What Cinema Is, Part III: "The In-Laws"

It's Thanksgiving time here in the United States, which makes me think of Peter Falk talking about giant tsetse flies flapping slowly off into the dusk with human babies clutched in their beaks.

Beaks? you might ask, Flies with beaks? and you'd be well within your rights. Alan Arkin had the same question. But wait, hold on, back up – just how big are these flies? And just what the hell's going on here anyway? I thought Thanksgiving was about turkey, and getting together to share a meal, and plaintive op-eds about ravening political arguments with family members and all that good stuff?

What's going on here, friends, is cinema. The silver screen, movies, films, pictures, and some of the glorious things they do for us. I've written before, here and here, about some of my ideas about what cinema is; as the holiday season approaches, I've been thinking about another way to understand cinema, which is the way it shapes us, or, more to the point, the way it shaped me.

When I was young, my family had a stable of movies that we revisited frequently. As do many families, I suppose. These were nearly all comedies of a type both gentle and clever, with a style that gestured in the direction of the absurd. We watched films like Mel Brooks' The Twelve Chairs, Blake Edwards' Pink Panther series, and Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World what seemed like endless numbers of times…although it's perhaps the case that we watched them fewer times that I think, but that because of the strength of childhood memory and the enormous impression that my early exposure to movies had on me, two or three viewings were enough to burn every scene and line of dialogue into my brain.

In any case, one of the mainstays on that repeated viewing list was Arthur Hiller's The In-Laws, from 1979. It's a film, along with several of the others I watched at a young age, that left its traces deep inside me. Not all of these films were comedies: other things that stand out from my earliest viewing days range from The Road Warrior to The Abominable Dr. Phibes to The Creature From the Black Lagoon to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and there's a great deal of all those films imprinted in my artistic brain.

But The In-Laws was a film I watched with my family, and quoted with them over and over again, until to this day I can look at a family member and say, "I have flames on my car!" or "Serpentine! Serpentine!" and they'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

So what does this have to do with the nature of cinema? Movies are a social phenomenon that helps bind people together. (I think about Quentin Tarantino's long-standing and convincing arguments about the importance of watching movies in theaters with a body of people, most of whom are strangers, because of the unique feeling that gives us.) They are a way of building shared reference points that rest on human stories and human characters, a way of developing one's sense of what those stories – and thus our own stories – mean, and a way of discovering, through that process, what we believe. What we believe about the world, about how to treat people, about what's worth valuing. In other words, movies are culture, in the deepest human sense.

And they are also, or were for me at least, tremendously formative. As a youngest child, when my family laughed, it was a cue for me to laugh too. What they found funny, I learned to find funny. The resonances of this run so deep in me that when I watch something like The In-Laws, I feel as though I'm seeing back down into the core of my own creation, as though I'm watching myself as a child being taught what it is to be funny.

The story of the film goes like this. Sheldon Kornpett (Arkin) is a successful New York City dentist. He's a comfortable man with a big house in the suburbs and a nice family; he's also a man who, both because of his nature and because of the nature of his success, lives with an undercurrent of neurotic anxiety. And this anxiety is being brought to a head by the fact that his daughter Carol is getting married soon, and Sheldon has never met the new in-laws.

When he does meet them, all of Sheldon's worst fears are confirmed. The father of the man his daughter is marrying is named Vince Ricardo (Falk). He works in very obviously suspicious enterprises – termed "international business" – and on a personal level seems completely unhinged.

Soon after they first meet, Vince shows up at Sheldon's dentist office in the middle of the morning with a favor to ask: would Sheldon leave work, for just a couple of minutes, and retrieve something from Vince's office? Vince would do it himself, except that he has some business competitors and he doesn't want them to see him going into his office. The next thing Sheldon knows, he's involved in an international crime caper. Vince, who claims to be with the CIA, has stolen some engraving plates for printing United States currency and plans to sell them to an insane Central American dictator named General Garcia (Richard Libertini), who wants to destroy the world economic system.

