Historically it has been a challenge defining the Independent Films coming out of the United States of America. The place that we know of as Hollywood, a neighborhood of San Francisco, California which now churns out movies now considered as hardcore mainstream, was once a refuge for independent film makers who moved far away from the east coast during the early part of the 20th century to avoid the clutches of the patent claims of the Thomas Edison controlled ‘Motion Picture Patents Company’, whose membership eluded these film makers. These non members as they were called slowly captured the US market with their longer narrative films and set up the structure of the Studio system, that more or less survives in its varied diluted forms to this day.
When Andrew Bujalski made ‘Funny Ha Ha’ in 2002, major Hollywood Studios had their own subsidiaries who ventured into making ‘independent’ movies, providing the makers with some of the infrastructure that the bigger mainstream movies had access to, for subjects and treatments that were a bit unusual from the mainstream. But “Funny Ha Ha’ is not associated with any such studio. Instead, it was produced by Bujalski’s Harvard University Film Department friend Ethan Vogt, shot low budget on 16 mm, with minimum light equipments and had a crew and an nonprofessional cast consisting of fellow Harvard alumni. Bujalski was all but 24 years when he made this film which is considered as a fair representation of the listlessness of the educated youth in the United States in a pre 2009 economic depression era.
Marine a rudderless not so ambitious young lady post her education tries to figure out her relationship with her school mate and best buddy Alex, the man she likes, but the later is inclined romantically with Lina. As Marine shifts between temporary jobs she also tries to figure out her relationship with a few other men who show interest in her, but things don’t work for her even after an extended encounter with one of them, Mitchell. Unbound, habitually upbeat and with a certain amount of maturity, she goes about figuring out a way of life where she can live the moment, even as Alex wants to maintain his childhood friendship with her post his marriage with Lina. Well, if one were to laboriously figure out the plot of ‘Funny Ha Ha’ in the Aristotelian sense, this could be it.
Aristotle in his book ‘Poetics” writes that a work of imitation should have a unity of plot; that the plot should be of one quantifiable action, ie.. there should be a unity of action. Such an action should be a complete whole, which means that there should be a beginning that has to have nothing before it, there has to be an ending that has to have nothing after it and there has to be a middle which has something before it as well as something after it. The said singular quantifiable action could consist of several incidents and the said actions in the incidents should be inter connected such that the removal or transposal of any one incident would affect the whole. This would happen only when the incidents are probable or likely to happen or are a necessity; in a cause and effect chain. Most films coming from the stable of Hollywood Studios adheres to these principles. But ‘Funny Ha Ha’ is not a conformist Studio movie. Dwelling on the plot of this film would be helpful in this regard.
The details of the plot are as follows:-
1. The Failed Tattoo: Marine, a loner, wants to get tattooed, but is refused for being drunk. Marine tells her childhood friend Alex that she has been fired, and is looking out for a job.
2. Marine’s one sided affair with Alex: Marine meets her friends Rachel and Dave accidently and hops on with them to a dinner where she declares she likes Alex, who apparently has just been separated from Nina. Back at Rachel’s house, Alex’s sister Susan visits them. All of them favor setting up Alex with Marine. Susan encourages Marine to speak with Alex. Marine gets a new job where she meets Mitchell. Over phone Alex awkwardly tells Marine that they cannot be a couple.
3. Marine’s failed other relationships: In a party at Rachel’s house, Marine meets Wyatt whom she had met in the previous dinner and displays an affection for him. They kiss each other, but immediately hold back and split amicably. After the party, Dave walks Marine up to her car, expresses his longing and kisses her, but both hold back thinking about Rachel. Marine leaves her job, but her colleague Mitchell wants to stay in touch. Marine lies that she already has a boy friend.
4. Marine’s closure with Alex: Alex refers Marine to his uncle for a job. Marine meets Alex at his place where after avoiding his talkative friend they move out for dinner, where they have crazy and funny friendly conversations. Alex drops Marine to her house, they see a drunk Liz in her car. Marine takes her into her house, puts her on bed and goes out to another party. The next morning Liz thanks Marine for being supportive. Marine gets the job with Alex’s uncle. When she wants to break the news to Alex, she finds out that he has married Lina. Marine avoids contacting Alex’s sister Susan.
5. Marine’s attempts to move on: Marine dines with her ex colleague Mitchell, who wants a romantic relationship with her. Marine is hard to oblige, although the dinner meeting goes off amusingly. Marine gets busy with her new work. She politely refuses to socialize with Alex, Nina, Dave and Rachel and instead, plans to revamp her life – her list of things to do include spending time outdoors and trying to be fit. Marine plays basketball with Mitchell. She tries to get off booze. Sensing her depression Mitchell tries to cheer her, but a polite rebuke frustrates him. Their date ends on a somber note, although again they part ways amicably. Marine gets a gift from her mother – earrings for her birthday. Her immediate work superior, Jackie, takes her out for a coffee where Marine ‘checks out’ on a flirting coffee server.
