Eating Raoul.

Whether working in drama or comedy, an artist's voice partially comes from their perception of death. Paul Bartel's angle in Eating Raoul is deliciousness, indifference, and absurdity. A great deal of all three if you ask me. I looked for but could not find what I believe is a Pynchon quote that says, approximately, an artist's seriousness is judged by how he treats the subject of death. What I take from movies like Eating Raoul, The Honeymoon Killers (+ Ripstein's Deep Crimson), Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven, an Almodóvar film, or a John Waters film, is an appreciation for the richness of emotional expression and the range of personal guilt over the matter of mortality and transience. Also, something like that Oscar Wilde quote "Life is too important to be taken seriously."

Because what runs through my head in any very serious situation, such as death, is not only unbearable sadness and grief. Not only that. I'm afraid that my first reaction to any very gloomy matter is usually a smile. A defensive reflex or a habitual sublimation, I'm not sure. Often a strange pettiness as well. For example there's an immense repercussion to manslaughter. I think about this all the time: manslaughter destroys two lives. An unintentional murder and the subsequent personal devastation is an awfully terrible thought. It's the kind of real life drama that's interminably both sensational and relatable.

The message I take from Eating Raoul is not that death is funny or that murder is humorous. What Eating Raoul does, however, is it takes this seriousness and works it all the way through to the other end, it frames murder against other absurdities and misfortunes, declaring it one horrible aspect in an unending deluge of life's absurdities and misfortunes. Because although death is the final statement of the dead, for the living it's a fraction of a life. Like that famous quote from Gates of Heaven, "Death is for the living."

If the world does not die when someone I love dies, and if I do not die when someone I love dies, and if I must continue to live, then my life must continue to be something beyond intolerable unhappiness. Let the films which only want to see death one way see it as that way, but it will not help anyone see the full reality of their lives. And what I mean to say is, Eating Raoul is ultimately simply a traditional comedy in that it frames the drama in a medium shot as to make it funny.

It's terribly funny. It's horribly humorous. Easily among the blackest, the bleakest, and the funniest of any dark comedy. It has lines like, "Why don't you go to bed, honey? I'll bag the Nazi and straighten up." It has exchanges like, "Mary, I just killed a man." "He was a man. Now he's just a bag of garbage." All completely straight faced. There's not a single wink in the film, all the way down to the supporting character of Raoul, who's at least as full a character as Paul and Mary are, and has his own dreams, motivations, mannerisms, challenges, and contributions.

The film lampoons a little bit of everything in society, including the film itself, the film's own characters, and Bartel's own sensibilities. It's thorough enough in its criticisms that it clearly doesn't convey an agenda. It's not counter-cultural or conservative, but it's not anarchic or flippant. It's deeply passionate about nothing in particular. As in, from the total nothingness of everything, it draws its passions.

It also possesses one of my favorite, though not necessary, virtues of a film. It's sloppy. It was clearly made over a long period of time, has frequent continuity errors, and feels low budget. I love a film with a pulse, with a sense of human eyes and hands laboring over the film. To me that amounts to hard work and dedication on the part of Bartel and only strengthens the film. It does not, however, share in the sin of the poorly made low budget film: it is not uncinematic. You could not accidentally film such a sexy x-ray room scene. You could not incidentally evoke the pathos of sexual perversity on the scale this film does. The narrative, too, works, and is a complete statement, fully realized.