At least with "Spinal Tap" there was some worthy object of satire. Now Mr. Guest has gone the way of "American Movie" and "Fargo" by taking a rather unsettling delight in savaging people for no apparent reason other than their sheer simplicity. You'd think Mr. Guest would have at least one friend with enough decency to drag him off these sorry folks before he pummels them to death. I've heard the term "dark" comedy tossed around a lot in connection with this emerging sock-it-to-the-little-people genre, something I understand to mean: people are uncomfortable laughing at this stuff. "Curb Your Enthusiasm" gets dubbed a "dark" comedy, though not necessarily because taboos are being broken, or because Larry David has pushed us into un-charted waters, or left us without a laugh-track to explain to us when laughter would be appropriate. As Lee Siegel writes in his dressing down of Mr. David and his comic "insignificance" (The New Republic, 1.7.03), satire makes more comic sense when the underlings are taking the piss out of their superiors. When the Davids and Guests of this world are pissing on the little people, it's not really satire so much as sadism. Mr. Guest's signature icy stare is beginning to remind me of the Larry David "f*** you look" Siegel finds so ridiculous--because the contempt it registers is usually directed, as he says, at some minimum-wage-earning shop-clerk. Mr. Guest, aka Lord Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron of Saling, is now cutting himself from the same insecure spoiled-brat cloth, asserting his supremacy over rural Americans and torturing them as the Coen brothers tortured those hapless northern Minnesotans, simply for having made a blip on the cultural radar. School plays? Dog shows? Next he'll be attacking cheer-leading contests and bake-offs. Apart from the occasional delusion of grandeur Guest attributes to these country rubes, they seem to know for the most part that they don't have any reason to take much pride in their lives except by the criteria they invent in order to be able to take pride in something. It would be a lot easier to laugh if the C. Guests and L. Davids and Joel and Ethan Coens of this world were a little more clear about identifying themselves with the people, the class and caste of people, they attack with such relish.
Review of Best in Show
