-style scene. This is the comedy of people not changing. Of course the boat these people take doesn’t go very fast. They don’t want it to go very fast. The kind of boats these people would take are touristy boats on a nice Saturday afternoon if they find the time. They are more scared by the idea that external expectations are going to force them to break up than they actually want to break up themselves.

The only way the characters really change is they become a lot fonder of PDA (and I ain’t talkin’ iPads). But you get the sense in the movie they were really into it the whole time and just never told each other before.

And because of this, the whole action subplot is not a bullshit failure of a dramatic twist – no, it just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the characters. It’s not the main plot of the movie. Instead, it’s just another distraction, another disruption we get to watch this very sweet, sincere honest couple deal with – and of course few things are funnier than unexpected honesty.

The action plot, in itself, is just a joke.

Yeah, it’s nonsense, but aliens could descend halfway through the movie, and as long as Tina Fey and Steve Carell confronted it as their constant, constantly sweet, very firmly established comedic characters, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just heightening.

This is a lot different from dramas, where what happens and how the character reacts does matter, because the character has an arc and has to change. If the character’s change happens for no reason or stupid reasons, then it sucks. This sort of lapse is very obvious in action movies, when huge sacrifices in plot are made to set up action set pieces, and if it just gets too nonsensical it makes me actively angry, because the characters end up doing things for no reason.

It is not nearly as troubling in a comedy when somebody does something for no reason – as long as it is consistent to that person’s character. Because, after all, there are few things funnier than unexpected truths people don’t tend to voice, and fewer unvoiced truths as widely shared as the one that says a lot of things don’t happen for any reason at all, and you should just try to get by and enjoy it.

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P.S. — I have the pleasure of re-announcing (since we’ve probably announced it already), that Overthinking It’s facebook fans have passed a critical numerical threshold. Oh, what was that number again… I know I had it around here somewhere…

Here’s to the next 9,000! Become an OTI fan on Facebook!