But Black Dynamite! I Post Blogs to the Community!

Happy Groundhog's Day, everyone. The groundhog prediction for me appears to be "three days of no school" although if I get stuck in an infinite loop then it could be EVEN MORE.

So I saw Black Dynamite the other day, and now I can't stop selling drugs to the community quoting it. It's a really good movie. Apparently, it's a parody of blaxploitation films, but besides a vague awareness of what constitutes "blaxpoloitation", I've never seen any blaxploitation films. Nonetheless, I liked it a lot.

I really respect parody. I think it's because there's geekiness inherent in (good) parody, for certain values of geekiness. You couldn't make an action movie parody without being thoroughly familiar with Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. You couldn't make Galaxy Quest without going to at least a few Trek conventions. (I've been to one. Leonard Nimoy was there. It was amazing.) If geekiness is defined as an odd sort of obsession, so that a "computer geek" is someone who knows a lot about computers, then that sort of thing is absolutely critical to crafting a parody that actually manages to capture the essence of a work and present it as humorous.

Since you have to devote time, energy, and thought into really absorbing a genre, we end up in the situation where, to really parody a genre, you have to love it. That means that most parodies--at least, all the best parodies--are the affectionate ones, that showcase a love of a genre. Obviously there are other "parodies" that don't qualify as this--Disaster Movie, etc--but I did say "the best parodies." Shallow, unimaginative potshots at the pop-cultural representation of a work might make for cheap laughs, but in general they won't give you a good parody.

Let me give you a case, in Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and was, in general, damn awesome. H2G2 is, in many ways, a science fiction parody. It makes fun of ideas like time travel, faster-than-light drives, galactic civilizations, artificially intelligent robots, etc, etc. But Douglas Adams also wrote regular science fiction--in fact, he was a writer for Doctor Who, to the point that plot points from his Doctor Who scripts worked their way into the (far-too-rarely-known) later book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Despite writing dead serious stories and contributing to the tropes he parodied, Douglas Adams was able to recognize the absurdities that lurk in science fiction's traditional settings (as they lurk everywhere) and draw them out.

In many ways, parody is harder to do than a straight example of your parody-target. While watching Black Dynamite, I was amazed at how often a subtle mistake was used for comedy. An actor's expression is a bit too fierce, his line a little strangely given, a camera shot holds just a few seconds too long. A sweet spot exists among the bad elements of film. If a camera shot is held just a little too long, it might be disconcerting. If it's held for a very long time, it becomes boring or confusing. Somewhere in-between lies hilarity. A parodist walks a knife edge. Making a normal movie isn't his goal, but making a bad movie isn't either. It can't just be ridiculous--it has to be the right kind of ridiculous, and it has to have the right amount. Without that balance, you don't have a good work making fun of bad works--you just have a bad work.

Parody contains within it a wonderful contradiction. Most of us hate getting made fun of, and when we like a work or a genre, we dislike it getting made fun of as well. But a good parody enables us to laugh at our favorite works and, in that sense, laugh at ourself. It's good to laugh at ourselves. It keeps us from being too serious, and puts a vital limiting circuit on mankind's innate arrogance circuit. To make fun of anything you like, you have to make fun of yourself, and you can't make fun of yourselves without, obviously, making yourself a little more fun. In my mind, that makes parody important. Even in our art, sometimes we aspire a bit too hard for perfection. To take our pretentions and deflate them as expertly as good parody does is nothing short of public service.