Whistling At the Graveyard: "I Love You to Death"
Lawrence Kasden's regrettably underseen I Love You to Death, from 1990, is almost always described as a "black comedy." Yep. Okay. Got it. Err…but what the hell is a black comedy, anyway?
The Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as "humor marked by the use of usually morbid, ironic, grotesquely comic episodes." This seems pretty straightforward, right? But poke around a little more and complications arise. The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that the use of "black" in this sense dates from 1583 and involves the idea of "dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister." Ah, I see. But…this raises another question: is the use of "black" in "black comedy" intended to signal that it's a baneful enterprise partaking in dark and deadly purposes (because some people don't find this kind of stuff all that funny), or that it stands as a corrective to those purposes, perhaps in the way that a vaccination uses a harmful agent to prevent harm from that agent?
The Oxford Reference website – an arm of the Oxford University Press – throws this into the scrum: "A kind of drama (or, by extension, a non-dramatic work) in which disturbing or sinister subjects like death, disease, or warfare, are treated with bitter amusement, usually in a manner calculated to offend and shock." Interesting. Now we have the idea of bitterness added to the mix, along with the notion of being intended to offend and shock. But what is it about something like death that isn't shocking on its own? Put differently, how does one shock by invoking a topic as already-shocking as death? Perhaps by upending our beliefs about it, or by forcing us to see it as what it really is?
Hmm. It's all pretty complicated.
The coinage of the phrase itself is often attributed to the French surrealist Andre Breton in his 1940 "Anthology of Black Humour," in which he offered a taxonomy of the subject, starting with Jonathan Swift and moving all the way forward through the works of people like Kafka, Picasso, and Dali. Breton gives us a list of people employing the form, but also insists that there's also something inexplicable or impenetrable to it, something that refuses to be captured. In a magnificent line from the introduction to that book, he notes that "there can be no question of explaining [this] humor and making it serve didactic ends. One might just as well try to extract a moral for living from suicide."
Hah! How about that? Using a blackly comedic line to explain the form itself. We tip our hats to you, sir.
I thought of I Love You to Death this week because my last two entries in this space have been perhaps a bit jeremiad-ish. I've presented cinema as groaning under the weight of the corporate franchise. I've presented the world as a place so disturbing right now that, in the lovely phrase of the punk band Bad Religion, even the lampposts can't stop crying, and living in that world as so difficult that, to quote the punk/rebel/guitar maestro Ani DiFranco, "if you're not angry you're just stupid or you don't care."
But the wonderful thing about cinema is that, like a rolling pin or a baseball bat, it can serve purposes both aggressive (if there's an intruder in your house) and liberating (if you like to eat pies or play baseball). Which is to say that in addition to being a tool of condemnation, as I framed it in my last two pieces, cinema can also be a tool of joy, or, as may be the case in these dark times, a tool of survival.
This is, perhaps, where we see those dictionary definitions of so-called black comedy knit together: its purpose might be lay out before our eyes those morbid, baneful things like death and taxes and Texas (I'm looking at you, Bernie) from which we can never truly escape, and to shock or offend us by suggesting a certain kind of irreverence through which we can approach them, not in a didactic way, but as an affront to them, as a suicide is an affront to life.
It's in the spirit of this that I'd like to propose a phrase to describe black comedy. One often hears the locution "whistling past the graveyard" invoked in these sorts of things, as a way of denoting the idea that we're trying to make ourselves comfortable with that which makes us uncomfortable. But I think this is pretty weak sauce as a way of understanding how something like I Love You to Death functions.
Instead, I think we should think of it as whistling at the graveyard, challenging it, mocking it, taunting it, and insisting that even though something like death might win, we will never lose.
In the film, Kevin Kline gives one of the broadest and best comedic performances of his career as Joey Boca, the owner of a pizza parlor and the possessor of a vitality so fantastic that it overwhelms everything else in his life, including those little forget-me-nots like morality and religion. An almost parodically Italian Italian – he notes at one point that America was discovered by one Italian and named after another, making it an Italian country, and the portraits on the wall of his pizza parlor include the Pope, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, JFK, and Frank Sinatra – he goes out four or five nights a week and seduces women.
