Rupture in The Films of Mel Brooks

As gifted as Mel Brooks is at satirizing and parodying genre and trope, where his films perform most acutely is in the deconstruction of filmmaking itself. For Brooks, the screen is an easily permeable membrane, and characters and filmmakers pass through it regularly. Whether it’s Hedy Lamarr (ahem, that’s Hedley) escaping to a screening of Blazing Saddles or Dark Helmet watching Spaceballs on video, Brooks’ films present a fiction that’s almost painfully aware of its own status as fiction.

Consider the moment in Robin Hood: Men in Tights when the hero’s second shot comes from an arbitrary deus ex machina pulled directly from a reading of the script. It’s not a moment that makes logical sense, but it does highlight the absurd ways in which scriptwriters tend to write themselves out of narrative corners. The same goes for a similar joke in Spaceballs in which it is a video of Spaceballs itself which guides the characters forward. For Mel Brooks, the work in progress is indistinguishable from the finished work. Unlike the classical Hollywood productions Brooks tends to lampoon, the narrative space is not sacred. It may not even exist at all.

I saw (by way of The Majority Report) a video of Bill O’Reilly and Dennis Miller claiming that The Producers or Blazing Saddles could not get made today (because scary PC people would, I don’t know, do a cancel culture on it or something), assertions easily disproven by the existence of Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Personally I think the reason a film like Blazing Saddles wouldn’t get made today is that the universe-rupturing finale in which Lamarr hails a taxi to “drive me off this picture” only to find himself at a movie theater playing Blazing Saddles.

The gags are funny, sure, but there’s meaning behind the mad cavalcade of rifts in cinematic space-time. Mel Brooks imagines a universe — the Mel Brooks Cinematic Universe, if you will — united by chaotic breaks in the (un)stable fabric of existence. This instability is the essence of Brooks’ comedy.

My favorite of Brooks’ gags is also one of his most subtle: in High Anxiety, a camera shoots two characters from under a clear table, but the characters keep placing objects on the table in the camera’s way. It’s a subtle ode to the strangeness of “clever” photography but also to characters who stubbornly refuse to acquiesce to the filmmakers, and the filmmakers who have inadequately prepared their trick shot.

In the finale of History of the World: Part I, characters in the French Revolution segment are rescued by characters from the Roman Empire segment. It’s a moment that makes more narrative sense than actual sense, but then, again, that seems to be the point. A textbook example of tying multiple segments of a narrative together becomes nonsensical in the face of Brooks’ time-spanning epic. Intolerance it isn’t, but the reference is there.

Mel Brooks’ films are much more about film itself than they appear on the surface, but once you see the director’s consistent commentary on the medium itself, it’s not easy to unsee.