/ 8 May 2009

Sperms of endearment

Irony is one of those things that are rather hard to pin down. Yes, the Concise Oxford does give us the following: “The expression of meaning through the use of language signifying the opposite, typically for humorous effect,” it says, pertaining to irony as utterance.

“A state of affairs that appears perversely contrary to what one expects,” it says, furthermore, which refers to what people mean when they start a sentence with the words “Isn’t it ironic —” Personally, I don’t think this is really irony, but let’s put that aside for now.

And then there’s what’s called dramatic irony: “A literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the significance of a character’s words or actions is clear to the audience or reader though unknown to the character.” (And, by the way, the source for the word is Greek eironeia, meaning dissimulation.)

But that isn’t quite getting it for me. How to define, or describe, the irony that is clearly there in a raised Sean Connery eyebrow? Or simply in the way Cary Grant looks at a co-star? Or how, in some mysterious way, Kevin Smith makes a movie such as Zac and Miri Make a Porno, which has much dumb-ass comedy, a dash of faecal humour, and a substantial froth of sentimentality on top, while at the same time signalling that he, and we, are cleverer than the movie would seem?

Perhaps, on one level — the most simplistic — it’s dramatic irony. We know something the characters don’t. That is, Zac (Seth Rogen) and Miri, which is short for Miriam (Elizabeth Banks), are long-time flatmates and non-sexual friends who wouldn’t contemplate jumping into the sack together, possibly because it would ruin their friendship. Except that, now, they are both penniless and in trouble and, given the idea by a random internet event, they decide the best way to claw their way out of debt is to make a porn movie.

Of course we, the audience, understand something they don’t. This is a kind of romantic comedy, and love is in the air — that much is fully predictable, and part of a genre Smith is invoking. The moment Zac and Miri decide to make the movie and have a careful discussion about how their having sex (on camera) won’t change their friendship, we know there are romantic issues at play.

Umberto Eco has said that irony is the opposite of innocence. One may not be able to say “I love you madly” in all innocence, aware as one is that Barbara Cartland has said it before, and repeatedly (as did Duke Ellington, but then he was already being ironic). Yet you can say it ironically — that is, with an awareness that in a postmodern era everything’s a quotation — and still mean it. I think this comes closer to Smith’s sense of irony. It’s not saying the opposite of what you mean but precisely what you mean, with a raised eyebrow, as it were. In this sense, Eco says, irony is “metalinguistic play, enunuciation squared”.

This ties in with what philosopher Roger Scruton says when he hails irony as one of the great virtues of Western civilisation. “I would describe it as a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself,” he writes in an essay called Forgiveness and Irony. Irony is a mode that “points both ways”; it is “not free from judgement: it simply recognises that the one who judges is also judged, and judged by himself”.

Smith has made a range of films in a range of tones, from the almost-serious Chasing Amy to the out-and-out silliness and parody of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. His keynote movies, though, are probably still his first, Clerks, and its follow-up, Clerks II, in which people who are more intelligent than they seem are stuck in dead-end jobs, while around them various ridiculous situations develop. This is dumb-ass comedy, but it also has a level of irony that removes it from the company of Dumb and Dumber and the like, which are just dumb-ass. Somehow we know that Smith is raising an ironic eyebrow at the antics of his own characters; there’s a sort of internal distance between what they say and what we understand it to mean.

Zac and Miri Make a Porno steps outside the “Askewniverse” that most of Smith’s other films inhabit, with their recurring characters and linked storylines. Smith regular Jason Mewes is here, hilariously, but he’s not playing Jay. Here, such regulars meet more recent arrivals on the American comic-movie scene, in particular Seth Rogen, who hit big with Knocked Up and Pineapple Express. Rogen, it would seem, is becoming a quintessential dumb-ass American comedy persona: he’s chubby and fuzzy-haired, but amusing and likely to get the girl — how ever much she may appear to be at least a light-year out of his league. This is surely the wish-fulfilment part of such storylines, and an element that will doubtless pull in the “ordinary guy” audience.

So the film follows Zac and Miri’s fumbling attempts to get an amateur porn movie together, and much comedy is to be had in the basic process of this assault on probability. Naturally, a lot of things go wrong, but some things also go right, and Smith is to be given credit for not baulking at moments that other filmmakers might have fudged, though he certainly can’t go all the way, like Shortbus did — pity, that.

I found the subordinate characters, even when they are little more than walk-ons, funnier than the leads, but perhaps that’s the nature of the lead roles: they’ve got to carry the burden of sentiment here. After all, like Clerks II, this is a romance of a kind — as well as a dumb-ass comedy. Perhaps that’s a source of the ironic element, too: the way two somewhat awkwardly combined genres rub up against each other, and produce a kind of static that could be called irony. Maybe irony’s what happens in the space between them. In which case, it’s a bit like love.