PETER VERSTRATEN HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM FRAMIlNG FRAMING FILM is a book series dedicated to theoretical and analytical studies in restoration, collection, archival, and exhibition practices in line with the existing archive of EYE Filmmuseum. With this series, Amsterdam University Press and EYE aim to support the academic research community, as well as practitioners in archive and restoration. SERIES EDITORS Giovanna Fossati, EYE Filmmuseum & University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Leo van Hee, EYE Filmmuseum Frank Kessler, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Dan Streible, New York University, United States Nanna Verhoeff, Utrecht University, the Netherlands EDITORIAL BOARD Richard Abel, University of Michigan, United States Jane Gaines, Columbia University, United States Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, United States Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Martin Koerber, Deutsche Kinemathek, Germany Ann-Sophie Lehmann, University of Groningen, the Netherlands Charles Musser, Yale University, United States Julia Noordegraaf, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States Linda Williams, University of California at Berkeley, United States PETER VERSTRATEN HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NL FILM FANDS This publication is made possible by grants from the Nederlands Filmfonds and the Netherlands Society of Cinematographers. eye Published by EYE Filmmuseum / Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: Borgman © Drafthouse Films. Design: Brandon Schaefer. Cover design and lay-out: Magenta Ontwerpers, Bussum Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978 90 8964 943 0 e-ISBN 978 90 4852 837 0 DOI 10.5117/9789089649430 NUR 670 Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND (http://creativecomnons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.o) O P. Verstraten / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016 Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations repro- duced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 9 15 INTRODUCTION 13 Overview of Studies on Dutch Cinema 15 Like Sharing a Secret Code 19 Three Theories of Humour: FLODDER IN AMERIKA! 25 From 'Jokes' to 'Humour' 35 1 LOW-CLASS COMEDIES 45 A Prostitute and a Chambermaid: WAT ZIEN IK?! 48 (No) Ordinary People: HOGE HAKKEN, ECHTE LIEFDE and SCHATJES! 52 Be Thyself (or Act Like a Person): FLODDER 58 Carnivalesque 63 Forrest Gone Berserk: NEW KIDS TURBO 66 Social 'Ragging' 72 Over-the-top: VET HARD, MOORDWIJVEN, FILMPJE! 75 Long Live 'Sjakie' 79 2 MULTICULTURAL COMEDIES 83 The Joie de Vivre of the Right-wing: VOX POPULI 85 Strategic Ambiguity: ALLEEN MAAR NETTE MENSEN 87 100% Halal: HET SCHNITZELPARADIJS 92 Primal Dutch: SHOUF SHOUF HABIBI! 95 A Dutch Road Movie: DUNYA & DESIE 101 Kebab Sutra: RABAT 1o6 Flouting Moral Rules 1o8 3 FROM 'KIND-HEARTED' COMEDIES TO NEUROTIC ROMANCES 113 Feel-good Tragedies: KOMEDIE OM GELD and CISKE DE RAT 115 Playful Parallel Editing: FANFARE 120 Bergman 'Light': DORP AAN DE RIVIER and MAKKERS STAAKT UW WILD GERAAS 123 Sticks of Satay in the Theater: EEN ZWOELE ZOMERAVOND and TUSSENSTAND 128 Pursuits of Happiness: ALLES IS LIEFDE and ALLES IS FAMILIE 132 Free-floating Irony: DE GELUKKIGE HUISVROUW and GOOISCHE VROUWEN 138 Post-Feminism: PHILEINE ZEGT SORRY 143 Women Who Know Too Much 144 Epilogue: A Note on Tolerance 146 6 I 4 DELIBERATE CAMP 151 A Faggot's Fairy Tale: THEO & THEO EN DE ONTMASKERING VAN HET TENENKAASIMPERIUM 153 Demy Revisited: DE TRANEN VAN MARIA MACHITA 162 Double Entendres: JA ZUSTER, NEE ZUSTER 165 The Detour of Postmodern Irony: FLORIS 167 Gay Pride: CHEZ NOUS 170 The Risk of Mere Witticism 173 5 HUMOUR AS AN AFTERMATH EFFECT 177 A Discrepancy between Story and Number: BLUE MOVIE 178 A Bohemian Display of Sex and Decay: TURKS FRUIT 182 Once Provocative, Now Obsolete: Pim & Wim Movies 187 Band of Outsiders: CHA CHA 191 Agent Provocateur: 06 and BLIND DATE 192 The Humour of Horror: SINT 195 6 HOMOSOCIAL JOKES 201 Ironic Distance: SPETTERS 203 Homosexual Panic as Baloney: ALL STARS 210 Bonding between a Gay Yuppie and a He-Man: SIMON 214 Dead Man 'Walking' as a Comedy: DE MARATHON 217 A Wannabe Tarantino Bromance: BROS BEFORE HOS 219 Poetic Homosociality: WILDE MOSSELS 226 HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM 7 FROM LUDIC HUMOUR TO COSMIC IRONY 229 A Stilled Form of Catholic Slapstick: DE ILLUSIONIST and DE WISSELWACHTER 230 A Buster Keaton Lookalike on and off the Set: OH BOY! 236 The Brother with a Movie Camera: ZUSJE 240 Play with Ontological Levels: HET ECHTE LEVEN and Mockumentaries 242 Baudelaire's Ironic Doubling: RENT A FRIEND 246 A Metafictional Joke Played On a Serious Man: OBER 250 A Rom-com with Peter Pan: AANMODDERFAKKER 254 8 FROM INSUBORDINATE PLAYFULNESS TO SUBVERSIVE IRONY 261 Ludic Paranoia: DE MINDER GELUKKIGE TERUGKEER VAN JOSZEF KATUS NAAR HET LAND VAN REMBRANDT 262 A Tongue-in-Cheek Short: BODY AND SOUL 265 Anti-Bourgeois Satire: DE VERLOEDERING VAN DE SWIEPS 268 I 7 Bunuelian Desires: DE NOORDERLINGEN 270 Pervaded with Role-Playing: KLEINE TEUN and DE LAATSTE DAGEN VAN EMMA BLANK 274 Middle-of-the-Road Absurdism: DE JURK and GRIMM 280 A Black Horror-Pastiche: BORGMAN 284 Deadpan Irony 288 9 FROM GROTESQUE CARICATURE TO GROTESQUE SATIRE 293 The Grotesque as a Concept 295 A Wannabe Tarantino Caper Movie: BLACK OUT 296 (Not) a Tarantino Dance Movie: NAAR DE KLOTE! 300 Comic Strip Meets Tarantino and Tarkovsky: DE WEDEROPSTANDING VAN EEN KLOOTZAK 302 Irony of Fate: PLAN C 305 Metafilm as a Vengeful Satire: DE MANTEL DER LIEFDE 311 Fantastic Irony: DE VIERDE MAN 317 Almost Full Circle 324 CONCLUSION 327 Notes 333 Bibliography 367 Filmography 377 Photo Credits 389 Index of Concepts 393 Index of Titles 397 Index of Names 405  PREFACE If the 'comedian is the anthropologist of our humdrum everyday lives,' as 9 Simon Critchley remarks in his On Humour (66), then it would make sense to take this study on humour and irony in Dutch fiction film as an (oblique) 'mir- ror of Holland.' Let me say right here that I would not discourage readers to consider this study as a 'metaphoric barometer' of certain Dutch mentalities, but do not succumb to that temptation too easily. For humorous remarks and comic scenes can have 'local and historical' dimensions, indeed, but they can also be (relatively) 'universal and timeless' as well, and the boundaries are very difficult to draw. Moreover, any crystal clear claim would perhaps meet the obvious objection that humour is not just a cultural phenomenon, but also a matter of personal taste. Suppose that I were to argue that the people in the vicinity of Maaskantje are more likely to appreciate the crude jokes of the 'New Kids' from Maaskantje than people from Amsterdam, then of course anyone would be right to protest 'I am from Maaskantje myself, and I do not like them at all' or 'I am from Amsterdam, and I think them very funny.' Thus, if I had set myself the task of pinpointing to what extent humour and irony can be called 'typical' for a specific region or exemplary of a particular decade, I would have moved onto very shaky ground. My main reason for taking up this project was more modest. First, as I will explain in the Introduction, the subject of Dutch fiction cinema has been blatantly underrepresented in the academy so far, and this neglect becomes all the more unfair with the increase in popularity of Dutch films at the box office in recent years. Second, it struck me that a healthy - unhealthy to others, perhaps - dose of humour and irony seems to be a key ingredient of the most noteworthy titles in the history of Dutch fiction cinema, from the phenomenal commercial successes of CISKE DE RAT and FANFARE in the 1950s to more recent winners of the Golden Calf for Best Film, such as the deadpan horror- pastiche BORGMAN and the happy slacker rom-com AANMODDERFAKKER. Combining these two facts, it felt as if the subject of this book was handed to me on a plate. Moreover, in response to academic tendencies since the mid- 1990s that have convincingly proposed the methods of 'cultural analysis' over strict cultural-historical approaches, I decided to include what Mieke Bal has called 'rigorously, perhaps provocatively contemporary readings' of the films (129). I did not want to restrict myself to discuss film X as merely a product of a particular era, since I can neither know nor fully understand what it is to watch a film from the 196os with eyes of a 'hippie.' Viewing habits have changed considerably - and the films in chapter 5 clearly give proof of this - and therefore I chose to favour a certain deliberate anachronism. Cinephiles with a preference for cult are much aware of this mechanism in the practice of their spectatorship: in retrospect, a once-derided picture does not seem that bad at all, and it thus deserves re-appreciation as a curious but wonderful 10 case or as an underestimated forerunner of later developments. I am much more interested in detecting affinities between films on the basis of the forms of humour they share than in sticking to chronological accounts or in recon- structions of historical contexts, which both have been quite common in jour- nalistic books on Dutch cinema. Hence, for me, films enter 'in dialogue' with one another, potentially travelling in a time machine: discovering common denominators between a film from 1967 and one from 2013 can make us see them both 'anew.' The reader has to bear in mind that the language of these films is Dutch. That means that when I use quotation marks to indicate the words of a char- acter, the quotation is not exact. The translation is either provided by me or it comes from the English-language subtitles from the DVD. In situations where characters use English terms, as they do occasionally, I have italicized the quo- tation or part of the statement. It was impossible to navigate through all these films, including the many anecdotes that surround them, without the help of many others who were often all too happy to converse about their experience with Dutch cinema, either as makers and/or consumers. My gratitude in particular goes to my two proofreaders, Ernst van Alphen, professor of Literary Studies in Leiden, and Hans Beerekamp, a journalist at NRC Handelsblad, writing on film since 1977. Though his main subject has become television from 2003 onwards, Beerekamp continues to exercise his keen expertise on cinema for the website schimmenrijk.nl, dedicated to obituaries of film actors, directors, producers, cinematographers and composers. I am much obliged to filmmaker Dave Schram, who filled many gaps in my collection of Dutch films by offering me a number of missing titles. I would also like to thank Het Nederlands Filmfonds [The Netherlands Film Fund] for their generous subsidy and I am grateful that HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM the board members of the NSC [Netherlands Society of Cinematographers] were kind enough to support this project, both mentally and financially. While writing this book, my father, Theo Verstraten, passed away, and it is to his memory that I dedicate this study. In January 2014 I made a trip with him and my mother to London to visit their then newly born grandchil- dren, the twins Hero and River Ejiofor. And, of course, many thanks to two of their other grandchildren who happen to be my very own daughters, Febe and Bodil, cinephiles-to-be. You know how to brighten up my life, just as my sevgilim Fatma does. I 11 PREFACE K K;,, ~ .....................\ KW K,; ~.44\ 4< ~ ~ ~ K , '~'~k< ~ ~ 4 7 \,,,,~. '4 4 4 ~ 7 ~K* ~ , ~ .' K '' ' , W 2~ N *~ 4N 4' ~N ~.; K ~< 4 '~ ' ' ~ ,4i~K4<~V 4444 ~ ~j24. 4~4<4 ~ ~4<4~ K ~ ~ .4< ~ ~~ ' ~"' N '2~I.1'2~~ "..~A4 ~< ~444< ~4'.'.'~>2 74 ' 4 ~. , ~ ~ N ,. ~ ,~7~4 ~' 'P4 N ' ~ ~ ~4<~< ~ ~ " ' ' ~ N "~N' ~"~ " 4 ~ ~~ ~ ~ < 4 4 ~ K '~"~'~4 4 . '~"N\ ~ 44. '.~ ' 4 ~4 $2~ k#'4y~4~> ~ ~' K ' ~ ~ 4 '~ ~ N " 4~ ~ W 4< ~ ? 4~N 'N 4~NN ~4~4 ~ Introduction Apart from the art-house cinema Het Ketelhuis, the self-declared 'canteen of I 13 Dutch film' founded in 1999, Dutch film is only consistently celebrated during the ten days of the annual Netherlands Film Festival (NFF), which started as the Netherlands Film Days in 1981. In the 2007 festival, a jury chaired by Jeltje van Nieuwenhoven presented the Canon of Dutch Cinema (Canon van de Nederlandse Film) in order to stimulate an interest in national productions. The jury decided to restrict the list to only 16 titles, covering a huge diversity of types and genres: shorts, documentaries, black & white, silent films, box- office hits, comedy, animation, experimental films, film festival successes and youth cinema. On the one hand, the canon bows to popular entertainment - the 'low-class' humour of FLODDER (Dick Maas, 1986) and the 'parochial' comedy FANFARE (Bert Haanstra, 1958) being the most obvious examples. On the other hand, the canon includes ('serious') artistic cinema - with the experimental shorts IK KOM WAT LATER NAAR MADRA [THAT WAY TO MADRA] (Adriaan Ditvoorst, 1965) and LIVING (Frans Zwartjes, 1971) at the other end of the spectrum of commercial endeavours. Except for some critical remarks about a few missing titles - such as Paul Verhoeven's SOLDAAT VAN ORANJE [SOLDIER OF ORANGE] (1977), George Sluizer's SPOORLOOS [THE VANISHING] (1988) or Mike van Diem's KARAKTER [CHARACTER] (1997) - the Canon of Dutch Cinema has met remarkably little controversy.' In addition to congratulating the jury on its balanced selection, the absence of a heated debate about the canon can be taken as a sign that both critics and the general public are no longer as adverse to Dutch cinema as in previous decades. There has always been ample admiration for a strong docu- mentary tradition in the Netherlands (by, among others, Joris Ivens, Herman van der Horst, Johan van der Keuken, Heddy Honigmann).2 There has also always been sympathy for the so-called 'family films,' aimed at a young audi- ence and their parents. This genre of the family films, pioneered at first by Henk van der Linden and then by Karst van der Meulen,3 has gradually grown into full-blown maturity since Ben Sombogaart's MIJN VADER WOONT IN RIO [MY FATHER LIVES IN RIO] (1989) and HET ZAKMES [THE POCKET-KNIFE] (1992), with MINOES [MISS MINOES] (Vincent Bal, 2001), HET PAARD VAN SINTERKLAAS [WINKY's HORSE] (Mischa Kamp, 2005), KAUWBOY (Boudewijn Koole, 2012), and the adaptations of Carry Slee novels, produced by Shooting Star Filmcompany.4 The Dutch (narrative) fiction feature, however, has in gen- eral met less enthusiasm, and if a canonical list had been presented in the mid-199os, the overall reaction would probably have been one of consider- able derision. In that period, Dutch cinema was so strikingly unpopular that the idea of a canon alone would have been greeted with jeers and might have provoked a contemptuous remark like: Is the idea of publishing a selected number of titles a means to cover up for the lack of quality of the non-selected 14 I films? Even though the attitude towards Dutch cinema has become much more positive over the years, in critical reception as well as at the box office, the persistent prejudices have not died out, as websites with a film forum, like moviemeter.nl, testify to. Among the responses to Dutch narrative fiction films, which not always exceed the level of a gut feeling, there are two recur- ring ones. The first one can be paraphrased like this: 'Dutch cinema consists of a too frank display of nudity and sex, which it tries to legitimize as a func- tional display.' The portrayal of sex in the notable box-office successes of BLUE MOVIE (Wim Verstappen, 1971) and TURKS FRUIT [TURKISH DELIGHT] (Paul Verhoeven, 1973), deeply ingrained in collective memory, led to a series of sub- sequent pictures over the years which also played this card, betting on it that the pair of 'nudity and sex' offers a road to fame. Every attempt to make a film that even remotely resembles TURKS FRUIT - from KORT AMERIKAANS (Guido Pieters, 1979) to BRANDENDE LIEFDE [BURNING LOVE] (Ate de Jong, 1983), and from DE GULLE MINNAAR [THE GENEROUS LOVER] (Mady Saks, 1990) to ZOMERHITTE [SUMMER HEAT] (Monique van de Ven, 2008) - only worsened the reputation of Dutch cinema and reinforced the prejudice that nudity and sex are part and parcel of it, regardless of the many films which do without this combination. The second one goes like this: 'In principle, I am not a fan of Dutch films, but I would like to make an exception for this one.' Apparently, a good or decent Dutch picture is considered to be a deviation from the general rule that the quality is below average. This study is not meant to correct the eventual unjustness of these preju- dices, for that would be Sisyphean labour. For every great Dutch picture, critics can easily respond with a number of failures. For every international success - like Academy Awards for 'Best Foreign Language Film' for DE AANSLAG [THE HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM ASSAULT] (Fons Rademakers, 1986), ANTONIA [ANTONIA's LINE] (Marleen Gor- ris, 1995), and KARAKTER - sceptics might cite the embarrassing statistics that BORGMAN (Alex van Warmerdam, 2013) was the first Dutch film to be selected for the main competition in Cannes in 38 years. Instead of combating preju- dices, I intend to address the fact that there is no proper educational forum to debate Dutch cinema. Hence, Humour andlrony in Dutch Post-warFiction Film has to be considered as only a 'modest proposal' to address the almost total neglect of Dutch cinema in the academy. OVERVIEW OF STUDIES ON DUTCH CINEMA In order to illustrate that Dutch cinema lacks a proper institutionalization, let me sketch the programmes of the various departments of Language and Culture at Leiden University. In Japanese studies some attention is devoted I 15 to Japanese cinema; in Chinese studies the same for Chinese cinema, and this list can easily be extended: Korean cinema, Turkish cinema, Iranian cin- ema, Brazilian cinema are all covered in Leiden - not very comprehensively, but nonetheless. Even though the films are not much valued for their specific cinematic potential, but as a means to deepen students' understanding of the culture in which they have been produced, the attention to cinema in foreign language departments is more consistent than in Dutch studies, although there are signs that this might change for the better in the near future. It is perhaps a matter of looking at tea leaves, but a (Western) scholar with an interest in Japanese, Chinese or Iranian culture is like an 'omnivore': fascinated by any peculiarity of that faraway country - not only literature and films but also popular songs, sports, food, up to the Japanese obsession with manga comics and Hello Kitty.6 These preferences are not strictly hierarchi- cally marked in advance. By contrast, a Dutch scholar studying his own cul- ture behaves like someone with refined taste, steeped in a tradition in which one is educated to distinguish high from low culture. Due to a conventional bias favouring literature over film - let alone, comic strips or popular (dance) music - scholars in Dutch studies have, at least until recently, a blind spot for (the national) cinema. If Dutch cinema is addressed at universities, it usually takes place in an incidental course under the umbrella of literature, like 'Novel and Film.' The policy which underlies such a course seems obvious: Dutch film can only be made to fit the curriculum on the condition that it is associated with the more venerable belles-lettres. And even if such a course were to give film (adapta- tions) pride of place over novels, it risks affording film the role of sidekick to literature, the more since the status of the written-source texts predominantly INTRODUCTION determines the selection of films. This aside, however, is not meant to strike a sour tone, because a course like 'Novel and Film' at least offers a way for Dutch film to position itself in the academy. Given the fact that there is no substantial interest in Dutch cinema at universities, it is no wonder that the output of studies on Dutch cinema has been quite meagre over the years. The most profound academic publications are not dedicated to the post-war feature films, but to film culture preced- ing 1940, like the introduction of sound in Dutch cinema (Karel Dibbets); a study called Hollywood in Holland on 'Filmfactory' Hollandia which produced 60 films in between 1912 and 1923, the year of its bankruptcy (Ruud Bishoff); a study on the Nederlandsche Filmliga (Cdline Linssen, Hans Schoots, Tom Gunning); a dissertation inspired by the collection of Jean Desmet (Ivo Blom), which was also the basis for an exhibition in EYE and an accompanying vol- ume (Rommy Albers and Soeluh van den Berg); reactions to film as a new 16 medium in the Netherlands in the period 1895-1940 (Ansje van Beusekom), and a study on the role of German emigrants on the Dutch film industry in the 1930s (Kathinka Dittrich). And of course, the internationally oriented Joris Ivens - whose work spans several decades, from the short DE WIGWAM [THE WIGWAM] (1911) to UNE HISTOIRE DE VENT [A TALE OF THE WIND] (1988)- has attracted some bookish attention (Kees Bakker on the documentary context, Andre Stuflens on Ivens' connection to art, Hans Schoots' biography, Living Dangerously). Dorothee Verdaasdonk wrote a dissertation on Dutch cinema, covering the years from 1960 to 1983, but her approach was sociological rath- er than textual-analytic. In BEROEP: FILMMAKER [PROFESSION: FILMMAKER] (1990), she examined under what socio-economic conditions Dutch filmmak- ers could practice their profession: what financial resources were available; what was the role of the Dutch Vocational School for Film and Television; does the family background of the director have an influence? Another sociological perspective was adopted by Bart Hofstede who examined the influence of the government and of film organizations like the Bioscoopbond as well as the growing impact of critics upon Dutch film production in the post-war period. Notwithstanding these studies, when the narrative fiction film in the last five decades has been addressed, it was much more common to adopt a journal- istic perspective than an academic one: Rob van Scheers on Paul Verhoeven, Mieke Bernink on Fons Rademakers, Joost Ramaer on Alex van Warmerdam, Hans Heesen on George Sluizer, Ruud den Drijver on Wim Verstappen, Hans Schoots on Bert Haanstra, although the latter was a biography, published in the form of a dissertation.? Moreover, a number of websites focuses on Dutch cinema, of which Neerlands Filmdoek (http://www.nlfilmdoek.nl/) and the Nederlandse Film Database by Ren van Dam (http://www.filmtotaal.nl/ nederlandsefilm) are the most noteworthy. HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM Further, in his Hollands Hollywood (1995), freelance journalist of NRC Handelsblad Henk van Gelder gave a solid overview of 60 years of Dutch feature films, starting with WILLEM VAN ORANJE (G.J. Teunissen, 1934) and ending with 06 (Theo van Gogh, 1994). It catalogued 337 films with brief descriptions, (amusing) anecdotes and an impression of their reception; only 27 of the films were considered so relevant that they got more than one page. Van Gelder does not resist the temptation to cite the lines from particularly damning reviews, which, it must be said, can offer amusing reading. In defence of the slightly sarcastic perspective of Van Gelder, who originally had in mind to use for a motto Wim T. Schippers' hilarious phrase, 'A Dutch film is no guarantee of an empty auditorium,' I would like to point at the year he wrote his book: 1994 is about the worst year for Dutch cinema in the post-war era. As the last line of Van Gelder's study mentions: That very year, no more than 126,000 tickets, which is less than 1 per cent of the total number of tickets, were sold for films made in the Netherlands (372). This statistic turns the title Hollands Holly- |17 wood into an ironic pun: while Hollywood is known for its commercial policy, the adjective 'Hollands' is rather associated with box-office poison. In 1995, Robert Jan Westdijk's low-budget ZUSJE [LITTLE SISTER] was hailed as an innovative debut feature, which marked the beginning of a recov- ery from the annus horribilis 1994. This film is the starting point for a survey of Dutch cinema between 1995 and 2005 in the book De broertjes van Zusje [The Little Brothers of Little Sister], edited by film critics Mariska Graveland, Fritz de Jong and Paul Kempers. The tone is one of moderate optimism, justified by some critical successes - DE POOLSE BRUID [THE POLISH BRIDE] (Karim Traidia, 1998), WILDE MOSSELS [WILD MUSSELS] (Erik de Bruyn, 2000), VAN GOD LOS [GODFORSAKEN!] (Pieter Kuijpers, 2003) and SIMON (Eddy Terstall, 2004) - which outweigh the failures and for the fact that the numbers of view- ers for Dutch cinema have risen, from the 1 per cent in 1994 to 13.6 per cent in 2005. Since then, the situation has further signs of improvement. In the year 2013, for instance, the share was 20.5 per cent, and 21 Dutch films attracted more than 100,000 moviegoers. In addition to the books mentioned above, three studies, all from the year 2004, deserve special mention as particularly penetrating contributions. The first one is Schoots' enjoyable study Van FANFARE tot SPETTERS, which took a cultural-historical approach. Sketching the cinema between the years 1958 and 1980 Schoots relates the predominantly provocative themes in a number of movies to the revolutionary atmosphere in this period. Hence, he considers national cinema as an expression of contemporary issues within society. Do the films under analysis succeed in capturing the so-called zeitgeist and can the white screen function as a 'mirror of Holland'?' This cultural-historical perspective offers an insight into a possible relation between art and society, INTRODUCTION but the drawback of this approach is the tendency to analyze the films insofar as they can illuminate their (social) context. Hence, the films are not primarily debated for