The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)

[therewillbeblus]

I’m not sure if I could make an argument beyond I was laughing for reasons I assume were intentional rather than accidental on the part of the film.

Looking at Aronofsky's oeuvre, it doesn't track. He used the same misery porn accentuation in Requiem and has approached his material with a pretty rigid self-seriousness throughout his career, which can certainly work at times, but to all of a sudden be lampooning himself without any cues just seems wrong and tone deaf. I suspect you were laughing because it was so obviously overindulging artificial theatricality without awareness, like The Room barely passing for a star-studded Oscar bait drama

[knives]

Thanks for explaining my experience to me. Aronofsky has dealt with comedy before. Just look at his previous film for an immediate example. The humour starts with Tom and Ellie’s laid back conversation and reaches a crescendo as Morton and Fraser laugh at the opposite way their own inequities have molded their lives. Even the ending recalls the way that AGI fused melodrama to comedy in Birdman and Bardo.

It’s okay if you don’t see humour in this presentation, but that doesn’t render a lie my experience.

[therewillbeblus]

I'm not trying to explain your experience to you, which is by nature subjective. You were laughing because you thought it was funny. Great. But you attached your subjective experience of seeing humor in the presentation to the intention of the film without offering anything other than a broad "for reasons I assume were intentional rather than accidental on the part of the film." So forgive me for pushing back on a vague assumption with my impressions of the auteur's practices and intentions. We obviously see Aronofsky's approach differently, which is fine (I didn't think the ending for this film was self-conscious about that fusion in the way AGI's work is), but you didn't respond with that. Challenging your theory of objective intentions is different than challenging your subjective experience, but just to be crystal clear: Anyone is allowed to find something funny regardless of its intention. Whether Tommy Wiseau designed The Room to be funny or whether it's funny because he tried to make something serious and failed doesn't take away from the humor found in this juxtaposition of tones, or discount the validity of the experience of finding it funny. You're fusing two different things together without allowing space for them to be mutually exclusive, and so it doesn't leave room to engage with you in discourse if you're going to feel insulted by pushback on the objective element you're attaching to your subjective experience. Sorry if you read that differently than I intended it, but if you reread my last sentence about "why you were laughing," I hope you can see that I'm talking about what the film is intending to do, which is producing something laughable but I think sourced in a different place, rather than calling your experience a lie.. We both found the film laughable and both of our experiences are valid for a common reason divorced from the artists' aims.