But is Vince really with the CIA? Is this really some hairbrained government plot? Or is he just a madman? Unfortunately for Sheldon, it's too late for these kinds of questions, because he's already complicit. So he flees in a small jet with Vince, only to find that they're not going to Pennsylvania at all, but to Central America to drop off the plates. And then it turns out that General Garcia is even nuttier than Vince, to the point of having a scar in the shape of a Z – as if he'd been tagged by Zorro – on his face.

It's all completely zany, but as the adventures mount, Sheldon begins to succumb to Vince's charm, and to the allure of the gun battles and car chases to which he's being subjected. He's letting go of his anxiety, if only slightly, and learning to live in Vince's madcap world. At the end, the in-laws defeat the dictator, and it turns out that Vince really is with the CIA, so Sheldon is not in danger of being arrested by his own government. And as a bonus, Vince pilfers ten million dollars from the dictator, five for him, and five for Sheldon. They return from Central America on the morning of the wedding, triumphant, wealthy, and each with a gift of a million dollars for their kids, to get matrimonial life started out on the right foot.

It's a wonderful romp, with fantastic performances from Falk and Arkin and a fantastic script by Andrew Bergman, who also wrote Blazing Saddles, Fletch, and Honeymoon in Vegas, among many others.

And there is one scene, in particular, that sticks with me every time I watch it, because of how funny I find it, and because of how clearly, in retrospect, it helped me define what I find funny.

It comes early in the movie, on the night when the Kornpetts and the Ricardos meet for the first time for dinner at the Kornpett household. Things start off a bit awkwardly, but soon both families – the two engaged kids, and Vince and Sheldon and their wives – are at the table eating. The topic of Vince's work comes up, and Vince explains that he lived in Guatemala for a while. How long? Well, I'll let him tell the story:

Watching this sequence now, what strikes me is the way in which it puts pressure on both the characters and the viewer. Vince starts out sounding like someone who exaggerates both his own status and the things around him for effect. So he notes that he used the term "the bush," which is a way of indicating his status as an expert in these matters, someone who knows the lingo. He then makes his comment about the tsetse flies "the size of eagles." This is a common-enough rhetorical device, and one that's usually not taken as a literal statement.

But it creates the first turn that the scene takes, because Vince assures us that he actually does mean the phrase literally: these flies were so big that they could carry away human babies. It's funny because it's ludicrous and unexpected – being surprised by something we didn't see coming is one of the central elements of a lot of comedy – but it also puts a kind of psychic pressure on the other characters and, inasmuch as we begin to share the perspective of the characters at dinner with Vince, on the viewer as well.

This pressure comes from the fact that the story is obviously ridiculous, yet Vince tells it with absolute sincerity. But how can he possibly believe this? Is he a crazy person? And this sincerity, matched with the social obligations of politeness, also brings a kind of awkwardness into the situation for the other characters. Because what do you do when someone starts acting this way, in this setting?

And then Vince continues: he's holding court now, has completely drawn the energy of the room (for the characters) and of the entire scene (for the viewers) onto himself. He adds the kind of specific details – the chasing peasants (the image here is that these flies move so slowly that they can be chased on foot and almost, but not quite, caught), the crudely fashioned brooms – that amplify the pressure of the scene. Because what the hell do you do when confronted with someone who refuses to stop talking this way?

It's here that Sheldon, as brought to life by Arkin's impeccable comedic talent, starts to become overwhelmed. The low-key "You’re sure these are flies you’re talking about?" works perfectly. It highlights the social conventions he's bound by (which, of course, we're all bound by): Vince is his future in-law, so he can't just come out and call him a liar. So he asks him a question that gives Vince a way out – maybe they weren't really flies – while also clearly expressing his own disbelief.

Once again, Vince doubles down. He cites a made-up Spanish phrase and then gives it a translation, "The flamenco dancers of death." It's just believable enough to leave the slightest sliver of possibility that it might refer to something real; and at the same time is funny because it pushes the button on the absurdity of the common trope of assigning to dangerous or important things a slightly melodramatic title. It rides a precise line, that is, between the almost possible and the absolutely unbelievable.

