— Fr. Schiller, “On the Pathetic”
We rewatched all but the last twenty minutes of “Kontroll” last night after our rotation (we finished it today).
Thereafter I put on “Clerks”, silently, in the background while sitting in the office and while munching on some oats and blueberries (no, I’m not a horse). I paid it little attention. No attention. This noon we had a tasty lunch in town; this evening I enjoyed a can of kipper snacks by Polar.
I.
“Clerks” is one of the first two movies I watched in Budapest seventeen and a half years ago; the other was “Pulp Fiction”. The problem with the former was simple: it’s full of jokes, but the movie was subtitled. And the subtitles were a little ahead of the dialog; as a result, much of the audience was in the middle of laughing when humorous things were actually being said, and so a number of us missed out on what was supposedly funny.
I saw it again years later.
Nearly a decade ago I sat in a theater more or less at the ‘Mammoth’ shopping center — rather American-mall-lite on one side and Balkan-express-flea-market at the other — and watched “Terminator 3” for the first time; I was pleasantly struck by it being a film that was willing to “go there”: nuclear holocaust — in a major American release — was not avoided; the good guys did not ‘save the day’, at least not in the way we had come to expect.
“Kontroll” (2003), then, is an interesting movie for me. On the one hand it’s a portal back to Budapest, to its subway system — showing the opening scene to Ms. S., I thought and said, “hey, I know that station …” –, to an era that is not ‘now’; but it’s also a fascinating film in its own right, a standalone work of art.
Art in the lowercase sense, not in the “Citizen Kane” or Albrecht Dürer sense, but art nonetheless, and the kind of film that — even with its languid but not antidepressant pacing — makes me glad I watch movies. It’s cinematic without being about film.
II.
For sh*ts and g*ggles I picked up my Reclam copy of Friedrich Schiller’s “Vom Pathetischen und Erhabenen” (Of the Pathetic and Sublime (‘pathetic’ in the sense of pathos, of feeling)), a short (about 150 pages) collection of essays on theater. The table of contents (translated loosely from the German)?
- The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution
- On the Basis of the Enjoyment of Tragic Objects
- On the Tragic Art
- On the Pathetic
- On the Sublime
- On Epic and Dramatic Theater
- On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy
- Tragedy and Comedy
It’s followed by notes (“Anmerkungen”), a bibliography (“Literaturhinweise”), and an afterword (“Nachwort”) by Klaus Berghahn, who edited the compilation (1970).
What I’ve really been meaning to re-read is Schiller’s “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung“, aka “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795 (beware: the ‘Schiller Institute’ is basically a branch of the LaRouche movement)), though I do not seem to own a print edition, which means I’ll need, eventually, to resort to scanned editions of ‘official’ versions at some point, along with other electronic editions for general reading.
In any case, back to the pathetic and the sublime; a few months ago I re-read early entries in that volume, and this morning, before heading out with Ms. S. for lunch at Panera, a nifty treat — they have nutrition information on their website, making ordering much easier –, I decided to read the last entry, “Tragedy and Comedy”.
The current relevance for me? Schiller considers the tragic and comedic not so much as differences in material handled but how that material is handled. This marks him as somewhat different than his predecessors, many of whom defined appropriate subject matter for tragedies and comedies along what we would recognize as class or status lines, such as the nobility and the ‘lower classes’ respectively.
For Schiller, instead, similar themes may be handled, such as ‘Undank’, more or less ingratitude, by both. But in comedy we deal with ‘moral indifference’, and in tragedy ‘autonomy’. In a tragic handling of ingratitude, as in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” (Schiller’s example), the ingratitude of the daughters with respect to their father leads to a feeling of moral injury on our part; but when it is a topic in a comedy (Schiller cites Molière’s “Tartuffe” (1664), those who are cheated or betrayed do not gain our sympathy but are made laughable. We must not concern ourselves the morality of the character who would or should others earn our indignation; furthermore, Schiller suggests, being so betrayed, etc., in a comedy must not be seen as the moral failing of he who is betrayed, not as a matter of ‘choice’ (of choosing wrongly), of having been able to have done otherwise … that is, it is not a matter of autonomy. Instead and indeed, such schemes in a comedy must work almost like clockwork, as a matter of cause and effect, even if there are hiccups along the way, it is not our choosing, but the unfolding of events as if according to natural laws. In this sense ‘comedy’ is ‘determinitic’.
Postponing judging which art form, comedy or tragedy, is ‘better’, Schiller diagnoses how they work, albeit it in different manners. Comedy does not make us work (emotionally); it affects us, but we, in a way, are above it (and the comedic figures), like gods. Comedy, Schiller tells us, puts us in a ‘higher condition’; tragedy in a ‘higher (level of) activity’. In tragedy — in catharsis –, emotional ‘work’ is undertaken. Gods do not suffer, but heroes do, and so while comedy lets us be gods, tragedy lets us be heroes, god-like (but not divine) men, or, perhaps, titans, even. And so, Schiller concludes, Prometheus, the hero of the most beautiful tragedies (I translate freely), is the very image of the tragic.
III.
Just the other day we (re)watched “The Post-Modern Prometheus”, as already indicated. That is my connection to ‘X-Files’ and ‘Millennium’ from Schiller, but it’s relevant insofar as it ties in to the interpretive approach I’ve been trying to hammer out with the two shows.
I’ve argued recently that in ‘The X-Files’ we have stories driven by the need to know the ‘facts’ of the cases, what ‘really happened’; whereas in ‘Millennium’ what is relevant is understanding not the how but the why. It is a given in the ‘X-Files’ universe that justice will not be achieved. Motives are greed and power, frequently biological imperatives like survival and hunger. In ‘Millennium’, in contrast, the cases tend toward the outwardly mundane, the perpetrator is identified and usually caught or at least the case is ‘solved’, and said events may be superficially, at least, explained naturalistically. In a couple instances so far we’ve had ‘Millennium’ episodes that seemed like that were using material that could have worked for ‘The X-Files’, but the how of the production fit the fictional world of the given show.
In a sense I’d suggest that ‘The X-Files’ gives us a comic worldview and ‘Millennium’ a tragic one, though season two of the latter is tending away from (moral) ‘autonomy’ and toward fate/inevitability/destiny.
