I love you love me love who exactly?

I swear I'm not doing this to increase my readership; I have no intention of bolstering my page-hits by picking up the pedos, but I'm afraid that I am going to discuss Gary Glitter today. But only peripherally. Those who have not followed The Hangover Epistles, volume one, volume two, volume three, and volume four, may want to do so before reading on.

So, an alert reader pointed out that Morrissey has covered Bowie ("Drive-In Saturday"), Bolan ("Cosmic Dancer") and now Reed ("Satellite of Love" - I mentioned in response that it would have meant so much to me if he had covered that particular song two decades ago); the alert reader said that all Morrissey had to do now was cover Glitter. The alert reader had no way of knowing that I had just been reading a decades-old interview with Morrissey, reproduced in NME's trashy, otherwise useless celebration of the 25th anniversary of the release of The Queen is Dead. The interview ends thus:

Together we talk about the future, the dreaded beast of Morrissey's worst dreams. You could almost say everything looks rosy. The world's favourite misery goat [eh?] seems radiant for a man in torment. He's left school, left home (almost), what next...a relationship, I suggest as a parting thought.

"I wanted to say this to you," he says slowly in a tone of confidentiality. "I always thought my genitals were the result of some crude practical joke. I remember an NME interview in the very early 1970s - it was Gary Glitter. It concluded with the remark 'the constant reminder that there's something between his legs.' And I thought it might be quite fitting to end this with...the constant reminder that there's absolutely nothing between his legs."

I'm sure you're disappointing millions!

"I doubt it...which is very disappointing to me."

[This was edited only to remove an exclamation point inserted by the author in Morrissey's quoted speech, one that I found to be intrusive; forgive my own intrusion.]

We can take this passage two ways. First, we can peer at it as a distant relic. How young Morrissey is. It still makes sense to talk of him leaving school and leaving home (almost). We can look back and wonder about the role of the closet in his refusal to indulge in romantic details and in his famed celibacy (although perhaps the celibacy and the bodily discomfort is less a function of social reproach and more Crispian in nature?) and, at the same time, relish the fact that he has come to acknowledge that there is something between his legs, although we necessarily are forced to reconcile this with the comparison to Gary Glitter whose spangled, anthemic phallic enterprise now looks less like glam hedonism and more like an offer of sweets to passing youth. Or, we can take a more Morrisseyian approach and refuse to impose a historical filter; we can reject rolling the condom of nostalgia down the shaft of our memory, and see continuity and contact. After all, in the mid-1980s Morrissey cites an NME article about Gary Glitter from the early 1970s; we can appreciate his own sense of history as something continuous and ongoing. For all his supposed wry bathos, and however revolutionary The Smiths were, Morrissey was the last original glam rocker.

It is interesting that his choice of covers of Bowie, Bolan, and Reed are so uninteresting. With his intense musical scholarship and fastidious taste, we might have expected him to dig out a real rarity to cherish; instead, he picks Drive-In Saturday, Cosmic Dancer, and Satellite of Love. These are unimpeachable covers, to be sure, and I think the reason he picks these, other than the real reason, which is that they're amazing songs he loves, is that he is refusing to indulge in the retrospective analysis that makes these songs obvious classics; there was a time when he first heard them, when they were new and fresh and had not yet been canonised, and it is in this spirit that he covers them. What makes them so uninteresting is precisely what made them interesting.

Now, we spent a lot of time last week studying penis-horror; Morrissey's notion that his genitals are a "crude practical joke" refines the horror into something palpably crude, and, as a "practical joke", both functional and dysfunctional at once (which is the key dynamic and ambiguity of a "practical joke"). And we then come to that dynamic of plenitude and emptiness, of phallic insurrection and castration: the man who is a constant reminder of what is between his legs, and the man who deems himself a constant reminder that there is nothing between his legs. This is, one might think, a somewhat mellower, somewhat more subdued version of The Hangover, but the interviewer gives Morrissey the last word. The interviewer, sweetly exposing himself as a fan and admirer, enthusiastically says, "I'm sure you're disappointing millions!" Morrissey coolly responds, "I doubt it...which is very disappointing to me." At his most snapping and casually over-articulate, Morrissey rejects the sallow presumption of the phallic, and admits to desire. And that is exactly what was lacking in The Hangover. Desire, the desire that doubts itself and yet still desires; the desire that is dangerous and as explosive as it is implosive (Gary Glitter); the desire that always disappoints. It is this amusing, surprising impinging of desire and hope where there would seem to be none (where Morrissey says, there is none) that sweetens and deepens; the mistake made by The Hangover is that it opts for disgust (in penis-horror, but elsewhere as well) without having the courage to offer desire.

