Laughing and Screaming
In the denouement of Franz Kafka’s short story “The Judgment,” the young protagonist is castigated by his widower father for being an unfaithful son and friend. The father reveals that he has been secretly corresponding with the son’s friends and stealing his clients at the family firm. He may even steal the young man’s fiancée. The dutiful son is shocked by the injustice and absurdity of it all. Then the father shouts: "So now you know what else existed in the world outside of you, before you knew only about yourself! Yes, you were a truly innocent child, but you were even more truly an evil man!—And for that reason, I hereby sentence you to death by drowning!" The son flees the house and immediately throws himself into a nearby body of water.
That ending burned itself into my mind on the first reading. It must have been equally unforgettable for writer and director Ari Aster, whose most recent film Beau Is Afraid is a neurotic, hypnotizing rhapsody on Kafka’s story. Known as a master of arthouse horror for Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), in Beau Aster proves himself just as gifted at comedy. In its best moments, Beau’s absurdist humor rivals that of Charlie Kaufman. But what puts the film in a league of its own is Aster’s control of the strange terrain where horror and humor bleed into each other.
The titular Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) suffers from acute social anxiety, paranoia, and mommy-issues. The wrinkle is that his anxieties and paranoia are justified. He lives in a slum above a sex shop (“Erectus Ejectus”) in the fictional city of Corrina, CR that incarnates the worst conservative stereotypes of urban life, putting even the Gotham of Phoenix’s Joker to shame. The street outside his brown-recluse-infested apartment is rife with casual violence, demonically tattooed gang-bangers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and the corpses of junkies left to rot in the sun. “Birthday Boy Stab Man” is on the loose, warns the local news anchor, “prowling the streets without clothes and stabbing random pedestrians in the neck and guts.” A Rube-Goldberg device of narrative chaos delays Beau from flying home to see his mother (Patti LuPone) on the anniversary of his father’s death. The following day he learns that, in his absence, his mother’s head was smashed so hard by a falling chandelier that it “evaporated.” Beau then embarks on an odyssey to return home for the funeral and is waylaid by one comic misadventure after another (including, yes, an assault by Birthday Boy Stab Man).
In shock after learning of his mother’s death, Beau gets into the bathtub and we’re treated to a sideview of his massively swollen testicles. As we later learn, Beau’s father died in the act of conceiving him, just as his father before him. According to Beau’s mother, that is, who warned him as a child that if he ever ejaculates he too will die.
Here Aster is making good on the psychosexual themes of his source material. Kafka’s story ends with a double-entendre: “At that moment an unending stream of traffic was going over the bridge.” The German Verkehr can mean both “traffic” and social or sexual “intercourse.” Kafka confessed in a letter to his friend and literary executor Max Brod that when he wrote that phrase he had in mind “a violent ejaculation.”
Anton Chekhov famously prescribed that a gun displayed on the wall in the first act of a play must go off in the third. Aster, keen on us getting the joke, places a sword on the wall near the end of his film’s first act, just after we learn of Beau’s “condition.” The sword is duly utilized, and the attentive viewer is primed to anticipate the moment when “Chekhov’s ballsack” finally discharges its narrative promise.
The comedy would be over-the-top without the counterweight of horror. Truly horrifying images abound: a junky thumbing out the eyes of another junky; a microwave filled with human waste; a teenage girl drinking baby blue house paint until she dies; an Army veteran with PTSD murdering an entire theatre troupe. Dread mounts throughout the film as Beau’s odyssey descends deeper into surreal nightmare and he learns that his mother and her agents have been orchestrating his misery as retribution for his being so unfaithful a son. As with Aster’s earlier films, we feel ourselves circling fate’s drain, plunging inexorably, like Kafka’s protagonist, toward a watery end. The humor, rather than leavening the horror, deepens it. This dynamic is worth dwelling on.
There is a late scene in Aster’s horror masterpiece Hereditary where a character awakens and sits up in bed. As the camera relaxes its focus, another figure becomes discernible in the darkness of the room. The viewer does not become aware of the presence so much as he becomes aware of having already been aware—and having frozen. The terror is all the more exquisite for being a process; unlike jump-scares that provoke a reaction at a discrete moment, the timing of each viewer’s discovery of the figure is idiosyncratic. When I saw the film for the second time during its opening week in 2018, as the audience began to discover the figure, one man seated near the front of the theater issued a long, horrified moan so deep and uninhibited it sounded sexual. This cut the unbearable tension of the scene and the audience erupted into relieved laughter.