But such is the intensity of his charisma that he has managed to convince both his wife Rosalie (Tracey Ullman) and his suspicious, live-in, Yugoslavian mother-in-law Nadja (the incandescent Joan Plowright) that he's a loving husband, fanatically devoted to Rosalie and their two children. Also on the scene is pizza shop employee Devo (River Phoenix), a perfectly-earnest and faux-sophisticated teen (anticipating many of Wes Anderson's characters of the subsequent fifteen years) who tries again and again to convince Rosalie that Joey is cheating on her, because he himself is in love with her.
All of this comes to a head at the end of the first act of the film, when Rosalie catches Joey doing what he does. After briefly contemplating suicide, she decides that the better course of action is to kill him as revenge for his life of betrayal. She enlists her mother Nadja in this quest, marking the film's real turn into black comedy.
Their first endeavor is to hire a guy Nadja knows to kill Joey; this goes awry when Joey wrestles away the baseball bat the man is going to try to kill him with. The mechanically-minded Nadja then tries to wire Joey's car to blow up when he turns the ignition, but nothing happens. So Rosalie takes matters into her own hands, preparing Joey a pasta sauce laced with two full bottles of sleeping pills. Being of insatiable appetites, he eats the entire thing, but it does little more than make him loopy, and he ends up on the porch swing between Rosalie and Nadja, groggily belting out romantic old songs before passing out again.
At this point, Nadja calls on Devo, who, after a terrible moral struggle, agrees to shoot Joey. He does, or thinks he does (he couldn't look while he was doing it), and they discover that the bullet seems to only have barely entered Joey's skull behind his ear. They are further dismayed when Joey wakes up, complaining of a headache, but otherwise claiming that he feels pretty good. Desperate, Devo goes to a bar and recruits two roustabouts that his brother knows.
These would-be assassins are brothers named Harlan and Marlon, are so stoned that they can barely function, and are played by William Hurt and Keanu Reeves. After a long and involved discussion about which side of the body the heart is on, including a failed attempt to remember the Pledge of Allegiance in order to locate which hand went over the heart and where it was located, Harlan shoots Joey. But while they're sorting out the details of the payment, Joey appears once more, this time with entry and exit wounds on the right side of his body, definitely tottering, but still alive, and wondering if any of these guests (his memory has gone a bit gaga) want something to eat or drink.
At this point, the cops show up, Joey is rushed to the hospital, and everyone else is arrested. The kicker at the end comes when Joey, fully recovered, decides not to press charges against anyone. The entire incident has managed to refocus his ferocious vitality back onto Rosalie. Any woman, he declares, whose love is so intense that it can lead to murder deserves to have that love reciprocated. The greatness of her love matches the greatness of his passion, and he vows to be faithful to her evermore.
In addition to being delightfully written, the film rests on a bevy of superlative performances. These are all very big – Klein, as I've noted, struts right up to the edge of parody – but they are at the same time so grounded in reality that they let the film operate as a kind of loving satire of humanity itself.
Now, reality is a funny word here. The plot of the movie has little to do with it. Joey's superhuman ability to resist being killed is maybe the most obvious example of this, but the other character's rather blithe acceptance of murder as a fitting way to teach someone a lesson is perhaps even more of an affront to the notion. My sense is that it's what they saw as the film's rather odious morality, its bending of traditional ethical realities, that tended to put off reviewers at the time the film was released: Joey is execrable to his wife, and yet the film forces us to like him; the other characters try to violently murder him, and yet the film asks us to see this as a gesture of love.
And in this equation, as I've said, it's the reality of the performances that make things work. But the reality is not one of should or should not, it's a reality of exaggeration, which is also, in this context, the reality of its black comedy.
What the film understands about Joey, for example – and this is why Klein's performance is so wonderful – is exactly that charisma, like other human emotions, can become its own driving force. The energy of life itself – that elixir of the fact that we are alive and not, as are the vast multitudes of other things in the cosmos, like rocks and stars and atoms, dead – is at times so overwhelming that it leaves no other option than to be expressed. "I'm a man – I got a lot of hormones in my body," is the way Joey puts it when someone asks him why he can't stop sleeping around.