Now if you'll excuse me, it looks like Beyonce's set at Glastonbury is online; I'll be busy for a while, watching a force of nature.

The Hangover Part Two, Part Two: Treatment of LGBT Issues

A few days ago, an alert reader asked me about the treatment of GLBT themes in The Hangover II, prompting me to see the film. I would have sent a bill to the alert reader for the cost of the film and a pack of peanut M&Ms, except that the astute reader turned out to be right that this is a tremendously rich subject of study, quite possibly dissertation-worthy. Any fledgling queer-theorists (or "thinks" as I call them) should read the following analysis closely.

Over the past week, distracted only occasionally from the task at hand, I've attempted to track concepts of comedy, reality, and consequence through a pair of films. The world these films create and inhabit is extraordinarily self-contained, exemplified by the laughter of the characters, which ensures safety and protects the films against breaches in their surfaces. The movies promise to take us wild places but they never go there, making only small incursions into the unknown and then retreating quickly to the familiar and the pat, epitomised by two destinations rich with history, glamour, anthropological interest, and narrative opportunity, Las Vegas and Thailand, and yet what we get is """Vegas""" and """Thailand"""; and when the films do slide into wildness, they uncomfortably rein themselves back in (Tyson); or else they forget about where they were going (pedophilia) as the reassuring backdrop of the status quo is re-established.

So what about GLBT issues? Well, I'm going to make two arguments, both of which are, I'm sure, obvious. Just in case they are not, I've bolded each one.

1) This is not a film geared towards making GLBT youth feel good about themselves.

Just as we got to enjoy the now-classic "Paging Dr Faggot" scene in The Hangover, so we hear "gay" flung around as a modifying slur in the sequel. Watching these movies, one has the slightly sickly feeling that the auteurs are indulging in the post-ironic, post-identity transmission of: Of course we're not homophobic, that's why we can make gay jokes, like Chow saying "niggaz" isn't racist, because we're not racist either.

But this transmission is invariably accompanied by episodes of good old-fashioned gay panic, just to ensure the following simultaneous transmission: of course we're not homophobic, that's why we can make gay jokes, but look, we'll also experience some gay panic, because we don't want you to think we're actually gay.

And so when Ed Helms discovers that he has been penetrated by a she-male, we get run-of-the-mill gay panic: wide-eyed babbling, shivering, clawing for sanity while struggling for breath, the desperate search for a moral shower that can wash away the sins of the flesh and even, in what I do not think is a parody of The Crying Game, wretching. Seeing a penis on the object of desire results in horror, shock, and vomiting - not unrelated responses. The horror and the shock come from finding alien desire in oneself, vomiting is expelling that alien desire, barfing it out. In The Hangover II, the episode of panic is followed by a discussion of the obligation and capacity to forget. The message is clear: a male should be panicked to discover a penis as his object of desire; he must purge this or, most conveniently, repress it.

On the other hand, it would be unfair to fail to note that it does not deny Ed Helms' pleasure in being anally penetrated. This is oddly resolved at the end of the film. The "demon in me" is confused with the "semen in me", a rhyme of unmitigated castigation, and yet Stu seems to claim that demon; he demands recognition and, one might detect the stirrings of a political consciousness: it's about time that randy straight white men are freed from centuries of moral stricture and condescension and even downright prejudice. Sadly, there is very little to suggest that his unearthed desire and his newfound pride is going to find fruition in the marriage. That his wife might "get used" to his demonic side and his tattoo is promising, but, as I have said, these films promise more than they deliver. She insists on switching sides with him for the wedding ceremony itself so that as she marries him, she has the blank, untattooed side of his face to look at. So, maybe she'll accommodate him later? Maybe? Either way, there is only the promise of affirmation, the retreat into the safety of the "normal", and the punch is pulled. (Imagine if she whispered to him as they stood in front of the altar, "I have a strap-on", and Stu's expression turned to delight>? But that would be a very different film with a very different message).