But it was more than the unexpectedly sexual register of the man’s moan that made the audience laugh so hard. The phenomenological structure of horror and humor are quite similar. Both depend for their effects on incongruity. Avid horror fans will be familiar with the experience of being so frightened that they laugh instead of scream. One emotion primes and reinforces the other.
The philosopher Nöel Carroll describes horror as an “occurrent emotional state,” a feeling of agitation caused by one’s cognitive construal of the object of experience as unassimilable into given, culturally determined systems of symbolic meaning. For example, we’re familiar with sewers and circus clowns (even homicidal clowns); however creepy we may find them, on their own they do not horrify us. But place a clown in a sewer that smells impossibly of popcorn, as Stephen King did in It, and we are deeply, unforgettably horrified. Because the physical sensations often accompanying our horror—increased pulse, gooseflesh, chilled spine, a sinking in our guts—are also felt alongside quite different emotions, the cognitive dimension is key. A certain wrongness must be apprehended before those sensations can be experienced as responses to horror.
Humor likewise depends on wrongness, on incongruity. In his historical survey of theories of humor, Terry Eagleton writes that,
“humour happens for the most part when some fleeting disruption of a well-ordered world of meaning loosens the grip of the reality principle. It is as if for a moment the ego is able to relinquish its grim-lipped insistence on congruence, coherence, consistency, logic, linearity and univocal signifiers, ceases to fend off unwanted meanings and unconscious associations, allows us to revel in a playful diversifying of sense and causes us to release the psychic energy conserved by this bucking of the reality principle in a smile or a snort of laughter.”
The involuntary, sexual moan of the man in the theater was doubly incongruous: first, as a genuine expression of terror, it was inexplicable; secondly, it provoked laughter at a decidedly unfunny moment in the film. Despite the close relationship of humor and horror, we feel wrong when laughing at something truly horrifying, as if we’re violating a taboo. Moreover, awareness of our feeling of wrongness only intensifies the humor. If you doubt me, try ceasing to laugh at a funeral once you’ve begun.
Humor and horror are evoked by different forms of incongruity. The wrongness of the horror-object is unassimilable, whereas the humor-object’s incongruity is assimilable. The idea of swapping Chekhov’s gun for a pair of distended testicles is deeply incongruous and yet lines up neatly with our expectations of narrative structure, which remains essentially unchanged. On the other hand, the idea of a parent, especially a mother, condemning her faithful child to death so thwarts our expectations of the psychologically possible that it horrifies us.
The “catastrophic collapse of the reality principle,” writes Eagleton, “…is prototypically comic.” However, “pressed far enough [the collapse] ends up in madness.” This is precisely where we’re left at the end of Beau Is Afraid, which is why the film’s overall effect is to horrify. But along the way, narrative madness itself creates unique opportunities for humor, such as when reality suddenly reasserts itself in defiance of dream logic. At the close of the second act, Beau experiences a vision while watching a play in a forest. In the vision, he is immersed in an alternate life in which he marries and has children, is separated from his family and then reunited with his sons after many years. The sequence is quite moving. However, when the sons ask about their mother and their grandparents, Beau tells them about his “condition,” that he’ll die if he ever has sex. “Then how did you have us?” ask the sons. Reality reasserts itself, briefly, before dream (or, more accurately, nightmare) logic prevails.
And here perhaps another theory of humor is helpful. Advanced by thinkers as divergent as Descartes, Hobbes, and Roger Scruton, the Superiority Theory holds that, in Scruton’s words, “laughter devalues its object in the subject’s eyes.” But we need not accept the maximalist version of the theory, in which all laughter is an expression of schadenfreude, to acknowledge that we enjoy witnessing Beau’s discomfort. Indeed, so narrow a view is undercut by the fact that we empathize with Beau and enjoy sharing his discomfort vicariously. Our experience of horror surely deepens our empathy.
As much punishment as Beau endures, one never gets the impression that Aster is merely indulging a sadistic impulse. There is real authorial affection on display, not least in the alternate life dream sequence. Kafka, who had a miserable relationship with his father, considered “The Judgment” to be one of his most personal, and perhaps most aesthetically perfect, stories. He understood the young protagonist straightforwardly as a stand-in for himself. I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping that Aster’s fascination with the story is more a matter of aesthetics than of biography.
Justin Lee is associate editor at First Things.
