Gad, Series, Huge in France, Comedy, Tragedy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology
Huge in France: Is He Gad, or Is He a Latter Day de
Tocqueville?
Having just finished watching the first season of Huge in
France, Gad Elmaleh’s
comic take on living life in America as a French Comedy Star whose celebrity
status counts for naught here, I was not surprised to hear that Netflix is not
renewing it for a second season. It,
like Hacks,
another current series about comedians, has not a likeable character in
it. Even The
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, starring a likeable comedian, is turning her into someone
we don’t like in it’s fifth and final season.
Is there something about being funny that makes people unlikeable? Certainly the characters on Seinfeld,
while likeable, had few other redeeming qualities, as they themselves were
quick to point out.
Gad, however, may only be a comedy by accident. Sure, Gad is the Seinfeld of France. His decision to leave fame behind; fame which
has turned bitter in his mouth, and move to America, propels the series towards
its black humor where Gad plays straight man to the antics of a series of
shallow, self-obsessed Americans like his son, Luke (Jordan Ver Hoeve), his ex and
his son’s mother Vivian (Erinn
Hayes), and her current lover, Jason Alan Ross (Matthew Del Negro). He is guided through this tour of vapidness
in the capitol of vapidity, Los Angeles, by a Korean American, Brian Kurihara (Scott Keiji Takeda). Brian, in his role as Sancho Panza, sits
firmly astride an early 1970s vintage Toyota(?) station wagon.
But this series does not primarily evoke Don Quixote for me,
even though Gad is on a Quixotic quest to win back the love of his Dulcinea –
in the form of the son he has neglected for the 14 years of the kid’s life –
but instead it appears to be the commentary of a Frenchmen on the culture, as
it were, that he finds in America. And
this, in turn, is reminiscent of the observations of another Frenchman, who
published, in 1835, his two-volume book Democracy in America,
Alexis de
Tocqueville . Many consider this work
to be a near prescient assessment of our country not as it was conceived, but
as it was realized.
Central to de Tocqueville’s assessment of America was the
idea that we, instead of inheriting our wealth, worked for it. He admired this, as it created an industriousness
that he did not see in his own country where men either inherited wealth and
looked down on those who needed to labor – or they were laborers with no hope
of becoming wealthy, so were consigned to the drudgery of life. Hence the current concerns in France with quality of life, including being unshackled from labor to retire at a relatively young age.
Gad’s wealth has been supporting the lifestyles of his ex,
her boyfriend and their son. But they
have not been living the life of Ryan, luxuriating in that wealth (though they
live in a fine home and drive nice cars).
Instead they are each working towards wealth and fame in their own ways. Luke is working to become a model, Vivian has
an Instagram based company, Exhale, to which she is uploading episodes filmed
by her assistant on their iPhone and for which she is entertaining groups and
instructing them how to be calm by, you guessed it, exhaling, and Jason Alan Ross
is trying out for TV parts while mentoring Luke based on his earlier experience
as a model.
Gad observes their antics with an air of mild disdain. Why are they engaged in such silly pursuits? He is most concerned with Luke, who is trying
to find the money to buy surgically supplied pecs to enhance his chest without
causing his arms to become bloated. Why
would he want to distort himself in this way?
Why are these people obsessed with appearance?
Luke, for his part, does not understand why his biological
father is so clueless about what is important to him and sticks like glue to
his preferred father figure, Jason Alan Ross, who keeps promising to come up
with money for his half of the cost of the surgery.
I think Gad’s feelings towards Luke (and Vivian and Jason
Alan Ross) are intended as commentary on our country in part because of his
reaction to American humor. Gad
repeatedly engages with a comic who tells dick jokes, as in, “I have a
California dick so it looks blond and curly and like it is ready to go surfing.” After commenting on what the dicks of various
members of the audience must look like based on where they are from, he calls
out Gad and asks where he is from. When
Gad acknowledges that he is French, the comedian calls out rhetorically, “What
does a French dick look like? If looks
like you!” (With drum roll and inane
laughter to follow).
Crestfallen, Gad, who has been questioning himself while
being bewildered by those around him, turns to his sidekick, the loser Brian,
who defends the comic, saying that his jokes are not just dick jokes, but meta-dick
jokes: they offer commentary on the weakness of the genre. Perplexed and angry, Gad enlists his friend Jerry Seinfeld to put
the upstart comic in his place, twisting Jerry’s arm to tell the punk that the
joke is not funny, but Jerry, in the moment when he should support Gad, pulls
the rug out from under him, acknowledging that the joke is, in fact,
funny. And humor, in Jerry’s world,
trumps the dignity of his friend.
Facing the ignominy of having lost his son, his ex, and playing
second fiddle to a man who is inept in so many ways that it is hard to imagine
a less worthy opponent, Gad excuses himself from a bowling match in which he is
supposed to be his son’s wing man to try his hand at an open mic night in the
bowling alley’s lounge – perhaps the lowest place a comic can sink to.
Now de Tocqueville did not face similar personal challenges
(as far as I know) on his trip to America.
