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Originally Posted by demonrail666

Sirk was definitely using it ironically. He wanted to show how fake and constructed hollywood was. He often put in outrageously ott happy endings for that very reason. And as you say with Fassbinder, very Brechtian. In terms of humour, I can see now why you might find him funny but he's never had that affect on me. I ultimately find his films quite cruel, which isn't a criticism of him/his films, more just a reflection of my narrow reading of him/them.

aaaaah-- then i DEFINITELY have to watch sirk. i'll have to put together a list & add it to my rental queue.

and yeah, it's not a happy laugh but it's definitely a laugh for me. in this one, not in all of them. with another one i watched recently, what's the name-- the one with the klimt woman-- petra von kant-- i only recall laughing at what the servant does when petra finally treats her nicely. i probably laughed at more but i don't recall it as a funny movie.

as for cruelty, yes, there's a lot of sadomasochism in his work. hans in merchant of four seasons is a classic masochist. his mother is a cold narcissistic sadist. his wife is a little more strange, i'll have to work that out. but yes-- he's all about power relationships, isn't he?

in a way, i was going to say earlier, he reminds me of peckinpah. because he's another one who doesn't flinch from horror-- real horror, not horror porn. he stares at what's fucked up and keeps staring. like when hans beats up his wife-- it's ugly and very uncomfortable but hans keeps beating and beating and beating and fassbinder makes us watch. "let's not pretend this shit doesn't happen."

is that cruel? sure, but-- life is cruel when you're fucked up-- and these people are fucked up and cruel to each other. is that how post-war germany was? is that how the economic miracle operated? i wasn't there but he seems to be saying so.

by the way, one thing the professor notes is that the names of the people--including the lawyer the wife calls, etc-- are names of prominent nazis. knowing that, that's funny-- it's almost out of mel brooks or zucker brothers (or marx bros?).

so, i don't see him as endorsing that cruelty, but rather pointing the finger at it. this is, in a way, reflected in the sister who defends hans and points at everyone's hipocrisy. and we watch, like his friend watched, and he calls us pigs. so we're cruel too.

the thing though, you have much bleaker, darker and brutal and violent films like "shallow grave" which are classified as "black comedies". and i don't find that one (or others of similar stripe, like a recent scottish one about a cop who is dying and hallucinating) funny at all-- they're just awful people being awful and nothing else. but in merchant, see-- i see the irony, i understand the social criticism, i understand the function, the hypocrisy is laid bare-- and that's sort of where the laugh comes from. not from the cruelty itself, but from the realization that it brings. the characters may act inhumane but the movie itself doesn't, i think. at least this one-- it's very lucid about little bourgeois customs.