This is a section of the blog where I have something off the side and doesn't pertain to the list I have in the introduction. These series of blogs are more of speculations and wishful thinking on my part. Its random ideas I have in my head that doesn't really belong in the list but its also too interesting to ignore so I call it, "Something Less Serious" for selected posts.
Mad World is full of repetitious gags and phrases throughout the mammoth comedic epic. Some would say its too long and repetitious in its story or (lack of ) for some people. I would argue however that was the intention of William and Tania Rose.
What if I told you that the Roses followed a literary device that was applied in writing the Bible, the Illiad, and even the Harry Potter series?
This device is known as the ring composition in which the story beats repeats itself throughout the narrative. This is something you see clearly in Mad World which takes its time in laying out its story and its episodic style of slapstick humor to make a solid whole. To use an old cliche for this movie, "there is a purpose behind the madness."
Renowned anthropologist, Mary Douglas coined this term of a "ring composition."
In her book, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (Yale, 2007), she details how stories from Homer's Iliad to Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, to include key passages and books of the Old and New Testaments and epics from every aural culture living and dead are configure as rings with specific characteristics. She explains that this "macro- structure" is invisible to the analytic modern readers focused on plot, language, and theme but that its internal echoing on top of its beginning and ion mark a ring artistry.
"Closure is the only, or even the principal, condition for a ring. Essentially, ring
composition is a double sequence of analogies. First a sequence of analogies.
First a sequence is laid down, then at a certain point the sequence stops and the
series turns around and a new sequence works its way backward, step by
step toward the beginning. This puts each member of the new series parallel
to its opposite number in the first series, so the return journey reverses the
order of the outgoing journey. The longer ring forms tend to embellish the mid-
turn with an elaborate commentary. A well-make turning point is a sign of a well-
designed ring composition. Sometimes it is so long as to mislead the reader about
its place in a larger sequence."
Ms. Douglas has "abstracted seven rules or conventions from long ring compositions" whose "meaning" is in the middle "that help identify this story scaffolding and reveal its principle message. These seven "rules" are not "hard and fast" but indicators reflecting the technical problems to be overcome telling a successfully rounded tale. For our purposes I think they can be distilled even further down to our characterisitics:
1. THE BEGINNING AND END MEET
2. THE BIG TURN:Prof. Douglas explains it this way:
"If the end is going to join the beginning the composition will at some
point need to make a turn toward the start. The convention draws
an imaginary line between the middle and the beginning, which divides
the work into two halves, the first, outgoing, the second, returning. In
a long text it is important to accentuate the turn lest the hasty reader miss it,
in which case the rest of the carefully balanced correspondences will also be missed."
3. PARALLEL FRONT AND BACK HALVES:
Prof. Douglas:
"After the mid-turn the next challenge for the composer of a ring to arrange the two
sides in parallel. This is a done by making separate sections that are placed in
parallel across the central dividing line. Each section on one side has to be matched
by its corresponding pair on the other side. In practice the matching of sections often contains
surprises; items are put into concordance that had not previously been seen to be
similar. Parallelism gives the artist opportunities of taking the text to deeper levels of
analogy. When the reader finds two pages set in parallel that seem quite disparate, the
challenge is to ask what they may have in common, not to surmise that the editor got muddled."
4. RINGS WITHIN RINGS (Nerds 59-61)
As I stated before there is a reason behind the madness and there is parallelism throughout this gigantic film. Throughout you see reflections (or reverse echoes) of certain scenes. Let's take a look at these reflections.
1. Big Dubya and Mad for Money/Airborne Hag:
2. Head Games and Crooked Cop:
3. Splits and The Dig:
4. Reckless and "W":
5. Other Means and Arrival:
6. Piece of Pie and Loopy:
7. Big Bang and Out of Control:
8. Intermission
Dead center of the film as all the characters in conflict and it foreshadows what happens to all of them at the end but it also references the beginning with all the vehicles sailing out there including Otto! They are all clutching onto something like they do on the ladder scene and Culpepper speech about how he is ruined at the end of the film is pronounced very loudly over the two phones before the intermission card shows up in a wordless scene.
Not only that you also have phrases that is repeated time and time again throughout the film like, "we're wasting time!" As stated before there is quite a bit of foreshadowing that you pick up after repeat viewings such as Culpepper telling Aloysius, "everything is going my way" which it it doesn't as it shows near the end of the first act.
Or the fact near the cliffhanger of the first act that Otto raises his fist at the kid as he is sinking his convertible in the river and one of his arms is raised at the end because his entire body is broken.
Or even the fact that Smiler foresees everything that was going to happen even in this line, "watch out for the bulls...Lousy, stinkin' bulls everywhere. Bulls all over the place!"
Not only does it foreshadows the police watching over the zany racers
but also Culpepper lies to them about being an honest cop!