Now, let's address a glaring issue. I started talking about LGBT themes. While this film disparages "gay" and puts the "trans" into sex work, we must not get confused. The Hangover oeuvre is about the kinds of guys who are shocked and disgusted by being anally-penetrated, the kinds of guys who end up with women (we are guaranteed a shot in the credit sequence of Phil and Alan with proper, vagina-toting women). The crucial point is this: Gay and Trans themes come up here not as "gay" or "trans" per se but as ways of conveying penis-horror.

The central scene in the movie is, of course, the discovery of Chow through his penis, poking up through fabrics in their Bangkok hotel room. "What is that?" "A spider's nest?" An ugly, dangerous thing spewing mites. Alan tastes it: "Shitake". This moment, as I know you know, specifically recalls the shower-room scene in Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library, but I hardly need point out to you how different The Hangover's and Hollinghurst's narrator's approaches to the penis are? No, I don't.

The only figure in the film without penis horror is the monkey. The monkey licks Chow's penis, the first of many gags about the "gay monkey" and its fondness for putting its mouth on penises. Once again, we should hesitate before calling this mere gay-bashing (or monkey-bashing, for that matter). It's something more. The comic-disgusting actis replicated when the monkey licks the dismembered finger. It's an important point, because it's not just a visual rhyme playing on the similarity of the dismembered finger and a dick; the monkey is a Virgilian guide leading the men through the psychosexual hell that is The Hangover. Confusing the dismembered finger for a dismembered member is no accident made by a stupid, gay monkey; it's a crucial point: Teddy has, in a way, cut off a dick when he cuts off his finger. The dismembered finger is not a symbol of Teddy castrating himself, but rather castrating his father who lived on in the phallic image of his perfect son.

So, we have a film that, in every way, encourages forgetting and repression, and has a compelling, convincing, and consistent message: the penis is revolting, even when appended to a woman. Gays and Trans aren't evil or moral reprobates, they just have a disgusting relationship with a disgusting object. Arguably, as Stallybrass and White famously said, "disgust bears the imprint of desire", but a film like The Hangover is too formally committed to its retreats, too immersed in the convenience of disgust, and too uninterested to allow that concept any room to breath (in just the same way that it suffocates the possibility of any good Asian jokes with jaw-droppingly obvious ones; in just the same way as it stifles Tyson, particularly in his return in this film).

2) So, the first point is obvious: the auteurs have no real interest in gay or trans issues, gays and transgendered people aren't targetted per se, they're just collateral damage; the real point is penis horror.

The more confusing issue hearkens back to Part One, Part One.

Once again, we are invited to see Alan as a pederast, this time with 16 year old Teddy. Um, even his name gives it away: Teddy to the Bear.

When he first meets Teddy and learns he is "pre-med", Alan asks him about Doogie Howser and then points out that the actor was gay. He says he learned this in Teen People. His immediate associations are sexual and, shall we say, age-inappropriate?

Alan quickly explains his antagonism towards Teddy. Teddy would disrupt the "wolf-pack", i.e. his friendship with the other lads. But is that entirely convincing? Is that why he stares at Teddy with such lingering intensity? Is that why he blurts out "in your face", or why he says to the boy: "It's illegal. It'd be a shame if anybody reported you"?

The subtext is barely sub at all. Once again, there is the implication that Alan is a pedo. But when Alan's head is shaved, he is effectively neutered, Samson-like, and the Alan-as-pedo routine is dropped, at which point pederasty becomes an explicit, instead of an implicit, topic. The tattoo artist tells the 9-year old he's tattooing to show them his balls. When the wolf-pack enter a bar, one of them says they're looking for a little kid. The owner answers, "Okay. $2000."

What does any of this mean?

I trust that you will have picked up two themes in these postings about The Hangovers. One, my attempt to find some meaning in the comedy; two, my acceptance of my failure to do so. Not everything has to be clever. Not everything has to be heavy. Yes, there are very interesting undercurrents suggesting that the only lovable weird character in the films is a pedo; yes, Mike Tyson has quite an interesting role in the first film; yes, there's one of the few parodies I've seen of the photograph of Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner; yes, there is a Virgilian monkey leading the characters through the psychosexual symbolism of penile hell; but ultimately the film works to forget these problemata, to erase them.

