Documentary No

There's a glut of comedy sketch shows on TV right now (Inside Amy, Key and Peele, Drunk History, and so on), and some of these shows are funny-haha, some funny-weird, and many are funny-not.  I would have to describe the first installment of Documentary Now, the new half-hour gig on IFC cooked up by Saturday Night Live veterans Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader as a combination of all three of those categories, but what wins out in the end is definitely funny-not.

First off, I love Fred Armisen.  He has a mask-like face that registers stupidity and confusion without having to move a muscle, and he deploys that plastic expression throughout most of his impressions, giving each bit of mockery he does a sort of Armisen through-line that makes it all hilariously precise and also broad enough to be slapstick.  I don't think I've ever laughed harder at him that earlier this year on the premiere episode of one of his other sketch comedy shows Portlandia, which just finished up its fifth season.  The premiere segment featured the back-story of the owners of Women and Women First, a feminist bookstore, and Armisen played Candace, a stodgy, judgmental, hilariously un-self-aware activist, as she was in the early 90s, a sexed-up, man-hungry, careerist tiger-lady in beautifully garish power skirt and pant outfits, prowling the halls of Big Business, just itching for a fight or a fuck.  That same dim but feverish face attached to that early-90s sense of what it means to be a glass-ceiling-buster was so hilarious because it was both parody and paean, over-the-top and yet sensitive enough to give Candace a break:  she's a broken, dimwitted icon, but she's a goddamn icon none-the-less.

Documentary Now's premiere episode features a sendup of Grey Gardens, the 1975 documentary about Edith Beale and her daughter Edith who live in the Hamptons in a haunted house.  Titled Sandy Passage, the mockumentary goes through the motions, with Hader playing the daughter and Armisen playing the mom, and at first you feel warm about it all, that the mockers are somehow enchanted by what's being mocked and we're in for great strangeness fortified by camp and homage.  For about five minutes, it is all that, with Hader and Armisen riffing on all the many idiosyncrasies involved:  the rotten-wood house, the raccoons, cats and possums who have taken over, the sweatpants turban, the poetic trash of lives lost in doldrums and regrets...  Making fun of how the original movie looks and feels (the Maysles brothers original is a desperately sincere affair, but that only makes the camp of it exquisite and heart-breaking and kind of comforting) is easy to do of course, and fun, but not really that funny.  Grey Garden's unique sensibility allows it to self-parody, thanks especially to Little Edie, who has a knowing countenance and glare every time she seems to be feeling she's being exploited.  In fact, her performance in Grey Gardens is truly a performance.  All the sad/creepy clothes she wears, the affectations she uses to express herself, that beautiful American flag-waving dance she does, all of that artifice, even if it is innocent and completely self-imposed, is completely controlled by her sense of decorum and ego.  So mocking all of that is shooting little Edies in a barrel so to speak, and Hader does so with his usual smattering of otherworldly intonations and stares.  Armisen takes on Big Edie with the same aplomb, giving us a slowed-down, stupider version, but also entering Big Edie into his personal wax-museum of freaks, right up there with Candace and the stolid Native American comedian he'd do on Weekend Update, sitting next to Anchorman Seth Meyers, who happens to be the writer and producer of Documentary Now. 

Meyers, I think, is the main reason that Sandy Passage is funny-not.  It's the narrative.  After the initial and obligatory scene-setting and mockery, the story of Sandy Passage takes a turn into Blair Witch territory, turning the house and the ladies in it into "pure horror," both Edies suddenly turning into grocery-store-delivery-boys-killing witches.  Grey Gardens definitely never wanted to go to that place Sandy Passages seems intent on going.  Even while flirting with the gothic grotesqueries confronting them, the Maysles brothers were intent on both capturing the horror and the swetness.  In fact both constantly intermingle.

It's just too easy to imagine Edie and Edie as malevolent forces, their story as witchy and horrible.  It's a frat-boy take on something a frat-boy could never understand.  Why go there?  I guess for the laugh, but it's not funny, it's just dumb, in the way all lazy easy satire is:  taking a situation that's sad and pathetic and layering on horror-movie kitsch only makes the show feel amateurish at best, and kind of hateful and phobic at the worst.

