The Pleasures of Deception: "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels"
One summer when I was in high school, I spent some time in Washington D.C. I had some experiences and learned some things and came home to Colorado with a fake I.D.
Actually, it was a real I.D. But in D.C. at the time they offered a legal service which involved walking into a storefront, asking to purchase an I.D., giving them a name and an age, and in return having your picture taken and being presented with an official looking "Identity Card." This was labeled, as I remember, "Class C," which, if you checked the back of the card, indicated that it had been "Verified only by signed truth pledge." With the wisdom of a teenager, I made myself 22 years old (because being 21 is automatically suspicious, as everyone knows) and, as I was a fan of the Fletch movies, gave myself the name "Claude H. Smoot."
Back home in Colorado, no liquor store clerk ever checked the back of the card or took the time to ponder the name. The I.D. worked like a charm, and all the next year my friends and I lived in Easy Beer City, once again having lots of experiences and learning lots of things.
I mention this because inasmuch as it's an amusing tale, at least part of what makes it humorous is the deception involved. There's something inherently silly in the image of me with a baby face and a rather unruly mop of blond hair walking into a liquor store with a "signed truth pledge" attesting to me being 22-year-old Claude H. Smoot, and walking out able to service whatever idiocy had popped into the pea-brain I possessed at the time. (Note to younger readers: there is not a construction company in the world that will act on a voicemail left at 1:23 AM, in a Thurston Howell voice, from someone purporting to be a wealthy local man who would like them to build a moat around his new house, starting immediately the next morning. Even if you get the address of the house exactly right, and repeat it several times.)
But the comedic workings of deception extend further than tales about people being deceived. They also involve the mechanics of surprise – for we frequently laugh out of a sense of pleasurable surprise – which can itself be a form of deception. It’s funny, for example, that an I.D. with the name Claude H. Smoot works, because we expect (or know) that it shouldn’t, which is exactly why I mentioned the name before I told you whether or not the I.D. worked or not.
All of which is to say that not only can deception be comedic, but sometimes comedy itself is deception, a leading of our audience (or ourselves) into a belief, and then turning them around in a way that precipitates that eruption of emotion we call laughter.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, released in 1988 and directed by Frank Oz of a script that's a re-working of the 1964 film Bedtime Story, is about a pair of con men who deceive other people as their way of life.
Michael Caine plays Lawrence Jamieson, a sophisticated British crook who spends his time convincing wealthy women that he's the impoverished prince of a small far-off country, in desperate need of funds to continue a noble fight on behalf of the liberation of his people. This works more often than not, and in some sense is a reflection of Jamieson’s only talent in life. He mentions at one point that when he was young he was a sculptor, painter, and musician, but that unfortunately he was terrible at those things. What he was good at was projecting taste and style, so he put that to use instead.
Steve Martin plays Freddy Benson, an American swindler whose ploy is to convince women that he has a sickly grandmother who needs money for a lifesaving operation. He matches Jamieson's suavity with tackiness, his sly charm with broad yokel-based yucks.
When these two men find themselves operating in Jamieson's proprietary hunting grounds in the south of France, a rivalry naturally develops. Jamieson at first tries to stamp this out by having Benson thrown in jail (the local police chief is a frequent participant in the Englishman's scams) and when this doesn't work, he develops a more subtle plan. He will pretend to take Benson under his wing to teach him the more sophisticated side of the trade, while actually pushing him into a series of humiliating situations such that Benson will eventually grow sick of the situation and decamp.
Thus, the two men develop a new con. Jamieson seduces wealthy women and promises to marry them; after he's bled them a bit he introduces them to his brother "Ruprecht," who is so annoying and odious that the women themselves call off the engagement. The plan works. Benson chafes under Jamieson's authority and demands that they have a contest for supremacy: the winner will stay in town working the fertile crop of wealthy heiresses, and the loser must depart.
Enter Janet Colgate (Glenne Headly), a wealthy young American. Jamieson and Benson decide that the first one who can take $50,000 off of her is the winner. The ensuing contest involves Benson inventing himself as a wheelchair-bound Navy veteran suffering from psychologically-induced impairment. In return, Jamieson pretends to be a famous psychologist who can cure Benson, which gives him the opportunity both to foil the other's plans and claim the money that Colgate is going give Benson to pay for the therapy. A problem arises, though, which is that the two men realize Colgate doesn't have any money after all. Undeterred, Benson changes the bet, wagering that he can seduce her. Jamieson accepts, believing that this will never happen.
In the end, of course, both men are themselves taken. Colgate is a con artist herself; she steals Benson's money and clothes and then takes $50,000 off Jamieson by telling him a sob story about how Benson robbed her. Benson is outraged by her duplicity; Jamieson is delighted. And in the final scene, Colgate shows up again on the French Riviera with a group of would-be American real estate investors, leading them into Jamieson and Benson's welcoming arms. The con is on, and the three of them will be working together.
The whole, from beginning to end, is full of delightful deception. There are the pretenses that Jaimeson and Benson load onto their marks, of course, which are funny because we're in on the action. But the humor doesn't just come from us knowing what's happening; it also comes from the thrill of our not knowing being turned into knowing. That is, we don't know where things are going – or we think they may be going in a different direction than they do – and when we do understand what's happening, we're spurred into laughter.
