Peter Bart: It’s Satire Season, When Doctors Maim, Professors Become Fugitives & Barbie Gives Mattel The Business

“Satire is a dangerous game In Hollywood,” Billy Wilder once observed. “It invites self-immolation.” Still, the satiric spirit looms large in many of this year’s buzzworthy movies: American Fiction, Poor Things, Saltburn, Air, The Holdovers and even Barbie.

All mobilize satiric weaponry — humor, irony, even ridicule — in advancing their perspectives. The clever corporate barbs in Barbie are soothingly pink-coated, but by contrast the protagonist in American Fiction is a blunt and self-destructive novelist. His work supposedly is not satiric enough nor Black enough for him to register success.

Barbie was heralded at the Golden Globes while American Fiction was snubbed. The latter still earned the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, a SAG Awards Cast nomination and a spot on the AFI’s Top 10 Films of 2023.

If Wilder were around to see this year’s slate, I think he’d admire the seditious scientist in Poor Things, the lethal social climber in Saltburn and the homicidal dealmakers in Air. Barbie’s subtle genius in manipulating the corporate world likely would delight every satirist from Aldous Huxley to Aristophanes, but the latter might prefer she took a crack at re-imagining Lysistrata.

As a genre, satire has profoundly frustrated many filmmakers – witness the successive failures of Mike Nichols and, later, George Clooney, in turning Catch-22 into an accessible story, even though the U.S. Army seems like an easy target.

By contrast, American Fiction confronts arcane targets ranging from academia to publishing to racial politics. “We knew we were plunging into too many danger zones but that was the challenge,” says Jeffrey Wright, the witty actor who stars as the film’s novelistic wannabe Thelonious “Monk” Ellison.

Written and directed by Cord Jefferson, the movie is based on an underappreciated novel titled Erasure, by Percival Everett. Its story recounts the dilemma of a gentle, Harvard-educated college teacher who listens to Mahler and Ry Cooder and, though Black, hesitates to write about racial issues (“I’m not sure I really believe in race.”).

Since he’s gaining scant recognition as a “serious’ novelist, he adopts a pen name and creates a violent novel about inner-city gangsters (he labels it “ghetto porn”). The book, My Pafology, is re-titled Fuck, and it makes him at once rich and humiliated.  

Critics lavish praise on his re-discovered talents while producers bid millions on movie rights and kudos flow in from critics groups. The success, and controversy, leaves the protagonist in a state of shock, with the FBI feverishly searching for him.

The producers of American Fiction don’t expect to achieve anything vaguely resembling the success of the mythical project it describes. Further, they could have learned from Wilder’s discipline in films like The Apartment or Some Like It Hot; American Fiction arguably takes on too many issues, its third act wandering confusingly among them.

Remember, it’s satire: Billy Wilder asked audiences not just to laugh at the movie but to laugh at ourselves. And that, as Percival Everett would say, represents a demanding “pafology.”