No Comedy After Auschwitz: review of 'A Real Pain'

Pity the poor philosopher Theodor Adorno, whose comments on art in the wake of the Holocaust are so often misquoted. Common wisdom has it that Adorno wrote that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz. In fact, he claimed it was barbaric, and in any case later went on to caveat the claim, admitting that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream.”

The screams of the tortured have soundtracked a long and heavily debated history of Holocaust cinema, that stretches from Alain Resnais’s 1956 Night and Fog through Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), much compared to Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah, to last year’s Oscar winning The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer), which distilled history’s horrible nightmare into one stomach-wrenching 105-minute howl. It seems clear that post-Auschwitz poetry not only survives, but thrives, barbaric or not. But what about comedy? How can we possibly laugh after Auschwitz?

Jesse Eisenberg’s wry, warm character study of two American cousins in Poland is a very funny film about a very serious subject. Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg (who is Jewish) and Succession-star Kieron Culkin (who isn’t, and whose casting has cued a thousand think pieces about the rights and wrongs of the practice comic David Baddiel has referred to as ‘Jewface’; I won’t be discussing that here) play David and Benji, who are honouring a promise to their late grandmother, are paying a visit to the country where she was born, raised and tortured almost to death. They join an organised tour, led by the British scholar James (Will Sharpe): an idea Eisenberg took from a real life advert and which is in itself wrought with black humour. We’ve all drawn a shocked gasp at those terrible, inappropriate insta-selfies of sticky-lipglossed young women pouting at the gates of Auschwitz. Benji is outraged that the group of tourists is travelling by train – and in first class, no less. But he also has the chutzpah to encourage his colleagues to pose alongside statues of Jewish resistance fighters: a scene that should be tasteless and yet is somehow filled with joy and community.

A Real Pain is funny in a very different way to the work of the self-dubbed “Jew Tang Clan”, also known as “the Spice Girls of Jews”: directors Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach and Ben Stiller, actors Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd. The Critic Vincent Brook describes these filmmakers as “confident about being Jewish, but less sure about what being Jewish means”. Their humorous approach to their heritage in films such as An American Pickle (Brandon Trost, 2020); The Meyerowitz Stories (Noah Baumbach, 2017); and This is 40 (Apatow, 2012) so often feels like an attempt to shrug off the weight of history. A good 10-20 years younger, millennials Benji and David have commonalities with the Gen X cohort: like Stiller, Eisenberg is self-conscious and highly-strung; Culkin blends Rogen and Rudd’s laid back charm with Sandler’s barely-suppressed rage. But in their own ways, each struggles to come to term with the atrocities wrought upon their ancestors. David finds solace in the future, and the family he is building. Benji’s relentless optimism and self-help mantras belie a deep seam of desperation. He is the walking embodiment of the line of Samuel Beckett’s – a Catholic, but a bleak humorist if ever there were one - at the end of 1953 novel The Unnamed: “…I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Of course where it was once possible to pretend that in 2015 after 70 years, the Holocaust was indeed ancient history, we occupy a different moment now, where for so many reasons religion is front of centre of global debates. It can be no coincidence that this year’s Oscars nominees feature several that pit faith against individual freedom in ways that are complex, unresolved: consider Edward Berger’s Conclave; Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist; Jaques Audiard’s Emilia Perez. A Real Pain is first amongst these works in asserting that what is needed now is not silence, but reflection: however febrile, fraught, or yes, funny, that might be.

Professor Catherine Wheatley has taught the module Film and Religion in the Department of Film Studies at King's. Her research is deeply invested in analysis how film reflects and shapes ethics and politics, on both a personal and a societal level. Professor Catherine Wheatley's teaching encourages students to analyse the positions they bring to films, and to think about how film can put us into contact with other cultures and views of the world.