April 18 2020 – The Tin Drum (1979) Criterion Channel
I read the novel The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass in the very early 1980s and then saw the movie The Tin Drum not long afterwards. I loved both. They are part of the black comedy genre: social satire that takes on dark subjects with a bitter but often very funny sense of humor. In general, I don’t want to read books or watch movies about death and destruction – life is depressing enough. But I love the novels Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller even though they are about war. I love the movies Brazil by Terry Gilliam, Parasite by Bong Joon Ho, and the Death of Stalin by Armando Iannucci, even though they are about dark subjects. Defiant humor in the face of death and adversity is somehow comforting to me. The laughter is a release, but beyond that defiant humor gives me the feeling of control in the face of my worst fears. I guess it is no surprise I am turning to black humor at this time.
The film of The Tin Drum is a great example of this genre and just a great overall film. There are images that have stayed with me since I first saw the movie almost 40 years ago. I still remember the POV shot narrated by young Oskar as he travels through his mother’s birth canal into the world. I still remember the conception of Oskar’s mother as an escaped Polish nationalist gets busy while hiding from soldiers under Oskar’s grandmother’s ample skirts. And I remember the toddler Oskar, disrupting a Nazi march, turning it into a waltz, with nothing but his tin drum. I guess it is not so surprising that I didn’t remember as well the more disturbing parts of the movie: the horsehead filled with eels and the brutality of the Nazis.
The Tin Drum the movie is really well made: beautifully written, beautifully shot, and beautifully acted. It is so easy to get the tone wrong in a black humor film. Mike Nichol’s film of Catch 22 never got the tone right – the visual depiction of violence in the movie overwhelms the humor. The Tin Drum the film avoids that problem. Volker Schlondorff, the film’s director and co-writer, turns a sprawling novel spanning decades into a funny, moving, and relatively focused film. OK, the film is a little sprawling too, but it only covers a third of the time period of the novel and omits much even from that period it does cover. The film is about a child that decides to stop growing because the adult world is so unappealing, not just because of Nazi violence which mostly comes later but because of the sexual hypocrisy and compulsion he sees. If it is not clear yet, I highly recommend this film.
I loved the film so much, that I went back to reread the novel. I am still in the early chapters of The Tin Drum the novel – Oskar’s mom has not yet been conceived in the potato field – but I am liking it a lot. I take it a good omen that the I was able to buy the book at a steep discount because it was on sale as a Kindle Daily Deal while I was still reading the free download of the opening chapters.