I’m a devotee of two film series at my local Brooklyn indie theater: Ridiculous <> Sublime, a series highlighting “the most bombastic and confounding movies imaginable,” and Hubba Hubba, a series by my friend Mark Pagán that takes “a long lusty look at the himbos, hunks and thirst traps of cinema that have dominated cultural desire.”
Last month, these series combined for a jointly hosted showing of Legends of the Fall, a movie about how Brad Pitt is so hot that it ruins everything. The movie is based on a novella by Jim Harrison, and I was curious enough to promptly get it out of the library.
The book is a collection of three novellas, including the titular Legends of the Fall. The story begins on a ranch in 19th century Montana where three brothers, Alfred, Tristan, and Samuel, live with their father. The grand narrative follows the boys and their overlapping romances and journeys of self discovery and self destruction. It’s very sweeping in a way that I stereotypically associate with western writing of a certain era.
It’s pretty effective too— there’s just something about these three boys that gets to you. In spite of how melodramatic and florid it can be, Harrison’s novella is nicely paced and plotted. He doesn’t use a lot of commas either, which gives the prose a matter-of-fact directness and breathlessness that feels somehow reflected in the movie’s aesthetics. I’ve also lately been wondering if I use too many commas in my own writing, so I might just have commas on the brain.
At the same time I was reading Harrison’s stories, I was also getting into the new Adult Swim show Haha You Clowns created by Joe Cappa. This is also a story about a family of three brothers and their dad, who live together in an affluent, nondescript suburb. The boys are Preston, Tristan, and Duncan—another middle son named Tristan!
The show is very funny, bizarrely heightened like a lot of Adult Swim’s stuff. The voice acting is infectious and I love the animation, which has that captivating, near-grotesqueness that will be familiar to anyone who grew up with Flash-animated web videos or the intense frames of shows like Ren & Stimpy.
Haha, You Clowns also captures a very specific, knee-jerk kindness that was immediately recognizable to me from growing up in the suburbs. These large sons are kind to old women and waitresses, forever saying things like, “Appreciate you.” The boys are also full of canned jokes, the kind of “well that just happened!” lines that are more references than actual humor or original observations.
In the way that Harrison looks to the Bible for models of relationships and drama, Cappa’s Haha, You Clowns looks to schmaltzy sitcoms and after school specials. The boys are trapped in a loop of earnest reflection, obvious life lessons, and small crises that always resolve in their favor.
It’s the shared earnestness between Harrison and Cappa’s work that really struck me. Legends of the Fall is the kind of fiction that feels a bit dated now, in that it exists beyond irony. The other two novellas in Harrison’s collection are pretty direct retellings of Bible stories: this is the kind of register that Harrison is working in. Cappa’s humor and the framing of his show don’t have the same narrative earnestness, but his characters do. The three sons live blissfully and weirdly in a bubble without irony. The boys are perhaps too simple and too sheltered, and can’t access the casual judgment that has to exist behind irony, or the desire to manipulate that is behind even very small deceits. They are sweet and direct in a way that isn’t performed. They don’t want to get anything from you, they just don’t have any other way to be.
Harrison’s writing also imbues this sort of predestination to his characters, though it’s more fraught. His boys resist their impulses and core traits, but can never be successful for long in that rebellion.
Harrison and Cappa’s work are suited for very different moods, but it’s a good time of year for both. All six of these boys—Alfred, Samuel, Preston, Duncan, and the Tristans—are committed to their family roles, for better and for worse. ’Tis the season to feel that same pull of familial expectation, the comfort or pain of slotting back into your place in the family dynamic. And while you might not be locked into an unshakable pattern with three hunky brothers, the familiar role that you play when back home can be hard to resist.
Images from Rotten Tomatoes.
