Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): Book Reviews
Review: Schuy R. Weishaar (2012) Masters of the Grotesque:
The Cinema of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and
David Lynch, London: McFarland & Company, 211 pp.
Giacomo Boitani
The grotesque is an aesthetic category that has been called into question in
the context of Film Studies scholarship most often either in discussions of
horror films or in reference to the artistic sensibility of European directors
such as Luis Buñuel, Werner Herzog, Pietro Germi and, possibly above all,
Federico Fellini. Examples might include William J. Free’s 1973 analysis of
I Clowns/The Clowns (Italy/France/West Germany, 1970), Ruth Pelmutter’s
‘The Cinema of the Grotesque’ (1979), and Elizabeth Cleere’s 1980 study of
Herzog in light of the grotesque. Schuy R. Weishaar’s book, however, uses
is the grotesque as a theoretical framework to spark a study not of European,
but of contemporary American auteurism, identifying the grotesque as the
undercurrent that traverses the filmic oeuvres of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam,
the Coen Brothers and David Lynch – although Weishaar states that his
study subscribes only to a ‘soft’ form of auteurism (5).
Weishaar appropriately provides an extensive contextualisation of the
ways in which the grotesque has been theorised throughout the history of
philosophy. Specifically, he grounds his study in Mikhail Bakhtin’s
articulation of the carnivalesque/grotesque as ‘an aesthetics of
“degradation”, which functions to materialise the abstract; embody the
“spiritual”; and displace the high gestures of ritual and ceremony, forcing
them back into materiality’ (28). This Weishaar contrasts to Wolfgang
Kayser’s categorisation of the grotesque as a ‘“comprehensive structural
principle of works of art”… [that] reveals art as a seething, tension-ridden
cultural cauldron’ (19) in which the process of art’s production, the work of
art itself, and the work of art’s reception are shown to be in conflict with one
another, thus creating the effect of an ambiguous sense of uneasiness and
disorientation (23). Rather than subscribing to either philosopher’s
theorisation, Weishaar uses both as frameworks to critique the stylistic
choices of the filmmakers whenever they resonate with either conception of
the grotesque.
In the chapter dedicated to the auteurism of Tim Burton, the director’s
frequent reliance on binary representations of two worlds at polar opposites
– for example, the living and the dead in Beetle Juice (USA, 1988), or
Halloween and Christmas in The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry
Selick, USA, 1993) – is related to the duality described by Bakhtin in his
positioning of ‘carnival’ culture as the polar opposite of ‘official’ culture.
Furthermore, a series of characters in Burton’s oeuvre is identified as agents
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): Book Reviews
of subversion who recall the figure of the madman as a menacing
manifestation of human nature, as described by Kayser – with Betelgeuse
(Michael Keaton) being the most obvious example of this, although the list
also comprises more traditional antagonists such as the Joker (Jack
Nicholson) and the Penguin (Danny DeVito) from Batman (USA, 1989) and
Batman Returns (USA, 1992) respectively.
A similar function is assigned to characters such as Baron Munchausen
(John Neville) and Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) in Terry
Gilliam’s films, since these characters are assigned the task of bringing to
the fore the mismatch between the world of myth and modernity. This,
Weishaar argues, resonates with Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s Bakhtin-inspired
theorisation of the grotesque as the ‘manifest, visible, or unmediated
presence of mythic or primitive elements in a nonmythic or modern context’
(51). Gilliam’s recurrent representation of ‘the tensions between the modern
experience of madness as stripped of any significance… and the rich
meaning attributed to the mad in the medieval and Renaissance experience’
(105) is identified in many of Gilliam’s films as the primary indicator of a
Harphamian version of the grotesque at play in the director’s body of work.
Harpham is again cited in reference to the ‘moments of extremis’ that
Weishaar identifies as the characteristic narrative nexus that distinguishes
the Coen Brothers’ blending of the mundane and the catastrophic in their
tragicomic re-interpretations of established Hollywood genres. Said
‘moments of extremis’ are equated to Harpham’s notion that the grotesque –
as Weishaar puts it – ‘inhabits an interval or gap’ and ‘resides within the
midmost moment of a narrative of the development of comprehension’
(117). Furthermore, the gestural codes of acting noted in Edward P.
Comentale’s scholarship on the Coen Brothers’ films are related to Terry
Eagleton’s ‘somatic root’ reading of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival
grotesque.
David Lynch’s cinema has often been discussed with reference to the
concept of the ‘uncanny’. Beginning with a discussion of the understudied
Lynch short film The Amputee (USA, 1974), Weishaar’s sixth chapter is a
journey through the director’s filmography, with the goal of demonstrating
how ‘Lynch’s films often rely on the grotesque in their evocations of the
uncanny, and both are ultimately aimed at disclosing or enacting a rupture in
the identity or “self” of the individual subject’ (142-143). Dieter Meindl’s
commentary on both Bakhtin and Kayser’s theorisations of the grotesque is
relied upon here, as are Todd McGowan’s and Slavoj Žižek’s writings on
Lynch, in order to discuss how ab-human figures and doppelgängers are
manifestations of the grotesque and the uncanny that serve Lynch’s
trademark practice of ‘obliteration of the individual human subject’ (167), as
previously identified by Anne Jerslev.
Having completed his discussion of the the directors named in the book’s
title, Weishaar then dedicates a final chapter to the examination of the role
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): Book Reviews
played by the grotesque in the critique of the American family carried out in
slasher horror films such as Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (USA,
1972) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (USA, 1974). This
choice appears rather disorientating: with the exception of the very earliest
films directed by Lynch and Gilliam, these cinematic manifestations of the
grotesque in a generic context predate by a decade, if not more, the vast
majority of the films discussed in the rest of the book. Certainly, there were
plenty of horror films produced in the 1980s and 1990s that could have been
selected as a more historically appropriate and non-auteurist counterpart to
the films discussed earlier.
In conclusion, the book is extremely well researched and displays a
profound expertise in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies and
psychoanalysis. However, it would have been interesting if Weishaar had
attempted to offer an explanation as to why ‘this was an era of filmmaking
ripe for the grotesque’ (9). As much as it is often reiterated in the book that
its primary aim is ‘to unwind the philosophy of the grotesque, and the
particular directors’ oeuvres… to help delineate and illustrate facets of how
the grotesque can function aesthetically’ (172), grouping under one aesthetic
category the films of four directors who have flourished in more or less the
same period of time (with all of the filmmakers in question being American
and all oscillating on the confines between ‘mainstream’ and ‘art-house’)
seemed a rather promising manoeuvre. Interrogating the historical and
sociological occurrences that brought American filmmakers with certain
artistic ambitions all to be fascinated by, and to adopt, a grotesque aesthetic
during this period may not have been among the purposes of this study, but
it sure does feel like a missed opportunity.
Bibliography
Cleere, Elizabeth (1980) ‘Three Films by Werner Herzog: Seen in Light of
the Grotesque’, Wide Angle, 3:4, pp. 12-19.
Free, William J. (1973) ‘Fellini’s I Clowns and the Grotesque’, Journal of
Modern Literature, 3:2, pp. 214-227.
Pulmutter, Ruth (1979) ‘The Cinema of the Grotesque’, The Georgia
Review, 33:1, pp. 168-193.
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