Little Murders

I just watched the most peculiar movie, by Jules Pfeiffer, the cartoonist. It is supposedly a black comedy but there is a lot more black than there is comedy. The marriage of a nihilist and a positive-thinker in an existentialist church is funny, as are several of the family conversations where everything said is either banal reminiscence or cliched, except for brief irruptions of dementia that are mostly ignored by the other characters. Still, I feel a little sick. The period is late 1960s New York, and everything is wrong, from the failing power to the 60 unsolved murders per month that appear to have no motive and that the hysterical, conspiracy-theorist police cannot and do not hope to solve. Pfeiffer perpetrates an especially horrifying murder to start in train a demonstration of the murders' motive. It is to him the ape-like love of making someone pay, of fighting back and killing someone when life is brutish and caged. The final scene is in fact of the men in the family truly happy at last in their metal-shuttered cage of an apartment, hooting, climbing on the furniture, slapping their chests, relieved of all torment because they have just murdered several strangers.

"Murderous ape" is certainly a better definition of man than "featherless biped" or even "rational animal," but only someone of Pfeiffer's wit and politics would respond to New York's disaster by going on safari above the human soul's First Cataract, when he needed to travel no farther than into his own memories. That the New York of his youth was markedly more tranquil might have suggested that deep causes were not needed, and a humanity surpassing his wittiness might have suggested turning his satire against the real problems. With elites like him playing games with disaster, it is amazing New York was ever repaired.