I don't think enough praise is given to William and Tania Rose for providing a very concise and jam packed script. In splitting the film into eight rings you can see it form into one major ring that is really exemplary and very solid. The Roses does appear to understand the mechanics of the structure to a high degree.
EPILOGUE:
WORKS CITED
1. Douglas, Mary. Thinking In Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. Yale University Press: 2007.
2. Ed. Granger, John and Prinzi, John. Harry Potter For Nerds:Essays For Fans, Academics, and Lit Geeks. "On Turtleback Tales and Asterisks". Unlocking Press: 2011.
3.It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Dir. Stanley Kramer. Perf. Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Johnathan Winters. 1963. MGM, 2001. DVD.
This is a section of the blog where I have something off the side and
doesn't pertain to the list I have in the introduction. These series of
blogs are more of speculations and wishful thinking on my part. Its
random ideas I have in my head that doesn't really belong in the list
but its also too interesting to ignore so I call it, "Something Less
Serious" for selected posts.
It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a 1963 epic comedy that featured an all-star cast that ranges from Spencer Tracy to the Three Stooges. It not only carries a slew of great comedians a great comedians and a great comic cast but also have an abundance of heavy slapstick and special effects for the more elaborate pratfalls. Which raises the question is Mad World a live action cartoon?
It certainly seems this way especially how it is all structured around the great American chase that you see in constant live action and animated shorts and its made on such a large scale that its hard to ignore such influence. It even has distinguished voice actors such as Stan Freberg, Edward Everett Horton, Marvin Kaplan, and Arnold Stang who had done voice work prior to their roles in the film. In this case you would think with all this comedic cast as well as setpieces that include a gas station being demolished as well as the basement of the hardware store.
Well...Not exactly. In the book, Comedy/Cinema/Theory there is an essay called "Cartoon and Narrative in the Films of Frank Tashlin and Preston Sturges" by Brian Henderson tries to give an explanation about cartoon narrative that patterns recur constantly. Cartoon narratives repeats a basic situation with variations rather than by moving aggressively toward a narrative resolution. Rather resolving themselves, cartoon narratives are often simply suspended at some point and given a more or less an arbitrary ending. Sometimes this is in the form of a kind of epilogue that involves a reversion to a previous state or a jumping ahead to some new point. In the case of well-known cartoon characters, needless to say, the endings of particular films usually leave open the possibility of revival in later works. (Henderson 156)
What about the narrative of Mad World? The principal sidderence between any carbon narrative and that of live action features are long, which is qualitative as well as a quantative difference. (Henderson 156) Nevertheless, Mad World end with a cartoonlike suspension of the narrative as it is accomplished by jumping ahead to a new point in the future of the characters.
As such as the ending where all the male leads are in the hospital all bandaged up from the fire truck ladder fiasco in a very cartoonish manner (where in real life they would very likely suffer concussions or fatality) and also the three women are seen in prison garb accompanied by a female cop. When Mrs. Marcus begins to rant at them before slipping on a banana peel and falls and everyone laughs hysterically afterwards. This resembles (very much I might add) to an ending of a cartoon short and serves as an epilogue even though, apparently, no story time has been omitted the main narrative and it.
However what about the rest of the movie? How cartoonlike is the story/characters/gags? I think it varies from time to time. Was the movie influenced by the Warner Bros. cartoons?
The Fleischer Brothers?
Walter Lanz?
or Mr. Walt Disney himself?
Again its hard to say because sometimes these cartoon studios try to overlap each other to try and stay in business and above all stay relevant.
You see some kind of Disney influence by the way of the sight gags and characterizations given that much detail like a comedic Mickey Mouse/ Donald Duck/Goofy cartoon. However the sight gags for the most part has a softer comedic edge compared to Mad World. The gags in Mad World has a more grittier, harder, and cartoonish element that I think is more akin to the Warner Bros. cartoon shorts.
Bugs meets Mickey: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
In Steve Schneider's book, That's All Folks! talks about the style of the Warners short compared to Disney's:
"In the Warner cartoons mental maturity was coupled with a youthful ebullience
which insisted that, come what may, anything goes...more specifically, the
Warner cartoonists took the Disney style of personality animation - which is
based on the creation of knowable, recognizable, characters - to a different
and eminently hipper level. The turnabout could not have been more extreme;
where cartoons had been soft and frolicsome, Warner's made them hard and
brassy and confrontational. An ideal of charm and gentle humor yielded to
shameless slapstick and mordant satire. The innocence of the forest was
supplanted by the savvy of the city (it's quite a journey from Disney's
cartoon, Lullaby Land to Warner's Bowery Bugs). Fairy-tale timelessness
gave way to constant visual and verbal reference to topical matters
and "real life" concerns (from the BIg Bad Worlf to the "wolves"
hanging out on the corner of the Hollywood and Vine). And the
pacing of these gag-jamborees could become almost
incomprehensibly fast." (Schneider 22-23)
This actually fits more with the style and tone of Mad World. This is not a screwball comedy where we deal with high class oddballs we are dealing with real, honest working to middle class characters. They are also brassy and confrontational and some will not hesitate to pick a fight and some actually do.