In part, this comes from the simple misdirection that comedy is famous for. The film opens with a wealthy women trying to give a piece of jewelry to a poor but noble prince of a far-off country; all we see for the first several minutes are their hands. She insists that he accept a piece of jewelry to help the freedom fighters of his nation, repeatedly trying to give it to him; he demurs again and again before finally accepting. We listen to their voices and watch their hands go through a kind of dance, touching as lovers' do, hers imploring him with caresses and his showing his reticence by the way they shy away from the jewelry.
And slowly, we become aware of what's really happening: Jamieson is running his con. Which is to say that in the beginning, we are deceived along with the woman, and the pleasure of the sequence comes from the fact of our losing that deception, or moving past it, while she doesn't. This realization makes us laugh, and this is only possible because we've been tricked about what's going on in the first place.
This movement from our wrong anticipation to our right understanding happens again and again in the film, and helps create many of its best comedic moments. In one of the cons in which Benson is playing Ruprecht, for example, he pretends to grow enamored with the bride-to-be that Jamieson brings to visit him, becoming increasingly affectionate and eventually tackling her to the floor behind a dressing screen and out of our sight. The action is just violent enough, and just sexually suggestive enough, to send a tiny shock through us, even though we know it's just an act; despite the comedic context of the film, we flash with concern for the woman's safety.
And then Jamieson calls out "Ruprecht, do you want the genital cuff?" Benson instantly bounds out from behind the screen and settles down on the other side of the room with his legs crossed; clearly, he does not want the genital cuff. The comedy comes from Martin's dominant physical performance, of course, and also from the wonderful absurdity of the line. Whatever else we have expected, the idea of a genital cuff has not entered our minds.
But the deeper key to the moment lies in its timing – one of the oldest truisms of comedy is that it's about timing, of course – and the way that timing works to misdirect us. The instant of anxiety we go through is the key to the whole thing. That instant must be long enough for us to register it, to worry (even if only at the edge of our minds) about what’s going to happen, but not long enough to threaten the lighthearted tone. And it must strike deep enough to make us uncomfortable, because it's this note of discomfort that Jamieson's line of dialogue immediately turns into hilarity. We must think something else, anything but the mention of a genital cuff, is coming, must be fooled into a sense of uncertainty for the resolution to be satisfying.
On the emotional level of the plot, Benson and Jamieson go through an experience that mirrors this movement exactly, and we share it with them. They believe, when they set out to con Colgate, that they know who she is. They think they are in on the joke (as the audience is in on it in the Ruprecht scene).
But then the deceptions are set into motion. For a moment, they (and we) believe that things have taken a darker turn. First, it seems clear that Benson has seduced the unsuspecting Colgate, making her fall in love with him. On the heels of this, they (and we) realize that she has robbed Benson and conned Jamieson. Which is to say that not once but twice at the end of the film we (and they) feel jolts of negative emotion, precisely as we do in the instant before we hear about the genital cuff. We fear for Colgate, and then we receive a kind of pleasurable and slightly vengeful excitement that the men have gotten what they deserved.
All of which, in retrospect, turns out to be misdirection: we've been deceived into suspecting that things will turn out one way, and they don't. Colgate has been in charge the whole time. And the men don't quite get what they deserve, because Colgate shows up with the gullible American investors at the end. But these turns make us laugh, in large part because we realize we’ve been wrong; our anxiety shifts right up through the register into laughter. Again and again in the film, the comedy works because we've been artfully deceived about what’s to come, and then gratifyingly rewarded with a reversal that takes us into a gratification we haven't anticipated.
There are two brief addendums to this. The first is that when one starts to think in this way, one immediately realizes the the value of comedic talent in front of and behind the camera. This timing and these shifts in emotional register cannot be effective if they aren't done right. It's not just the dialogue or the situation, it's the way Caine and Martin deliver their lines; it's not just the sequence of events, but the way the actors and the director (along with the editor and all the rest of the complicated machinery of filmmaking) put them onto the screen. The deceptions involved are human deceptions, and it takes a great deal of knowledge of the human to bring them off.
The second note is that when one talks this way about a movie like this, it's inevitable that someone else responds that they were never fooled and knew it all along. They insist that they saw through everything, that every gag and punch line and plot twist was transparent to them well in advance. They would like to argue that their laughter, if indeed they experienced any, was a laughter of superiority: it amused them to be right about how things would unfold. Or maybe they will claim they didn’t laugh at all, because it was all just so obvious.
As we cannot see into one each other’s hearts or minds, there is of course no way to know if these kinds of comments are true. But I do think they’re fascinating, because they reveal the way that in large part the deception involved in comedy is that of self-deception.
At some level, like every mark, every person who receives comedy must submit to it willingly. To be the pedant who claims they have the foresight that allows them not to be deceived is in many cases simply to be the kind of person who won't give themselves over to the fictional dream of any film, won't allow themselves to fall into any deceit so that they can be delighted. In other words, it signals the kind of emotional un-involvement which makes that person essentially uninteresting to talk about film with.
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