their intrinsic value, but they are rather used as a kind of reflection of the context as its original model. The Cinema of the Low Countries, edited by Ernest Mathijs, presents itself as a volume that seeks a balance between contextual readings and textual analysis. The 24 articles of about ten pages each put a particular film central stage. Half of the contributions are devoted to Dutch films, and in addition to the 'usual suspects' like TURKS FRUIT and SOLDAAT VAN ORANJE, films like KOMEDIE OM GELD [THE TROUBLE WITH MONEY] (Max Ophils, 1936) and TWEE VROUWEN [TWICE A WOMAN] (George Sluizer, 1979) were included in the selection. The volume is significant, since it attempts to fill such a yawning gap that one is willing to accept the 'glaring omissions' of which Mathijs himself is so well aware (2). A study which is at the same time very ambitious in its effort at comple- 18 tion and strikingly unpretentious in its deliberate choice for a totally random structure, is Film in Nederland, compiled by a number of researchers affiliated with the former Filmmuseum, now called EYE. It contains in alphabetical order brief descriptions, anecdotes and some thematic similarities regarding 200 Dutch films. The sheer breadth of subjects covered is necessarily at the cost of in-depth analyses. Due to its wide range, Film in Nederland reads like a database, but one of the advantages of this book is to see how flexible the term 'Dutch cinema' is interpreted by the editors. They endorse elastic criteria for the obvious problem of deciding when a film is to be considered as 'Dutch.' CISKE DE RAT (1955) was directed by the German Wolfgang Staudte and some of the crew members were German as well, but the film counts as Dutch, if only for the Dutch actors, the Dutch producer, the Dutch locations, and the Dutch novel it was based upon. Another entry is more or less the opposite, since MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH (1976) is shot in California with an Ameri- can cast and crew, except for camera man Bert van Munster and director Ren Daalder. PROSPERO'S BOOKS (Peter Greenaway, 1991) is included as a Dutch film because this international co-production had set designers Jan Roelfs and Ben van Os on board, was produced by Kees Kasander and Denis Wig- man, and had some Dutch actors in minor parts. Hence, the editors of Film in Nederland used flexible guidance for selection as entries, which is compara- ble to the criteria the Netherlands Film Festival has set for its competition. In 1989 the Golden Calf for Best Film at the festival was awarded to the Spanish- language film BODA SECRETA [SECRET WEDDING] by the Argentinian-born Alejandro Agresti, because of the nationality of its producers, Kasander and Wigman. The Dutch-Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad won the same main prize in 2005 for PARADISE Now, but it could not be the Dutch submission to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, because in that case the rules HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM are stricter. Since the film is in Arabic, it could only be submitted on behalf of Palestine. And what about the career of the cosmopolitan director George Sluizer, who made his stunning debut feature JOAO EN HET MES [JOAO AND THE KNIFE] (1972) in Brazil and LA BALSA DE PIEDRA [THE STONE RAFT] (2002) in Portugal and Spain; UTZ (1992) was shot in the Czech Republic with Armin Mueller-Stahl, THE VANISHING (1993) was the American remake of his afore- mentioned SPOORLOOS, THE COMMISSIONER (1998) was set in Brussels, and just before his death he finally finished DARK BLOOD (2012), starring the late River Phoenix who had passed away in 1993 during shooting. These are just a few examples of many borderline cases, which illustrate how problematic it is to think in terms of absolute and strict national demarcations. Since the prac- tice of international co-productions is becoming more customary than ever, this is all the more reason to see Dutch film along a continuum.9 |19 LIKE SHARING A SECRET CODE A main rationale behind this study is to countervail the underrepresentation of Dutch narrative cinema in the academic world, but one has to prevent oneself from 'drowning by numbers.' It would be overambitious to cover the whole domain from (action) comedy to avant-garde cinema. Writing a study on national cinema always risks being an arbitrary endeavour. The concept of national cinema erroneously suggests that the country of origin of the filmmaker, cast and/or crew is a more predominant factor for a useful tax- onomy than economic, industrial, artistic and/or generic ones. It is easier to mention the differences in subject matter, film style, target audience and so on, of the films of Paul Verhoeven, Nouchka van Brakel, Dick Maas, Nanouk Leopold, Mijke de Jong and Alex van Warmerdam than to sum up what unites them. Maas has perhaps more in common with the Farrelly broth- ers who made THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY (1998) than with any of the other mentioned here; Leopold with French director Bruno Dumont; De Jong with the Belgian Dardenne brothers; Van Warmerdam with the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki. Even though 'national cinema' may not be the best criterion for analysis, in common parlance it is still a vibrant concept. Each and every national cin- ema is haunted by the question: Which films are characteristic of the country at hand?'0 From an academic perspective, it is a daring, almost impertinent, question, because any hint at a clear-cut answer always already sounds too definitive. By contrast, from a journalistic perspective, it seems the most obvious of questions to ask whether there is such a thing as a typically Dutch film. Three global positions to this question can be derived from the first epi- INTRODUCTION sode of the documentary series consisting of nine parts, ALLEMAAL FILM: DE NEDERLANDSE FILM VAN 1945 TOT NU TOE [IT'S ALL FILM: DUTCH FILM SINCE 1945]." First, Frans Weisz replies with a rhetorical question: Does the label of Dutch cinema not denote limitations as if a filmmaker has to be caught in a straitjacket? It is not surprising that the label is not productive for Weisz, since he has always adored Italian cinema, which is most evident from his grandi- ose film HET GANGSTERMEISJE [A GANGSTERGIRL] (1966). Second, as Paul Verhoeven states, the fact that he himself is rooted in Dutch culture shows unmistakably in his pictures, but at the same time he also has a preference for American cinema, to which he adds that SOLDAAT VAN ORANJE is very Ameri- can in its framing and in its editing. This is implicitly proven by the rumour that Steven Spielberg was very enthusiastic about this picture. So, if the concept of Dutch cinema is restrictive according to Weisz and if, as Verhoeven claims, Dutch influences are only one among many others, 20 then only the third position, hesitantly mentioned by Alex van Warmerdam, presumes that there indeed may reside something 'typically Dutch' in films. In order to articulate a 'Dutch' accent, Van Warmerdam tentatively points at a distinction with his own canonical film DE NOORDERLINGEN [THE NORTH- ERNERS] (1992) and the work of Federico Fellini. Whereas Fellini's cinema is marked by a certain Catholicism in an exuberant and baroque way, the Chris- tianity of DE NOORDERLINGEN is rather Calvinist, meaning very sober and puritan. This does not only show itself in the plot of the film about a woman who is worshipped as a saint, but also in the mise-en-scene of the film: the square windows look straight on to the pavement and the scenery is framed and delineated, as if to emphasize a suffocating atmosphere. As a conse- quence, Van Warmerdam says, his film is miserly, the opposite of baroque, and 'may be that is what is so Dutch about it.' Although Van Warmerdam describes his film as steeped in a puritan Christian tradition, DE NOORDERLINGEN is at the same time in polar oppo- site to Calvinism. It is a characteristic of Calvinism to distrust visual culture, because in the eyes of Calvinists images can never be reduced to only a single meaning. Whereas the deadly serious Calvinists adhere to a strong textual unilaterality ('X means this and nothing else'), the wilfully visual minimalism of Van Warmerdam's cinema lends itself to ambiguity.'2 This deadpan kind of cinema excels in consistently portraying introvert and often even taciturn male loners whom we never can truly fathom. Journalist Hans Beerekamp coined the term 'Hollandse School' [Dutch School] to characterize the many enigmatic outsiders in films from the 1980s, made by not only Van Warmer- dam, but also Jos Stelling, Orlow Seunke, Danniel Danniel, and Joost Ranzijn. The work of the first three will be discussed at length in later chapters, so let me at this stage just refer to Ranzijn's 45-minute MAN IN DE WAR [MAN IN HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM TROUBLE] (1984) for a thumbnail sketch of its chief characteristics. Though it is a little known and underrated film, it can function as an exemplary case. Its main protagonist is a guy who has difficulty expressing his emotions: the shy Henk works as a gardener in a public park and has to make sure the vis- itors leave in time. Its plot is fairly absurd: One day Henk is on the tram when a woman hands him a bag to hold for her while she buys a ticket. She does not return, and before long the sound of a crying baby can be heard coming from the bag. He goes to visit his parents, but while his mother wants to take care of the baby, his father is fiercely against it. In subsequent scenes, we see how Henk tries to get rid of his unexpected asset, but to no avail.'s Father tells child protection about his son's situation and the baby is taken away from him by a policeman. Then, there is the twist: he starts stealing babies, not just one, but very many, often aided by his friend who is a boxer. We can only guess that he does so for the joy of raising them, together with his mother who by now has divorced her husband.'4 The humour is basically deadpan and slightly mor- 21 bid. In the beginning of MAN IN DE WAR, preceding the tram scene, Henk is getting married. During the taking of the wedding picture, the photographer busily arranges the guests for the photograph. At the very moment when the chaos has been transformed into calm and the photo can be taken, the bride collapses and eventually dies. Moreover, the film works with ironic parallels. One of Henk's attempts to get rid of the baby is to put the boy next to another kid in an unguarded pram on the pavement, but a bunch of women starts chas- ing him as an irresponsible 'father' - an irresponsibility which seems further proven when he takes the baby to a boxing match. In a later scene Henk takes a baby from another unguarded pram, and once again people start chasing him, this time as a vile kidnapper. Some of the chases recall the tradition of early slapstick movies from the silent era, when a sparse use of editing was common. At one point, a very high- angle shot of a crossroad shows that Henk is indecisive about which direction to go: first to the left, oh no to the right, oh no to the left. A bit later we see the crowd chasing him as indecisive as he was, leading to a chaotic bumping into each other. Then we get an extreme long shot of the front of a gallery apart- ments: Henk is running to the right on the gallery at the second floor, while the crowd is running to the right on the ground floor, and via jump-cuts, this pattern repeats itself a few times. At one point, we see Henk hiding behind a pillar, while everyone of his chasers is frenetically passing behind him, sug- gesting that a crowd often functions like a blind horde. If spoken text is used in films of the 'Hollandse School,' it usually accentuates the insignificance of language. To track down the kidnapper, the local police force is called upon, when all of a sudden the policeman who had taken the baby from Henk at the time remembers that his last name was related to something with a tree. He INTRODUCTION starts mentioning a huge variety of tree types until he finally arrives at 'birch' and reminiscences correctly 'Berkhout,' literally meaning 'birch-wood.' The importance of language in Ranzijn's film is further trivialized via a montage sequence of frontally staged shots of mothers who behave like the scream queens from horror films upon discovering their baby is gone. And at the end of the film, when the police have recovered only some of the children, all the talk at the station becomes a chaotic buzz because parents whose kid has not been returned just grab a baby girl as if it is their own. This noise contrasts greatly with the final shot of the movie: Henk has been able to take a great number of children to a boat, which peacefully sails on the water, against a beautiful, but artificially created, sunrise, suggesting that the introvert abduc- tor proves himself a better father after all than all those biological parents who mainly produce a cacophony. In seeking to understanding what identifies Dutch cinema or a 'Hollandse 22 School,' how these films use humour and irony might be the key. Oh yes, humour is 'universal,' in the sense that, as Simon Critchley observes, there is 'no society thus far discovered that did not have humour' (28). And yes, there are jokes or comic scenes which are appreciated by practically everyone. Who does not like the short film comedy THE Music-Box (James Parrott, 1932), in which Laurel and Hardy have to deliver a piano? The scene in which Charlie Chaplin as a factory worker is being fed by the eating machine in MODERN TIMES (Charles Chaplin, 1936) is still considered incredibly funny, by young and old. Despite these wonderful examples, it is fairly common to believe that humour, much more so than adventure stories or drama, is culture-bound. This assumption is confirmed in the idea that 'British humour,' rooted in hearty insults and self-depreciation (Bloxham), is of an entirely different nature than, let us say, 'German humour.' In making a claim for the locality of humour, Critchley argues that having a common sense of humour is 'like shar- ing a secret code' (68). Laughing at the same types of comedy creates a bond among people, strengthening the impression that one is culturally distinct from, not to say superior to those who remain silent, or worse, who do not get 'it.' And to make matters slightly more complicated: some variants of national humour are widely appreciated, like 'British humour' or 'Jewish humour,'" but some variants fall absolutely flat when 'exported' to another country. To the question 'What is the smallest book in the world?' the answer, according to a Dutch joke is: 'One Hundred Years of German Humour,' which expresses how huge a gap the Dutch believe there is between the German and the Dutch sense of humour. The nomination of KARAKTER as the Dutch candidate for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film may count as a fine example of the hypothesis that humour is culture-bound, and therefore difficult to 'export' HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM to other countries. Six members of a jury voted in October 1997 for Jean van de Velde's ALL STARS and only five for KARAKTER. Rolf Koot, producer of ALL STARS, turned down the honour, because he claimed that his comic film about the male camaraderie in a football team was well-attended in the Netherlands, but lacked any international appeal. By contrast, the serious coming-of-age drama KARAKTER would probably cater to both a Dutch and an American audi- ence, as was confirmed by Laurens Geels, producer of Van Diem's film (and Koot's father-in-law): American actor William Hurt had already seen the film twice, Geels said, 'leaving the theatre in tears.16 The rest is history, for KARAK- TER won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The suggestion underlying Koot's position is that the humour of ALL STARS was too local to be appreciated by an American public. Despite this emphasis on the cultural dimension of humour, one should not commit the fallacy of identifying humour too closely with nationalities. The thesis that humour is culture-bound may as such meet little resistance, but any attempt to delineate I 23 the contours of Dutch, British, Italian, etc., comedy is impractical. If the films by Van Warmerdam are perhaps 'typically Dutch' because of their humour/ irony, then one should not forget that his DE NOORDERLINGEN turned out to be remarkably successful in France in the 1990s and was even re-released in French theatres in 2012. Moreover, his cinema seems to have affinities with Scandinavian films, like the ones by the Swedish Roy Andersson, the Norwe- gian Bent Hamer and, as already mentioned above, the Finnish Kaurismaki. Even more striking is the fact that the dryly comic DE WISSELWACHTER [THE POINTSMAN] (Jos Stelling, 1986) turned out to be much more successful in Rome than in Amsterdam.'7 Humour is marked by a cultural dimension, but simultaneously always in excess of it. The same goes for the historicity of comedy. People may still laugh at the comedies of Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder (at least I do), or at the Dutch cabaret performer Toon Hermans, but much humour does not stand the test of time and people today will shrug at many comic sketches which made people laugh their brains out in earlier decades. Humour can become 'curiously outdated' for one and the same person: what one considered funny in the 1980s, might come across as stale these days. So, when this study ventures in the subject of humour and irony in Dutch feature cinema, it is with the proviso that its local flavour, its Dutchness, can- not be described and pinpointed in exact terms, but only circumscribed at most. What in the end proved decisive for examining the humorous poten- tial of Dutch post-war feature films, was the quite banal factor of box-office appeal. Take a cursory glance at the list of box-office hits in Dutch cinema and be amazed at the relatively high number of downright comic films. Of the 25 titles that have attracted more than a million viewers, one can men- INTRODUCTION tion FANFARE (Bert Haanstra, 1958), WAT ZIEN IK!? [BUSINESS IS BUSINESS] (Paul Verhoeven, 1971), HELP! DE DOKTER VERZUIPT [HELP! THE DOCTOR IS DROWNING] (Nikolai van der Heyde, 1974), FLODDER (Dick Maas, 1986) and its sequel FLODDER IN AMERIKA! [FLODDER DOES MANHATTAN!] (1992), FILMPJE! [VERY SHORT FILM] (Paul Ruven, 1995), ALLES IS LIEFDE [ALL IS LOVE] (JOram Lirsen, 2007), NEW KIDS TURBO (Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil, 2010), and GOOISCHE VROUWEN [VIPER'S NEST] (Will Koopman, 2011) as well as its sequel GOOISCHE VROUWEN 2 (Will Koopman, 2014), and this list is not yet exhaustive. One might say of several other titles that they either have humor- ous tones - like TURKS FRUIT and the two versions of CISKE DE RAT [CISKE THE RAT] (Wolfgang Staudte, 1955/Guido Pieters, 1984) - or they can be retro- spectively read from an ironic perspective, like BLUE MOVIE (Wim Verstappen, 1971) and SPETTERS (Paul Verhoeven, 1980). Apparently, Dutch films strike a chord among the general public in case they contain some dose of humour 24 I and irony. Moreover, several films with comic elements which did not sell that many tickets as the titles mentioned above, have received a favourable recep- tion, like the work by Alex van Warmerdam, some titles by Eddy Terstall, Pieter Kramer or Paula van der Oest.18 It is highly significant that DENNIS P. (Pieter Kuijpers, 2007), based upon a true crime, does not take the form of a gangster picture or an art-house drama. Instead, this film about a big diamond heist by an employee of a trading company, is made as a comedy with cartoonish effects. Hence, an emphasis is put upon the representation of the thief as a merry simpleton, who naively thinks that he can buy the striptease girl's affec- tion with money. The gaudy colours of his clothes further accentuate that he is a pathetic and bulky oddball. Moreover, it is perhaps no coincidence that a film like HET DINER [THE DINNER] (Menno Meyjes, 2013), which in essence is a serious drama about high-class parents whose children have commit- ted a horrible crime, is littered with many funny one-liners, often uttered by protagonist Paul. 'Only Roger Federer rakes his fingers through his hair more than Serge,' he comments upon his brother's vanity. Or he remarks about a man standing next to him in the lavatory: 'It's the kind of stream that is full of its own importance. A stream that wants to testify to its own indestruct- ible health. The stream of a man with a young wife.' His comically sarcastic reflections in voice-over arrest the progress of the actual story, and thus edgy humour is the film's special attraction, outbalancing its serious theme. The sheer fact that so many Dutch films contain a fair amount of humour is perhaps culturally ingrained. This fact might be taken as a cheeky hom- age to one of the best-known Dutch achievements in the academic world, the publication of Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938), a study which garnered international fame. The implication of his study that the fun of playing can function as a welcome antidote to a predominance of seriousness seems to HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM be taken to heart by a relatively great number of Dutch filmmakers.19 Against this background it makes sense to read Dutch cinema through the conceptual lens of humour and irony. Whereas the reference to Huizinga bears histori- cal weight, the publication of this study also has an initially unforeseen actual value: the killing of the cartoonists of the Paris-based satirical magazine Char- lie Hebdo in January 2015, has particularly highlighted the issue of freedom of speech, which has been - due to the tragic occasion - converted into proclaim- ing the freedom to make transgressive humour. THREE THEORIES OF HUMOUR: FLODDER INAMERIKA! In FLODDER IN AMERIKA! (Dick Maas, 1992), the successful sequel to Maas' immensely popular FLODDER (1986), two representatives of America discuss with the mayor of the 'blossoming city' Zonnedael the conditions for a pro- | 25 gramme of cultural exchange between America and the Netherlands - one 'average family' from the US for an 'average family' from Holland. Thereupon, two American delegates proudly present that they have selected a 'well-edu- cated, cultured and attractive' family that will come to visit Holland in order to explore the Dutch lifestyle. The Johnsons have been voted family of the year': the father is a prominent lawyer, the mother sells real estate and the oldest son is a stockbroker on Wall Street. It is rumoured that the family is already preparing for the trip by clumping around in wooden shoes. The two repre- sentatives are anxious to hear which Dutch family, in turn, will be travelling to America, for they have high expectations of the initiative. As the American male says, after it has been explained that this is supposed to be the beginning of a long-lasting series: 'If the programme is successful, one day we might be living in a world ofpeace,' to which the American female adds 'and love,' whereupon the man completes the reference to the Nick Lowe/Elvis Costello song: '... and understanding.'