Bartel: Eating Raoul (1982)

One of the great cult comedies of the 80s, this delicious, delirious comedy revolves around a couple – Paul and Mary Bland (played by writer/director Paul Bartel and Warhol regular Mary Woronov) – who come up with a quite original way for disposing of the tiresome swingers infesting their apartment complex. Moaning the degradation of America, and especially of Los Angeles, where they live, Paul and Mary frame themselves as the vanguard of the middle class – but the great joke of the film is that they’re really the rearguard, since the sexual revolution they’ve taken up arms against was really incorporated into the middle class years ago. Left behind by the middle class as much as by the sexual revolution, their very prudishness quickly feels like a perversion, making for something of a masterpiece of middlebrow aesthetics, as Bartel more or less refrains from exploitative spectacle, but only in the name of a putative tasetfulness that’s well and truly internalised it. That, in turn, makes for a quite striking, bathetic comic signature – cartoony enough to anticipate the over-articulated banalities of Family Guy some thirty years later, the only shocking thing about it is how easily shock is absorbed, how much more voracious bourgeois tastefulness is than even the most outrageous fetishes that the couple come across. It’s all enhanced by being shot in the same lush, retro-celluloid palette of so much late 70s and early 80s neo-noir – and, in a kind of weird twist on the 80s fixation with the 50s, everything might seem to have changed, but nothing has really changed, just because nothing can ever really change in the world that Paul and Mary have chosen to inhabit. For that reason, the odd combination of 50s and 80s décor probably feels just as retro-futuristic today as it did when it was released – indeed, for Bartel, it’s clear that the middle class can only exist in a kind of perpetual retro-futurity, as the film scrupulously refuses to distinguish between the avant-garde and the arriere-garde, between what’s transgressive and what’s old-fashioned. It’s a tribute to the audacity of Bartel’s comic vision, then, he not only manages to restore Paul and Mary to the cutting-edge of middle class values, the cusp of retro-futurity, but manages to make them feel even more obliviously and blithely quaint in the process, in a brilliant, scathing elegy for a revolution – and a resistance – that never really happened.