Bad Apples

I enjoy black comedy immensely. Most people do not, and I understand that, and there are different approaches to black comedy that don't all appeal to me at the same level. I particularly enjoy when the story (like Network, or The Hospital) starts out plausibly and moves subtly into the insane. A largely forgotten Dr. Strangelove-ripoff, Wrong is Right, struck me as hilariously preposterous at the time because these Middle Easterners kept blowing themselves up as if that w—

What was I saying?

Oh, right: I love black comedy but if someone came to me and said, "'gique, how would you like to drop 180 million into a black comedy?" I'd say, "No, sir, I would not like that one bit. 180 thousand, and you can get Tom Cruise, we'll talk." But enough about Digger.

I was thinking about it because Bad Apples is called a black comedy. It has the box office of a black comedy, somewhat south of $2M. But it's so generally benign, it made me question what a black comedy is. It has the right just-over-the-top elements to it that tickle the same funny bone for sure. But let me tell you a little bit about it, and you see what you think.

Saoirse (sor-SHA!) Ronan plays a beleaguered Scottish (?) school teacher, Maria, who is constantly catching heat from her parents, from administrators, and from her ex-, all due to one psychotic kid in her classroom, Danny. In fact, the movie begins with him bringing down a factory they're touring by throwing his shoe into the works. Through a series of escalating events—the little brat is bashing cars and she tries to stop him, and this gives him an excuse to rat him out, and she snaps and—the point is, he ends up locked in her basement.

Well, that's a career ender, innit?

Slow your roll, there, sparky: In fact, the absence of the problem child results in her class absolutely flourishing. She's able to teach. The other children are able to learn. This is all in the movie blurb, by the way: I'm not spoiling.

One particularly doting child, Paulina—the one Daniel flipped over a stairwell and nearly killed before mysteriously vanishing—flourishes so much, she writes a song on (checks notes)...the blitz. Well, I'm sure this little weirdo won't be a problem.

If you can guess that this child is going to be a problem, you have a sense of how black comedy tends to scale. 

It reminded me of The Player, but based around the educational system rather than the movie system, and in that it is not as gleefully malignant. Typically, in a black comedy, you end up alienated from the characters (like Tim Robbins' character in The Player, or almost everyone in The Menu or Triangle of Sadness), if you had any sympathy for them to begin with. (I don't think anyone in Dr. Strangelove is meant to be particularly relatable, e.g.)

This is the first time I can recall in a putative black comedy where I kind of like the people involved. Maria is, of course, sympathetic, and she's in this system where she is forbidden to discipline Daniel in any way. With Daniel in the picture, you can see why her ex- left her, and why her boss disciplines her. (Her boss is especially bad, though, because it's a typical "Well, everyone else is handling their difficult children just fine, so it must be a you problem.")

Given a chance, we see that not only can she teach the good kids, she can teach Daniel. 

The climax has the piquancy of a black comedy, and it presents an interesting, erm, moral dilemma. Because you can't keep a child chained up in your basement forever, can you? Right?

I used to do a bit back when I had a blog called Today Is Not That Day (or TINTD). I'd post some story about failing schools, children being molested or shot, or simply mal-educated, and say, "One day I may regret homeschooling my children, but today is not that day."

I look at the inherent degeneracy of schools, how they sacrifice the greatest educational period of a person's life and often also subject him to various degrees of physical and mental abuse, all in service of grinding them down to work in factories that don't even exist anymore—and then throw a kid like Daniel into it and realize, oh, right, the abuse is the point, really—and, yeah, I retired TINTD years ago.

Movies like this, which are not as exaggerated as most black comedies, remind me why.