- When the mayor asks about whether the stay abroad is 'only for one year,' the response is that if things go well, the families may possibly remain longer. Medium close-up of the mayor who says, with a sparkle of hope in his voice: 'May be forever.' When the mayor then hears from his guests that America is a big, beautiful country one might easily get lost in, we are given a medium close-up again of the mayor, repeating the words: 'Get lost.' He folds his hands and as the camera then shows the Americans in two-shot, he says: 'Well, I think we have the perfect family for you.' At this point there is a cut from the mayor's office to a wealthy bungalow with conifers and a green lawn, but from below the frame the head of a woman with unkempt hair suddenly pops up. This woman will be plainly called 'Ma' INTRODUCTION Flodder. This Ma, which is shorthand for Mama or Mother, a first name is never given, yells at her children - 'bunch of assholes' ['stelletje klerelijers'] - and puts a big cigar between her lips. While she starts to walk to the left of the frame, the camera tracks to a high-angle establishing shot, revealing that the bungalow does not belong to her, but that her own residence has become a total ruin. In one of the subsequent shots we see the neighbours spying on the Flodder family through the curtains of the expensive bungalow. The woman is glad they will be delivered from that 'riff-raff' ['schorriemorrie'] who has been a 'disgrace' to the neighbourhood, for, as she says, the Flodders ter- rorized them, were walking around naked, and the mother even ate dog food. The camera goes back outside again, and one of the Flodder children carries a heavy suitcase which bursts open. As a result, a great number of whisky bottles break, prompting the anger of Ma, who tries to smack the kid, but in vain. She then also attempts to kick the dog, because of its single bark, but when the 26 animal bites her in the leg, she hits it on the head with a bottle. Immediately thereafter there is a cut back to the mayor's office, who rec- ommends the family Flodder. The Americans consider it a peculiar name, because it sounds like fodder,' but the mayor reassures them that it is a 'typi- callyDutch name.' When he later takes a photograph of the Flodders from their file, the Americans react by saying that they 'sure are ... different,' and their clothes look so 'ragged and dirty.' The mayor tells them that the photo shows the Flodders dressed for a costume party and that they were the highlight of the evening. When the American woman notes that the Flodders lack a father, the mayor closes the case by stating: 'Well, nobody's perfect.' Anyone who has seen (or only read my account of) the scene above, which is derived from the first 6 minutes and 20 seconds of FLODDER IN AMERI- KA!, will acknowledge that this film is a comedy (in terms of genre) in that it attempts to produce humour (as an effect). In plain terms, humour is, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, the 'quality of being amusing or comic.' Comedy can be defined as the dramatic genre characterized by a humorous tone. At the heart of much comedy, as critics like Mikhail Bakhtin, in his study on carnival laughter, and French philosopher Henri Bergson have taught us, is a (visual) awkwardness with one's body, in its many possible manifestations: from the scatological 'humour' of farting to slipping over a banana peel or to the performance of 'silly walks' (to recall a famous sketch from the British tel- evision series MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS). In the scene from the FLOD- DER film, bodily humour shows itself on the one hand in the absolutely plump dress code of Ma Flodder, best signified by both her cigar and the shabby rub- ber boots she is wearing at all times and at all places. On the other hand, her rude physical manners become silly, because she lacks the athletic ability to justify her threats. She gets mad at both her daughter and the dog but she fails HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM to actually hit anything because she is so physically unfit. To make matters worse for Ma Flodder, the counterattack by the dog makes her tumble onto the ground with the animal's teeth in her leg. She can only liberate herself from her uncomfortable position by breaking one more bottle of whisky, whereas the fact that some bottles had been broken happened to have been the cause for her bad temper in the first place. In his seminal study Le rire [Laughter], Bergson has famously argued that a comic effect is produced when a human being, visibly at unease with his/her body, acts so clumsy or stiff that he/she begins to appear machine-like. The 'mechanical rigidity' of the tramp played by Charlie Chaplin, as cited by Simon Critchley in his insightful study On Humour (57), comes to mind as a perfect example, but it is noteworthy to distinguish the tramp's inflexibility from Ma Flodder's stiffness. The machine-like appearance of Chaplin is a combination of an apparently gawky nature and the art of (slapstick) timing. In many scenes from THE GOLD RUSH (1925), to name one of his masterpieces, it seems like I 27 the tramp is bound to take a nasty fall, but time and again he is able to save himself miraculously. Performers like Chaplin (or Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton) act in the tradition of the circus clown walking a tightrope - and one has to be very good at walking the tightrope in order to pretend to be about to fall down, but never do.2" If Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton are counted among the great artists in cinema, it is on account of their quality of being inflexible but surprisingly agile as well, whereas the stiff gestures by Ma Flodder are, by contrast, a mere consequence of her lack of control over her overweight body. Except for noting that humour often involves a bodily aspect, I have select- ed the first scene of FLODDER IN AMERIKA! in this introductory chapter of this study since it addresses, in a nutshell, the three basic theories of humour. The scene is compatible with the so-called superiority thesis, which of the three theories comes first in historical order. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made some observations on the nature of comedy which are too scat- tered to be truly called a theory, but their remarks can be taken as a stepping stone to the insights of the 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (Billig, 38). According to Aristotle, in comedies people are normally depicted as worse than the average and, as he famously postulated in The Poetics, the ridiculous is a species of the ugly (qtd. in Billig, 43). A character may commit a kind of silly 'error,' but since he himself is not aware of his own improper behaviour, he is not injured by his mistake or deformity. For Aristotle, com- edy lacks pathos since the errors do not bear severe consequences for the ridiculous characters. It takes little imagination to see that the Flodder family from Maas' comedy conforms to this Aristotelian pattern. Even though their neighbours cast disapproving glances at them and consider them both malad- justed and utterly silly, they are so unconcerned about everything that they are INTRODUCTION immune to derision and insults. So, the fact that they are called 'riff-raff' does not bother them at all, as anyone who has seen the first film will already know. In the case of the Flodders, the spectators are perfectly aware of the ridiculous nature of, to paraphrase Aristotle, the 'inferior action,' practised by the fam- ily. Obviously, the viewers laugh at the dysfunctional family Flodder, who do not care about any rule of decorum, best illustrated by the total absence of decency on the part of Ma Flodder. The grounding principle of the superiority theory is best summed up by Hobbes' famous quote from chapter 9 in his Elements ofLaw, Natural and Politic (1640) that the 'passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly' (qtd. in Billig, 52). This 'sudden glory' presumes that a group (or a person) laughs because a joke is made at the expense of someone else, which potentially can also include one's former self. 28 Laughing at another person's stupidity or misfortune is both a pretext and an affirmation to feel oneself elevated over the scapegoated other. In the case of the FLODDER films, the family's stubborn naivety only contributes to the audience's pleasure, for it implicitly emphasizes the smartness as well as the good manners of the viewers. In Maas' comedy, every single family member is so stereotypically rude and vulgar that practically all spectators can feel themselves 'more civi- lized' than the Flodders. In short, the family has set a yardstick for inappropriate behaviour to which anyone else will be a favourable contrast. According to the superiority theory, the function of humour is predomi- nantly reactionary, for the effect of the scene is that we, as viewers, can feel 'better' than any of the characters. We might consider ourselves to be not as careless as Ma Flodder, more upright than the mayor and not as credulous as the Americans. The confrontation with the presumed stupidity, arrogance, disarray, laziness, or whatever negative character trait of someone we can safely count as 'other,' can yield pleasure, because it works to emphasize our own elevated status. In such a case, humour is used as 'an insulation layer against the surrounding alien environment' (Critchley, 68), or as Nol Carroll put it, humour is primarily 'involved in the construction (or, more aptly, the permanent reconstruction) and maintenance of what we might call an Us - the us that abides by the pertinent norms' (77). Against that backdrop we can comprehend the final words of Giselinde Kuipers' study on the sociology of the joke that humour, even when it is good, 'always implies some bad taste' (248). For, as she asserts, humour is not only to be associated with uplifting feelings - like (the majority of) art and beauty - but also, if not primarily, with the vile and lower things of life. In case that art (cinema) is wilfully provocative in addressing gut feelings, as in LA GRANDE BOUFFE [THE BIG FEAST] (Marco Ferreri, 1973) or FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke, 1997), the predominant and HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM preferred response might at least be contemplation, but the primary reac- tion to humour is, Kuipers observes, 'always visible, physical and to a certain extent, unrestrained' (248), from a (faint) smile to a guffaw. Notwithstanding the fact that Hobbes' ideas on humour have been quite influential, they will only figure at the margins of this study, for the simple reason that he is distrustful of comedy: humour is for him no laughing matter at all. He argued that humans are basically driven by selfish motives, which are expressed by emotions and passions, including joyful laughter. A person had better guard his balance and not burst into a laugh, which in his eyes is always already (too) undisciplined. One had better repress one's 'sudden glo- ry,' for, Hobbes postulates, laughter is an anti-social force. It is, as Billig notes, potentially rebellious, but for Hobbes it is without any benefit. In his hands, 'all humour stands ostensibly condemned' (Billig, 56) and can only serve nar- cissistic demands. Had Hobbes seen FLODDER IN AMERIKA!, he would have confirmed that this comedy worked to provide its viewers with superior feel- | 29 ings, which is seldom, if ever, a condition to improve social inequality. The main objective for mentioning Hobbes is that many subsequent reflec- tions on humour have struggled with the 'Hobbesian daemon' (Billig, 58). His critics made an effort to circumvent his general suspicion at laughter, among others by trying to distinguish a witty remark from a vulgar one, as was a pre- occupation of a number of 18th-century British philosophers of humour like James Beattie, Sydney Smith or the Earl of Shaftesbury. For these philosophers laughter became first of all a practical problem. To begin with, they made a distinction between 'wit' and 'humour.' The first term referred to clever ver- bal sayings and wordplay - and 'clever' here means that downright puns and jokes are excluded.22 Humour, which was then used in a more restricted sense, denoted a laughable person, turned into an object of ridicule (Billig, 61-62). These philosophers aimed to walk the middle ground between indecorous humour for the uncouth masses and the overaestheticism of the idle aristoc- racy (62). The kind of wit they pursued was to create something incongruous by bringing dissimilarities together, or, in a definition of wit by Henry Home, who acquired the title Lord Kames: 'A junction of things by distant and fanci- ful relations, which surprise because they are unexpected' (173). According to the incongruity theory, laughter is provoked when something great or serious is juxtaposed with something small or frivolous. In an attempt to keep any association with Hobbes at bay, some 18th-century philosophers emphasized that an analysis of such juxtapositions was basically a cognitive process. The social and psychological dimensions of laughter were not to be ignored, how- ever, and the third Earl of Shaftesbury - real name: Anthony Ashley Cooper - highlighted the connection between incongruity and ridicule. Since ridicule is always aimed at something or someone, it is inherently social.23 INTRODUCTION In the case of the scene from FLODDER IN AMERIKA!, two different kinds of ridicule have to be kept apart: one which potentially may have some sanitizing effect on a person's moral sense, and another one whose effect will probably be nil. As regards the latter, the Flodder family is represented as utterly coarse. Conventionally, a (single) mother, as head of a household, is responsible for nurturing her children and teaching them decent manners, but Ma Flodder acts contrary to this image of a mother. The point is: she does not care at all about what others think of her unorthodox lifestyle, and disregarding outside opinion would imply that she is quite immune to ridicule. The 18th-century adherents of the incongruity theory were more interested in the option that ridicule might remedy some social wrong, or in the beautiful phrasing of Syd- ney Smith that ridicule was 'the great cure of extravagance, folly, and imper- tinence; it curbs the sallies of eccentricity ...' (qtd. in Billig, 79). In case some self-conceited character - which Ma Flodder is obviously not - is made to look 30 I ludicrous, then ridicule can become effective. On account of his profession, a mayor has to be an upright representative of his city, hospitable to his guests. The mayor of Zonnedael, however, behaves in an opportunistic way for he mis- uses the exchange programme to get rid of the troublesome family. One might argue that he does his own community a great service - as a mayor is supposed to do - but it is also a foul trick at the expense of the American guests. Because of the cross-cutting between the mayor's office and the ruined residence of the Flodders, we understand the mayor's vicious strategy in selling his guests a pup. We know what the Americans do not know (yet), namely that the mayor has told them a lie: the pictures of the Flodders were not of them at a costume party, but of them in their habitual clothing. In his modern reinterpretation of the incongruity theory, Critchley remarks that 'insofar as the joke plays with the symbolic forms of society' - in FLODDER: the mother turns family life into a total mess, the mayor deceives his foreign guests - 'jokes are anti-rites' (5). This type of humour, mocking symbolic practices, reveals 'the sheer contin- gency or arbitrariness of the social rites in which we engage' (to). In the case of Maas' comedy, this contingency is exposed because the mayor, who is an official dignitary, violates social customs by selecting the vulgar family for the trip abroad. Though the mayor formally exceeds his duty, his action can nonetheless be legitimized. If the mean gesture of the mayor is to be pardoned, then it is because the American leaders of the exchange programme are represented as self-righteous. If the original idea was to opt for an average family, they pride themselves on having selected the family of the year.' Further, they make fun of the Flodders' name and they criticize fatherless families in passing. Since the American visitors are so overtly complacent - and it is to be expected that the Johnsons are flowers from the same garden - it is somehow excused HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM that the mayor turns the tables on the Americans by sending the Flodders in return. Thus, persons with pretensions of superiority, like Americans whose pomposity is symbolized by the Johnsons, will get their comeuppance (Billig, 72). Formulated this way, it is clear how this variant of the incongruity the- sis is to be distinguished from Hobbes' theory. The latter was cautious about laughter, since it usually testifies to one's superiority towards 'silly' people: the well-behaved poke fun at the non-adjusted (the Flodders). Thinkers like Shaftesbury and Smith rather celebrate the kind of (true) raillery, aimed at highfalutin' people - at those who display an arrogant stance. It deserves emphasis that a 'banal' example, such as the scene from FLOD- DER IN AMERIKA!, would have been too blunt for the critics of both the supe- riority and the incongruity theory. By contrast, the pioneers of the so-called relief theory, the third one on the list, were less strict on the requirements of 'refined taste' but took laughter as a bodily response quite seriously. For the philosopher Alexander Bain, laughter indicates, as a surge of pent-up energy, I 31 a momentary release from habitual constraint (Billig, 97). According to Bain in his The Emotions and the Will, the comic, in fact, starts from the serious. On many (official) occasions, the general setting of dignity coerces people into a 'certain posture of rigid constraint': one has to be quiet in a church, a class- room, a court of justice. People who tend to take themselves very seriously will often be deeply offended if the solemn atmosphere is disrupted, but those who take the sentiment of self-importance lightly, Bain says, will respond with 'uproarious delight' to any 'contact with triviality or vulgarity' (283). When the required attitude of reverence does not correspond to one's inward feelings, any sudden disturbance of protocol can be experienced as a 'blessed relief' from tension, for, as Bain asserts, it is 'always a gratifying deliverance to pass from the serious to the easy side of affairs' (284). According to that other pioneering thinker of the relief theory, Herbert Spencer, laughter serves no other purpose than 'expending an accumulation of nervous energy' (Billig, 99). When an official ceremony is all of a sudden interrupted by the presence of a young kid or a dog, then some elevated event is briefly displayed as petty. In the eyes of Bain, however, laughter is not harm- less but represents a rebellion - albeit only a temporary one - against authority and establishment. His ideas presume that humour is pervaded with streaks of malice and that one takes glee in mocking that which should not be mocked (Billig, 98). One's laughter at a person or an institution is genial on the sur- face, but, in fact, it covers up one's feelings of disgust for the person or institu- tion at hand. According to this logic, a joke about a minister or a member of parliament is considered the better, the less popular the politician is. One's pleasure is increased the more the object of humour deserves degradation and humiliation in one's eyes. It is but a small step from Bain's relief theory to the INTRODUCTION comedy FLODDER IN AMERIKA! On the one hand, it is reassuring to laugh at the family for they can be used as a yardstick of inappropriate behaviour that any viewer will meet. On the other hand, as the first chapter will clarify, Maas' films position the carefree family as the perfect tool for a mild mockery of any- thing that connotes an air of (solemn) conventions. On their way to America, they start to occupy the business class, which makes perfect sense to them for the seats are available and much more comfortable than in economy class. The argument that this is not permitted does not impress them, for they have an inbred resistance to anything which is justified by a mere reference to rules and conventions. Insofar as we laugh at the Flodders in a sympathizing way rather than a condescending manner, this is owing to the fact that they never take conventions very seriously - a 'positive' side to their rudeness. Thus, they perform a relief from conventions, and our laughter is to be taken as a con- sent to this performance. In a similar vein, the scene I described above from 32 I FLODDER IN AMERIKA! is the prelude to ridiculing the whole idea of a 'family of the year' contest, which, as one can read between the lines, can only origi- nate from a country that wants to show itself off as the most wonderful nation in the world. And thus the Americans do not send their 'average family,' as was the original plan, but they nominate a family which is far above the average according to their standards, 'the family of the year,' as if to suggest that all 'normal' American families are this fabulous. Attempts to rethink the pitfalls of the relief theory have resulted into two thought-provoking studies on humour at the beginning of the 20th century. Though he himself did not consider laughter a very important subject, the aforementioned Bergson wrote the remarkable Le rire in 1900. At this stage I restrict myself to his observation that Bain's ideas actually work the other way around, because Bergson focuses upon the object of the joke rather than upon the laugher. Yes, people tend to laugh at a person's rigid behaviour or at a hilarious deviation from strict conventions, but Bergson stresses the point that anyone will avoid the risk of being laughed at. Hence, laughter is not a 'release from social authority,' as Bain asserted, but laughter is experienced as humiliating, as 'the punishment in the classroom of life' (Billig, 128). There is, Billig mentions, a 'cold cruelty' at the heart of Bergson's theory: because peo- ple dread being made fun of, they try to avoid peculiar behaviour. In order to prevent coming across as ridiculous - neither too rigid nor too frivolous - they choose the middle ground, i.e., sticking to conventions. Hence, for Bergson, laughter has a corrective and disciplinary function. At first sight, his ideas do not seem to tie in with the case of the Flodder family. Oblivious to everything, Ma Flodder and her children are immune to humiliation, but at the same time, this feature turns them into extraordinary characters. Hence, they are the comic exception that somehow 'proves' Bergson's rule. HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM Unlike Bergson, Sigmund Freud did not emphasize the disciplinary func- tion, but he attributed a rebellious nature to humour, or to Der Witz ('the joke,' both good and 'bad'), as found in the full title of his 1905 study, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewuften (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious). Psychoanalysis presumes that a subject's repressed desires and unconscious motives manifest themselves in distorted form, particularly in seemingly minor expressions, like dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes. Even though Freud spoke of 'innocent jokes,' which do no more than yield pleasure, the category of 'tendentious jokes' is of greater interest. Whereas the innocent joke is merely appreciated for the joke-technique, people derive enjoyment from the tenden- tious joke on the basis of its underlying content rather than the joke-form.24 Thus, Freud would suspect the usual excuse of a joker when he claims that absolutely no harm was intended and that it was a mere prank. In cases where a taboo topic is addressed as the object of a witty remark, it depends upon the lis- tener's attitude towards the target of the joke whether one appreciates the joke 1 33 or not - the technique of telling is irrelevant. If a man experiences the fact that he is married as a confinement, he might laugh at jokes about the frigidity of a wife or about a too meddlesome mother-in-law. Elaborating upon this Freudian idea that the content presides over form, Critchley mentions that there is a radi- cal feminist joke about men, which runs like this: 'How many men does it take to tile a bathroom?' Answer: 'It depends how thinly you slice them.' However, as soon as one replaces the men in this riddle by blacks or Jews, the technical wit is the same, but its content becomes quite disconcerting all of a sudden.25 If we laugh at the tendentious thought behind the joke, as was one of Freud's seminal insights, then one can only consider FLODDER truly funny on condition that one adheres to the film's tendentious politics. According to a psychoanalytic logic, this politics goes beyond the fact that the film ridicules conventions like violating the separation between business and economy class. Jokes always backfire at the teller/laugher and implicitly reveal their (social, gender, class, cultural, etc.) positions. There is a scene in FLODDER IN AMERIKA! when each and every family member is subjected to a full body search at the airport after the ringing of an alarm. Only in the case of Kees, the big-breasted blonde daughter, the alarm remains mute. Since most members carried a weapon, the guard asks her whether she has none. No, Kees replies in a seductive tone, but 'you are permitted to search me anyway,' which clearly hints at her sexual availability for men. In this scene as well as in several oth- ers, Kees uses her body as a sexual commodity in such an obvious manner that it might offend anyone with only the slightest feminist sensibilities. Those who regard sexism as a serious and problematic issue will be inclined to reject the comic value of such a scene, but as the suggestion runs, those who laugh heartily are apparently more indifferent to sexism. INTRODUCTION Freud's take on jokes teaches us that humour potentially functions as a metaphoric barometer, exposing one's (unacknowledged) instincts. Whether one enjoys FLODDER as amusing then depends upon one's sentiments on 'uncivilized' behaviour: if one takes heavy drinking, insulting dignitaries, foul language or using sexuality for opportunistic ends as pardonable acts, then one is more likely to enjoy FLODDER than those viewers who are attached to general rules of proper conduct. My main reason for selecting FLODDER IN AMERIKA! as an introductory example is not because of its sordid jokes, but because its comic scenario of a cultural clash between the Netherlands and America exposes some characteristics that might be considered 'typically Dutch.' When Ma and her five children arrive in New York, they are mistaken for the members of a Russian delegation of medical doctors invited by the Roosevelt Foundation. Since their proficiency of English is too poor to understand why 34 I they are driven by limousine to the expensive Plaza hotel, they simply presume that this first-rate treatment is part of the exchange programme. The Ameri- cans do regard the Flodders as weird, as can be gathered from a comment by one of the hotel clerks: 'I knew it was bad over there [in Russia], but this is ridicu- lous.' The Americans remain hospitable throughout, however, which can on the one hand be seen as a positive signal: they are courteous even when faced with rude people. On the other hand, the opening scene suggests, as the spec- tator may remember, that Americans tend to see themselves as naturally and 'simply the best.' Their hospitality can then be built upon the prejudice that for them, everyone outside America is entitled to a certain dose of outland- ishness. In overdoing this eccentricity, the Flodders are for Americans just an extreme case of their self-conception that not everyone can be as 'perfectly normal' as they are. That a great doctor from Russia might be dressed as a hoodlum, well yes, nothing is too weird for the inhabitants of the (former) 'Evil Empire.' Hence, the error can continue for a while, partly thanks to American hospitality, which is an inverse version of their arrogance: well, if one is the best, the consequence is that one has to deal with wackos all the time, and the best way to prove one's superiority is by acting polite and controlled. In turn, the Flodders themselves accept the wonderful welcome matter- of-factly since for them it merely illustrates their idea that America is, as Johnnie mentions, the country of unprecedented possibilities, although his brother Kees inadvertently botches the term 'ongekend' (unprecedented) to 'ongewenst' (undesirable'). After the