6. Marine, Alex and the art of being there: At night Marine is woken up by a drunk Alex who wants to wish her on her birthday. During a chat at her door steps, he tells her that she is special for him, possibly re-kindling some feelings for him in Marine; but then he stops short of fully expressing himself. At her work, she sees Alex visiting his uncle. Alex and Marine go out to a park carrying with them their lunch. They watch, make fun and analyze two players blissfully playing a game of Frisbee, who Marine says are regulars on this ground. They live the moment.
So, what then is the one quantifiable single action here, if we apply the Aristotelian wisdom? To provide an analogy, in Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 independent film ‘Wendy and Lucy’ it could be ‘a not so well off young girl makes a trip to the north in search of a job but loses her dog and her car in an in-between small town before continuing her journey again’. With ‘Funny Ha Ha’, such a deduction becomes a bit problematic. At best we can probably say, ‘A dignified lady in her post collage days tries to find her bearings when she drifts around not being able to find herself a suitable companion nor a fit job’. But would that be a real reflection of the film?
In the Aristotelian world, a work of imitation, specifically in a tragedy, and the actions there in should be serious, must have a certain magnitude and has to be whole. ‘Funny Ha Ha’ is not a tragedy in that sense that Marine and her friends are having any existential or life threatening consequences for the actions that they are indulging in. It somehow occurs to us that the characters are in the know that the crisis that they are encountering are the ones that would eventually pass off, as it is implied for Marine by the end of the film. The magnitude of the film is just about sufficient for the character to have undergone some sort of not so obvious makeover in coming to terms with what life throws at her. Marine is possibly aware of the existence of the ‘wandering soul’, if I may use the phrase, within her all through the film. What transforms in the end is probably the heightened level of acceptance and coming to terms with that being.
To be whole or complete in Aristotelian terms is to have actions that have a beginning, middle and an end. The beginning of ‘Funny Ha Ha’ can be termed as the portion where Marine is reaffirmed that things will not work out between her and Alex and that they can’t be a romantic pair. The middle can be defined as the portion where Marine tires out to work upon her relationships with the different other men that life throws at her, hoping that one of them would stick on. Here too, she is re-affirmed that they won’t work for her. And finally, the ending is when she re-assures herself by continuing her existing relationship for what they are. So, there could not have been anything before the beginning or anything after the ending. And the middle had to happen between the two.
Another of Aristotle’s deductions in ‘Poetics’ is that the said singular action should have incidents which are connected with each other by a cause and effect chain and that the removal of the actions would affect the singularity of action. It is because of the fact that Alex has rejected her romantically that Marine tries out the different men that life throws up at her. It also could be argued that it is because it does not work out well with the other men in her life, that she has a reckoning and accepts well the state of things in her life on a as it is basis. Although it should be mentioned that this thin plot does not betray the tight cause and effect relationship of a plot that has a say the government of a nation trying to convince a reluctant retired space engineer to gather a group that would go into the outer space to neutralize a comet that is heading for the Earth. If the said space engineer is not convinced, there would be no film.
On the other hand, in ‘Funny Ha Ha’ if we remove the first sequence where Marine goes to get herself tattooed, would it affect the central action of Marine trying to get a just man and a just job? It probably would not. Marine would still meet Alex, Mitchell, Wyatt and the rest of the men. Why then this opening sequence exists in the film? Its role probably is to introduce her drinking problem as well as to show the kind of recluse that she is – while the rest of the youngsters come to get tattooed with their friends for support Marine is all alone.
And then there are episodes that deal with the drunk Liz, or Alex’s roommate who gets into a fight with the neighborhood kids or even Wyatt, one of the men whom Marine befriends. They all have their individual existence, issues that they are dealing with that merits some screen time on their own. But take them off from the film, and probably still the singular action that Marine goes through in the film would probably still remain. Against the Aristotelian theory, these sequences are probably are there in the movie in an episodic nature because the film is not just about Marine, it is basically about the generation of the privileged young men and women in the United States who are trying to navigate through the lanes of their initial period of life in the first decade of the 21st century. It also can be argued that these sequences do betray the fact that Marine in each of the sequences mentioned above is ‘being’ with the said characters – trying to ‘listen’ to them as she is being ‘listened’ to by them.
There in is the crux of ‘Happy Ha Ha’ that its characters, like their counter parts in the films of Eric Rohmer, are ‘being’ with each other and letting them be with their endless conversations, mumbles, fumbles, emotions, angst and in their moments of reckonings, in happiness, in anxiety and in gloom and glee. The film maker too with his laid back, observant, unobtrusive hand held camera is ‘being’ with his characters and letting them ‘be’ as they are, just as the characters in the film let their friends ‘be’. Therefore the willing audience thankfully has no choice but to ‘be’ with the characters and let them ‘be’ and ‘be’ with the film letting it ‘be’, without getting into any judgmental mode.
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