Notes from the author, I guess:
This is a draft I wrote in two hours and never edited again. I haven’t read it over so it’s probably really bad but uh…
I stopped using em-dashes because I was told “hey did you know that using em-dashes means you use AI” by too many teachers. But I was convinced by my teacher to bring them back and I absolutely adore them so here they are.
I also promise I know how compound commas work but I omitted a few because the writing flows… better without them. This is an artistic choice :)
Also, this is the most creative thing I’ve written. I don’t know if I went too far or if I sound like I’m trying to masquerade as a better writer than I actually am (although, I guess that’s the point of my essay). Anyways:
When I was in 7th grade, I used to kick my friends: a hard, swift, leg-swing to their shins. I don’t remember why. I remember the stairwell, sort of: the gray of it, the musty smell… and I remember the group of boys I was hanging around with that year, the ones I had decided, maybe without anyone inviting me, were my friends. (They seemed cool and fairly approachable, at least more than everybody else). I kicked one of them and laughed. I thought it was funny. The boys stared. One of them said “no, Kira” accompanied by a small (looking back at it, quite awkward) laugh. And I laughed harder, because I thought we were doing a bit. I thought their faces were part of the joke: the straight men to my comedian. I was performing and they were watching and that, to me, was the same thing as them enjoying it.
A few weeks later the same boy told me I should hang out with the other girls I knew instead. He said it kindly. I was offended: I thought he meant it as a gender thing (like a “you’d probably have more fun with girls”). So, I took it as advice. I didn’t realize until years later that it wasn’t advice and he never meant it that way at all. He was generous enough to give me a door to walk through that didn’t have the word leave bolded on it.
The thing I cringe at now isn’t the kicking, or the whining, or any of the specific things I did (well, maybe a little). It’s that I didn’t know the genre: I thought I was the funny one. I thought I was the lead in a comedy about a girl who was a little too much and beloved for it. I was actually the lead in a different movie entirely — one where the other character could see and I couldn’t — and that movie had already ended by the time someone told me, gently, where the door was.
I know life isn’t like a movie (people very often are irrational), but, reading the texts we’ve studied this year, I realize I sympathize with a lot of the characters we’ve encountered. Each character slowly realizes there’s a gap between the genre they think they’re in and the genre they actually are in. The Kim family spends the first half of the movie inside a heist comedy: they’re clever, they’re winning, they’re getting away with it. The living room scene, where they’re sprawled on the Park family’s living room floor, drunk on liquor that does not belong to them and laughing at jokes that cost them nothing because everything around them, for one golden impossible perfect evening, costs them nothing. I feel a nervous unease because this is the first time there has been still, but I ease into the slow pace of the scene and lie back. Bong Joon-ho shoots it almost like a sitcom: the lighting is warm, the jokes land, and we laugh along with them.
But, then the doorbell rings, and, as we are laughing, the trapdoor slowly opens beneath everyone’s feet. We don’t notice (not yet, not while the warmth is still lingering), as we fall deeper and deeper into the ground beneath us and finally come to our senses with a resounding smack. Bong tricked us.
The comedy was real up until the moment it wasn’t. Comedy and tragedy have never been opposites at all: sometimes it’s the delivery mechanism. The Greeks knew this: they performed the comedies after the tragedies (as a relief, as a catharsis, like a “here, breathe, you’ve earned it”). But to me, the comedies are the most confusing part (you’ve been weeping for hours and now someone is cracking stupid jokes and you are laughing and crying simultaneously and you genuinely cannot tell which one is real anymore. Probably both, you think. Probably both, and isn’t that the whole terrible joke of it).
I read a snippet by Henri Bergson the other day, he said that laughter is what happens when we notice something mechanical where there ought to be something living (like slapstick: we see the person as a body obeying physics instead of a person with real emotions. Or, a character who keeps repeating the same phrase is funny because they’ve stopped responding to the world like a living person and started running like clockwork).
What I think Bergson missed, or didn’t say loudly enough or perhaps knew and didn’t write down, is that the mechanical thing is so very often us. The reason cringing at your past self feels so specific, so physical (like a kick to the shin), is that you are watching yourself be the clock. Slapstick is funny because there’s distance between us and the bodies on the ground. Bergson’s distance collapses when the mechanical figure is no longer someone else, but our own past self. Instead, the laugh inverts and we call it “cringe.” The thing I was remembering wasn’t a stranger, it was me.
Bong invokes the same feeling by making us feel like the Kims (or the Kims feel like us…?). Bong removes the distance, slowly…
And I see myself in Gatsby too: he thinks he’s the star of some glittering social comedy (the man everyone is whispering about because they want to be him, the man whom Daisy always longs for). But, he isn’t. The whole time, he’s a horribly tragic figure… Gatsby himself is the last person to know how everybody else sees him and the genre he’s in, and by the time he figures out, he’s lying dead in a pool.