error comes out, they are dismissed from the hotel and have no other option than to spend the upcoming night outside. However, they enjoy the lack of a roof over their heads at least as much as their stay in the Plaza. They are frankly happy to eat sauerkraut with smoked sau- sage, better than any other meal, and they also appreciate the cosiness of a HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM campfire. In short, no fancy stuff for the Flodders, and despite their excessive rudeness, they breathe oxygen into proverbs like 'he who cannot keep a penny shall never have many' and 'if you just behave normally, you are already weird enough.' In this film, this latter saying, which is often said to characterize a Dutch mentality, works to distinguish the Flodders from the Americans. The Flodders may look outrageous and uncivilized, but do not let that fool you, they are content with the simple things in life. Americans, by contrast, are hos- pitable and civilized in manners, but do not let that fool you, their attitude is a cover-up for their self-absorption, for they like to show off everything as big and beautiful. It is highly significant that the 'family of the year' contest is not won by common American citizens, but by the financially successful Johnson family, an embodiment of true capitalism. FROM 'JOKES'TO'HUMOUR' I 35 The first chapter will offer a more in-depth analysis of the phenomenon of juvenile and low-class comedies like FLODDER, but suffice it to say right now that its overall effect is to advocate a certain amount of authentic roughness as benevolent. This effect ties in with an influential tendency within Dutch mentality, namely the one which presumes that anything is permitted to say because the freedom of expression is an inalienable right. Blunt jokes are an integral part of this right. In her comparative study on American versus Dutch jokes, Kuipers claims that Dutch people with a lowbrow humour style use humour with a 'social, spontaneous intention' in order to create a 'good atmosphere' (231). On these grounds, it is legitimate to make derogatory jokes about anyone, regardless of culture, religion, ethnicity, sex. Kuipers refers to the work of sociologist Johan Goudsblom who claimed in his Dutch Society (1967) that a long-standing tradition of tolerance has caused Dutch humour to be 'decidedly amoral at times' (Kuipers, 241). As a consequence of this typi- cal mixture of individualism and egalitarianism, Kuipers asserts, Dutch peo- ple presume that by 'being direct, honest, straightforward you show yourself "as you are", that is: not elevating yourself above others' (241). The popular- ity of the Flodders among Dutch who adhere to what Kuipers calls a lowbrow humour style is proof of this principle of egalitarianism. This (Dutch) mentality of refusing to condemn coarse remarks comes explicitly to the fore in the replies to the severe criticisms of the controversial figure of Zwarte Piet [Black Pete]. Those uncomfortable with this black faced servant of Sinterklaas [Saint Nicholas] see this figure as too awkward a refer- ence to the history of slavery and/or to a regrettable tradition of inequality favouring whites over blacks. Due to Zwarte Piet's unfortunate racist connota- INTRODUCTION tions, the critics argue, it would be better if he was replaced. To the supporters of this figure, the critics are simply too sensitive, for he is part of an already ancient celebratory tradition in the Netherlands, aimed at young children, and therefore 'innocent.' To anyone who questions the folkloristic appearance of Zwarte Piet, they say: 'Don't be a squeamish.' From there it is but a small step to those (Dutch) people who lack the antennae to grasp that jokes about for- eigners can be a delicate matter. In November 2013, a jury member of the tel- evision programme HOLLAND's GOT TALENT, Gordon, made fun of a Chinese contestant, not because of his singing qualities, for they were excellent, but merely because of his descent. Another jury member, Dan Karaty of American origin, called Gordon's comment awful and said to him that 'you are not sup- posed to say things like that to people.' When the clip was posted on the social news website Reddit, a general reaction from Americans was that there would be wide hysteria in the country if this had been aired in the US, sometimes 36 I followed by the questions whether Dutch people are racist or intolerant. A con- siderable number of reactions by Dutch people to the accusatory tone ran like this: Gordon makes jokes about everyone, so it is only proof of the acceptance of Chinese that they are turned into the butt of jokes as well. Or to paraphrase Gordon's own reply: We are hospitable to all foreigners and everyone is enti- tled to express his opinions, but one should not encroach upon 'our tradition' by deciding what I am permitted to say or not (qtd. in Heijmans, 5). My point is that the way Gordon's remarks are defended as not amiss is analogous to the careless modus operandi of the Flodders. The inclination to cover up cal- lousness with the mantle of love is deeply ingrained in some parts of Dutch culture: people should not be too easily offended by jokes. Those who are fond of the humour of FLODDER, I will claim, are more likely to side with the sup- porters of Zwarte Piet and with Gordon's stance -'What is all this fuss about?' - than with their critics. For in the end, as chapter 1 will further elaborate, the Flodders can be taken as a backlash against an atmosphere of political correctness which gained momentum in the Netherlands in the 198os. In this decade, as the tripartite television documentary WONDERLAND (Robert Oey, 2004) suggests, people got caught up in a 'straitjacket of prescribed left-wing opinions.26 This backlash manifested itself in a desire, albeit often repressed since one could risk being labelled a 'fascist,' to escape this straitjacket by expressing oneself in terms of political incorrectness. FLODDER offered the advantage that by enjoying this comedy with its outrageous jokes, one could give vent to this desire in a most innocuous form. Maas' comedy illustrates the double impact of humour. On the one hand, FLODDER can be qualified as critical insofar as it lays bare the hypocrisy of those who take an a priori condescending attitude towards the lower classes. On the other hand, it is reactionary insofar as it is averse to the logic of political HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM correctness, advocating a 'live and let live' mantra. This double impact, oscil- lating between subversive and conservative, will be a red thread throughout the chapters of Humour andlrony inDutch Post-warFictionFilm. Since the value of humour can only be determined in context, there is no golden rule to decide whether the scales tip in favour of the reactionary or the critical. In many a case, the reactionary pole will speak louder than the critical pole in the end, which will make the exceptions a real treat. In clarifying how a comedy might increase its critical potential, I follow Freud's short essay on humour, which he wrote in 1927, after an interval of more than twenty years, as a concise reconsideration of his studyJokes. In the essay Freud makes a clear-cut distinction between jokes and the comic on the one hand, and humour on the other hand. He had defined the joke in his 1905 book as the 'contribution made to the comic by the uncon- scious' (Jokes, 208; 'Humour,' 165). Jokes are often performed to affirm, in passing, the 'invincibility of the ego' by suggesting one's superiority at the 37 expense of others. The comic assumes the role of a grown-up and reduces oth- ers to being children (163). Whereas jokes often function to elevate oneself over others - and therefore betray some unconscious aggression - Freud's characterization of humour can be taken as the inverse of the superiority theory. In humour, one treats oneself as a child from an adult perspective, or in Freud's formula: humour 'would be the contribution made to the comic by the agency of the superego' ('Humour,' 165, emphasis in original), in which the superego refers to an imaginary instance 'speaking' with a voice of authority, either as a severe master or, in this case, as a consoling parent. In contrast to jokes, in humour, one laughs at oneself rather than at others, so that one's ego is not aggrandized, but deflated. According to this criterion, FLODDER obviously belongs to the category of jokes, aimed at instant pleasure with low risk for the comic Flodders themselves. Significantly, a character like John- nie Flodder is always cheerful, just like the teller of a joke often is amused by his own punchline. This study will aim to explore a gradual shift from the Freudian joke to the Freudian kind of humour, perhaps best represented by the films discussed from chapter 7 onwards, such as the ones by Van Warmer- dam. In some of his films, servile characters like a waiter, a train conductor or a postman who rebel against their submissive roles in quite pathetic manners become the object of ridicule. They are never the smiley faces themselves, but viewers might consider their sorry fate funny, though not every viewer is sensi- tive to this type of humour as I will explain in later chapters. To underscore the idea of a deflated ego, it can be noted that Van Warmerdam himself performs these roles of servile characters - and in another film, he even plays a man who has accepted performing as the dog. My suggestion to consider the pranks pulled by the cheerful Flodders INTRODUCTION as 'jokes' in the Freudian sense, and the deadpan performances in the cin- ema of Van Warmerdam as 'Freudian humour' is not meant to imply that diegetic laughter necessarily belongs to the category of 'jokes' rather than 'humour.' Let me as a counterexample refer to a film which can be regarded as the polar opposite of FLODDER IN AMERIKA!: DE STILTE ROND CHRISTINE M. [A QUESTION OF SILENCE] (Marleen Gorris, 1982) was marketed as a kind of 'psychological thriller with particular appeal to female audiences' (Udris, 157).27 Housewife Christine, bar worker An and secretary Andrea are arrested in the beginning of the film. Unbeknownst to each other, the three of them are charged with murdering a male boutique owner in his shop, in the presence of, as will turn out later, four female witnesses who remain silent throughout. In a fine contribution to the volume The Cinema ofthe Low Countries, Jan Udris discusses the formal devices of Gorris' debut feature, like the unstylized 'real- ist' camerawork in the majority of scenes, the green-blue tint of the prison cor- 38 I ridors, the use of sometimes disorienting electronic music, and the brusque insertion of flashbacks which gradually reveal the killing and the ordinary things the three women do in the aftermath: visiting a funfair, cooking a meal, eating an ice cream. Though Christine is mentioned in the (original Dutch) title, the criminal psychiatrist Janine can be taken as the 'prime identification figure' for viewers (Udris, 159), the more since she undergoes a radical shift in perception. As Udris argues convincingly, the successful career woman regards herself as an emancipated spouse who enjoys an 'egalitarian relation- ship' with her husband-lawyer (159). Thus, she has reason to think of herself as different from the three suspects who have typical feminine occupations (housewife, secretary) or who, like An, has been divorced from a domineering husband ('so glad the bloke has gone'). In the dream, however, which has no synchronized speech and has many interposed shots of the women of less than one second, Janine becomes aware of her close bond with the three female suspects. She herself has been 'co-opted as a surrogate man' (Udris, 164), intent on producing 'wonderful phrases' about the mental state of mind of the women for the benefit of male authorities. Hence, she starts seeing herself as no more than a pawn in a patriarchal society, just like her 'clients' - whom her husband tends to address as 'patients.' The dream sequence makes her real- ize that the women did not suffer from a temporary mental disturbance, but were perfectly sane at the moment of their 'bestial manslaughter,' to coin the words of the male prosecutor at the trial. Janine's husband is deeply annoyed by her argument in front of the judge, and since she refuses to step into his car at the end of the film, their different positions seem to foretell a separation. On two separate occasions in the film, two of the women laugh exuber- antly in response to a question posed by Janine, before she has her 'revelatory' dream. When Janine suggests to Andrea that there must have been a motive, HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM the latter starts laughing. An is very talkative, driving Janine crazy with her verbiage, but to the question whether An had never wanted to re-marry, she gets a burst of cackling laughter for an answer. It is suggested that when Janine rewinds her tape recording of An's laughter twice, the awareness slowly begins to dawn on the psychiatrist that these women suffer from oppression in a male-chauvinistic environment. The laughter, then, is to be understood as a dismissive reply, as an indication that both Andrea and An consider the psychiatrist too naive - and her 'dream' will reveal this insight to her. Hence, their laughter was a defiant riposte to Janine, who initially failed to grasp the severity of the inherent inequality of men and women. Near the end when Janine and the male prosecutor are having a discus- sion in court on the presumed accountability of the women, the latter argues that he sees absolutely no difference between this case and the hypothetical case of three men murdering a female shop owner. Upon hearing this claim, An cannot suppress a laugh. One of the female witnesses joins her, and soon 39 eight women are choking with laughter: the three suspects, the four silent wit- nesses and Janine. All the men present are flabbergasted, judging from the puzzled looks on their faces. At first glance, the mirth provoked on the part of the women may seem to chime in with the superiority thesis: their laughter has the effect of disqualifying the male professionals as ignorant. Something seems to be hilarious, but the men apparently do not get it. Their silence is only cause for greater hilarity among the women, for it helps to turn the men themselves into the 'butt of the joke.' So far for the logic of the superiority thesis, since the point here is that there is neither a proper joke (or punch- line), nor a funny situation like someone acting clumsy or machine-like, nor an (unintended) pun or slip of the tongue. On top of that, the situation is sol- emn and the prosecutor's tone is deadly earnest, devoid of any irony. Thus, the laughter seems inappropriate for the occasion, which has to do with the fact that the women are not laughing at someone or at some situation, but at a general institutional flaw, deeply rooted in patriarchal society. Because the men in court are blind to this flaw, their response is one of amazement at this convulsive laughter and since the feminine pleasure abides, surprise becomes visible discomfort. The judge demands the dismissal from court of the three suspects and their smiling faces are the last we will see of them in the film. Upon their forced departure, Janine decides to leave as well. On reflection, the laughter both is and is not an expression of the women's superiority. First, why it is not. If a rational conversation falls on deaf ears, then one can either decide to remain silent (as is Christine's tactic for so long) or one suddenly finds oneself bursting into a hearty laughter at one's own misery. This kind of laughter is far beyond the idea of a prank or a joke in the vein of the Flodders, but it has a provocative and subversive effect, much more INTRODUCTION in the spirit of Freud's idea of 'humour' in his 1927 essay: the spontaneous laughter gives vent to the women's frustration at their structural subordinate position. It is not a reaction to someone stupid or something concrete, but to an abstract structure. The laughter at the end of Gorris' film functions as a gesture of contempt for those who refuse to acknowledge gender inequality. Their laughter puzzles and piques those in power (and that is hilarious), but those in power choose the poorest of options: by getting rid of the 'rebellious' elements, the men hope to 'save' themselves from their laughter, which gives them the creeps. By dismissing them, they in fact return them to 'silence.' But now let me explain why this laughter can also be termed subversive, and here I refer to one of the most thought-provoking books written on com- edy, Alenka Zupancic's The Odd One In (2008), in which she tries to reconsider common notions about humour and laughter from a predominantly Lacanian angle. The point of a comedy, she claims, is not to convince us that we are 'only 40 I human,' endowed with regrettably weak and fallible characteristics. As Lacan has claimed, the laughing stock is not the simpleton who erroneously believes he is a king, but the king who really believes he is a king (Zupancic, 32), which she translates, in different wording, into: The biggest fool is the one who will do anything not to be fooled (84). The men in court do not try to understand the laughter, but they are only concerned to keep up appearances: they pride themselves on their position of authority on account of their togas. The laugh- ter by the women can be taken as a derision technique, as if they are declaring: 'Stop this charade. You are only concerned about the deadly serious letter of the law. You act as representatives of justice, but underneath your togas you are human, too, men who snore, who fart. Thus you are subject to the same physical laws as other mortals.' According to Zupancic, we tend to laugh at a dignity that strives to control any disturbance of order (112), and since the situation in court is becoming uncontrollable for the male high officials, they have to send the female subjects off. In fact, their "'embarrassing" pretension to seriousness' makes the dignitaries all the more laughable (Zupancic, 11). This study oscillates between the cheerfulness of FLODDER IN AMERIKA! and the subversive laughter from DE STILTE ROND CHRISTINE M. It addresses the manifold variants of humour as they manifest themselves in Dutch narra- tive fiction features, ranging from juvenile jokes and carnivalesque in the first chapters to deadpan comedy and black humour in the later chapters. It also discusses the trope of irony and its related forms, like camp, persiflage and satire, as well as its rhetorical devices, such as hyperbole and understatement. This goal has to be accompanied with one caveat and three disclaimers. To start with the caveat, if this were only a theoretical book on humour, I would have selected fewer examples and focused upon the very best, usually from international sources (scenes from films by Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM Alexander Payne). It is a book in which humour is addressed via analyses of a considerable number of films made in Holland, without any pretence to be complete, for then this study would have been at least four times as volumi- nous. Ideally, this works as a double-edged sword - a thorough overview of Dutch films to get an understanding of 'typically Dutch' humour - but that is aiming too high. This book is much more provisional than that: an overview to get some understanding of what more or less could be termed 'Dutch' humour and irony. My first disclaimer is that there are criteria I have set for the selection of titles, but they do not rule out a certain randomness. To start with the obvious ones: acomedythathas proven successful at the box office is likelytobe includ- ed here. Moreover, favourable reviews and/or much publicity work greatly to a film's advantage. Occasionally, and here I may seem to enter a grey area, a film will be discussed even when it does not fall under either one of these criteria, but because it, like MAN IN DE WAR in this Introduction, happens to serve my 41 argument so excellently. Further, some films address serious subject matter in a not particularly funny manner, and thus would not qualify as 'comedy,' but nevertheless offer some, or at least sufficient, comic relief. Cases in point are DORP AAN DE RIVIER (Fons Rademakers, 1958) in chapter 3, or BORGMAN (Alex van Warmerdam, 2013) in chapter 8, that is to say, insofar one can speak of comic 'relief' in a movie that dark. The status of these titles in the history of Dutch cinema and/or the place these films take in the directors' oeuvre were decisive in incorporating them. A film like WOLF (Jim Taihuttu, 2013) contains some humorous passages as well, particularly thanks to the representation of Adil as a wannabe tough guy, but overall Taihuttu's movie - inspired by among others MEAN STREETS (Martin Scorsese, 1973) and UN PROPHETE [A PROPHET] (Jacques Audiard, 2009) - depicts such heavy-laden topics, like criminal behav- iour, violence, and cancer, that its tone actually is too 'serious' and pessimistic for consideration in this study. By contrast, Taihuttu's preceding film, RABAT (2011), which he co-directed with Victor Ponten, is examined in chapter 2, especially because the ending is not as gloomy as WOLF's finale but rather par- allels the principles of a joke's punchline. Another point of contention could be my inclusion of a film like SPETTERS (Paul Verhoeven, 1980), in chapter 6, for it is neither (meant as) a comedy nor was it received as humorous at its time of release. In the course of time, however, the status ofVerhoeven's picture has changed so drastically, that its case has become a cause for humour. Even though my criteria are fairly flexible, the selection had the unfortu- nate consequence that some quite good, quite humorous and/or quite well- known films fell in-between categories and therefore remain undiscussed - like VAN GELUK GESPROKEN [COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS] (Pieter Verhoeff, 1987), EEN MAAND LATER [A MONTH LATER] (Nouchka van Brakel, 1987), INTRODUCTION VREEMD BLOED [THE ODD ONE OUT] (Johan Timmers, 2010), to name some - or are relegated to a note - like DE AVONDEN [THE EVENINGS] (Rudolf van den Berg, 1989), Suzy Q (Martin Koolhoven, 1999), DusKA (Jos Stelling, 2007), MATTERHORN (Diederik Ebbinge, 2013). Keep in mind that, as my second disclaimer runs, this study is a first- attempt array to explore the uncharted territory of post-war Dutch narrative fiction film: there is no consistent academic tradition yet to relate to. In order to take humorous and ironic tendencies in Dutch feature films seriously, I will have to preserve discussions of films which offer only (too) little, or even no humorous interludes for another book. Among this list of excluded pictures, there are some of my personal favourites: alas, no DE DANS VAN DE REIGER [THE DANCE OF THE HERON] (Fons Rademakers, 1966);28 no EEN OCHTEND VAN ZES WEKEN [A MORNING OF SIX WEEKS] (Nikolai van der Heyde, 1966); no PASTORALE 1943 [PASTORAL 1943] (WimVerstappen, 1978), despite the clumsy 42 I actions by the resistance during the war; no CHARLOTTE (Frans Weisz, 1980); no HET TEKEN VAN HET BEEST [THE MARK OF THE BEAST] (Pieter Verhoeff, 1980); no DE SCHORPIOEN [THE SCORPION] (Ben Verbong, 1984); no SPOOR- LOOS, no GUERNSEY (Nanouk Leopold, 2005); no LANGER LICHT [NORTHERN LIGHT] (David Lammers, 2006); no HET ZWIJGEN [THE SILENCE] (Andre van der Hout and Adri Schrover, 2006); no OORLOGSWINTER [WINTER IN WAR- TIME] (Martin Koolhoven, 2008); no NOTHING PERSONAL (Urzsula Antoniak, 2009); no GLUCKAUF [SON OF MINE] (Remy van Heugten, 2015); no THE PARA- DISE SUITE (JOOst van Ginkel, 2015), and, as said, no WOLF. In addition to that, a 'quality' film like WILDE MOSSELS [WILD MUSSELS] (Erik de Bruyn, 2000) is examined, in chapter 6, but since humour is no more than an undercurrent of this predominantly melancholic film, the interpretation is relatively brief for a film that good. And finally, my third disclaimer, as Simon Critchley remarks in the begin- ning of his study On Humour: a theory of humour is itself not humorous. Nev- ertheless, enjoy reading. HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM  ~, ~ ~ 2 4 ~ .22 ~,,. ~' '~ .11) A \4g~ ~ A. ~< 4 ~ 1v. ~ A~. ~ 21~ ~ ~V 4~, CHAPTER1 Low-Class Comedies In the Dutch language, the word boodschappen can mean both 'messages' and 45 'groceries.' When film director Dick Maas was criticized that his film FLODDER (1986) was sheer amusement and consecutively void of (social/political) mes- sages, he retorted: 'Boodschappen doe je maar in de Albert Heijn.' A literal translation of this sentence might run: 'Get your groceries at Albert Heijn [the largest Dutch supermarket chain],' which, of course, slips into the pun: 'Get your messages at the supermarket.' This pun is a variation upon the quote, attributed to, among others, American film directors Frank Capra and John Ford that 'if you want to send a message, go to Western Union' (or 'try Western Union').' Apart from the fact that it is a witty remark, behind Maas' response is a specific rhetorical question: 'Is there anything wrong with trivial entertain- ment?' If you disagree with this view, Maas would probably reply along the lines of: 'Laugh and grow fat. Does comic laughter not purge humans from negative emotions and relieve them from their daily sorrows, at least for the duration of the film?' Such a position presumes that a comedy like FLOD- DER does not offer its viewers food for thought - due to a lack of substance, that is 'messages' - but that it can be mildly beneficial to the mood of the spectators: laughter might help them to forget their troubles for a while. In this chapter I want to argue the superficiality of such a claim by addressing, in addition to FLODDER, films which can be considered to be companion pieces to Maas' successful feature. Maas' shrugging attitude unjustly under- estimates (the effect of) such bawdy comedies; they are more meaningful - in both negative and positive terms - than his retort suggests. If one were to focus on the representation of both the sexy daughter Kees and the womanizing son Johnnie, FLODDER and its sequels bow to the tradition of what can be called 'blue comedy,' and for which the Dutch LOW-CLASS COMEDIES have reserved the term 'onderbroekenlol,' translated as 'underpants-fun.' 