There is also satire to be found in the slapstick as well that the characters commit as well making it ten times bigger than the average 90 minute star vehicle. Interesting enough as much as Mad World was considered at the time a big mainstream, comedic its themes and situations are not usually seen up at that time period.
In the 50s the comedies were much broader and more pronounced as you has the buddy comedies like the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis films or the romantic "bedroom farces" like the Doris Day and Rock Hudson films.
This type of theme about pure madness and pure greed was something you saw in a drama, an Ealing comed, or an episode from a sitcom of that time period like I Love Lucy. The fact that a comedy based on greed would get such a large scale treatment shows that Hollywood really stepping out the box and the gags in the film became much more broader as a result. But exactly how broad?
Schneider continues by stating the characterization of the Warner Bros. players:
"...The leading Warner players were endowed with complex, richly nuanced
psyches a fact that accounts mightily for their enduring appeal."(Schneider 23)
The same can be said of the cast in Mad World may be greedy but some of the actions they commit will also be out of fear, suspicion, pride, or wrath. In some ways can be seen as a mixture of Bob Calmpett, Chuck Jones, and the Tom and Jerry shorts from MGM. I say this, because I believe Mad World is not a full blown comedy with cartoonish, outlandish, and mostly improbable gags that you saw in the films of Preston Sturges and Frank Tashlin or even the sitcoms of the era like Gilligan's Island or The Beverly Hillbillies, director Stanley Kramer what critics and average filmgoers give him credit for.
The setting of Mad World is very realistic unlike say Blake Edwards' The Great Race where it is set in a cartoonish version of the turn of the century and it has a large comedians who had played realistic, surreal, or exaggerated characters in past roles or routines. This seuge ways to my first point the reaction shots of the characters. Because these characters are played by comedians or actors/actresses with a HUGE comedic background they will automatically react more exaggerated than usual in a performance in order to gain a laugh. Much like what director Bob Clampett did with his cartoons as Schneider describes his style:
"[Clampett] began pushing his cartoons to the limits of
cartoonliness picking up their existing exaggerations,
replacing any gentleness with slapstick and clamor.
Absurdity and aggressiveness were raised to
preposterous gags detonated like bomb blasts.
If animation is an extension of live-action cinema,
then Clampett was intent on extending it almost
to the breaking point, to places where human
bodies and emotions could not possibly go."(Schneider 74)
You see this throughout Mad World, characters will give out exaggerated takes to show spitefulness they are going to be or rapidly becoming. From Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, Don Knotts, Terry Thomas, Jerry Lewis, Dick Shawn just to name a few gives out cartoonish facial expression the most and they themselves stretch the limits of what you can do in a live action comedy.
From grimaces, anger, and sadness there is no restrictions of what these comedians can do in this film. Aggressiveness abounds throughout from multiple car crashes, demolition of a gas station, airplane hijinks, and the final large scale gag involving a fire engine ladder shows no idea too impossible for Kramer and Clampett.
Much like Kramer, Clampett was not afraid to use sick or black humor with some of the more beloved characters like Bugs Bunny by making him more of a patsy than a winner
or taking Daffy Duck in a more aggressive and even more surreal type of insanity that no other director tried to attempt before or since.
Same can be said of the cast that Stanley Kramer assembled, usually their screen personas
can be brash,
can sing/dance
can act goofy
or can perform slapstick really well.
Here however there roles must be turned a skewed and now they all must become unlikable in some ways in order to send the message home about the dangers of greed.
Some are probably acting more aggressive and outrageous than usual.
However the film does not fully replicate Clampett style, the characters retort their bodies as exaggerated as Clampett's characters and very few topical references is said in the film. Also Clampett's direction is extremely unsubtle and something this film doesn't completely follow either. Another WB director from Termite Terrance that the film seems to take its cues from and that is Chuck Jones.
Schneider also comments on Jones' style:
"But where Clampett used animation's potential to achieve a kind of
overblown overstatement, [Chuck] Jones turned in the opposite direction
to bringing out the subtlest of shadings and nuances within his characters
personalities.
Like the clowns in the silent era whom he had been exposed as a boy,
Jones saw that screen personality was expressed through the way a
character stands, and carries his weight, and moves, and how he connects
with other characters - and the audience - with his eyes. Thus Jones
delved ever deeper into personality as the basis for his comedy, as he
communicated by drawings made to convey worlds of emotion from the
flick of a rabbit's lash to the bending of a duck's bill to the contortions of a
coyote's face. And by the late 1940s, when Jones more expressive poses
mated with a superfine sense of timing, his cartoons gained a psychological
penetration and a depth of humor that were unparalleled."
