The Grotesque in Black Comedy: Space, Time and Character

Abstract

The article explores the relationship between the genre of black comedy and the technique of grotesque. Black comedy balances on the edge of the feeling of horror, which in spite of everything causes laughter. At the heart of this genre is the fear of death, one can say that black comedy seems to imply the grotesque, since the technique involves visualizing the transition and "being stuck" in between two totally opposite, contradictory emotions.
In the films which were selected for the article, grotesque images are the most vivid, consonant with modern reality, and exemplify various objects of myth-making: zombies, angels and vampires.
Those are transgressive subjects of cinema, because they are helpless in the face of something concrete and definite. Time has no power over them, although the bodies of the characters are constantly changing and the rules of new historical realities always cause unexpected damage.
Their life in death cannot be called happy, as far as immortality turns out to be a burden that each category of the grotesque characters has to bear in their own way. Taking three movies as an example — “Death Becomes Her” (1992, dir.
Robert Zemeckis), “Dogma” (1999, dir. Kevin Smith), “What We Do In The Shadows” (2014, dir. Taika Waititi) — an attempt was made to analyze various borderline states between life and death, expressed through the ambivalent nature of laughter inherent in the grotesque.
And despite the fact that every plot twist in the films under discussion ends with a gag, the conflict in these movies is related to the tragic discrepancy between the form and the rules of space, in which death is the end, not the beginning or continuation.
The article can be useful both for active playwrights and directors, as well as students studying the basics of drama, and a wide range of readers interested in the nature of the grotesque structure. The analysis is based on the scientific research of M.M. Bakhtin, Y.M. Lotman, Y.N. Tynyanov, Y.N. Arabov.