'Blue humour' involves material that is typically considered more 'adult'; it can include swearing or foul language, sexual or scatological (bathroom) humour.2 This tradition is quite modest in terms of numbers, but its box- office successes have been considerable. Its main representative in Dutch cinema is WAT ZIEN IK?! [BUSINESS Is BUSINESS] (Paul Verhoeven, 1971), which stands uncontested as the prototypical sex farce. Some 'light' versions of this subgenre would be HELP! DE DOKTER VERZUIPT [HELP! THE DOCTOR Is DROWNING] (1974), SHERLOCK JONES (1975), both directed by Nikolai van der Heyde, as well as the two Andre van Duin vehicles: IK BEN JOEP MELOEN [I AM JOEP MELOEN] (Guus Verstraete, Jr., 1981) and DE BOEZEMVRIEND [THE BOSOM BUDDY] (Dimitri Frenkel Frank, 1982). All these films are, to a lesser or greater extent, marked by a corny kind of fun. In a scene from HELP! DE DOKTER VERZUIPT, there is an enormous rescue operation, after 46 I the doctor has accidently driven his car into shallow waters. The nearby gyp- sies take pity on him and in the kitchen he is about to change his wet clothes. As he stands there naked, he sees the beautiful Katja, who hardly looks at him. Nonetheless, the doctor takes pain to cover his nakedness, first with a feather brush, which he substitutes for a slightly bigger object, a vase. Then he lays eyes on an even more appropriate object, a book which he unfolds to hide his genitals from her sight. We get a close-up of Katja looking in the doctor's direction and she starts to smile. The doctor glances downward, and then we see in close-up the title of the book: What Girls Need to Know. Because of the embarrassing pose of the naked doctor, the content of the book is reduced to sexual knowledge, as if girls only need to know about (male) genitals. Sexual innuendo is grist for the mill of a popular comedian like Van Duin.3 In IK BEN JOEP MELOEN, a nurse has to take the temperature of the protagonist, and while he opens his mouth, she asks him to turn over. He does so reluctantly, and then asks him to help her find the right spot for the thermometer. He says: 'Cold, warm, warmer ... HOT!' Similarly, the title of Van Duin's second (and, due to its lack of success, final) feature also plays on a possibly sexual interpretation of a principally conventional uttering. The term 'boezemvriend' is a Dutch expression meaning 'very best friend.' Set in 1811, Van Duin plays a dentist who is mistakenly identified as a baron and then boasts that he is Napoleon's closest comrade. Since he delivers the emperor from a terrible toothache, Napoleon will at the end of the film con- firm, to everyone's surprise, that the dentist is his very best friend, indeed. At the same time, 'boezemvriend' can literally be translated as 'bosom bud- dy.' The term is then a pun on the physical appearance of the big-breasted woman who crosses the dentist's path on several occasions. Well-educated HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM people usually turn up their nose at such 'vulgar' humour and 'risque' word- play, at least, in their public statements, but Van Duin's films have particu- larly catered to the taste of the lower class. Part of the fun may reside in the tendency of well-educated people to sneer at them, which enables the lovers of these comedies to whole-hearted- ly articulate their identity as 'anti-intellectual.' Such a reading is too short- sighted, however, for at the same time, several 'intellectuals' have exploited so-called onderbroekenlol, sometimes to a superlative degree, because then this type of amusement could easily transform into a sly provocation at the address of the (petit bourgeois) viewer. This worked well on Dutch public tel- evision, e.g., when an 'anarchistic' programme like DE FRED HACHE' SHOW (1972) featured an act with a nude belly dancer, which raised many angry responses from viewers. Deliberate grossness was also at stake in films by, among others, Wim Verstappen, whose work will be discussed at length in chapters 5 and 8. Together with his close companion Pim de la Parra, Ver- 47 stappen had presented himself as an outsider to the establishment, even though his success had also made them part of the establishment. In GRIJP- STRA & DE GIER [FATAL ERROR] (1979), which he made after his split from De la Parra, a detective couple has to visit the place of two men whom they sus- pect of being drug dealers. No, one of them says, we do not make money with hash, but with the 'nice ass' of my partner. In the presence of both Grijpstra and De Gier, they then start dancing together and when one of them bends over, the other holds a lighter to his buddy's ass, which results into a large flame. 'You were expecting some filth, but no ...,' they say to the flabbergast- ed guests. 'How did you do that?' De Gier asks, whereupon the gays repeat their act, the large flame in close-up this time. In the next shot, Grijpstra enters his very own bedroom and wants to perform the trick for his wife, but she immediately turns away from him, saying: 'Aaargh, a fart in my face ...,' thus missing the flame. Moreover, in another scene De Gier is in the com- pany of a naked woman in a scene in slow motion with soft focus. As soon as he kisses her nipple, there is a cut to a close-up of De Gier's mouth, sipping on the tail of his cat, Olivier.4 On the one hand, onderbroekenlol derives its humour from the discom- forting attitude of dignitaries towards any sexual insinuation. People who have to keep up appearances - or think they have to do that - become the laughing stock in the subgenre of the farce, like the doctor in HELP! DE DOKTER VERZUIPT who starts to behave nervously when an attractive blonde woman enters his consulting room.5 On the other hand, when one pushes this kind of 'underpants humour' a bit further, one can have the effect of annoying those (bourgeois) viewers who presume there are standards of decency which had better not be crossed. These types of viewers are the ideal LOW-CLASS COMEDIES audience for directors who delight in poking fun at everything that reeks of decorum and the establishment. As a popular comedy which adapts to the proverbial 'underbelly of society,' the most important predecessors to Maas' box-office hit would be Verhoeven's WAT ZIEN IK?!, HOGE HAKKEN, ECHTE LIEFDE [HIGH HEELS, TRUE LOVE] (Dimitri Frenkel Frank, 1981), SCHATJES! [ARMY BRATS] (Ruud van Hemert, 1984) and MAMA IS BOOS! [MAMA IS MAD AS HELL] (Ruud van Hemert, 1986), and its most eye-catching successor is probably NEW KIDS TURBO (Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuijl, 2010). Con- tradicting the position that these 'banal' comedies are devoid of messages, I will set up a 'dialogue' between these films and some theoretical notion of laughter taken from the French philosopher Henri Bergson as well as the tradition of the culture of folk carnival humour, voiced by the Russian liter- ary scholar and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. 48 I A PROSTITUTE AND A CHAMBERMAID: WATZIENIK?! When offered the chance to shoot a feature-length film in 35mm and in col- our, Paul Verhoeven was delighted with the opportunity until the moment he heard that producer Rob Houwer wanted to make a 'popular sex comedy' based on the confessions of a prostitute, recorded by Albert Mol. Verhoeven felt he had to make a forced choice as in a hold-up (your money or your life). Naturally, he chose the 'bad' - going along with Houwer's plan and to make the best of it - over the 'worse' option of declining the offer. He feared that he either had to give up directing at all or would be condemned to shoot 'boring, navel-gazing, low-budget art films' like his colleagues did (qtd. in Van Scheers, 126). Together with scriptwriter Gerard Soeteman, Verhoeven decided to bal- ance the sensual story material with the tone of the people's theatre, which had characterized the pre-war successes of DE JANTJES [THE TARS] (Jaap Spe- yer, 1934) and BLEEKE BET [PALE BET] (Alex Benno and Richard Oswald, 1934). Soeteman gambled that film spectators might then recognize the picture as part of a typically Dutch tradition: 'The more Dutch, the better' (qtd. in Van Scheers, 127). Even though Verhoeven considers his WAT ZIEN IK?! as a negligible pic- ture in artistic terms, it happened to become a tremendous success finan- cially. The film set the trend for what Hans Schoots termed the 'sex wave' in Dutch cinema in the first half of the 1970s. In most films of this wave (see chapter 5) the dramatic parts (are meant to) preside over the comic parts, but in WAT ZIEN IK?! it is the other way around. Some groups of people in the Netherlands, mainly in Amsterdam, had participated actively in the so- called 'sexual revolution,' facilitated among others by the invention of the HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM birth-control pill. 'Free love' became a popular catchphrase and sex was not restricted to only one partner. Many people had no first-hand knowledge of the practices of the sexual revolution, butwere acquainted with the rumours. A volume of short stories, compiled by Mol in 1965 under the title Wat zien ik ...?!, had captured the zeitgeist successfully. The fact that it became a best- seller over the years was an indication that a mass public was willing to read about (and watch) naughty sex adventures, when told in a frolicsome man- ner. Mol himself admitted that he had heard some gross anecdotes, which he decided not to include in order to keep the tone light-hearted (Van Scheers, 125). Even though tone and approach were not much to Verhoeven's own taste, he understood that the film could only attract an audience if the per- formances by the actors were relatively down-to-earth, for the material itself was already slightly exaggerated. Hence, he selected actors who had worked in television rather than in theatre, for television actors are more used to keeping emotions in check. I 49 The dramatic plot of Verhoeven's adaptation is very thin: Greet is a red- haired prostitute and her colleague Nel - also known as 'Haar van boven' [Her from upstairs] - is her dearest friend. Greet gets involved in a relation- ship with Piet, but he will eventually return to his pregnant wife. Nel, on the contrary, is under the spell of her no-good, pimp annex boyfriend, Sjaak, but Greet encourages her to leave him. After a miserable blind date Nel bumps into a balding but decent merchant by accident, for whom she decides to leave the Red Light District. The pace of the film was deliberately fast to pre- vent the spectator from noting the absence of a coherent narrative (see Van Scheers, 128), for the plot is little more than a coat hanger for a series of weird encounters between prostitutes and their customers. In the opening scene, a man returns to Holland after doing three years of development work in Africa. Giving vent to the idea that first things come first, he rushes to Greet by cab, and complains that he has not seen a single gorgeous woman in Africa, except for a nun. Sensing that he is very eager, she charges a high price for her services. In his excitement, the sex is quickly over, to his own deep dissatisfaction. Greet moves over to her cash register and dryly calculates the bill: '285 guilders, tax included.' In another scene we see Greet enter a toy shop from a high-angle master shot in order to buy a mask for a 'children's party.' Then we see Greet from behind and we face the salesman. Because the shot is from a slightly low angle, we see the many masks above his head, while he says: 'A children's party, so something cheer- ful.' He tries on two funny masks himself, but the camera pans to the right as Greet makes a quarter turn and points at a mask off-screen. The camera shows the salesman in close-up who after a few seconds mutters with a puz- zled look on his face: 'That one? For a children's party?' LOW-CLASS COMEDIES In the next shot we see a neatly dressed gentleman arrive in an expensive car and enter a building. He walks slowly, while the musical score creates a sinister atmosphere. 'Can I proceed?' the man asks Greet, and a bit later: 'Nothing scary is gonna happen, right?' Greet leaves the room and orders him to get into the bed. Cut to a shot in which we see her from behind while she puts on a wig, lilac in colour. She bangs on the door and yells with an eerie voice: 'Ha ha ha ... I'm coming to get you.' First, we see the man in bed, frightened facial expression, and then the camera tracks behind Greet who enters the room, still yelling and laughing hysterically. In the meantime Nel has come down the stairs to Greet's room, and looks into the open door. Greet turns around in medium close-up, but half-way through the move- ment, the camera jump-cuts to a close-up and we see the scary witch mask she is wearing. Nel's scream is deafening. In fact, the close-up of the witch mask is the reverse shot of the scene in the toy shop, when Greet made her 50 I choice by pointing at a mask off-screen, one and a half minutes before. The unorthodox jump-cut during Greet's turn can be seen as accentuating the shock that provokes the bloodcurdling scream. The man in bed falls back in the cushions, with a satisfactory smile on his lips. He visibly enjoys the thrill. After Greet has reassured Nel by pulling off her mask, we see the customer leave the place, and he congratulates her on the superb act. He gives her an extra tip because of the fabulous scream. It will be a red thread in the subsequent scenes between Greet and her customers that she puts on an act, dressed in character, and in retrospect it will turn out to be that the performance is in the service of the erotic satis- faction of a male client. At one point there is a cut to a close-up of Greet who blows a whistle against a white background. She is so close that we can only see that she is wearing something with a high collar. She mentions a vari- ety of children's names, and then singles out 'Jantje' to whom she speaks sternly. Jantje is an adult man, wearing a sailor suit and, as we see a bit later, when he walks to his bench, shorts. In a long shot it becomes clear that Greet is dressed like a schoolmarm with a skirt to her ankles. As soon as she drops her piece of chalk, she bends over and remains in position so that Jantje can come over to put his hand under her skirt. Of course, Jantje has to be 'pun- ished' for this behaviour. With both Greet and Nel, who plays the headmas- ter, in shallow focus in the background, we see Jantje in sharp focus on the left side of the frame, enjoying the spanking. Each and every time in WAT ZIEN IK?!, a specific setting is created - a horror scene, a school class with a naughty boy, Greet made up as a corpse who is asked for forgiveness by a male client and then comes alive - which is a play-act for sexual pleasure. Sometimes, as in the scene with the man whom they pick up in the park, the act is accompanied by a joyful melody, composed by Julius Steffaro (real HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM name: Jan Stoeckart). The tune continues until we see them in three-shot on a bench, from a low angle that centralizes the man's suitcase. As he opens it, white feathers pop up, and in the next shot, Greet and Nel walk and cluck like chickens, whereas the man climbs upon a small table, imitating a roost- er. The joyful melody that prepared us for this scene - which takes a twist by the way, when Greet gets angry at the customer - can be taken as a general guideline for all the episodes with the male clients. All the sexual desires in the film are not presented as deviant only, but as comic aberrations. The music is one clue, but Greet's cool attitude is another. Her lack of affection for them clearly shows after they leave. She only tolerates their idiosyncratic wishes because her axiom is, as the English title of the film runs, 'business is business.' Each and every customer is therefore no more than a weird pas- ser-by, of whom we never get to know anything but his eccentric preferences. Perhaps the strangest bird of them all is the man who chooses the dis- guise of a chambermaid, dusting Greet's place at her command. His arrival 51 at her place is also announced by a happy tune. Dressed in a white miniskirt, a pair of pumps, and a silly head-cap, he likes the threat of being slapped by Greet's carpet-beater. Greet can play the role of dominatrix. When she checks the cabinet, she says in a loud voice: 'Wat zien ik?! Stof.' [What are I seeing? Dust. The grammatically incorrect language is deliberate, a sign of her lower-class background.] She then starts to hit this 'dirty and filthy girl.' While she continues to hit him, it becomes increasingly unclear whether Greet is merely playing the role of stern mistress or is actually disgusted by the act. When she stops the beating, she apologizes: 'Sorry. Was it too hard?' After some moments of recovery, the 'chambermaid' turns around and says: 'Ah, Madame, it has never been this great before.' While Greet fears that she really has transgressed some boundaries, it turns out that the customer experienced the punishment as the epitome of enjoyment. This illustrates the peculiarity of the male desires in Verhoeven's movie: The most terrible punishment can equal the greatest sexual satisfaction. This conclusion might have been cause for deep reflection, as in a Luis Bunuel film,6 but the way the 'chambermaid' behaves and ultimately delivers the line with a happy expression on his face makes the scene fit for comic laughter. The overall impression of the film is that all the male customers seem weird mis- fits, but though their yearning for role-playing games is a bit bizarre, they treat Greet with respect, minus perhaps the man who has taken on the guise of the rooster. But when she makes clear 'enough is enough,' he runs away as fast as he can, even leaving his clothes behind.7 LOW-CLASS COMEDIES (NO) ORDINARY PEOPLE: HOGE HAKKEN, ECHTELIEFDE AND SCHAVTES! In fact, the way Greet seems to be in control in almost every scene is part of the vulgar charm of WAT ZIEN IK?! One indication that working as a prostitute is not that bad, is given when Greet visits the newlywed Nel. Her new home in Eindhoven is absolutely spotless. Her husband, Bob, returns home from shopping and announces he has a gift for her: two bottles of Vim, a cleaning product, which he bought on discount. The pettiness of Nel's life in the spick- and-span residence (along with Bob) contrasts sharply with the careless con- viviality of the lower-class environment to which Greet happily returns after the visit in Eindhoven. Being direct is a quality that works to a prostitute's advantage in her own world, but such an approach to life leads her into an embarrassing situation when she enters into new, more sophisticated surroundings, as it is shown in 52 I the 'classic concert scene.' This episode deserves to be singled out, because it heralds, in a nutshell, the turn that the bawdy comedy will take in the 198os. In this scene, Piet takes Greet out for the evening, but where they are going is a surprise for her. When she enters the music hall and sees the pianoforte, she exclaims: 'A concert?' so loudly that people in the audience turn their heads. Piet reminds her that she likes to listen to Schubert and Beethoven, but she counters that she only ever does so when that is what her customers request. For them, she asserts, it is a way to enliven the atmosphere. In every sense, Greet does not fit in with the audience at the concert: she applauds too late and continues clapping after one is supposed to be silent. While everyone is immersed in the aria, contemplating the high-pitched notes, she sits staring at the stage with wide open eyes, flabbergasted. She wants to put her arm over Piet's shoulder, but notices that he is uncomfortable with the gesture and so she starts eating a bar of chocolate instead, doing it noisily, and comments: 'This is certainly not Arbeidsvitaminen,' a radio programme that plays popu- lar music. When Piet tells her this is not a cinema, but a concert, and that he wants her to behave herself, she gets so frustrated that she leaves her seat, causing quite a clamour. In the concert scene, it becomes clear that Greet is only familiar with an ordinary background and has never been exposed to 'high culture.' She despis- es that everyone behaves according to some silently agreed upon sense of deco- rum that she herself is not aware of. She, however, does not just leave the music hall, but she makes a huge spectacle of her departure, which leads to shocked reactions among both the audience and the performers. Her going away is sup- posed to attract everyone's attention, for it is meant to express her disdain for this sense of decorum. Moreover, the best way to give vent to her anger at Piet is to make him embarrassed of her behaviour in front of all the viewers. HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM This scene from WAT ZIEN IK?! can be seen in tandem with the film HOGE HAKKEN, ECHTE LIEFDE, which reverses the pattern, but to a similar effect of privileging the low class. Semijns Roggeveen, managing director of a firm, is bored by his upper-class existence, with a wife talking about yoga and medita- tion all the time. One day he visits the canteen of his workers, and sees how his employees address each other in a direct manner, like 'Watch out, loaf.' While we see him drinking a mineral water at a table, a subsequent shot shows him amidst the workers, dressed casually and laughing at corny jokes. In another shot, he imagines himself flirting with the assertive and high-heeled sales girl Jenny. While his wife thinks that he is withdrawing into a Buddhist convent, he starts to lead a double life, thanks to a wig and a fake moustache: in his new guise he becomes a truck driver, called Arie Snoek, at his very own company. 'Need a blow?' ('Moetje een knal?') becomes one of his favourite expressions, but when he receives one himself, he enjoys it tremendously. At the same time, he starts setting his new colleagues against the direction, complaining about 53 the poor working conditions. Moreover, Arie starts an affair with Jenny, who one day happens to meet Arie's double, Semijns, in the office. Afterwards she tells Arie that the director told her that her breasts are very shapely, which drives the truck driver mad with anger.8 He even challenges the director via a letter to a duel, but this impossible situation of Arie meeting Semijns makes him realize that he has to make up his mind who he wants to be/become. This moment is visualized when he stands in front of a mirror - wearing Arie's clothes, but without the wig and moustache - and with a gun he cracks his own image. While the end credits start running, we see him say farewell to his upper-class friends as an orange-clad Buddhist at the airport, but in a next shot he secretly dons his clothes in a dustbin and continues the relationship with Jenny. The children of the family Gisberts in the film SCHATJES! can be seen as relatives of both Greet and Remijns in terms of mentality. While the protago- nist from WAT ZIEN IK?! displays her contempt for social status predominant- ly in the concert scene, the disdainful behaviour of Remijns is turned into a structuring principle. The way Remijns expresses his disdain for the upper class, however, is only 'child's play' in comparison to the rude way the four kids in SCHATJES! will behave. The timing of this film by Van Hemert can be considered as striking, for it is released in the wake of successes like ANNIE (John Huston, 1982), E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) and the Dutch CISKE DE RAT (Guido Pieters, 1984). In all three films children suffer from the absence of father figures, but feel-good alternatives are at hand for them. SCHATJES! offers the bleak inverse of such narrative developments and its 'message' can be paraphrased as: 'Well, children, eatyour heart out! Parents suck and fathers are even worse than mothers.' On a personal level, this film can be regarded as LOW-CLASS COMEDIES Van Hemert's 'revenge fantasy' upon his own authoritarian father Willy van Hemert, a director himself who became a household name thanks to a few hugely popular television drama series.9 From the affluent villa including an enormous lawn as well as from the fancy names they have given their children - the young adolescent Thijs, his slightly younger sister Madelon, and the two young boys, Jan-Julius and Valen- tijn - we can gather that the parents regard themselves as members of the better social circles. It becomes clear from the start, however, that there is an icy-cold relationship between the parents and the children. The oldest son is driving around on a motorbike on the green lawn, seen via a point-of-view of the father who observes this from his helicopter during office hours, for he happens to work as a pilot at a nearby air base. Father John yells at his son, but to no avail. This opening scene is merely the overture for a series of violent attacks 54 and demolitions: on the request of Madelon, Thijs executes a bombing via the alarm clock in their parents' bedroom; Thijs floods the house; the two young kids attach a chain to their father's car so that the automobile breaks in half, and Madelon mows the word 'lul' [prick] with huge letters in the lawn as the father flies over the villa once again. One may wonder whether some of these scenes are funny at all, for a bombing is a most serious assault, but the pres- entation of it is definitely cartoonish. Due to the bombing, a door flies through the air, there is a lot of smoke, one young kid yells 'The Russians!' and the pissed-off father walks outside with one very dark eye and a bandage on his cheek. In another brutal scene, which is nonetheless played for laughs, the mother is thrown of a ladder, off-screen. We hear