One fascinating possibility is that these films are arguing that the reconstruction of memory can only take place with the forced repression of memory; or, even better, the reconstruction of a narrative memory can only take place with the forced repression of certain memories. It's not just a matter of simplification, but rather the formed story needs to be a linear, coherent, normatively-paced substitute for the ambiguous, haphazardly-beating pulse of life itself, and must silence, or forget, the off-tempo beats that dysregulate it. As each Hangover moves towards the reconstructed narrative, it sheds the confusion, it forgets what it needs to forget; it presents us with violence, pederasty, sodomy, and then demonstrates how these must be shed to reconstitute the "normal", with the recuperation of the status quo, where the remainders - the hangover - is no longer real, but only a symptom.

A second fascinating possibility is that these films are intentional enactments of the forgetting of obscenity, running through a formidable array of obscenities - the history of colonialism in the United States (Vegas as the ultimate symbol of a freedom for rich, white males purchased cheap) and globally (Thailand as a site occupied by Western sex tourists, foreign criminals, and importers of corporate goods), which is a history of the obscenity of power; the history of sex, which is a history of exploitation and the obscenity of the penis; the history of violence, which is also a history of cross-racial encounters and the obscenity of human difference. The films promises the reconstruction of obscenity as the characters piece together the violence and destruction and violations of the night before, but this reconstruction is accompanied by active forgetting, repression, justifications, and the construction of a normative narrative that will permit the final return to the status quo, where remainders and reminders are no longer threatening, they are symptoms of recovery. This is a crucial point: a hangover is a lingering weariness and suffering but is also a physical path back into sobriety, tinged with regret and recuperation.

Were you at all surprised that nobody was hurt when Alan ran the motorboat into the wedding reception? How much better would the film have been if Alan had run the motorboat into the wedding reception and run over and killed Doug? Why Doug? Doug is the excluded member of the wolf-pack, the facilitator, but ultimately the most castrated member of the group, the one without an ugly penis, but who is, like Teddy's finger, therefore a dismembered penis? There is no consequence other than regret, which is a form of moral reconstitution after-the-fact, and acceptance of physical punishment. Doug survives, Teddy is unmolested, the wedding goes on.

And we can add one more point: these films are enactments of forgetting, and it is precisely as such that they are compulsively repetitive. "It happened again . . ." There can be a Hangover III, Hangover IV, this series can go on forever, convulsively, repetitively, regenerating and forgetting and then repeating. If you want to take this theory seriously, then you must face the following: in a rejection of psychoanalysis (which would be odd, because this film seems to be so undeterred in making a psychoanalytically-derived theme its only sustained theme), the fundamental trauma is not the trauma of castration, but the trauma of having a penis in the first place. The fundamental obligation to forget is because you desire the penis you have. It is only through forgetting that you can reconstitute yourself narratively. And if this is true, then all psychopathology resides not in developmental regression or conflict, but in the constitutive ideal of heteronormative masculinity.

A third possibility is less flattering, but weird and, in my mind at least, ill-formed. What direction does a work of art look? Does it look to the real, whether because it is mimetic, or inspired, or therapeutic, or curious? Or does it look to you, the audience? In Part One of this series on The Hangover, I mentioned this issue: the film is full of guarantees of safety, most obviously in its persistent internal laughter; I am also certain that not a single person, not one, who watched The Hangover II thought that there was going to be the slightest hint of carnage when Alan drove the speedboat over the dock onto dry land, much less that there would be widespread boat-murder of the wedding party, Stu's wife, of the castrated penis, Doug. The film makes a promise to its imaginary "you" that there will be safety; to enjoy the film and to accept this promise makes "you" what exactly? What promises did you accept from this film, and were they delivered? Was it worth the cost of a price of tickets and a packet of peanut M&Ms? What exactly is the hangover from the Hangovers?

I haven't a clue, these films are beyond me, which is why I promise never, ever to write about them again.

The Hangover, Part Two, Part One: Asians

So, having discussed The Hangover here and here, we now move on to Part Two, the sequel, honing in on an alert reader's request that we spend some time thinking about how the film handles LGBT issues. We're not quite ready yet. We need to deal with something else before we can go there.

So, there were two surprisingly funny moments in a film otherwise as predictable as the look on a vegan's face when you tell her the tofu turkey isn't tofu.

(It's a bull-penis turkey).