But the film is not making excuses for, and is not really about, male infidelity, except as an expression of something larger. It's about the concrete existence of the furious urges of life. For why else do we have things like laws and religion – the film opens with Joey confessing to his priest – other than the fact that we are built like racecars into which someone forgot to put brakes?
This becomes apparent when we realize that the other characters in the film are in a sense exact reflections of Joey. They too are immediately willing to renounce legality and morality when they are overcome with their passions: Rosalie, at the mercy of her love and furious desire for vengeance, readily becomes a murderer; Devo and Nadja do the same, out of their own passions for Rosalie and anger at Joey. Where Joey is driven to infidelity, they are driven to assassination.
The lovely, absurdist wildcard here (which, I think, people like Breton and Kafka would have adored) comes in the form of Harlan and Marlon. For they commit murder, or rather try their darndest to commit murder, for no reason at all other than a couple hundred bucks. That they are not driven by passion like the other characters is not a refutation of the idea that the film is about the overwhelming power of life, but a confirmation that that power is so vast and strange and ridiculous that it needs no purpose. Like the eerie forces of dark matter that pervade the universe, life itself is at times, or perhaps at base, entirely inexplicable.
How inexplicable? Well, it's so inexplicable that on occasion it simply reverses itself.
Unlike something like Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which is the text that kicks off so much discussion of black comedy, there is a note of sentimentality in the end of the film. Joey forgives his would-be killers, and declares that he will be faithful to Rosalie. If we take this notion that "love conquers all" to be a dollop of syrup that makes all the darkness of what has come before palatable, then it seems that the film cuts against its own grain.
But if, instead, we step back and think about how wildly bananas this ending is, how indicative of the ridiculous and barely contained forces that reside in us, then it becomes clear that it is not sentimental at all, but a rallying cry in the face of the graveyard.
This element of the ending is best encapsulated, I think, in a look that William Hurt's character of Harlan gives Joey after Joey tells him that he has forgiven him for trying to kill him. This look is half "what the hell is going on here?" and half terror. It is the look of a man faced with something strange and inexplicable, something larger than himself, which he has never encountered before.
And that thing is the sheer force of life itself, crying out against anything that would contain its own magnificent mischief. It is the mad joy of living in a world where we have no choice but to collide with other beings who are necessarily possessed of the same spirit, and the mad protest against anything that would deny the elixir of humanity. (For is there a better and pithier summary of Swift's raging suggestion that if we're going to treat the Irish like this, we might as well just eat their babies, than "Stop being inhumane, you assholes!")
This is black comedy. It's a shaking of the fist at anything and everything that seeks to deny that which is the most noble and the most alive in us, and at the same time an acknowledgement of commonality, in that we are all pitted together (or should be) against those destructors, and at the same time an assertion that those forces in us can never be quelled, because they are us. It is a whistling at the graveyard. A middle finger at the obscenity of death. A Bronx cheer blown at those of us who side with the forces of obscenity.
And so, friends, take heart, for when scolds like me try to tell you about how shitty the world is, there's always the rebuttal of black comedy out there waiting for us, to prove that no matter how bad it gets, we can always laugh in its face. And don't only take heart, take a load off, too: when the world gets to be too much, go have a look at I Love You to Death.
It'll make you smile.
Enjoy this piece? If you want to support me, please share tylersage.substack.com with anyone you know who's interested in film, culture, or ideas. And please consider subscribing for $5 a month: you'll receive every piece in full, get full access to the archives of this site, and greatly contribute to my ability to keep writing.
If you'd like to read more of my work, my book on William Klein's cult classic superhero film "Mr. Freedom" is now available in the Constellations series (Auteur/Liverpool University Press). Read an excerpt from the introduction here.
If you'd like to buy a copy of the book, you can buy it here https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mr-freedom-9781800856943?lang=en&cc=us.