her scream, and we only see the outcome of the fall: she has landed head-down in a bush. As in animated cartoons, characters have only minor bruises or injuries, ready for other pain- ful incidents in subsequent scenes. SCHATJES! is a physical comedywhich may come across as rude and sarcas- tic, for it pivots around the total disrespect of a bunch of rogues towards their parents. Since the battle can only harden, and even some soldiers in a jeep (to the dismay of Van Hemert, the budget did not allow for a huge army) eventu- ally arrive to call the young riff-raff to order, the comedy comes to border on horror without ever losing its connection to humour.10 The manner in which John starts to chase his children with an axe, while singing 'Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf?,' recalls Jack Nicholson's behaviour from THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), but the overall atmosphere is obviously too humorous to ever become truly as haunting and sinister as Kubrick's classic. The best scene to argue that the horror should not take the upper hand over laughter is the one and only musical interlude. In a scene which is colour-tinted red and pink, Dennis - the handsome blonde tennis coach, both fancied by mother and HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM daughter - starts to sing all of a sudden about how much he loves Madelon, if only to prevent the film spectator from getting (too) immersed in the family drama. Despite the film's insistent emphasis upon comedy over drama and hor- ror, it is worth looking at the nature of the parental crisis in SCHATJES! At the air base, John is senior in age, but he is still lowest in rank, as we gather from his superior, Pete Stewart (played by Rijk de Gooyer, who was Arie and Remijns in HOGE HAKKEN, ECHTE LIEFDE). John had been nominated twice for a pro- motion, but the behaviour of his children impaired his general esteem among his peers to such an extent that the nomination was withdrawn. Now, he will get a third, and last, chance. From the few scenes at his work, John is shown as a docile pilot who wants to please his superior. He takes his job very seriously, and he works hard to support his family. Actually, he is so preoccupied with the possibility of a promotion that he fails to notice that his house is flooded upon his return, until he lays eyes upon the broken toy helicopter he once 55 received as a trophy. The basic error John makes is that he projects the hierarchical thinking that works best in a military setting onto the situation at home. In the mili- tary a higher-ranked person automatically derives prestige from his symbolic position. In his own family, however, he expects that his children pay him due respect because a father happens to be the head of the family. Symptomatic is the verbal expression he uses when he starts to interrogate the eldest of his off- spring after the bombing: 'Your mother has asked me to enquire after the root causes of your behaviour of the last days, last months, yes, you might even say the last few years.' This 'your mother has asked me ...' presumes that a father is supposed to call the kids to account for their deeds: in the opinion of the par- ents, it is up to a father to speak with a voice of authority. In the eyes of John, his children have been troublesome ever since they could talk. According to him, they are intractable, as if it is in their nature to be nasty brats. To him, his symbolic position is so self-evident that if his command is ineffective, the children are to blame for they probably lack the right mentality and discipline. When they do not listen, he can only impose a penalty, such as withholding their pocket money or (what piques Thijs, as he says later when things go bad at home) threatening to send them to boarding school. Underlying the apparent sarcasm is the children's attempt to reveal to the father that his power is an empty shell. He always takes a stance of author- ity, but that does not make him authoritative yet. Since he does not see this discrepancy, John fails to acknowledge that his authority is built on quick- sand. Moreover, as the mother makes clear, he overshoots the mark by using rude expressions like 'kut met peren' [literally, 'cunt with pears'] or grandi- ose words, as when he calls the deeds by the children 'pure genocide.' Such LOW-CLASS COMEDIES efforts are so pathetic that they will ruin any chance of having an impact on the children. The father not only has a blinkered view of the needs of his children, he is also blind to the licentious behaviour of his wife. She tries to seduce the much younger Dennis and performs some cunning tricks to prevent any encounter between her daughter Madelon and the guy she is infatuated with herself. Mother Danny has told the tennis coach that Madelon is still ill and Dennis asks her whether he can pay her a visit. The mother answers that her daughter is perhaps only pretending to be ill because she does not like playing tennis. While she caresses his neck, we hear the whirring sound of a helicopter. As Dennis walks away from the mother in bad temper, the sound increases in volume. A low-angle shot shows both Danny and the helicopter in one shot. She gets mad at the helicopter, for she realizes that it is probably her husband, who might discover that she fancies Dennis - even when John is actually too 56 I trustful to recognize her behaviour as improper. Her crush on the tennis coach is so extreme that she flies into a fit of rage when the youngest child tells her by phone that Madelon is sleeping with Dennis - actually, he uses the word 'rampetampen.' She even unleashes her anger at a totally innocent child. SCHATJES! can be qualified as an anti-establishment comedywith children who, while living in relative luxury, rebel against their parents in a manner as if they have never had any form of decent upbringing. The father exclusively relies upon his symbolic position and the mother merely pursues solipsistic desires. She is hardly interested in giving her children a proper upbringing, bribing the two young kids with candy if she wants them to do something. Although SCHATJES! owes its success to the laughter provoked by the bold acts the kids commit, it warrants attention that the children are not just spoiled brats nor are they 'inherently' bad. A great part of their bullying results from frustration with their parents' incompetence and neglect of them. In the absence of their parents, the children turn out to be quite caring among each other most of the time and both Thijs and Madelon take up the parental role, almost matter-of-factly. This implies that their rebellious behaviour is basi- cally aimed at exposing the false pretence of their father. As such, the film can be taken as a critique of the thin veneer of social varnish in a well-to-do family. Perhaps this (implicit) social critique is the main reason why SCHATJES! was generally more appreciated than its less successful MAMA IS BOOS! [MUM- MY Is MAD AS HELL]. (Ruud van Hemert, 1986), which is more like an average drama of adultery. Thijs and Madelon are no longer around and the focus is upon the animosity between the father and the mother, because he has had an affair with a woman, which Danny considers unbearable. She plays the role of the cheated wife to ridiculous effect and he becomes the object of her aggres- sive fits. In fact, MAMA IS BOOS! offers little more than her irrational anger. HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM This already shows in the very first, outrageous scene of the film. At the end of SCHATJES! the parents were in pursuit of their children by car, late at night. They deliberately ignore a roadblock and drive their car into a huge gap that is about to be filled with cement. The very final shot of the film shows a little flag, stuck in the highway, apparently locating the spot where the parents are bur- ied. In the opening of MAMA IS Boos!, preceding the starting credits, we get a shot of this particular road. Red, purple and blue filters are used respectively, while the camera zooms in on the little flag still stuck in concrete. The flag flaps vigorously because of the wind caused by busy traffic. The camera moves underneath the road and we hear a radio report about a missing couple. The father, still alive, gets angry when he hears the journalist say that he is 42 years of age: '41, asshole.' The camera tracks back, and then we see the mother lying on the back seat of the car, staring with glazed eyes, as if she is a zombie. Even when a few litres of sewerage floods over her face, she does not move. Initially, the scene seems to be a follow-up to the finale of SCHATJES!, but then father 57 John wakes up, gasping, and it only turns out to be a bad dream. Nevertheless, there is one elemental feature that distinguishes the bad dream from 'real life': in the dream John's wife was motionless, but in 'real life,' she will burst in a fury, totally unreasoning, time and again. During the party of the 20th anniversary of their marriage, the mere hint of the youngest son, Valentijn, that the tears in his father's eyes are caused by the absence of his mistress, Jane, enrages the mother, Danny. At no point in the film is she open to reason and she grasps every opportunity to wreak physical havoc upon him. When in a later scene John tells his mistress that perhaps some sense will have come into Danny, there is an immediate cut to the mother with a chainsaw. The difference between SCHATJES! and MAMA IS BOOS! can be illustrated by distinguishing the psychoanalytic notion of demand from drive. A demand has some symbolic value. A person can demand something, but, as Slavoj Zizek explains, what he is 'really aiming at through this demand is something else' (Looking, 21). The children demand to terrorize their parents, but what they actually seem to aim at is their affection. Drive, on the contrary, 'persists in a certain demand, it is a "mechanical" insistence that cannot be caught up in a dialectic of desire: I demand something and I persist in it to the end' (Looking, 21). This seems applicable to the mother in MAMA IS Boos!, for she seems only bent after the destruction of her husband: terror is her goal. Of the many subvarieties within the genre of horror, one might say that they are all 'caught up in a dialectic of desire.' Struggling with immature or 'unfinished' masculinity, (young) men in slasher films might give full vent to their frustration by targeting female victims whose behaviour is frivolous, as is hypothesized by Carol Clover; or the sleazy horror can be a reaction to the LOW-CLASS COMEDIES monstrosity of the female body as Barbara Creed suggests, while the vampire, Richard Dyer claims, can be related to a context of (closeted gay) sexuality." As psychoanalysis teaches us that repressed desires always return, but in a neces- sarily different form, then the various categories of horror are possibly some of these forms. In such cases, horror can tap into people's unconscious and this can explain the elevation of some well-executed films to the status of clas- sic, from NOSFERATU to PSYCHO and from DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE to THE SHINING. The one subgenre exempted from this logic is the zombie film which may be one of the reasons why the status of its best-known title - NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (George A. Romero, 1968) - is definitely cult, with relatively lit- tle appeal to middle-class audiences. The zombie only demands to be fed by someone's flesh and has no further quibbles with (structures of) society. Of course, the zombie can be, and actually has been, read as a metaphor for criti- 58 I cal tendencies in society (shopaholics are like zombies), but as a character this monster is basically an 'it,' merely programmed to bring death and destruc- tion. The mother in MAMA Is Boos! is, of course, not a real zombie, for she has a clear motive. She is stunned with jealousy and therefore she demands the annihilation of John. But through this demand, she is not really aiming at something else, like the children were in SCHATJES! This may explain why the quite straightforward MAMA Is Boos! was less successful than its slightly more double-edged predecessor. The superiority of SCHATJES! over its sequel also shows in its intertexts. Whereas SCHATJES! clearly alludes to the classic horror film THE SHINING, MAMA Is Boos! is to be associated with the subgenre of the zombie film, accentuated by the scene in which the characters who are still beholden to the mother move towards the caravan of John's mistress. Shot from within the caravan, they appear as huge threatening shadows outside. This scene is almost like a replay from similar scenes in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD when zombies are trying to invade the house in which the main protago- nists of the film are hiding. Whereas the official sequel MAMA Is Boos! could not rival the original SCHATJES!, one might say that FLODDER is its unofficial successor, which brought the anti-establishment comedy to a new level of suc- cess. BE THYSELF (OR ACT LIKE A PERSON): FLODDER Since the lower-class family Flodder has been living unwittingly on a dump for toxic waste, the social worker Sjakie van Kooten pleads the case that the coun- cil has a responsibility to offer these 'well-meaning people' a proper home. There is no better option than to settle them in a long-vacant house in the well- HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM to-do neighbourhood Zonnedael.'2 According to Sjakie, such a completely new environment has the advantage of forcing the family to adjust themselves to the structured lifestyles of their upper-class neighbours. The basic humour of the film FLODDER consists of laying bare the discrepancy between the gaudily rude behaviour of the new inhabitants and the social conventions of the upper class. This discrepancy is announced in the beginning in two ways - via strik- ing edits as well as via a specific conversation. First, while Sjakie is emphasiz- ing the benevolence as well as the utter sensitivity of the Flodders, we get shot transitions to Mother ('Ma') Flodder which belie his statements. The first time we see her, she is surprised that her oldest son, the 27-year-old Johnnie, digs up a photograph of a man, probably from the attic: 'I have not seen that face for more than ten years,' she says. 'Is that my father?' daughter Kees asks. 'No, his father, not yours.' After the photograph has fallen on the ground, its glass broken, the dog pees over the portrait. This very first scene with the Flodders is meant to suggest the family's laconic un-sentimentality and the matriarch's 59 apparently unforgiving nature, according to the commonplace: 'Out of sight, out of the heart.' Second, the discrepancy between the family's straightforward stance and the social cohesion among the rich is ambiguously expressed in a dialogue between Johnnie and his half-sister Kees, when they drive with his very old car, exploring the new neighbourhood. Overlooking the villas with their well- kept lawns, Johnnie says: 'Well, don't fancy anything.' Kees: 'Oh, no, I will just remain my very own self.' Johnnie: 'That is exactly what I am afraid of.' In fact, this conversation goes to the heart of the film's 'message,' if this term can be used at all. The Flodders cannot be but their very own selves, because they live according to their 'instincts.' And in just following their impulses, they wreak havoc in the streets. A binary opposition is clear from the start: in contrast to the proper and 'good' citizens in Zonnedael, the Flodders are primitive, and hence, (mildly) 'evil,' because it is not in their 'nature' to conform to social conventions. The opening scenes function as illustrations to point out their nastiness and/ or their laconic attitude bordering on moral indifference. When a journal- ist mentions the nasty odour of their old home, Ma Flodder says: 'What bad smell?' Their obliviousness to dirt is affirmed when the male Kees throws a banana peel out on the impeccably clean streets of Zonnedael. Further, the Flodders address people in either too colloquial a way - 'Hey, Sjakie, old wanker' (Johnnie) - or in sexist terms - 'look, some horny dames' (the male Kees). Their disinterest in a working ethic is illustrated when Ma Flodder tells Sjakie that 11 o'clock is too early to pay them a visit, since everybody will still be sound asleep. Their refusal to recognize authority shows itself in the scene when Johnnie drives away in his car at high speed, almost overrunning two LOW-CLASS COMEDIES policemen. Their utter lack of an intellectual standard is proven in their nam- ing: the mother is simply called by the shorthand 'Ma,' and the old man in a wheelchair is just 'grandpa,' even though as is revealed after his unfortunate death, he probably was not their grandfather at all, but some drifter whom they adopted as their grandfather, another token of a topsy-turvy world. More- over, this 'grandpa' is not a wise, old man, but seems like a cranky fool, all the time dressed in the attire of a railway guard, and every word he utters is simply inarticulate. The names Johnnie (not spelled as the more common Johnny) and Henkie (not even Henk, but the belittling variant) typically connote a lower-class background; the name Toet for one of the daughters is down-right silly and sounds more like a nickname, whereas the fact that both a boy and a girl are named 'Kees' is the ultimate sign of how little they care about fanciful names. When Toet meets a neatly clothed girl, called 'Stephanie,' much more fan- 60 ciful (like Madelon or Jan-Julius from SCHATJES!), the latter's mother is quick to remind her to attend her violin lessons. Stephanie then asks Toet: 'Do you love Paganini as well?' but Toet replies: 'I prefer Chinese,' misunderstanding the fondness for the compositions of a famous musician for a question about types of cuisine. This particular conversation is striking in that it highlights the gap between the typical bourgeois with their cultural taste and the lower- class family. If the latter hear the name of an unknown artist, they think of food. In the vein of Bakhtin's concept of 'grotesque realism,' the family has the tendency to bring anything abstract, intellectual or cultural to the level of the body. Since they display neither a spiritual nor a sophisticated dimension, they can permit themselves to be frank about basic needs like food, drink, sex and death. Ma Flodder is brewing her own beverage, while attaching fake labels to the bottles. The point whether she has the capacity to make her own alcohol, is sidestepped by her remark that it is only a 'matter of fermenting.' Quality is not the issue here, but quantity.'3 The family consumes drink and food in large amounts: they eat fried potatoes with their hands and at an amazing speed. As regards sex, the big-breasted daughter Kees has no problems in showing her- self off as an erotic object, on the condition that it offers the family financial profit. She seduces the neighbour in his garage, while her brother Kees takes a photograph of the scene. The seduction is a well-planned act to blackmail the neighbour who works as a car dealer. If the neighbour asks them how they want to pay the expensive sports car they have in mind, Johnnie replies: 'Polar- oid.' The scene is exemplary for the overall context of the film: the needs of food, drink, sex and death are absolutely basic in anyone's life - and hence, one might expect a serious treatment - but these are constantly hinted at in a humorous way. For the family, sex is not related to love, affection or excite- HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM ment, but it is a commodity value instead. And insofar love and sentimental feelings are at stake, the impression is at hand that it is play-acted or embed- ded within another aim. Johnnie has an affair with Yolanda, one of the neighbour ladies who is bored to death with her husband. She is a handsome woman, but part of her attraction may reside for Johnnie in the fact that she is married to a colonel in the army. Such a man tends to believe that he can derive some status from his profession, and moreover, he will definitely think himself superior to an unemployed 'bum.' Cheating with his wife is then a special delight for a guy like Johnnie, the more since the colonel is in fact still only a boy, as can be gathered from the huge toy army he has in the cellar for a hobby. This toy army is used for comic relief in the representation of the sex scene between Johnnie and Yolanda. When they make love for the very first time, their act is off screen, but we see some of the toy soldiers tumble down and, suggestively, we see the 'loop' of several cannons rise. 61 To summarize, the majority of the comic scenes are rooted in some bodily aspect - be it sex, food, drink - or in an utter disinterest in decorum, and this is the common denominator of all the films in this chapter. For that reason, one might say that their behaviour is not that far removed from the way animals behave themselves. According to a specific theory of humour, the human is to be separated from the animal because of man's capacity for laughter. Humour confirms man's eccentric position in the kingdom of animals. But, as Critch- ley wagers, the capacity for humour also, 'curiously, marks the limit of the human,' for all too often 'what makes us laugh is the reduction of the human to the animal' (29). If this is the case - and I think it is fairly applicable in the case of FLODDER - the lower-class background is the object of humour. And hence, one might say, in general, that characters who act peculiar, because of bestial instincts, are to be taken as butts of the jokes, that is, we laugh at them, to paraphrase Critchley, because they constantly overstep the limit between the human and the animal (36). The prostitute Greet in WAT ZIEN IK?! is pre- pared to do anything to satisfy the whimsical demands of her clients, even wear a scary mask or dress and walk like a chicken.'4 Their ludicrous actions, however, are superseded in silliness by the behaviour of the people who surround them: the male clients of Greet in Verhoeven's film or the decadent neighbours in FLODDER. The Flodders are unconventional, indeed, but in 'being themselves,' their indecent appearance at least corresponds with their indecent 'identity,' not to say, nature. Unlike the Flodders who do not make any attempt to adjust to the well-to-do environ- ment, their neighbours apparently fit in with their surroundings. The pres- ence of the Flodders will actually reveal, however, how their whole lives are exclusively structured according to tight social conventions. All the time, one LOW-CLASS COMEDIES is supposed to act like this, or like that, but this socially accepted behaviour is only the result of the repression of one's impulses. The direct neighbour of the Flodders, Mr. Neuteboom, pretends to be watering the plants and trees, the perfect excuse to his wife for hanging out in the garden, while he is playing peeping Tom at daughter Kees, dressed in a sexy bathing suit. When his wife tells him that his task already takes quite a while, Neuteboom is reminded of the job he is actually supposed to fulfil. Neuteboom's distraction will turn out to be exemplary for the other neighbours as well. They come across as per- fectly civilized beings, but as soon as they are sexually aroused or provoked, they give free rein to their desires or aggressive impulses. Hence, it seems no more than logical that at the party at the Flodders' home, near the end of the film, practically everyone starts to indulge in vulgar behaviour. One might say that FLODDER shows that finally there is hardly any wall separating the lower-class family from their 'civilized' neighbours, and that 62 as soon as one strips the veneer of social conventions, the 'animal within' is released after all. In that sense, SCHATJES! can be seen as a relevant predeces- sor to FLODDER, for the parents respond to the provocations by their children in a hysterical manner, making the father a match to the father in THE SHIN- ING. Even though this would already come down to a kind of message - which, remember, director Dick Maas would deny his film contains - I guess there is a more intriguing purport to be gathered from FLODDER. If the neighbours, like the parents in SCHATJES!, start to display their particularly uncivilized demeanour, this means, in retrospect, that they have all the time only been pretending to be civilized. Here we can address a specific twist that Critchley mentioned in his study On Humour. A person behaving like an animal (or like a thing) can be a source of pleasure, but at the root of the comic is 'rather - sur- prise, surprise - a person acting like a person' (59, italics in original). As such, we can point at a displacement taking place. On a superficial level, the lower- class family is the object of humour, because their conduct deviates from con- ventional norms in a rather rude way. By contrast, the neighbours conformed to the norms upheld in the villa area, but ultimately it is revealed that they only play-acted this conformity. Whereas the Flodders are 'authentically' rude, the neighbours are in the end 'worse': their polished appearances do not cor- respond to their identity, deep-down. The best example of this gap between appearance and correspondence is the scene in which Mr. Neuteboom tries out some cocaine and asks the dealer whether it will have a quick effect. 