Look up The Last Laugh in any film history book and the first thing you’ll read is how director F. W. Murnau and his cinematographer, Karl Freund, made imaginative and influential use of the moving camera in the film. The second thing you’ll probably read is that they also made use of the subjective camera, most evident in a scene of the main character, a doorman, experiencing drunkenness—complete with spinning faces and rotating rooms.
However, what most books don’t mention is Murnau’s excellent use of the camera as his own extension into the world of the film. Much like in Michael Haneke’s recent Caché, the camera in The Last Laugh exerts a pressure on the film’s characters. For example, when the doorman still has his uniform, and is proud and happy, the camera acts as a spectator for whom the doorman can perform by strutting around and showing off his strength; it is a welcome presence. But when he loses his job and is stripped of his uniform, the doorman suddenly doesn’t enjoy being in the camera-eye. Shamed, he wants to hide; and yet the camera follows him. It watches even though the doorman doesn’t want it to. It contributes to his psychological breakdown. And once the breakdown is complete, and the doorman is a broken human being, the camera violates him by taking away the only shred of dignity he has left: his privacy.
Long before Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze decided to parody the familiar Hollywood formula of guns, car chases and explosions through a third-act “twist” in Adaptation, Carl Mayer and F. W. Murnau were using the same method to parody another cinema-staple: the happy ending.
For most of its running time, The Last Laugh is a simple, heavy, and tragic tale about a doorman who loses his job, his uniform, and all the respect and honor that comes with it. However, just as the film throws its main character into the gutter—quite literally, as a uniform-less bathroom attendant—there’s a sudden switch in mood, tone and plot. It all comes via the film’s only intertitle:
“Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death. But the author took pity on him and has provided a quite improbable epilogue.”
The doorman, it turns out, has inherited vast riches!
The result is a glorious happy ending that sees the doorman feasting on mountains of food, laughing, and handing out money to the hotel workers who didn’t as much as turn an eye when he was fired. But, coming from where it did and with the careful “explanation” it did, it may be, as one critic termed it, the “most cynical happy ending” ever. Rather than trying to create a happy ending from within the story, however forcefully, Murnau imposes the happy ending on it—with the God-like hand of the director. The result is an instance of Deus ex machina, a miracle, and outrageous. It’s like the musical endings of Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin or Takeshi Kitano’s Zatôichi, but meaner; instead of creating a spectacle for the audience to join in, Murnau creates a trap: take joy in the ending of The Last Laugh and become the butt of Murnau’s joke.
Another interesting aspect of this ending is its destruction of any notion of cinema-as-reality. Not only does Murnau blatantly expose his own film as just a film by communicating directly with the audience, and identifying the role of “the author” in its creation, but he actually shows the opposite of what, in his mind, would happen to the doorman in real life. Content and form point out that cinema is artificial—it is not physical reality and not meant to be a reflection of it; cinema is its own reality, the camera-reality, of which “the author” is in total control.
One of the directors to take these idea of artificiality, author-control, and audience manipulation further was Alfred Hitchcock. For example, many of Hitchcock’s sets, especially in his later films, took a certain pride in their exaggerations and distance from physical reality: the female corpses in Frenzy, the Golden Gate Bridge in Vertigo, the horse-riding and harbor scenes in Marnie. Hitchcock also liked to gloat about being able to control the emotions of his audience—something which he was well entitled to gloat about. Furthermore, he even added a The Last Laugh-like “intertitle” to a few of his own films: the last minute “explanation” of Norman Bates’ condition in Psycho being the most famous.
The tie-together is two-fold: Hitchcock first entered the British film industry as an intertitle artist; and he learned much of the craft of filmmaking in Germany in the nineteen twenties by watching the great German directors, such as Murnau, at work.
Pacze Moj
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006