Schneider goes on to say:
"In such fashion, Jones applies what he called "disciplines" to much else
in his work establishing rules that defined the limits of the game.
'Everyone I've ever respected always used restricted tools," he says.
'The greatest comedians were the ones who wore the simplest costumes
and worked in prescribed areas - like Chaplin.' For Jones, the films
needed nothing beyond their fundamental premises- anything else would
only clutter up the interaction of the characters. (Schneider 100-101)
This would apply to Mad World as well. What many people do not realize is the fact that there is subtly throughout the film. From the scenes in the beginning where the motorists discuss how to split the money and it almost becomes a tit for tat from one of the Bugs/Daffy/Elmer cartoons where they argue about which season for Elmer to hunt.
The facial expressions between the characters alone feel like something from a Chuck Jones cartoon.
All throughout the film's humor comes from the characters' actions and their action is what drives the plot forward much like in Jones' work, plot is substantially an outgrowth of character, not vice versa. (Schneider 107)
Great examples of this are Ali Baba Bunny and One Froggy Evening, both cartoons deal with greed and the consequences of the main characters' actions in a tragic but hilarious fashion. For most of the movie, Captain Culpepper pretty much act like Chuck Jones' Bugs Bunny even when his pension is not getting an upgrade or his family unit is crumbling on the telephone. He still is able to keep that calm and collective persona long enough before he tricks the racers to give him the money. Not only does Mad World feel like a good chunk of Jones' cartoons strung together. The first half of the movie is even set in the desert!
It as if Kramer was homaging the Roadrunner cartoons in this fashion by having the motorists chase each other in their cars the same the coyote will fail at chasing the roadrunner;
and both of them deal with a pared down premise in order to have all the characters generate the plot and the conflict. Side note if there was one character that was a pure Chuck Jones character that would be Melville Crump who has the most Wile E. Coyote moments in the film.
Speaking of chases, the last cartoonish influence for Mad World would be the Tom and Jerry cartoons.
This series also features and much like the Roadrunner cartoons it is mostly silent. However the reason I am mentioning this series in correlation to Mad World is the fact that both use very violent slapstick to get a laugh. Joseph Hanna (one of the creators of the duo) talks about the success full formula of the cartoons:
"I think the reason the series was so popular was the slapstick comedy
and the hard gags and the little guy triumphing over the aggressor. We
always used to say: the harder they hit, the harder, they laugh." (Solomon 170)
If this is the case than Mad World would have the motorists be their own Tom and Jerry within their circle. One is fighting over the other and initially all were following one another to get to the park first. Much like the shorts the film occasionally demolition which seems to emulate a Tom and Jerry cartoons as Ray and Irwin keeps throwing tools at a raging Lennie as he breaks down their garage down bit by bit.
It is revealed in a deleted scene that after the melee that both Ray and Irwin appear from the wreckage, dirty but unscathed much like cartoon characters would traditionally do after some has been applies to them. What's really interesting is the fact during the destruction both Ray and Irwin continually scream as they are toss through windows and doors in the garage much like how Tom screams when he is in pain.
Another interesting comparison is the fact that Melville almost references Tom and Jerry in Yankee Doodle Mouse as both them make battle in a basement in which fireworks are used, sometimes by accident.
The most violent gag in Mad World is the fire ladder scene where everyone on the ladder as it throws them every which way and the male characters are thrown into solid objects in which they slam into; however even though they are flesh and blood, they are much like Tom in that they are unable to be injured and killed off for very long unless the plot says so hence the hospital scene.
Another interesting fact to note is that Lennie wears blue and Otto wears brown as if they could represent Tom and Jerry themselves in human form.
I don't know if this was a conscious decision or Kramer seems to place a lot of cartoonish elements into the film. It may not be in the level of heavy slapstick and impossibility like the Three Stooges or even the films of Preston Sturges or Frank Tashlin but its there. As I have previously mentioned there is quite a bit of sublty and unsubtly in Kramer's magnus opus and it shows that he and the screenwriters understands comedy more than people realizes.
P.S. If you want a Walter Lanz connection here it is:
Works Cited:
1.Henderson, Brian and Horton, Andrew, eds. "Cartoon and Narrative in the films of Frank Tashlin and Preston Sturges". Comedy/Cinema/Theory. California: University of California, 1991. Print.
2.Schneider, Steve. That's All Folks: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation. Henry Colt and Co, 1988. Print.
3. Solomon, Charles. Enchanted Drawings: The History of Drawings. Random House Publishing. 2nd Ed. 1994. Print.
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