'Oh, yes, it will,' the dealer replies. And at that very moment, Mr. Neuteboom is hit by his wife on his head, for she has discovered in the meantime some compro- mising pictures of her husband, harassing girl-next-door Kees. The more the hypocrisy of the rich is being revealed, the more the Flod- ders are to deserve our sympathy, because it is their attitude of 'just being HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM themselves' which is responsible for the revelation of the 'false' appearance of their neighbours. The frequent references to bodily aspects of the Flodder family - food, drink, sex - are ultimately embedded in a satirical portrayal of the so-called civilized environment. We laugh at the all too direct manners of the lower class, but this laugh is relatively benevolent. Despite their unor- thodox practices, we at the same time sympathize with the Flodders for their refusal to compromise their desires. They do not undertake any attempt to bend themselves to the norms of their new area. In contrast to this benevolent laugh, the neighbours are ultimately turned into the true objects of derision, if not of scorn, because of their sly ways to respond to the direct manners of the Flodders. CARNIVALESQUE I 63 The humour of FLODDER is to be categorized under the section of what Bakhtin qualified as the carnivalesque. The film plays with existing notions of social hierarchies between the upper class and the lower class, and seems to suggest that, on a closer look, these hierarchies are represented topsy-turvy. As in carnival when all hierarchies are temporarily suspended (Bakhtin, 1o), the world is portrayed upside-down: the apparently decent people are revealed to be more indecent than the primitives. Moreover, another reversal concerns the fact that the seemingly wild Flodders are ultimately good-natured. Not only are they so hospitable as to invite their hostile neighbours, but if they commit an evil deed, it is because they know no other way how to achieve their goal. The Flodders may have obtained a fancy car with foul means, but they unexpectedly pay Mr. Neuteboom the full sum after all, as soon as they totally unexpectedly inherit a large amount of money. Hence, impressions that they may be sly or greedy are contradicted in the end. A logical question would now be: Is the effect of this carnivalesque sub- versive or not? To some extent it always is, as Bakhtin claimed. Carnival laugh- ter is of a complex nature, for it is always ambivalent. On the one hand, one laughs at a specific carnivalesque situation, because one recognizes that it is a reversal of the convention. Hence, the laughter works to affirm the 'original' hierarchy as the norm. On the other hand, however, the 'entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity,' and as such, the mockery is 'also directed at those who laugh' (Bakhtin, 11-12). People who are laughing at the scenery also belong to the crazy world that is being represented. In FLODDER, all social hierarchies are mixed up and hence, undermined, which would underscore Bakhtin's idea of the ambivalence of folk humour. Nonetheless, several aspects considerably lessen the possible impact of LOW-CLASS COMEDIES the subversion. First, the Flodders at no point effectively resist the existing status quo. They accept the situation as a given, just as they have agreed to be moved to the new area. Their only goal is to continue living as they used to do, regardless of the fact whether their habitat is a dump or a beautiful villa. Being poor themselves, it is no issue for them that the neighbours are wealthy. They are out of step with their environment, but they do not bother and make no attempt to adjust. Their neighbours, however, and that is the basic source of pleasure in this film consider their presence as a nuisance. Even though the Flodders are neither deliberately vicious nor troublesome, their arrival is inter- preted by them as an invasion of 'alien elements' and as a violation of their way of life. The careless behaviour of the Flodders has a comic effect, because the neighbours get irritated by any slight disturbance from their regularly coded existence. Being shabbily dressed, as the Flodders are, or ordering the cheap- est kind of meat leads to expressions of dismay among their neighbours. 64 I In the end, the Flodders owe the audience's sympathy because of their sharp contrast to the self-elected elite in the neighbourhood. The latter are such a stock representation of a bourgeois class who consider sticking to strict etiquettes as more important than personal contacts or emotional ties that viewers are not encouraged to identify with them. The Flodders as a typically maladjusted family, displaying a series of jokes centred around the body - on sex, on eating, on excrement - are to be preferred over the well-to-do citizens who live by rules of decent decorum. As such, the neighbours are exposed as play-acting being aristocrats of 'good taste,' which is 'worse' than behaving like animals. The banality of the Flodders is ultimately a more reasonable alternative than the cold shallowness of their neighbours. If the social elite is being poked fun at in FLODDER, then there is none- theless a character who supersedes them in ridicule. Sjakie is a well-meaning social worker with good connections in local politics. His mission is to abol- ish the borders between different classes. According to him, the differences between people are neither natural nor inherent, but only a result of reigning conventions and habits. People are like chameleons who will automatically adapt themselves to the environment they inhabit. Sjakie aims to mediate between all the parties involved, but in the end he is the true fool of the film because, time and again, something happens which proves the reverse side of his good intentions. His belief that neighbours will behave in a socially cohesive manner and act according to the principle of mutual forbearance is exposed as utterly naive. Hence, his social experiment results into a total failure, illustrated in the particular image of Sjakie waving a flag amidst the ruins after the house has been blown to pieces. Most of the characters have only minor bruises, but Sjakie, as the proverbial unlucky bird, ends up in a hospital with several broken bones and his head bandaged. The Flodders send HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM him a postcard thanking him that he has made his holiday resort in the south of France available to them. In the final shot, Sjakie crumbles the card with his one remaining arm. Three insights can be drawn from FLODDER. First, the Flodders wreak havoc in a well-to-do environment. Their behaviour is a source of vicarious discomfort to the neighbourhood, but becomes a source of humour for the spectators, because the social veneer of the elite gets stripped away. Their intolerant attitude towards the newcomers emphasizes that they only play-act their status as aristocrats. The film is turned into a clash of social classes, with the lower-class family in the role of sympathetic underdog, thanks to the great contrast to the stereotypical bourgeois - or to use that alliterate expression that any Dutch person will know, 'kouwe kak.' Impossible to translate prop- erly, but it would run something like 'cold upper class' or 'fancy airs,' but the expression works so well, because 'kak' is also a lower-class term for poop. Second, as a necessary mediator and scapegoat, the too truthful Sjakie is I 65 time and again put in a position to make a fool of himself. He is mildly, but never severely, punished for his naive belief that there should be tolerance between the classes. He wants to abolish the borders between classes, but its effect is paradoxical. He believes that the Flodders can become 'decent people' when well-bred in a 'solid' environment, but in fact it is the other way around. The two groups can only come together on the condition that the neighbours become a bit like the Flodders. Third, if there is a depiction of the lower class in a serious manner, it usually has the outlook of a heartfelt art-house drama, shot with a handheld and/or close camera, as in JoY (Mijke de Jong, 2010) or in LENA (Christoph van Rompaey, 2011). The deplorable living conditions should not be taken too lightly, these films imply, with the inevitable consequence that an optimistic tone is only minimal. Maas, however, did not opt for a gloomy, cultural-pessi- mistic template, but presented his FLODDER as a film about the lower class, in the form of a hilarious comedy, including bright and gay colours instead of a damp atmosphere. Its tremendous success at the box office, proof of its 'enter- tainment' value, may almost gloss over its ideological message - almost, but not quite. FLODDER may have been produced as sheer amusement without an explicit 'boodschap,' but that does not alter the fact that there is a message underneath: swanky neighbours and the naive social worker are disadvan- taged in favour of impulsive simpletons. LOW-CLASS COMEDIES FORREST GONE BERSERK: NEWKIDS TURBO Leaving aside its two sequels - FLODDER IN AMERIKA! (Dick Maas, 1992) and FLODDER 3 (Dick Maas, 1993) - and the television series, the best candidate for inheritor of FLODDER in terms of its humour and its popular appeal, might be NEW KIDS TURBO (Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil, 2010). This may seem a peculiar claim, since the differences are many and obvious: the New Kids do not constitute a family, but consist of a group of five buddies; unlike the Flodders, they derive their social identity from their home ground (Maaskantje in the region of Brabant) to such a degree that any relocation to another place would be unpopular; they are not being used in a social experi- ment like the Flodders were, but they initiate a social experiment themselves: What if we do not pay for anything anymore due to the low unemployment benefits? Apart from these obvious differences, there are quite a number of 66 I gradual dissimilarities: The language is more coarse, the manners are more rude, the exhibit of sexual desires is more direct, and the homophobic tone is more aggressive. This does not surprise us in a film which post-dates the TV shows of Paul de Leeuw or the late Bart de Graaff, the gross sexual jokes in the films of the Farrelly brothers, the juvenile pranks in the AMERICAN PIE franchise, and the popularity of the violent cinema of Quentin Tarantino. The best token of a general ruthlessness in NEW KIDS TURBO can be illustrated by pointing at the cameo appearances of the popular comedians Hans Teeuwen and Theo Maassen. Teeuwen and Maassen are forerunners in a generation of cabaret performers who are not afraid of provocative jokes, which may anger those who think they violate the conventions of dignity. Notwithstanding these differences, NEW KIDS TURBO can be regarded as close to FLODDER in terms of its kind of humour as well as its popular appeal. As a common denominator, the five buddies do not compromise and all the time act according to their primitive instincts. So, if one feels like eating fast food, one goes to the snack bar, even during the working day. If one wants to smoke marijuana, one does so from self-grown cannabis. If one wants to drive around very fast, one neither cares about speed limits nor about the safety of pedestrians or cyclists. If one hits a person, one is concerned about a scratch on the car and not about the victim. As a typical feature of their indifferent attitude, they at one point wonder what day of the week it is. Since two of them wrongly assumed it is Sunday instead of Tuesday, they are far too late for work - and both get fired thereupon. Another typical feature concerns their appear- ance. They are sloppily dressed in clothes which might be qualified by the oxy- moron 'camping tuxedo.' All five are wearing a moustache and they have long unkempt hair, covering their neck, except for Rikkert who has a short haircut which is known as the flowerpot style. Because of his haircut, Rikkert recalls HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM Forrest Gump, the title character of the successful film, played by Tom Hanks. My point will be that this resemblance is far from accidental, and that the film can be seen as a brutal updating of FORREST GUMP (Robert Zemeckis, 1994). The very first scene, before it is interrupted by a loud and brief title sequence, clearly captures the film's spirit. In the vein of FORREST GUMP which famously starts with a digitally manipulated feather floating in the air until it arrives at the main character's feet, the camera in the opening of NEW KIDS TURBO follows an artificial butterfly, accompanied by the melodic intro of a happy hardcore house song, Paul Elstak's Rainbow in the Sky. As soon as the butterfly comes in the reach of Robbie, he crushes it with a single blow: 'That fucking butterfly.' The song stops abruptly. The feather in FORREST GUMP was only meant to muse about the idea, effectively articulated at the end of the film, whether each and every person already has a set destiny or that people are 'just floating accidental-like on a breeze.' Although Forrest thinks it may be both, Slavoj Zizek has indicated that 67 the film thereby overlooks a more significant effect: we create our fate but not in conditions of our own choosing (Taylor, 45). It is a tale about an innocent bystander, who just does what he does, without any further ado. All his actions are based upon intuition, not intention, but he happens to set in motion great historical events, like the U.S. rapprochement with China. Forrest's purely accidental deeds, however, serve time and again a conservative mentality. According to Zizek, Forrest 'gives body to the impossible pure subject of Ide- ology, to the ideal of a subject in whom Ideology would function flawlessly' (1996, 200, emphasis in original). He never ever gives the slightest impression of a political orientation, but all of his actions have serious ideological con- sequences which are constantly in support of the American Dream and are averse to any leftist-liberal tendency of 'free love,' 'allowance of drug use' or 'war protest.' Better be a simpleton like Forrest whose naivety situates him on the right side of history than the idealist and (pseudo-)intellectual stance of the other important character, Jenny. To underscore the conservative tone of Zemeckis' film, Jenny dies of AIDS, which is related to her excessive pursuit of (amoral) freedom. It is excessive in the sense that leftists like Jenny delib- erately adopt a political attitude of resistance and presumed commitment: she spends her life involved in the lefty protest movements of the moment, unlike Forrest, who just strolls through the decades, unaffected by the zeit- geist. Jenny is positioned as a rebel for silly causes, time and again opting for the latest fashion or political hype, whereas Forrest remains the very same, stable figure from beginning to end. FORREST GUMP thus suggests that if peo- ple follow their natural 'self' or destiny, they are always automatically - and safely - within the domain of a liberal-capitalist society, the secure basis of the American Dream. In order to follow one's natural destiny, and this is the LOW-CLASS COMEDIES basic ideological purport of FORREST GUMP, one should not be hampered by an overabundance of rational thinking, which is the best guarantee to prevent one from siding with political fads. Ultimately, FORREST GUMP seems criti- cal of those who think they are smart, like Jenny who considers herself to be more clued in than a simpleton like Forrest. Unlike his blissful ignorance, her restless intellect is expressed as - literally and figuratively - a fatal variant of political engagement. FORREST GUMP is a heart-rending film about a sentimental guy who pur- sues his genuine love for a politically engaged girl whose life is elsewhere and whose wisdom of life can be summed up in the simple tagline: 'Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.' NEW KIDS TURBO can be seen as the conversion of the sentimental FORREST GUMP into a rude comedy. Its hypothesis can be summarized as: what if For- rest had gone wild under the influence of four buddies, with Rikkert - who has 68 I a young mother as a girlfriend, but has never had sex with her - in the role of Forrest. If Forrest Gump seems critical of intellectual smartness and political engagement, then NEW KIDS TURBO, as a version of 'Forrest gone berserk,' adds to this a vehement attack on the obstacles created by social rules. So any figure who upholds such rules becomes the butt of a joke. This can be exe- cuted in a relatively friendly atmosphere, when Gerrie pokes fun at the local policeman, Adrie, by making him run for his cap. The New Kids, however, get seriously angry when after what they consider a minor offence against a civil servant at the social security office, their unemployment benefits are reduced to zero. First, we see how a bill collector, in a rapidly cross-cut sequence, is persistently ringing the doorbell. Not only is he hit on the nose when Richard finally opens the door, but Adrie also receives a punch in the face when he comes to the assistance of the bill collector. From this moment onwards, it is time for hard and gun-blazing action, for the law enforcement officers have decided that their practice of looting are totally unacceptable. The trick of the film is similar to FLODDER: how to legitimize the totally unorthodox practices as sufficiently valid so that the New Kids - despite their anti-social stance - can maintain their role as the sympathetic underdog? NEW KIDS TURBO hinges upon a twofold rhetorical strategy. First, Richard who more or less acts as their leader succeeds in sentimentalizing their posi- tion, when they are interviewed for the local television station TV Brabant. We hear sentimental music, when Richard tells the story that he was a normal, hard-working guy who got fired because he had brought his bulldog Gradje to his job at the sanitation department. In times of economic crisis, he laments, it is hard to find another job. While we see a shot from the journalist who nods in an understanding way, Richard explains that he could not leave his dog alone at home, because the animal is sick. Due to sensitive intestines, the HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM dog needs special food. While he wipes off tears from his eyes, Richard is also shown peeping from under his hands to see whether his story has the wished- for effect upon the journalist, which emphasizes that he only play-acts his sor- row. Moreover, the television item is intercut with shots from viewers, and the most important of these viewers are two men in a caf. One has apparently drunk so much that he has dozed off on the bar, but the other one is still drink- ing beer and talking, to no one in particular, after we get a close-up of Gradje: 'That is such a sweet dog,' and then again, almost in tears: 'My God, that is a sweet dog.' While the journalist ends his item by stating that the viewers have to decide for themselves whether the five buddies are dangerous swindlers or victims of the economic crisis, the viewers within the diegesis have already decided in their favour. The moment that definitely affirms their status as piti- ful victims, is when the beer-drinking man in the cafe yells to the bartender: 'Hey homo! We won't pay for anything anymore, either. Hand me four more beers, dude,' which is followed by a shot of men sitting on a couch, tearing up I 69 letters from the taxman. The media coverage of the New Kids works to encour- age sympathy for them and will result into a chain reaction, for many inhabit- ants of the region of Brabant will imitate their example. Second, insofar as the New Kids might be 'bad boys,' any civilian alter- native is worse. The very worst is probably the Minister of Defence who is called upon by two officials to intervene because of all the uproar in Brabant. Since the five buddies are identified as the root of the problem, the minister decides to bomb Maaskantje, which he constantly mispronounces as Maas- kant. (Since he has never heard of the place before, why would anyone else?, he argues.) This cynical attitude is topped by the fact that the army accidently bombs Schijndel, the neighbouring place, of which the minister has probably never heard either, as one of his assistants asks him after the mistake. As the television reports that the bomb - that 'big ass ball of fire,' as the New Kids call it - which has destroyed Schijndel was meant to eliminate Maaskantje, the five buddies become totally determined: 'Nobody touches Maaskantje!' This slo- gan or battle cry functions as a counterpoint to the cynicism of the minister. Despite all their apparently narcissistic pursuit of pleasure - drinking, smok- ing, joyriding, insulting people, breaking things - there is something elemen- tary they care about: they have a deep-felt concern for the small community they are part of. Their birthplace is an undeniable core which constitutes their identity, just like the blood running through their veins. Politicians utterly lack such a core. They only cling to symbolic, and therefore shallow, accoutre- ments signalling power, authority or wealth. The violence that evolves from the battle with the army and the New Kids will be shown in a humorous context, full of wisecracks and unlikely inci- dents. Thanks to the sympathy that has befallen them, the Kids get support LOW-CLASS COMEDIES from a variety of inhabitants of Maaskantje, like the pregnant woman Rikkert used to date and the man who delivers Chinese food. The owner of the snack bar, with whom they had many a quarrel, even comes to their aide, although he in turn has to be saved by Gerrie. Thereupon he confesses that Gerrie actually is his son of whom he always was so very ashamed, but only now he has reason to be proud of this 'ugly ass.' Officer Adrie, no longer under the command of a superior, also takes their side, but they nonetheless are still facing a majority. However, when need is highest, the boot is nighest. As a true deus ex machina, a truck runs over a group of soldiers, deciding the fight in favour of the inhab- itants of Maaskantje. The driver turns out to be a boy with a Down syndrome. Here, at the end, the boy saves the Kids' skins by citing the stock phrase he uses on each and every occasion: 'Truck driver ... honk ... honk.' By this turn of events, the film ultimately concludes with a ludicrous take on FORREST GUMP, for the kid with the Down syndrome is a hyperbolic version of the title charac- 70 I ter from Zemeckis' film. Even though the Kids used the term 'mongoloid' as an insult for practically anyone, even their friends, they more than tolerated the guy's presence throughout the film. Ultimately, the boy pays them back for their benevolence, and his intervention ultimately is evidence that the New Kids, despite their brutality, also have a heart of gold. There is one yet unmentioned difference between FLODDER and NEW KIDS TURBO, and though this distinction is crucial, it is also the main reason why I read the films in tandem. Social worker Sjakie was the butt of many a joke in FLODDER, but was a likeable character. In NEW KIDS TURBO, this role is performed by the local policeman Adrie. He is a lot like them, except that he is in the ('unfortunate') position of maintaining the law. The true culprit in the film, the one who sets the events in motion, is the official of the social work agency. His inflexible attitude enrages them to such an extent that they behave aggressively and lose their unemployment benefits. The historical gap separating FLODDER from NEW KIDS TURBO is that types like 'Sjakie' have become very strict. The original Sjakie was an optimist, a do-gooder par excel- lence, though a bit gullible, but NEW KIDS TURBO can be taken to exert a nos- talgia for 'Sjakie.' That the New Kids feel themselves left to their own devices is because a mediating figure like Sjakie is missing and has been replaced by a hair-splitting civil servant. FLODDER was a comedy that could be enjoyed by the whole family for Sjakie seemed willing to take all the blows. NEW KIDS TURBO is a nihilistic comedy, because the boys feel as if they are taking all the blows themselves, which makes them raving mad. In fact, the attack by the army is a blessing in disguise, for it enables them to project their aggression onto a specific target. HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM Films like FLODDER and NEW KIDS TURBO obviously display stereotypes in a superlative fashion. The blond bombshell, the train-loving grandpa, the disorderly mother in FLODDER are hyperbolic figures, whereas the New Kids are offspring of the utterly indifferent daredevil Johnnie. Stereotypes are an 'arrested, fixated form of representation' (Bhabha, 321), which are always in excess of the norm. They can have severely damaging effects in case people do not recognize the image as a deviation from the norm and take them as 'realis- tic.' The problem then is that they probably will not grasp the humour either, for the basis of this type of comedy is incongruity: one has to acknowledge how obviously the stereotypical representations transgress the norm. One might surmise that this kind of humour can have sanitizing effects: understand- ing that the image of the sexually promiscuous bombshell, to take Kees from FLODDER as an example, is obviously a fiction can help to understand that women are not like that. A counterargument has it that one might react: well, they are not exactly like that, but only to a certain degree. In that case, one pre- |71 sumes that stereotypes may be exaggerated, but they are apparently not totally unfounded, and hence, they are supposed to contain some grain of truth. If it works like that, the stereotypes will leave some residue after all, albeit as a diluted reproduction of the images. From an ideological perspective, the problem with the type of off-colour humour in films like FLODDER and NEW KIDS TURBO is that they lack explicit signs for reflection. If one just laughs at the ridiculous portrayals of the characters, one obviously acknowledges that they transgress the norm/convention, but this also implies that the norm/con- vention is implicitly affirmed. Ma Flodder is comical, because she does not do what a mother is supposed to do. She is not disciplined and she does not give her children a decent upbringing. In understanding her shortcomings, one at the same time positions her representation against a conventional idea of motherhood. In the process of seeing divergence, this idea is then turned into an idealized principle - which is the great pitfall of humour