humour and horror, comedy and tragedy

Thanks for your thoughts about the humour and horror stuff. First off, you ask if I actually like and watch horror much. I think part of my growing fascination with horror is that it's something I never really indulged in much, but not because I didn't have a taste for it, but rather because I didn't have the stomach for it. As a kid and teenager I knew I couldn't handle spicy food, and it was only in my mid-twenties that I slowly discovered that I could now handle spicy food and really enjoy it. Similarly, what little horror I saw as a kid deeply traumatized me and gave me nightmares, and even now I get really spooked by effective horror (my girlfriend takes much amusement at my getting the willies). But, like with spicy food, my palate's gotten duller, so I can handle the stuff without too much trauma, so I've started to explore more. And part of what fascinates me about this question is precisely the fact that I seem to be so deeply affected by horror. What is it about this stuff that troubles me so much?

I think another thing that fascinates me about the topic is simply that I'm fascinated by and enjoy humour and also find it dangerously precarious. It's a very thin line between humour and creepy. It's one of the things I admire about black humour as well as authors as diverse as Chekhov and Roald Dahl: they leave you unsure whether you ought to laugh, and that in itself is quite effective.

I actually do remember that scene you mention from Mulholland Drive and remember finding it tremendously effective. I think part of what makes it work is that the guy himself is so bizarre (such a Lynch character) and yet he's clearly very nervous and the way he tells the story builds up incredible tension. And this being a Lynch film, you haven't the least idea what's going to happen when we look around the corner. But what we see is just a tacky-looking beast and that instantly deflates the tension. A friend of mine who's a real horror connoisseur told me about a complaint that Stephen King had about the difficulty of building suspense in horror: the suspense is easy, but actually showing the monster is almost inevitably a let-down. You show the audience a thirty-foot tall man-eating slug and the audience says, "oh, I was kind of expecting a three-hundred-foot tall man-eating slug." The scene in Mulholland Drive seems deliberately to play on this, to say, "okay, whatever you were expecting back there, it's better than what I could show you, so let's just play up the humour instead."

It also raises a further question: Lynch films aren't generally classified as "horror," but I'd say there's certainly an element of horror in them, or at least the uncanny, which is to horror what suspense is to mysteries.

I think you're right that most horror almost inevitably teeters on the edge of humour. Both deal with the grotesque, and especially for an audience that knows it's dealing with fiction, and a postmodern audience most especially, it's hard to do the grotesque without devolving into giggles. But it is possible. And usually humour and horror are easy to distinguish, especially when it's not in fiction but in real life.

Anyway, a few thoughts about comedy and tragedy in the Symposium. I wonder if I can tie this back into some of the stuff I said about Eric Havelock. The theatre was traditionally one of the main repositories of Greek wisdom: both Plato and Aristotle quote the tragic poets almost as much as they quote Aristotle when they want to illustrate a point. In that sense, Platonic philosophy is in competition with theatre as much as it is with the rhetoric of the sophists for the claim to being the dominant mode of thought and discourse in Ancient Greece. And just as a dialogue like the Phaedrus tries to demonstrate philosophy's superiority over rhetoric by showing how Socrates is a better rhetoritician than the sophists, the Symposium seems to want to demonstrate that philosophy offers better drama than the dramatists. Fitting, then, that Alcibiades should enter at the end and declare Socrates to be the champion. And at a party celebrating Agathon, too--cheeky!

As for why the dialogue is predominantly comic rather than tragic, I wonder if that's because Platonic philosophy is itself more comic than tragic, or at least it's rational and optimistic where tragedy emphasizes irrationality and pessimism. With the blessings of philosophy, nothing that befell the House of Atreus should have happened. Nor Oedipus, nor Medea, etc. Nietzsche's main complaint about Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy is that he brings a sunny rationality onto the Greek stage, thereby killing the--for Nietzsche--much more profound tragic yet cheerful spirit of pre-Socratic Greece.

I worry all these thoughts are already obvious to you. Though I suppose there are worse things to do than state the obvious. Like state the misleading or patently false.