Both comic moments came in the closing credit sequence where we're shown photographs from the forgotten night of debauchery; and yes, it's sad that the only two surprisingly funny moments in The Hangover II come in the closing credit sequence.

The first is a sequence of photographs revealing how Teddy (Mason Lee) loses his finger. (If you thought that throughout the film Lee was acting with all the forced mannerisms of a student actor, probably one who is the child of a famous director, you'd have been right.) Teddy chops his finger off when playing the game where you jab a knife as rapidly as possible between your splayed fingers. While it is quite funny in its own right, the joke also speaks to a developed if banal theme in the film. The overachieving Asian youth rebelling against his parents and sabotaging them by sabotaging himself is perhaps passingly familiar as a trope, and some harsh critics might assert that it is a "full-blown cliché" (although we would quickly riposte that "full-blown cliché" is a cliché), but the gag at least was part of a narratively-driven, psychologically-consistent development rewarded with a punchline, something otherwise lacking in the film.

The second surprisingly funny scene was also the only shocking moment in a film that smugly tit-toes through the Garden of Transgression like it's the Queen of Shock about to roust the Trespasser of Complacency from his snooze. It involves the tiresome Chow, played by the go-to-guy for any director snapping at a casting assistant, "Let's find an Asian who'll be a stooge for Asian jokes . . . what am I saying? Get Ken Jeong on the line!"

In this particular amusing sequence of photographs in the closing credits, Chow is playing with a gun; as the photographs fly past, we see things getting out of hand until suddenly Chow is holding the gun up against Phil's neck.

It's a fairly mild gag about impulsive, unstable men with their drugs and their bombs and their guns and their bombs.

But suddenly, flashing before our eyes, right after we've seen Chow holding a gun to Phil's throat, there's a reversal. Phil is holding a gun to Chow's head.

Did you see it? And then it was gone. But the final snapshot in the Chow-Phil-Gun sequence in the closing credits was based on another famous photograph.

What famous image served as the exact model for the snapshot?

Let's take half a step back. In this stupid film, there are oodles of Asian jokes, mostly accompanied by the internal laughter I've been describing. Phil makes a crack about the size of Asian women's boobs - which was not the first time a single person in the world would have heard that joke, that day - and we get a cut to Ed Helms. As a white guy about to marry an Asian woman, he laughs the joke off on behalf of all Asians. Being able to speak for the single most populous racial demographic is something of a compensation for committing yourself to small boobs, is it not?

Anyway, the Asian jokes are, as they would say, rame. Thailand or, as Alan pronounces it,"Thigh-land" (I think they were trying for the "If it's not funny the first time, it'll be funny the fifth time, and then it won't be funny again, until the twelfth time, when it once again becomes funny" approach) - anyway, as I was saying, Thailand and Asia are reduced to backdrops, sometimes pretty, sometimes unfathomable, but of no real interest. We get the usual motifs: sex tourism, slurping noodles, small boobs, martial arts, monkeys and monks, all worth a joke or two. And come on, did we expect anything else? I didn't go see The Hangover II for its clever investigation of things Asian - and, that's okay. Not everything has to be about Asia. I get it.

What can we say about Asia, then, based on this film? There are some almost-interesting peripheral figures, but they're mainly not Asian: the Russian mobsters, the fat American . . . and an Arab of some sort? Why were all the criminals not Asian? Was it a radical take on Thai cosmopolitanism or a pointed refusal to fill the screen with Thai criminals? Who the hell knows. The film limits itself to obvious Asian jokes; it seems to imply that Asia is a receptacle for transnational criminality; and, in a film that burps up a new sponsor every few minutes, Asia merely belongs on a corporate continuum from IHOP through Smartwater to Long John Silvers, Fanta, and PF Changs.

But one thing is for sure, with that snapshot of Phil as Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan and Chow as a Viet Cong prisoner, the auteurs wink, blink, or grimace at a whole other set of relations between the United States and Asia. You might say it's weird having a Chinese-American in Thailand standing in for a suspected Viet Cong officer, but having Phil in place of Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulls no punches. What does it hit? I'm not sure. The whole thing has been so mushy and so afraid to move beyond the easily-recognisable stereotype and familiar jokes that it's hard for me to know quite what happened there. But it's the only astonishing moment of comic hubris in a film that thinks it hit the comic hubris goldmine; it's the only unsettling moment in a film full of gags intended to unsettle.

