Auteurs Depict Monomania
August 18, 2022
Rupert Pupkin is a maniac! His outsized ambition––to be king for a night––is matched only by his lunacy. He is not cunning. His antagonistic designs on the downtrodden Jerry Langford start out harebrained and only unhinge further as The King of Comedy barrels on, eventually seeing ol’ Rupert get all he ever wanted (or so it seems). It’s Rupert’s summit, his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame as the opening act for a captive Langford audience that codas the film and unsheathes its most disturbing revelation. Poor Rupert is entirely mediocre, see. The product of an evidently hard upbringing and subsequent years spent striving for glory, albeit through less than savory means, is a series of jokes that yields only a warped modicum of the laughter and adoration Rupert has long craved. And then, it’s over.
It’s over for Sidney Falco too. Over before it really begins. He has no soul. It was sold, presumably for one bit of press or another sometime prior to his introduction in Sweet Smell of Success. That much becomes clear when he sidles up to the nefarious proprietor of slander J.J. Hunsecker like a scarred fish testing familiar bait. He has, and will again (it’s not long before we see him pimp out a quasi-girlfriend for a lead) traverse any and all channels available in pursuit of success. Falco is intelligent. An apt manipulator. But his tools have deformed him. His breath and bread is predicated on retaining cog status in the ever-churning Hunsecker chum machine and as such, a sort-of vile membrane coats him from the onset.
For all his sins, Rupert Pupkin is still sympathetic. It’s obvious something chemical is wrong with him. There’s a befuddling grotesqueness to his suits and the mustache De Niro adorns him with. He indulges in the fantasies of a child, and has outbursts like one too. Through one lens, he is a victim. Not so in Sidney Falco’s case. With promises that this is the last extended animal metaphor, Pupkin is a hapless possum, Falco a cunning rat; his aims poignantly bottom of the barrel. At least Pupkin was seen by 87 million people. His triumph fits an idyllic concept of fame, almost pure. Understandable. No such sanctity graces Sweet Smell of Success. The King of Comedy and Sweet Smell of Success are prescient and cynical critiques of American media culture as relevant in the contemporary landscape as they were in the periods of their release. With Comedy, Scorsese invites interpretation and maintains a satirical bent. Alexander Mackendrick constructs a far grittier, more scathing, and direct skewer.
There’s a palpable menace to Success’s visuals (DP James Wong Howe): an intensity in the blacks that forebodes, textbook noir compositions that magnify grittiness (especially in the slew of grubby interiors that litter the picture) and weaponize shadow. Exaggerated angles emphasize the immensity of Hunsecker’s power over lowly Falco in scenes (e.g.) at the jazz club. Single/few compositions tend to sustain the bulk, if not the entirety of scenes. We are steeped in environments, arrested by charged dialogue without visual ‘breath,’ intensifying the drama’s neurotic verve. When Mackendrick does take us out onto the post-war New York streets, there is little relief. Long focus––a handy minimizer of the perceived distance between objects––here crowds the skyline: buildings bunch on top of one another, the city seemingly collapsing in on itself, parallel with Falco’s morals. It’s oppressive. Mackendrick effectively forges a symbiosis between the decaying city and the characters themselves.
New York functions differently in The King of Comedy, one of the lesser stylized films in Scorsese’s entire catalog, which holds as a thematic tension the collision of stardom and anonymity. King’s streets teem with life like they do in Success, but they don’t feel malicious. Everyday people go about everyday lives. Rupert and Masha are two such folk. In Rupert speak, they’re schmucks. Jerry Langford takes to the street too. It’s supposedly where he feels safest, a disposition that facilitates his eventual kidnapping. When he takes the path of the common man, he might as well be parting the Red Sea, the way construction workers and elderly women alike sing his praises. Until they betray him, the streets are a haven for Langford, whose interior existence lends the film some of its most intriguing commentary. Langford’s ‘life at the top,’ in his Manhattan high rise or country mansion is a solitary one. Staid, wide compositions shrink him in his own domain––setting down his keys, having a meal at a table set for one. Being known by everyone has rendered him really very lonely. Where Hunsecker relishes subjecting his harem of press agents to a lap-dog dynamic, Langford could do without all the hoopla that haloes him, even before it takes on the bizarre/violent tenor that Rupert and Masha affect.
Press agents need J.J. Hunsecker and he needs them. The American public, Rupert and Masha especially, needs Jerry Langford. Jerry Langford doesn’t necessarily need his fans. It’s this distinction, coupled with its never explicit toggling of reality and Rupert fantasy that complicates and mystifies The King of Comedy’s ending. Sweet Smell of Success, by virtue of its construction, is grippier and more decisive in its payoff, truly in and of itself “a cookie laced with arsenic.” Which is more devastating?