Edie and Edie's story is about surviving but also about caving in, about pride and sloth and lost chances and ego, but by the end of Grey Gardens there's definitely a sense that both Edies are in on the joke.  In the end, watching Sandy Passage, you truly get the sense that parodying Grey Gardens, without understanding its essence and power, is the ultimate in redundancy, and even the ultimate in disrespect.

Drag without Drag

 

 

Drag can be a drag sometimes, a rote activity performed because it's "drag," not because it's exciting or unique or funny or astute.  Drag-shows (the ones in gay bars, on Logo, and a lot of other venues across the entertainment spectrum) can become as one-two-three as old-school stand-up routines or kitschy sing-alongs, so self-conscious and people-pleasing you want to push a dollar-bill at it all and then walk away.  I've been to, and seen, a lot of those kind of shows, with lip-syncing queens acting all busy and fierce in shiny costumes that seem worn out as much as the music and poses.  Drag to me is about an off-kilter celebration of what you are trying to emulate; it is askew and yet also somehow straight-on, judgmental enough to make a statement but also lovely enough to rise above the judgment and make a statement about the inevitable worthlessness of every situation, the absurdity of trying too hard to be somebody in a world that usually just does not give a shit.

 

So with all that said, ladies and gentleman:  Candace Devereaux, as performed by Fred Armisen on Portlandia.  The inaugural episode of the fifth season of the sparkly, slapsticky, on-target sketch show features an all back-story segment (framed hilariously by an innocent newsletter writer stumbling into Women and Women First, wanting some bare-essential information to put into the neighborhood newsletter, and Candace and her partner Toni [played to perfection by Armisen's eternal sidekick Carrie Brownstein] taking it as a major opportunity to tell their story and have it written down).   From this mini-movie, we discover why Candace and Toni wound up in feminist bookstore obscurity.  What I really want to celebrate is Armisen's exactitude and total love for Candace, in which Ms. Devereaux is given to us as an early-90s career woman fiercely focused on being the top dog in a book-store-chain empire overseen by male chauvinist pigs.  It is probably the funniest 30 minutes I have seen on TV in recent years, specific, dynamically stupid, calmly over-the-top, kind of like Armisen himself.

 

I've seen this episode now about 10 times.  Whenever I feel down or troubled, I go to it.  It makes me lose it every time, especially the gorgeous dance sequence, when Toni and Candace have a dance-off to Snap's 1990 classic, "I've Got the Power" in a fluorescently-lit happy-hour club.  What could have been a drag in this scene turns into a revelation, as Armisen performs Candace's early-90s machinations through a series of horrible and glorious dance moves involving posing like Murphy Brown and pulling her hair away from her face like a super-model with the fan just turned on.  It's all red-hot-camera-sessions, arrogance, and power-envy, blurring into a sort of caricature that isn't a caricature:  it's a portrait, a tribute.  Armisen really seems to love being Candace, inhabiting her life and skin and facial expressions with the ease of Meryl Streep doing a Hungarian accent.  He slips into the guise effortlessly, and then finds huge amounts of joy in playing through her hilarious, professional rages ("We have a story to tell.  So listen.  And WRITE IT DOWN!!!"), her man-hunger, her appetites that seem formed from intense personal politics as well as trends bullet-pointed in a 1992 Cosmo article.  Candace has no shame or remorse about it:  she is goddamn sleeping her way to the top!

 

I think a lot of the credit has to go to the director of the series, Jonathan Krisel.  He is the perfect documentarian for drag.  He lights, photographs and edits this episode with the deft, hilarious care he does in all the other Portlandia episodes, giving both Armisen and Brownstein a stage on which to be totally stupid and perfect.  There are scenes in "The Story of Candace and Toni" that seem to be mocking and/or paying homage to great 80s and 90s glossy thrillers like Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, and a number of Demi Moore vehicles where she played a hot executive in search of either a lover or a killer or both, all of that simulacra fashioned into a love-letter to Candace's persistence in being Candace, her flourishes, her furies, her wonderful Candace-ness.

 

This is the kind of drag I'm talking about:  dumbfoundingly on-target, effortlessly silly, and a tribute to what is being mocked while mocking without any reverence or fuss.  And it is so hilarious I can't stop going back to it to find some other morsel of joy. 

 

Candace Devereaux for President!