Narratologizing The Hangover

What do tigers dream of when they take their little tiger snooze?

Do they dream of mauling zebras, or Halle Berry in her Catwoman suit?

Don’t you worry your pretty striped head,

we’re gonna get you back to Tyson and your cozy tiger bed.

And then we’re gonna find our best friend Doug,

and then we’re gonna give him a best friend hug.

Doug, Doug, oh, Doug, Dougie, Dougie, Doug, Doug!

But if he’s been murdered by crystal meth tweakers,

well then we’re shit out of luck.

Our need for narrative form is so strong that we don’t really believe something is true unless we can see it as a story.  Bringing a collection of events into narrative coherence can be described as a way of normalizing or naturalizing those events.  It renders them plausible, allowing one to see how they all “belong.”

Allow me to tie these two quotes together.  The first is from a song in the The Hangover.   The second is from Dr. H. Porter Abbot’s The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative.  Both highly recommended.  By me. If you haven’t seen the movie, the first quote will appear to be filled with non sequiturs.  But it fits into a narrative.  Allow me to explain/digress.

Three guys wake up in the middle of the desert, bloodied and disoriented, with no memory of what happened the night before.  Yes, I finally saw The Hangover and realized why it was this summer’s highest grossing comedy.  (Actually, due to word-of-mouth-buzz-luck, it set the record for best performing R-rated comedy in theaters, ever.)  It’s got a lot of laughs and it holds our attention for at least three reasons: 1) we want to know how they got into this mess, 2) we want to know how they’ll get out of their mess, and 3) it’s refreshingly unpredictable and yet the character development is satisfyingly formulaic.  Sure, you can quote that.

“It’s refreshingly unpredictable and yet… satisfyingly formulaic.”

Many of the comedy elements are not very original – celebrity cameos, hilariously inappropriate wedding songs, marrying a stripper in Vegas – and yet they all work together very well.  (Besides, since when do good movies have to be original and unformulaic?  If they have soul and genuinely touch the heart of the archetypal story, long live the formula. If you don’t know Stalone’s rags-to-riches story behind the film Rocky, Tony Robbins tells the story really well.)  Anyway, the tangential craziness is hilarious.  The cast clicks like the giggle seatbelt you’ll need to strap on before this wild ride of laughs.  OK, tone it down.

And Ed Helms is at his insecure best and Zach Galifianakis is at his weirdest weird.  This is the landmark, break-out film for Helms, previously best known for his role as Andy in The Office.

The Hangover is something like the perfect storm of comedy aimed at the lucrative demographic of 18-35 year old males.  We’ve got three exaggerated characters and one level-headed groom who go to Vegas for a bachelor’s party.  The cinematography is actually beautiful.  The cast is over-the-top funny.  The setup happens right away, stakes are high, the payoff happens near the end of the movie and everybody wins in the end.  Well, almost everybody wins.  Ed’s tooth is still out.  Which is an interesting anecdote from an interview with Ed (with About.com’s Rebecca Murray):

Ed Helms: “When I was 15 I lost a tooth and had an implant put in. Cut to 20 years later, I’m doing this part and the script calls for my character to lose a tooth. We did some camera tests blacking it out, we made a prosthetic with a gap in it, but that made me look like a donkey, so I vetoed that right away. And then I just finally called my dentist and said, ‘You know, I’ve had this implant for 20 years. What’s it involve in taking it out?’ And he said, ‘It’s actually not that big a deal. We can do that.’ So we took it out and I was toothless for three months, for the run of the movie.”

There ya go.  A narrative about one of the actors’ tooth.  Didn’t that anecdote just make the movie a little bit better and make us like Ed a little bit more?

All of this is just to say that a narrative makes sense of life.  We understand what we call “truth” through narrative.  We think narratively.  Try to make justify a truth statement without telling a sort of little story.  Am I a little too excited about narrative?  Narratize this: (read that second quote again).  Seriously, it’s worth re-reading.

A story (yes, even an R-rated comedy film) leads us to understanding truth – about a situation, about reality, and about what kinds of human action work and don’t work.  In short, we learn about life and human nature, first and foremost, through narrative. And part of learning about our human nature, is laughing at it.

The Hangover: an Oscar nominee?

Stuff like this will get talked about in a conference in Paris next year titled Narratology and the New Social Dimensions of Narratives.  Narratology is also a big subject in video games these days.  So many new ways of experiencing the oldest of art forms, the telling of stories.