What kills me about Nick as a narrator — what makes him one of the greatest narrators, actually — is that his voice is dryly funny throughout the entire book. The party scenes read like a comedy, and Tom’s racist rant about a book he read is written like a sitcom father embarrassing himself at the dinner table while everyone stares at their food and pushes it around their plate. Gatsby’s character seems like a caricature of a socially awkward man whose entire life is devoted to one girl. Fitzgerald lets us laugh at the absurdity, the grandeur, the same way Bong lets us laugh, because laughter is the load-bearing wall of it all. (hey that rhymes). If the novel had been somber the way through, Gatsby in the pool would just be sad — a sad ending to a sad story (how fitting). But because it was funny just a few pages ago, Gatsby in the pool is annihilating. The comedy was holding the tragedy up, and when the comedy fell, the tragedy fell right on top.
Nick is also, maybe, the friend that told me to hang out with other people. He’s one of the only characters who sees Gatsby (sort of) clearly and stays kind about it. He gives Gatsby a door, which Gatsby refuses to walk through. I think that’s the difference between us.
Shakespeare, too. After Macbeth murders Duncan — after the single most horrifying act in the play has just taken place (offstage, mind you: we sit in the dark feeling it happen in the silence) — the next person who walks on is a porter, drunk, cracking jokes about equivocators and farmers and hell and the cold. It makes no sense to me at first, but I hear some words I know and I laugh. People have been laughing at this scene since 1606 (in every language, every country, which tells you something about how deep this runs to us). And again, like Bong, it lowers your guard. Then Macduff walks in and finds the body and the world ends again, harder this time, because you almost believed that it wouldn’t.
Macbeth himself, like Gatsby and the Kims, like me at 12 years old in a hallway, keeps performing his role long after it stops being true. He performs kingship, certainty, control, giving speeches of magnificent, terrible beauty to the empty chairs in front of him. The performance and his moral degradation grow at the same rate, like two vines climbing one wall (you cannot tell them apart).
Wittgenstein wrote that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, which is a very elegant way of saying that some things cannot be said and must instead be performed. Macbeth performs his kingship because he cannot say his kingship, cannot locate it in a part of his body and point to it where it would feel true. (This is, when you think about it too long, quite frightening, because it raises the question of whether the performance is ever different from the thing itself, or whether we are all, always, performing into being the selves we hope are underneath.)
I have a friend now who is hilarious with strangers and quiet with me. People who meet him will say he’s the funniest in the room: they’ll laugh at his dryly witty remarks and cocky smile. And I would agree, he is. But, the version I know is a much smaller and stiller person, just water moving over stones. The jokes serve as the wall he puts up for people he doesn’t trust yet. I don’t think he knows he’s doing it (and I think if you told him he would laugh).
I do this too, obviously. I have been doing it since the hallway, since I was twelve years old and kicking someone and laughing at their blank faces and not knowing what it meant or what I was. Now, the performance of being fine is the one I practice everyday. I have gotten good enough at it that I almost cannot tell, from both the inside and out, when I am performing and when I am being, which is the part that probably ought to frighten me but mostly doesn’t, because the alternative is worse. The alternative is being twelve again. The alternative is watching myself and hearing the clock.
Kierkegaard wrote about the aesthetic life as one of perpetual performance, of arranging the self for maximum effect, living on the surface of experience because the surface is where the light hits the best. He meant it as a critique. But I wonder if he had fully thought about how good the surface can feel, how warm, how safe, how much like being held. How difficult it is to want to go deeper when the surface is comfortable and this bright.
I’m not sure if the performance is protecting me or trapping me. I think it’s always both, the way a cast holds a broken bone in place and also keeps it from moving, keeps it from knowing whether it has healed. The Kims couldn’t have stopped being funny in the Park house even if they wanted to. The comedy was the only thing keeping them alive in there, keeping the air breathable. Gatsby could never stop being Gatsby. The performance had long since eaten at the person and there was nothing underneath to go back to.
That is to say, comedy is not the opposite of tragedy. They are not opposites arranged on either end of a long spectrum, with the ordinary and the bearable living somewhere in the bleak, beige middle. They are the same substance in different light (hold them up to the sun and you cannot tell them apart). The comedy is the trapdoor, not because the world is cruel but because the world is both things, always both things, beauty is terror, morphing into one another like a butterfly into a spider into a tiny ball of light, and when you try to hold one still and name it, when you close your hand around it, what runs out between your fingers is blood, and what rises from the blood when you finally let go is light.
Jeff Mangum stood on an ocean in a vision and held a creature that could not decide what it was, and it kept showing him: they are the same source, the beautiful and the terrible, they come from the same place, stop trying to separate them, stop making war inside yourself over things that are simply true. He disappeared from public life a year later, which is probably uncorrelated, but I would like to think it is, because it might as well be the most honest response anyone has ever had to an insight like that.
What I want to believe is that I am not Gatsby. That if I stopped performing, I would find something there. Someone older than twelve; someone who has learned, finally, to read the room they are actually standing in.
But, the honest truth is that you cannot see your own genre from inside of it. Every single character can’t. You are always, to some degree, the last person at your own party to know what story you’re in, and by the time the knowledge comes, it comes all at once — crashing — and you are already in the pool, already in the basement, already hearing Macduff on the stairs.
And that’s the whole horror of it. That’s the whole comedy of it.
Which, if you haven’t gotten that by now, are the same thing.