based upon stereotypes. In general, one might say that this kind of humour is ambivalent: it offers as much potential relief from conventional imagery as that it affirms stock representations. Nonetheless, comedies - even such bawdy ones - always have the poten- tial to address issues which can either be too complicated or too controver- sial. One can act as if the jokes are only innocent and make no sense, as Maas' remark that opened this chapter suggested, but in the meantime they have a social significance, as Bergson stresses in his landmark study, Le rice. Via Bergson I will discuss the two 'vulgar' comedies in order to identify them as two historical stages in the domain of humour, separated from each other by the popular success of 'amoral' humour. LOW-CLASS COMEDIES SOCIAL.'RAGGING' In Le rire Bergson is searching for a deeper-rooted meaning of laughter than the obvious claim that we are just smirking at stupid mistakes and trifling matters. For him, earnestness is laughable in particular. In his eyes, man can become comic when he is deadly serious, or rather, when he is overdoing his serious attitude. Any good quality can be regarded as ludicrous as soon as one performs it in a rigid fashion. When a man prides himself on a virtue he possesses - thorough honesty or extreme cleverness, for example - he with- draws from society into himself. And precisely at this point he becomes liable to ridicule (Bergson, 138). Such a man may think he is an utter emblem of a social ideal - of morality, of wisdom, or whatever - but in the eyes of others, his self-righteous attitude is a token of his unsociability. Such a person becomes comic when he falls into a ready-made category. For Bergson, laughter implies 72 I what he called an 'anaesthesia of the heart.' It is essential that we temporar- ily suspend feelings of sympathy, fear or pity for that person, since such feel- ings might prevent us from epicaricacy. Hence, laughter, and schadenfreude in particular, is incompatible with emotion and requires the indifference of a totally detached observer (138). Although Bergson associates this working of laughter with 'high-class comedy' such as the plays of Moliere or novels like Cervantes' Don Quixote, it seems applicable to FLODDER as well (or would that prove that FLODDER is 'high class' after all?). The well-to-do neighbours all seem to fall in a 'ready- made category' of those trying to keep up appearances at all costs. Hence, they only play-act at being sophisticated citizens, and their unrestrained behaviour at the party at the Flodders' residence only serves to prove that in fact there is a discrepancy between their 'inner nature' and their decorum in daily life. The presence of the Flodders has a corrective function insofar as their arrival in the neighbourhood lays bare to what great extent the upper class is not civilized in itself, but only pretends to be civilized. The supreme example of this is the colonel, a well-respected citizen and a member of the fancy tennis club. As the film progresses, he is increasingly estranged from the community up to becoming a 'mad dog,' who defies the authority of the policemen and bombs the Flodders' residence. Thanks to the pres- ence of the presumably anti-social family, his 'true face' as an utterly intoler- able man is revealed. All the laughter that is directed at the neighbours is, to adopt a quote from Bergson 'really and truly, a kind of social "ragging"' (135). On the one hand, the Flodders behave in an apparently rude and anti-social way, but on the other hand, in annoying their neighbours their pretence is exposed, which, within the theory of Bergson, can be taken as a service to social conventions. HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM While the neighbours are shown to lack social cohesion and to be some- what narcissistic, Sjakie represents the other side of the spectrum. He can be regarded as overtly tolerant, upholding the social ideal that if people are giving the same opportunities they will adapt their behaviour for the ben- efit of building a happy community. In order to show the naivety of such an ideal, Sjakie also has to become the butt of the joke, despite his good inten- tions. By contrast, the Flodders owe their role as instigators of comic scenes to their indifferent attitude towards those conventions. A comic character, Bergson claims, no longer 'tries to be ceaselessly adapting and readapting himself to the society of which he is a member' (196), a description which perfectly fits the behaviour of the Flodders. In not adapting to the rules and regulations of society, however, the family members are ultimately accepted as to who they are: big-mouthed, but not so bad after all. If FLODDER is to be seen as a comedy of 'social ragging,' then NEW KIDS TURBO adds an element to it because of its particularly coarse tone. Maas' 73 film was released in 1986, but the relatively recent film by Haars and Van der Kuil post-dates, as I already mentioned, the cinema of the Farrelly brothers, of Tarantino. If in the 198os, PORKY'S (Bob Clark, 1981) and its two sequels were eye-catching sex-comedy box-office hits, then AMERICAN PIE (Paul and Chris Weitz, 1999) and its three sequels, can be called its more extreme match for the new millennium.'s Whereas FLODDER was still a family film, considered fit for the age of 6 onwards, NEW KIDS TURBO has been rated for 16 years, especially due to its violence, its foul language and Rikkert's obsession with getting laid. The havoc wreaked upon citizens, often inno- cent bystanders, is presented so hyperbolically that its cruel violence recalls the effect of cartoons. The cat can be crushed by a rock or blown to pieces, but in the next scene he is chasing the mouse once again. If one is seriously hit in NEW KIDS TURBO, one either simply disappears from the film, without anyone shedding a tear about the loss, or one continues in the next scene, with only relatively minor injuries. Such cartoonish violence has a repetitive effect, as is commented upon in the film's sequel NEW KIDS NITRO (2011), once again directed by Haars and Van der Kuil. A teenager has an encounter with the five, and tells them that their stuff is entertaining but that they keep doing the same thing over and over again. And when the police officer Adrie is hit by a car, the boy starts applauding cynically: 'Of course, there it is: the car accident. Original.' He continues his condescending tone by saying that if they consider making a sequel, they should not think he will 'spend a dime on another boring movie with a bad storyline and the usual shitty New Kids jokes.' While he adds to this that he will look for a cam version on the Inter- net, he happens to be shot in the head due to a clumsy act by Adrie. Hence, the kid is criticizing the option of a sequel while he himself happens to be LOW-CLASS COMEDIES an extra in the sequel, until the moment he is killed, to which he definitely would have said: 'Of course, there it is: another innocent bystander dead. Original.' The crudity of the humour can be seen as an attempt to transgress the norms of what Noel Carroll calls, 'right moral thinking' (80). These norms have been stretched since Tarantino, since the adult animation sitcom SOUTH PARK (which started in 1997), since Sacha Baron Cohen introduced characters like Ali G., Borat, and Bruno. The makers of NEW KIDS TURBO have jumped onto the bandwagon of these comic shock successes. This type of humour is clearly targeted at those who hold the opinion that humour can act as the 'guardian of relevant norms' (Carroll, 85). Once these norms have been stretched and a new implicit 'limit' has been imposed, another film or series will be introduced to abandon this role of humour as 'guardian.' What was an 'amoral' variant of humour in the 1980s will look quite tame from a 74 I present-day perspective. 'Amoral' humour is never stable, for it thrives at the grace of exceeding boundaries. For the amoralist, as Carroll postulates, 'it is a category mistake to suppose that indulging in humour is ever immoral. Humour is categorically beyond good and evil.' Humour is to be regarded as a 'verbal carnival': 'What is said in jest stays in jest' (87). Any offensive remark can be justified by saying that one was only joking.16 In fact, the object of the humour of NEW KIDS TURBO is someone who believes that humour can be, or perhaps even has to be, morally serious. For such a viewer, the hyperbolic display of violence will be 'too gross' and the banality of the jokes will be 'too coarse.' The possibility of this 'too' enhances the comic effect for those viewers who have no problems with the rudeness of NEW KIDS TURBO. At the same time, and here I follow Carroll once more, this aggressive and vulgar type of humour has a 'double edge' (11). In laugh- ing at the New Kids, the 'amoral' viewer who has no qualms about transgres- sive and politically incorrect jokes, already acknowledges his distance from the characters who are 'revealed to be nearly Neanderthal' (Carroll, 101).17 The laughter implies that he does not identify with the attitudes displayed in the jokes, 'but it may indicate [his] feelings of superiority to them' (11). Although the humour is aggressive and transgressive, the laughter itself can be regarded as a safety belt, for it signals that the viewer acknowledges that the attitude of the character is too ridiculous to be endorsed. Laughter is then, as Bergson already suggested, a clue that one does not hold an emo- tional bond with the character. HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM OVER THE TOP: VET HARD, MOORDWUVEN, FILMPJE! Why was NEW KIDS TURBO, if it is so banal, a huge box-office success? It attracted more than one million moviegoers in a relatively brief time span. In making a brief comparison to another off-colour comedy a provisional answer might be suggested. VET HARD [Too FAT Too FURIOUS] (Tim Oliehoek, 2005) is an over-the-top action comedy in the spirit of a rude comic strip. Mast, an old gangster, is hospitalized because of his bad liver. As a last wish he wants to see his son Koen on whom he has never laid eyes before, but this son is in a Belgian prison, since he, as Mast claims, had not paid his parking fines. Aided by his two sons, the corpulent gangster Bennie, who is Mast's adopted son, will attempt to liberate Koen. One of Bennie's sons has an absolutely crazy master plan, based upon arithmetic and acrobatic tricks. It is impossible to execute, but it works wonderfully. Mast is very happy to see his son, but he is on the verge of dying unless he has a very expensive operation in South America. From then 75 onwards, they try to raise enough money for the operation by way of a variety of (criminal) activities, such as a bank robbery, betting on a fixed kick-boxing match, stealing a container of money at Schiphol airport. In addition to the fact that all these actions develop in a bizarre manner, just as in a cartoon, all the characters are a total caricature. Bennie gets mad when he is called 'Fatso'; the ambition of his two sons is to acquire a delicious quiche recipe while their father only wants a simple snack bar; Koen turns out to be a dangerous psy- chopath who had not only killed five women in the past, but also two after his jailbreak, excusing his misdemeanours with the words: 'She fell.' The one woman Koen cannot kill - despite the obvious references to the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO - is Katia, who during several crucial moments needs to pee. There is the prototypical dope Vuk who is said to be quite good with electricity, but actually it is the opposite. And I have not even mentioned the many cameo appearances of well-known Dutch celebrities like TV presenter Chazia Mourali as a bitchy nurse; film critics Rend Mioch and Jac Goderie in a cinema, one eating popcorn, the oth- er asleep; porn star Kim Holland as a pole dancer; or Estelle Gullit, the then wife of an ex-football player, as a stewardess. They all meet a quick and vio- lent death, except for Holland, who is 'only' used as some sort of punching ball. Hilarious is the scene with the stewardess who bows over a wounded man at the airport, trying to reassure him with her one line: 'The ambulance will be here soon,' not knowing that at that very moment an ambulance has been dropped from an aeroplane and is about to land upon them. All the bizarre incidents and striking cameos do not alter the fact that the plot of VET HARD hinges on the deeply felt tenderness of both Bennie and Koen for Mast. They are prepared to do anything for the sick, old man, up to making LOW-CLASS COMEDIES a childish drawing. In a film in which everything is so utterly incredible and over the top, the suggestion of such warm feelings for Mast becomes a trav- esty itself. These feelings are expressed in such an exaggerated way that they are tainted by an overall context of idiocy. In principle, NEW KIDS TURBO is no less idiotic and bizarre than a film like VET HARD (close to 200,000 viewers) - or FILMPJE! (Paul Ruven, 1995), MOORDWIJVEN [KILLER BABES] (Dick Maas, 2007) or BLACK OUT (Arne Toonen, 2012), the latter discussed in chapter 9 - but the film by Haars and Van der Kuil is explicitly set against the background of the economic crisis. Except for Barry, who did not have a job anyway, four of the five protagonists get fired. Even though their work attitude was far from impeccable, they blame it on the crisis. Since the crisis is, rightly or not, associated with the discussion about countries losing their sovereignty in a bigger Europe, there is a counterweight desire among people to cut up the big world in smaller 76 I pieces. It has become increasingly popular to derive one's identity from the local area one inhabits. Similarly, for the New Kids, the outside world begins in Schijndel, the rivalling village next to Maaskantje. If a film like VET HARD can be seen as an attempt to make an over-the-top gangster or crime movie in the vein of comic-strip violence, NEW KIDS TURBO happens to have the additional advantage that it can be seen as a response to 'genuine' social problems, no matter how rudimentary such a response might be. It is a mat- ter of reading the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup but I would dare to propose that the timing of NEW KIDS TURBO was absolutely right. Perhaps this was no more than a coincidence, the inverse of collateral damage so to speak, but then it was a case of mere luck. Further, VET HARD could be seen as a typical product of the so-called 'grachtengordel,' a term often used pejoratively to indicate the elitist Canal District in and around Amsterdam, and the parade of (semi-)celebrities, known from television basically, in the film testifies to this association. The 'grachtengordel' is the prototypical 'non-region' in the Netherlands to which countryside areas position themselves as regional. To emphasize that VET HARD lacks a 'regional' aspect and does not respond to local 'problems,' the fact can be mentioned that it is a remake of the Danish film GAMLE MAEND I NYE BILER [OLD MEN IN NEW CARS] [Lasse Spang Olsen, 2002). By contrast, the New Kids could depict themselves as 'grassroots' filmmakers, who were not part of the media establishment. They simply gained the opportunity to make a film because their YouTube clips had attracted attention due to their use of foul language and the aggressive tenor of the actions. Moreover, most of the cameo appearances are by people who have expressed explicit ties to the province of Brabant - Teeuwen, Maassen, actor Frank Lammers.18 Perhaps even more than the other films in this chapter, this film is aimed at HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM a target audience of young adolescents who dislike big city areas and elite tastes. And they sure responded to the release of the picture, for NEW KIDS TURBO was a gigantic box-office hit and broke records during its opening week. The prize of such popularity as 'regional outsiders' among adolescents is that success cannot endure: one loses one's cherished image of fresh new- comers. The only option left for its sequel, NEW KIDS NITRO, was to make an overblown version: bigger, louder, more spectacular. In offering a truly over-the-top comedy, in which, among others, the New Kids have to battle with zombies in the region of Friesland, the sequel lost track of its social the- matic. No matter how loose the connection with a social thematic, as soon as it is practically absent, a comedy seems to be void of any urgency, which, influences its (box-office) appeal negatively. In order to avoid misunderstanding: this aspect of a social urgency is not an iron law, but it is only one of many conditions that can help to make a 77 comedy really successful - apart from the usual stuff, like funny jokes, well- timed performances, solid camera work and editing. For his MOORDWIJVEN Maas was expecting at least a million moviegoers, but it attracted 'only' 400,ooo. According to the standards of Maas, this is a modest number, but, this relatively disappointing result is due to the absence of a clear conflict between the lower class and the higher class. The story of MOORDWIJVEN is little more than a portrayal of the lives of three spoilt-rotten wealthy women who are mainly preoccupied with plastic surgery. After the famous doctor Bilderberg is shot, one of them says: 'Well, Kit, you were right on time with your nose.' Their lack of empathy comes to the fore on many occasions; when the black gardener from Togo is found dead in the swimming pool, one of them crudely remarks: 'Oh no, now the pool has to be disinfected again.' As their major form of distraction, the three women conspire to have one of their adulterous husbands killed. In the case of MOORDWIJVEN, the film spectator is left with a view of a greedy, posh culture, but there is no character who mediates this look for us. One could argue that such mediation is not necessary here, and that exactly is the problem with the film. Seeing the overdone acting of female friends with an affluent lifestyle and hearing their decadent comments, it is (much too) obvious that this comedy is to be interpreted as a parody of the upper class throughout. By contrast, the strength of FLODDER was that the viewer started with a prejudicial view of the lower-class family, but as the comedy progresses, the vulgar Flodders garner increasing sympathy at the expense of the high class. The main protagonists in MOORDWIJVEN are so utterly shallow and outrageously silly from start to finish that there is no other option than to laugh at them or, even worse, to cast a cool glance LOW-CLASS COMEDIES at their overblown behaviour. Moreover, unlike FLODDER and NEW KIDS TURBO, MOORDWIJVEN lacks - as does VET HARD - any reference to some deep-rooted social problem, and hence, it risks being a film without a par- ticular trigger, lacking a minimal amount of engagement. No wonder that critics considered it a farcical observation in comic-book style rather than a humorous comment upon a social bias. My criticism of MOORDWIJVEN is that this comedy lacked a dialectical tension; there was no 'versus,' such as the lower class versus the higher class, for the high-class ladies were already disadvantaged from the start. Such a 'versus' can also be too crude, and then it does not work either. That is to say, Ruven's FILMPJE! did not get great reviews, but it fared quite well at the box office, for the film had the obvious advantage of being an extended ver- sion of brief sketches in a TV show hosted by the popular comedian Paul de Leeuw. He always announced these sketches by yelling 'Filmpje!' to clarify 78 I that it is recorded and not live. FILMPJE! was the very first film in the Neth- erlands which was altered based upon the reactions of a test audience. The consistency of the film's plot was sacrificed to have as many scenes as pos- sible with the two characters from the show, Annie and Bob de Rooij, both played by De Leeuw.'9 Annie is always dressed in the very same chequered ensemble and she is very naive and good-hearted. When asked what she thinks of gambling, she says: 'I am against gambling, but if you want me to be in favour of it, I am in favour of it. I simply do not have an opinion.' She simply does not want to offend anyone. THE WIZARD OF Oz is her favourite movie, because, against all odds, she believes that happiness will be 'some- where over the rainbow.' Annie is such an exaggerated version of credulousness that she is brusquely exploited all the time by her husband, Bob, who is her polar opposite. In the beginning of FILMPJE!, he files for a divorce because Annie refused to give him a blow job. Bob is an extremely rude and nasty charac- ter, who has a whinnying laugh each time he does something nasty or uses foul language - and he laughs a lot. They are such an odd couple that their confrontation lacks tension, for she is always too gentle and he is always too vulgar. Since they are stock characters, each and every confrontation is only a slight variation upon the same theme, and therefore the film never becomes more than a series of sketches. In the end, FILMPJE! is better at being a spoof of James Bond movies and of PULP FICTION than in offering some coherence in plot, let alone a socially urgent plot.20 This incoherence is addressed by Bob himself, when he suddenly looks into the camera, in a big close-up and says: HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM Yeah boppers, it is turning into a really weird movie, don't you think? I have read the script, and therefore I know how it will end, but I am in a funk right now. Of course, it has a happy end, within less than half an hour, with some fun song from THE WIZARD OF Oz, and a tin man and a scarecrow and the smoked sausage from Oss2", but how will it end? Sud- denly, everyone is lost. Now, I am about to jerk off. Not because I feel like it right now, but it might give me the idea that I have had an enjoyable day anyway. LONG LIVE 'SJAKIE' The off-colour and vulgar comedies in this chapter are obsessed with the physical joys of drinking, drugs and sex and/or with aggressive impulses and/or, in the case of MOORDWIJVEN, beautifying one's body. These obses- 79 sions are so hyperbolic that any viewer may feel superior to the cartoonish characters. Even though their fixations manifest themselves differently, the common denominator is to discredit social conventions. This can happen by legitimizing violence (as in SCHATJES!), by glorifying 'authentic' rudeness (as in FLODDER and NEW KIDS) or in parodying the effects of plastic surgery (in MOORDWIJVEN). These comedies testify to Critchley's dictum that worse than the 'animal within' is a person acting like a person. The concert scene in WAT ZIEN IK?! illustrates the disregard of the prostitute for the strict codes of the cultural elite. In SCHATJES! the riotous children hold up a mirror to confront their highfalutin' parents with the shallowness of their authority. The guys in NEW KIDS TURBO cling to their regional identity because they feel themselves victims of a globalized and abstract economy, represented by a civil servant who defends himself by saying he is only doing his job. Actually, FLODDER offers the finest example of the relief theory in this regard: it is a good thing to give way to one's impulses, for those well-to-do inhabitants who become a bit like a Flodder are not as derisive as those who still aim to keep up appearances. Neighbour Neuteboom, who is under the spell of the female Kees and tries a joint, is more likeable than his nagging wife. Better to accept some 'animal- like' behaviour than hang on to the restrictive codes of the upper class. In her study Good Humor, Bad Taste, Giselinde Kuipers has analyzed Dutch humour as a 'social phenomenon.' The building block of her theory is that each and every social group can and probably will appreciate jokes differently. The vulgar humour discussed in this chapter is often derided by intellectuals, but generally positively valued by the lower classes. Kuipers observes that the 'Dutch tend to think of themselves as a classless society, making references to social class slightly taboo' (16).22 The utopian nature LOW-CLASS COMEDIES of this thought is undermined as soon as lower-class characters are turned into main protagonists - like the family Flodder, like the New Kids, like the criminals in VET HARD. If these comedies have some merit, it is above all to break the taboo not to refer to class-based distinctions. It is highly significant that the narrative crisis in NEW KIDS TURBO is the result of a conflict with a civil servant from the social security office and that in FLODDER, the social worker is the ultimate butt of the joke. Sjakie's belief that one is the product of social circumstances is derided as hope- lessly naive, and this is basically shown on the basis of incongruity. Each of his statements is contradicted, often via editing. When he mentions that the Flodders are, deep down, sensitive people, we immediately get a shot transi- tion to Ma getting angry, hitting one of her kids and kicking the dog. This can be regarded as no more than cheerful amusement, but at the same time and despite all the vulgarity of the Flodders, Maas' comedy also functions as 80 a clear thorny signal. The film expresses a certain discontent with the Band- Aid approach of left-wing politics, represented by well-meaning social work- ers. Though these latter are the object of (mild) humour in FLODDER, NEW KIDs TURBO owes its brutal tone to precisely the frustration of the increased inflexibility of a new generation of 'Sjakies.' To couch the aggressive and vulgar humour of the New Kids in positive terms: better well-meaning and naive than nitpicking about rules and details - long live 'Sjakie.' HUMOUR AND IRONY IN DUTCH POST-WAR FICTION FILM  ~&~j 2% ,',.A ~ * ~*. 2' >,21.~ N~N'N ,\.** ~ **~** ~ . N ~ ........................... * . <2\~:2. ~, .~., ', ~ ,' '22 ~ 2 .2 ~ 2~ 2%~~ ~ 2.,. ~ N ~N..* ~ * ~ N.. .. N22%Q' ~ ~ ~2~NN* Y~.N ~ 2~222%222%\~2222K~22 >2%~2222 \2222j~.~>K22W2 *. 2222 2%~ ~ N~. ~~222i.22\NN~22NN2N&~ N~N~NNNN24 %%~2%~N%22N N ~ N2,.N, .. ~ N'