MARTIN SCORSESE'S 'THE KING OF COMEDY' - WEIRD BUT WONDERFUL. DISTURBING BUT DAZZLING.

A tragicomedy…a delightful film...a film that’s sad and funny at the same time. (I mean exactly at the same time!) 

A loser, a kind of a character you see and think, “Yeah, there are people like that around; so delusional that they tend to lose sight of what's real and what's not.” You find it difficult to empathize with them until you spare a minute and give your conscience a little prod only to realize how close their reality and their goals are to yours; it is only the approach that is alienating. Even as an audience, you find it difficult to sympathise with this Rupert Pupkin character even though you are aligned to him throughout the film - which more often than not works; say in complex cases like Kubrick's 'Clockwork Orange' or simpler cases like Ramu's 'Satya'. 

In 'King of Comedy', you don’t even know whether the person you are half-rooting for is talented or not because you haven’t been given an inkling of a clue about his talent or the lack thereof. You are uncomfortably close to his life, his financial situation, his dreams, his fantasies, confined in his closed bedroom with him - his bedroom is almost a manifestation of his fantasies but know nothing about how good or bad he is at what he loves to do. That reminds me of a scene in the film; a wonderful example of the director's clever "'No entry' beyond this point" - you can be in his room, in his head but not know a thing about a crucial aspect of his life. This wonderful ambiguity about Pupkin's talent takes a complex shape in the scene when he makes a tape for Jerry. He practices his lines in front of a cardboard cutout/wallpaper audience in his room and plays recorded laughter in the background. As the camera pulls back and continues to do so for a while, it makes you feel more and more like the audience is laughing at him and not with him. Sitting in this audience, is of course, you. 

The film oscillates between the real and imaginary. The fantasy scenes where the principal of his school apologizes to Rupert on National TV, Jerry begs for him to take up his show for a while to increase the ratings are hilarious and tragic at the same time. These scenes also add to the ambiguity of Rupert's professional abilities. You are laughing but it's not with Rupert, it is certainly at Rupert and to a certain extent at yourself. Rupert, throughout the film, is unintentionally funny for the audience, hence, once again becoming a butt of all jokes rather than the man who makes a living by telling jokes. 

The imaginary, ironically is more relatable than real. We all fantasize like Rupert does, we all want our principals to apologize to us, even better if it's on National TV - to admit it would be like admitting to insanity but it still is real whereas the real in the film is so dark and so action oriented that not many of us would take the liberty of indulging in it. It’s this upside down/inside out phenomenon of the film that is so wonderful and weird at the same time. 

Like I said before, what you have been allowed to see is Rupert Pupkin's struggle and his desperation to somehow get to Jerry Langford. And when he conceives the whole plan of kidnapping Jerry, you begin to think he is stupider than you thought. But it’s only in the end that you see his act on TV for the first time and realise he’s indeed talented and that all he needed was one chance, one small window of opportunity which was so difficult to come by. He concludes his act by saying something to the effect - He has tied up Jerry and that is what a person has to do to reach here (a laughter later) you will believe me when you read the papers tomorrow and then you will wonder why I did this, well because I figured that it’s better to be a King for a night than to be a shmuck for a lifetime. It is this last sentence that just explains it all; it sums it up - his behaviour, his actions and you immediately buy it. You like the character for it and you wholeheartedly root for him for the first time in the film when the film ends; which is a risky thing for a director to do but so refreshingly novel, disturbing and interesting. 

Scorsese, you are slowly becoming one of my favourites, up there with Truffaut and Kubrick! And yes, I saw 'Taxi Driver' some 10 years ago and loved it but somehow I became more of a Schrader fan than Scorsese's. 'Raging Bull' put me off, but it's been a while since then and I have been watching Scorsese films for many years now and been loving most, barring some of the obvious ones. The man's working for 4 decades and he is still younger in style and content than most young filmmakers. Looking forward to 'The Wolf of Wall Street'.