At the end of the film, One Night In Bangkok, the Andersson-Ulvaeus-Rice collaboration most famously performed by Anthony Head's brother, is performed by an off-key Tyson and edited into a bits. The song is one of the great, wry Orientalist tracks in music history, with several of the best couplets in pop history ("Siam's gonna be the witness/to the ultimate test of cerebral fitness/this grips me more than would a/muddy old river or reclining Buddha" - which arguably isn't even the best verse in the song). It could have served as a template for the entire film, with its confused synthesis of erotics and disdain, its contemptuous opinion that could belie a certain underlying respect or appreciation, its insistent focus on the Western in Bangkok, and where reconstructing the night would substitute for chess. But the track is more sordid, more unsettling, and, in its few words more evocative than any of the scenes in the movie, every line is better thought-out, and it is far funnier than The Hangover II. By showing Tyson singing it off-key, the auteurs make a dope of Tyson - it's as if they were embarrassed that twelve seconds of One Night In Bangkok is better than two hours of The Hangover II and so, kamikaze-like, used an ingenuous, gullible Tyson to bring it down.

The alert reader who suggested I address GLBT issues wanted me to do so soon; instead, we've discussed pedophilia, Tyson, and Asians.

We'll get to GLBT issues tomorrow, but I wanted to set the stage: The Hangovers are two cowardly films, pointing or gesturing or feinting towards the darkly taboo but then retreating; as we see manifested in Tyson's tired, flat return, the film is all about pulling its punches, even if the occasional one gets through.

The Hangover, Part One, Part Two: Tyson

In last week's final post, I mentioned that it was not clear to me what The Hangover was targeting in its comedy about pedophilia. Christopher Morris satirises media hysteria and public outrage; The Simpsons is in a twenty-year dialogue with television culture; but The Hangover? Anything? Bueller? Bueller? Sometimes jokes do not have much heft, and that's okay.

One of the more interesting things in The Hangover is Mike Tyson's crucial cameo; in a film that refrains from connecting with the real and the consequential, having somebody play himself is enormously satisfying, an anchor into the world. Apparently, during their renegade night of safe-white-male-terrorism, the wolf-pack stole Mike Tyson's tiger. CCTV footage leads Tyson to the men and he insists they bring the tiger back; eventually they do so, not without some adventure.

Up until the final moment, Tyson is a mesmerising figure. When he first appears, he lashes a punch that knocks out Alan. Violent but sensitive, Tyson peers out in a half-squint as if unsure what is expected of him. He is a figure of athleticism and strange delicacy, a reservoir of brutal power but also etiquette not unlike, perhaps, a house-trained tiger. At least twice he is addressed as “Champ”, an honourary term he occupies without irony or condescension – despite the multitude of scandals, he is one of the greatest boxers in history. When he first appears in the hotel room, he is shadow-drumming along with a Phil Collins song. It would be a mistake to see this only as a joke about a burly black athlete being a fan of the definitively white, 1980s chartbuster. Collins is also a point of reference, consistent precisely with that admixture of violence and sensitivity, contextualising Tyson as a particular modern American archetype, the alienated male whose violences are not entirely unforgiven, whose self-justifications are not entirely unheard: he is bound in the reference to Phil Collins with Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman and Eminem’s Stan.

But then at the end of the film, there’s a joke. One of the wolf-pack has commented apologetically about bad behaviour the night before. Tyson laughs it off, saying that one cannot be held responsible for what one does when drunk. The men around him onscreen laugh. On the one hand, Tyson is being generous: he forgives the debaucheries that these men have committed against him, his property, his tiger, and, indeed, all of Las Vegas. The figure of always-possibly forgiven violence becomes a figure of forgiveness; the Phil Collins reference is not so jarring. On the other hand, the line is still also a reference to Tyson’s own behaviour – and, irrevocably, to the charge of rape for which he went to prison. In a role that rehabilitates Tyson as wiser, self-parodic, and, insistently, as a man who deserves the title Champ, and in a film where Tyson is one of the few intersections with consequence and reality, this last line, which earns the onscreen laughter of the men around him, suggests a glib rehabilitation and easy forgiveness, one in which the easy-to-forgive debaucheries of fictional characters in a mock-up of Las Vegas are blended with something real, something uncertain, but something very dark. And just to make sure we know, the men laugh. This is the internal laughter that runs throughout The Hangover, the laugh track that lets us know what is supposed to be funny and what is not. It also runs throughout The Hangover, Part Two, as we shall see in a week of posts, I kid you not, dedicated to The Hangover oeuvre.

