I’d’ve shot Marvin Gaye if I was Marvin Gaye’s dad

Kris is watching “The Office,” episodes I saw late last night, so I wandered upstairs and decided to see what Netflix might offer for instant queuing. I fancied the moment akin to me old college days, when I was green in judgment and grateful for whatever hack horror film I could muster up on cable, so I consciously sought out some crap I would probably never allow myself to actually have sent to my home, simply because it’d seem too much like paying to see them. (And, for any of you who’ve questioned my judgment, you can imagine what someone with my almost degree-zero lack of taste might prefer not to pay to see.) So I found a little early-nineties horror-satire called Satan’s Little Helper, the work of one Jeff Lieberman who various very interesting fan blogs call an unsung hero of indie popcorn horror. (Check out the fantastic final girl blog.)

That all said, and I’d be wasting your time if you had anything worth doing, which you don’t, Little Helper wants to be a satire of our love of violence, always a tricky move best attempted in a genre other than brutal-killers-on-the-road or slasher flick. It’s intermittently interesting, but shot on a budget that would be pleased to be called shoestring, with atrocious acting especially from the terrible eponymous kid Helper, but I did think the thing had some pizzazz and style in its almost classical framing, editing, and development. I enjoyed a little of its manic violent (‘though actually fairly non-graphic and muted violent) wit. Still, it’d have been a lot more fun at 2 a.m. on Cinemax, me half in the bag.

But now I had this itch. What to do? And I remembered, since Jeff recently taught the film and wondered what I’d thought of it, that I had yet to watch my downloaded copy of Martin McDonagh’s academy-award-winning short film Six Shooter. It’s outstanding–funny, vicious, strangely moving.

A man who’s just lost his wife (and before you piss about his carelessness note that it was cancer) boards a train home and sits across from the Kid, an aggressively motor-mouthed, pasty-faced, green-track-suited snot who quickly entangles him in absurdist anecdotes and deep-thoughts about Marvin Gaye, infanticide, bloated livestock, and so on. Most of the major characters are mourning a death or about to experience one; the film could be–and has been, by many–labelled showboat thrill-ride sadism, misanthropically funny yet nihilistic. And others, trying to legitimate their pleasures, see in it (and much of McDonagh’s stagework) a satire of violence and violent cultures through the medium of absurdist cruelty.

And I think either view’d be mostly wrong, or at least missing the boat.

I see the Kid–like many of McDonagh’s characters–as a kind of life-force. Sure, he seems duty-bound to get under the skin of–and drive to suicide–those seeking any real emotional connection, he cackles about a cow’s combustive end as the best feckin’ day of his life. But we have these characters onto whom he’s latched–the grieving husband (a superlative Brendan Gleeson) and a grieving couple who’ve just lost their son to cot death–and he’s Daffy to their Elmer; any hint of sadness or somberness is met with aggression, yet smile at his notes and he’ll gladly buy you tea, and ask after your feelings as you leave the train. I haven’t really got this nailed down (and should, as I’m teaching one of McDonagh’s plays, “The Pillowman,” over the next couple weeks) but he strikes me as tackling head-on (maybe not tackling; maybe driving to the ground in a flurry of fists and kicks) the desire for mimesis and identification as the ostensibly natural–let alone best and most vital–objectives for great art. To get us to feel, and think, do we need to care for the characters, to see their triumph or tragedy in realistic terms? Bah. I think he trumpets the outrageous perfection of the cartoon as an emblem of human endeavor: the furious aggression, the wild gaming wordplay, the triumphant existential energy of doing it again and again and again.

I dug it. Way better than Satan’s Little Helper. Can’t wait to see his first feature, coming in Winter with Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Colin Farrell….