Table Of ContentC O M E D I E S
O F N I H I L I S M
The Representation of Tragedy Onscreen
AMIR KHAN
Comedies of Nihilism
Amir Khan
Comedies of Nihilism
The Representation of Tragedy Onscreen
Amir Khan
LNU-MSU College of International
Business
Liaoning Normal University
Dalian, Liaoning, China
ISBN 978-3-319-59893-2 ISBN 978-3-319-59894-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59894-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944602
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To the Occupiers
A
cknowledgements
I am fortunate to have a second opportunity to compose a page like this.
So much of my thinking and research is indebted to Stanley Cavell as
both my previous work, I believe, and this work, will show. I know not
how to go on exactly in expressing my gratitude because whatever I say
will have been said and felt by many others as Stanley, fittingly, has had
similar influences on a range of scholars of much finer calibre than me.
Some fellow Cavellians whose encouragement and support, either
ongoing or at select intervals in my thinking and writing, has spurred
me along are Sérgio Dias Branco, Larry Jackson, Adam Gonya, Lawrence
F. Rhu, Peter S. Fosl, Rachel Malkin, Byron Davies, Sara Saylor, Bruce
Krajewski, and David LaRocca. Moreover, on this second occasion
I am all the more grateful to have my daughter, Arden, in my life, my
thoughts, and my aspirations; she remains one of my happiest achive-
ments. I draw continued strength and inspiration from my sister, Sarah,
and from my brother, Raheel, and his loving and supportive family. My
mom’s sacrifices are the sort only the luckiest children have the privilege
of taking for granted every day.
Since my last dedication, I have found myself, unexpectedly and hap-
pily (in hindsight) exiled, from a so-called North American or Canadian
existence to a newfound geographical one in China. Friends whose warm
company, either in person or over Skype, I am glad has thus far extended
over the Pacific are Jonas Ng, Zac Schnier, Noah Richmond, Keith
Friedlander, A.S. Dhillon, Nitin Kumar, Jeffrey Fletcher, and Andrew
vii
viii ACKNOwLEDGEMENTS
Song. I am also blessed to know and have known Zahid Makhdoom,
whose spirit spans continents and whose soul and presence I will spend a
lifetime trying to mimic.
Social media affords otherwise disparate souls, however awkwardly,
or perhaps however conventionally these days, an opportunity to
remain in touch, either through heated exchanges or via many accu-
mulated likes and reactions. I’d like to thank Dave Durrant, warbling
J. Turpitude (aka Don Lightband), Colin waddell, Samir Gandesha,
Bethany Ruth Guenther Peter, Tim williams, Justin DeMaris,
John O’Carroll, and Chris Fleming. And, being on this side of the world,
I did have a chance to reconnect with other usual suspects in Nagoya,
Japan at the tenth annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference
in 2016. I cherish the professional and personal exchanges I have had
with Eric Gans, Matthew Taylor, Andrew Bartlett, Richard van Oort,
Ian Dennis, Peter Goldman, Benjamin Matthews, and Kieran Stewart.
Also, I must acknowledge a host of Shakespeareans and Renaissance men
and women, whom I’ve run into elsewhere, including Bill walthall, the
late Eric Binnie, Douglas Green, J.F. Bernard, Gail Kern Paster, Ryan
Netzley, Robert Knapp, Neema Parvini, Laurie Johnson, Mary Crane,
Emily Shortslef, and Douglas Lanier: I am so glad to know you all and
so pleased to have shared my thoughts and ideas with you.
New friends and colleagues in China I would like to mention include
Dean Liu Yamei, who has been extremely helpful, supportive, and open
to my research initiatives. I’d like to thank also members of a very capa-
ble support staff, especially Abraham Hammar and Selina Song. Other
colleagues I have the great pleasure of knowing, and who double as
excellent building mates, include Steven Henry, Chandra Sinha, Fanis
Trantos, and Moctar Alanda. To Associate Dean Mike Coutts, both
mentor and friend: I cannot thank you enough for giving me the oppor-
tunity to teach in Dalian. One should not use the word “lifeline” too
hastily for fear of both exaggeration and cliché; but, to use another, I was
at the end of my rope when I received a call, seemingly a world away—a
call which opened up for me a world.
Convention in China prevents close acquaintances from expressing
heartfelt thanks. I am not likely to be pitch-perfect here, but I owe sin-
cere thanks to Lü Yan Xia and wang Jing. I am also delighted to have
discussed with and learnt from Chen Beile who has begun, like me, in
a new world. Lastly, I’d like to mention Han Yang—in some ways my
namesake and to whom I may‚ one day in future‚ owe a dedication.
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Farming Out Resentment: Up in the Air 29
3 All War and No Agency: Tropic Thunder 51
4 Tragic Cinema: The Death of Subjectivities in JCVD 65
5 Hiding from Significance: Winnebago Man 93
6 A Claim to Community: The Trotsky 107
7 A Plea for Time in a State of Nature: Be Kind Rewind 129
8 Losing the Name of Action: Hamlet 2 145
9 Conclusion 163
Index 167
ix
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 6.1 The “Grand Narrative” of Leon’s life appears
to us sans humains 115
Fig. 6.2 The camera begins its vertical pan 116
Fig. 6.3 The dialectic passes … 116
Fig. 6.4 … before our eyes 117
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
My central thesis is that film depicts decay and, further, that they have no
choice in the matter (though I cannot say they had no choice in the mat-
ter). The present-day ontological realities of film itself necessitate that
even films that end happily (i.e., affirmatively) do so ironically, by way,
that is, of presenting a world dead to us and past, to be received pas-
sively. Movies cannot show us the future—or, perhaps, if they want to
be taken seriously, a dystopic future (the sort parodied in Ben Stiller’s
Tropic Thunder, as Scorcher I–VI)—dystopic because, as I will go on to
argue, film reveals, in the fullest sense of the Fryvian use of “revelation”
(meaning “apocalyptic”) its hands as bare. The revelation is that there is
nothing to reveal—a cause either of scandal or empowerment depend-
ing on how you view things. Through the reading of seven films that
makeup, but do not exhaust, a genre I loosely call, in lockstep with the
Stanley Cavell, the comedies of nihilism, I want to emphasize that film,
for whatever reason, has been made to show its hand as bare. The pos-
sibilities of the art form are not to be explored here and the possibility
of recovery—say, of possibilities for, or of, the medium lost—only ten-
tatively expressed. This project is a continuation of Cavell’s treatment of
comedy (which, incidentally, follows his reading of Shakespearean trag-
edy [King Lear and Othello, anyhow])—more specifically, of comedy as
depicted on film.
Cavell argues in his Pursuits of Happiness (1981)1 that the golden age
of Hollywood cinema, in working toward a certain type of happy conclu-
sion, depicts not the marriage that consecrates the conventional happy
© The Author(s) 2017 1
A. Khan, Comedies of Nihilism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59894-9_1