Quite the contrary, he was greeted as an esteemed visitor from a
country, in the midst of its second try at a Republic, that was imagined by
both countries to be comrades in arms – working, on two sides of the ocean, to
figure out how to engage in this complicated mess called self-government. De Tocqueville had a whiggish view of history
– that the Republic was built on the accomplishments of Louis the IV – the Sun
King, who had brought France out of the middle ages and into an enlightened era
that would lead, inexorably toward the ennoblement of the common man.
The reality of America, for de Tocqueville, was that the
white man in America was so focused on his own promotion that he was largely
unaware of others, except in so far as they could help him towards a goal –
whether in working together towards something that would benefit all working on
that project or working alone. In the
process of being so focused on themselves, they were blind to, among other
things, the terrors they were wreaking on African Slaves and Native
Americans. He predicted that we would
assimilate the Native Americans and isolate the African Americans, and that
this would be a dilemma that would prevent us from achieving the lofty goals of
equality that we set for ourselves.
De Tocqueville, though, saw that the industry of the
Americans would outstrip the French in productivity. He saw the French
collectivism as breeding a certain kind of apathy. The French may have a greater sense of
country and of belonging and they may enjoy a certain kind of freedom that
comes from not being afraid of being left by the side of the road by a citizenry
that doesn’t care (OK, I may be presentizing de Tocqueville here), but their
material accomplishments were likely to be eclipsed by the exploits of the
Americans.
Gad, the character, is the most popular comic in France (I
don’t know whether the actor – a French/Morocan comic – is actually that
popular). As the most popular comic, he
is known in France as the French Jerry Seinfeld. Even in France, where he speaks the language
and where he is huge, he is eclipsed by the exploits of the self-centered and
aggrandizing Americans.
Curious about what we do across the pond, and also wanting
to connect with his son, Gad travels here. As a comic, he observes. This is what comics do. They observe – and they comment. They notice what is going on around them, and
they (at least according to Hannah
Gadsby) bring the most egregious and anxiety provoking aspects of our
experience to our attention, but then, rather than energizing us to do
something to change those things, they release the tension that they have
brought into the room by making light of the situation.
Aristotle
wrote the book on tragedy. Nietzsche used
that work to write a modern version of the
tragic. What was lost in antiquity were
Aristotle’s thoughts on comedy. Could it
be that Gad, now in the guise of Aristotle, would point out that comedy is
based on horror?
Freud maintained that dreams are, at their base, means of
granting wishes to our unconscious drives.
What he didn’t say, but maybe left implicit, is that the source of the
wish is a lack and behind that lack is a fear that the lack will not be addressed. Freud's first example of a dream is of
the child who is hungry and dreams of eating so that he or she doesn’t wake
up. What he doesn’t point out here is
that the child is lacking something – food – and feeling something – hunger –
that would motivate him to address the lack except that, at the moment, the
need for sleep is going to trump the need for food, so we are going to produce
some imaginary food - and the purpose of the dream is to keep us asleep.
Of course, when we are hungry enough, we are desperate for food
because we are horrified that we will die if we don’t eat. Similarly, while we may want to cavort naked,
to meet our desire to exhibit ourselves, we are also horrified when we dream
that we have gone to school or to work without wearing any clothes. Gad points out to us, in this film, the he is
horrified of the state of affairs in America.
We are bloated narcissists who focus on the surface of our lives – and put
that out on the internet for others to emulate, parading nude, as it were, on the internet.
From a classical perspective, this is, indeed a comedy. It has a happy ending, of sorts. Our hero – whether as Quixote, de Tocqueville,
or Aristotle, managed to accomplish the relational goals that he set for
himself. His Sancho Panza helped him to
these goals. There was some ambiguity
about how well the other characters made out – and without another season, we
will not know how the story might have continued.
I think that the essential unlikeability of most of the cast
was necessary to clarify to the reader that what Gad was seeing was really
there – he wanted to hold up a mirror to them and to us that would highlight
the flaws that his de Tocquevillian self was observing. Perhaps, though, the horror that is at the heart
of the series – and one that the happy ending could not quite mask – is that,
for all his disdain, Gad still wants to be an American – and he despises himself
for doing that.
In his stand-up routine – taped and available to stream – he
talks about being at the beach in Morocco when he was a child and his father pointing across the ocean and saying that America lies on the other side of that and,
if he is lucky, he will be able to go there some day. He ends the show by telling of going out to Long Island
and pointing across the Atlantic to tell his child that Morocco lies there, and,
if he is lucky, some day he will be able to go there – but it is a joke. America is the shining destination. As horrible as it is, it is desirable in a
way that Morocco simply is not.
What if, then, what is most monstrous and horrifying about us
is that we desire to be Americans – to be striving to make our dreams come true
not just at night, but when we are awake.
That we are in love with the idea of being able to “live the dream” and
blind to the fact that the effort to achieve it will spoil us.
It is a truism in psychotherapeutic work that we don’t want to strip away all of the defenses. Some delusion is an important element of living a happy life. As observer, Gad (and his fellow comedians) relentlessly desire to show us who we are ultimately has a tragic quality – he strips away his and our delusions and connects us to our ugly, unhidden selves, and we find him, and ourselves, unlikeable.
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