This kind of deadpan pushing on the boundary of the credible delights me. I was recently in the classroom talking to students, and I had written on the board a timeline of thinkers related to whatever topic it was we were discussing. As students are wont to do, before class one of them had decided to draw a cute cartoon cat on the board, and it ended up next to the name of Karl Marx. So, after mentioning Marx’s ideas on our topic, I gestured at the board and noted that it was a little known fact about Marx that he had also discovered cats.

Oh joy! Their reaction entertained me to no end. Some of the students grinned, or even guffawed. Some looked confused. And some wrinkled their brows in consternation, obviously trying to comprehend how they could not have known this monumentally strange fact. I went on to talk about our next figure, Freud, waiting in the back of my mind for what I knew would happen next. A tentatively raised hand. An uncertain voice. An almost-stammering phrasing: "I just wanted to ask...um...ah..." the student began, and then plunged to the heart of the matter: "Karl Marx didn't really discover cats, did he?"

I couldn't help but grin. The student hesitated, and then realized how ridiculous the whole thing was, and the strange fascinating pressure that had been built was turned into the relief of laughter.

Vince is, of course, not done yet. The second half of the sequence takes us through another turn. After Vince’s straight-faced claim that a dry-cleaning mishap cost him the Pulitzer he should have won with his photos of the enormous flies, Sheldon continues to grow increasingly agitated about the absurdity of what's being said. He pushes back against the detail of flies with beaks, and Vince counters with an assurance that it was so appalling he couldn't believe it either, before explaining, only when cornered, about the red tape in the bush.

But it's only when he goes over the line that things come to a head. Until this point, Falk has played Vince as being entirely in control of his ridiculous tale, but when he gets to the bit about the Guacamole Act of 1917, Falk makes it clear that Vince is in trouble. He puts some hesitation into the line, with the "for example, ah," which cues us that he's clearly just making it up on the spot, and then out comes "Guacamole." In a subtle way, I think, "Guacamole" pushes the whole over the edge. None of it has been plausible, but this is the first naked indication that Vince is simply bullshitting.

He is no longer quite in control; the lie has gotten too far ahead of him. "Jose grecos de muerte," is at least plausible (for a non-Spanish speaker) as a name, and "flamenco dancers of death" has a great absurdist comedic value. But the "Guacamole Act of 1917" is just silly. It's Vince's first miss in the scene. And Arkin plays off this sudden exposure of weakness perfectly, shifting from incredulous repetition of lines to a witticism of his own about how even National Geographic isn't aware of these astounding creatures. He's now the one in charge, the one who gets the good line.

Every comedic sequence needs an end; this one ends by shifting the power away from Vince to Sheldon. It only lasts an instant, because Sheldon’s daughter interrupts to prevent him from spoiling the night by pointing out the inanity of the lie that has just been spun. But it closes out the moment perfectly, and sends it forward to the scene's next movement.

I could go on. There is scene after scene in the film that is worth thinking through. But there is leftover turkey to be eaten and discussion to be had.

So I’ll end by noting, in reference to the way this dinner-table dialogue wraps up, that as every good comedic bullshitter knows a large part of the joy is in being caught. As a youngest child, another thing baked into my DNA is the urge to needle people: when you are the smallest, least significant one in a group, annoying the other members of that group is a fantastic way to get them to include you, even if only by chasing you away multiple times.

But even better than this is when you say something that gets under someone’s skin, and then they realize that you've just been bullshitting them. In that instant, you can – if you play it just right – go from annoying to entertaining. And then they're not chasing you away, but letting you hang out with them, because you're funny.

This is at least in part the motion of the dinner scene from The In-Laws, and it's in part the motion of the entire film. Vince is crazy, a loose cannon who may be involved in the madness of a plot to destroy the world economic system...or perhaps he’s just clever, an absurdist exaggerator who loves to see how far he can push people before he makes them laugh, plunging them into the release of comedy. Perhaps, that is, this is simply his way of engaging with a group of strangers, with the hope that they will like him. It's a delightful approach to drawing a character and to telling a story, and it's one that has shaped me to the core.

So, as you retire into your weekend of post-Thanksgiving bliss, which will, hopefully, involve watching some movies, remember that they're not just a way of connecting you to the people around you. They're also a way of creating you, and a portal through which you can look back and see who, and why, you are.

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