The Hangover Part One, Part One: Pedophilia

I was at dinner with a friend at a fancy restaurant in London, enjoying a plate of fresh local asparagus, when a propos of very little, I said, "God, I hate pedophiles." My friend immediately pounced. "What? You hate people who like children? Because that's what 'pedophilia' means, from the Greek roots, 'pedo', 'child', and 'philia', 'likes'. So you hate parents who like their children, or teachers who like their pupils? You're such a dick!" What could I say? My friends are all pedos.

It led us to reminisce about the great pedophilia jokes. There is, I think, one great modern moment in comedy about pedophilia. It is, of course, Christopher Morris' extended riff on the media and paedophilia, Paedogeddon.

Another minor moment in the comedy of pedophilia can be found in The Simpsons movie - a film that I ought to re-watch because I certainly felt at the time that it met the two challenges facing it: will it be funny? and will it translate a television show to the big-screen? (The latter question was particularly important because, above all other things, The Simpsons is a show by, for, and about the television). Anyway, do you remember the more or less conventional sequence where Bart skateboards through Springfield without any trousers on, and full nudity is prevented by conveniently placed objects between his body and the screen? And then suddenly he goes underneath something and we get to see Bart in below-the-waist frontal nudity? It was a nice double-gag: we thought we were supposed to enjoy the reference to Austin Powers, and instead, we were shocked by a gag that blasted through Austin Powers' parody of coy cinematic conventions for intimating but disguising nudity, a gag that was no doubt considered for prosecution - and something I don't even think South Park has done?

And of course there is the theme of pedophilia in The Hangover. You might remember the scene where Zach Galifianakis, as Alan, has the baby "Carlos" simulate masturbation. And just to make sure the stunned and amused audience knows what he's doing, we get to see it twice. Remember, we've already been told: Alan isn't allowed within two hundred feet of schools . . . or Chuck E. Cheese. And remember, when they're driving to Vegas and Alan is leaning out of the car screaming "Road Trip" and attracting the attention of the car in the next lane, it's not, as one would expect, a car filled with buxom blondes, but rather we see in the back seat a small fair-haired girl. That she gives him the finger should not make us any less uneasy with the undercurrents here.

In any case, this is all somewhat interesting. If Morris has an agenda and if his satire is targeted with all the lip-curling intensity of a monomaniacal assassin coiling to administer the death-blow, if the Simpsons is one-upping Austin Powers (by showing that a gag about prurience is itself prurient) - and both claims could be developed and expanded and added-to - what is the minimum we could say about the pedophilia in The Hangover?

Well, it's kinda funny? I suppose we could say that there is comedy to be had in something that manages to appear to be both fundamentally harmless and shocking. The eruption of the harmless shock is a fairly common comic trick. And comedy is very effective at eking out elaborate forms of harmless shock, all the more impressive because the overlap between the categories of the harmless and the shocking would seem, intuitively, to be fairly meagre.

We could look more closely at the character of Alan who is more cuddly than creepy, more alienated than alienating, while recognising that just because he is more cuddly or more alienated does not mean he is not creepy or alienated. The fact that we're being told that a potential pedophile is the most sympathetic figure in the film and the one put in charge of the baby has a certain subversive frisson. But going back to the scene where Alan has the baby simulate masturbation: he's at a table with Bradley Cooper's Phil. We get one shot of Phil in the middle of this skit and he's laughing it off. But look closely at the laugh: it's a carefully crafted laugh that allows a very mild disapproval and some benign condescension while signalling easy enjoyment of the joke, which in turn effectively communicates to the audience: don't worry, this is really safe, we're only talking about a guy doing something inappropriate, not a pedophile doing . . . that.

For my next post, we're going to come back to the internal laughter in The Hangover. But for today, I just want to point something very obvious out: the comedy is operating here as a performance that is divorced from the real. Hence the "harmlessness". It is not always the case that the performance is so easily divorced. There are times when we are not so sure whether what we are seeing is a performance or real. I can think of two examples from recent memory: Dr Thraft and a certain Amazon book review, which has been deemed more helpful than any other review of Go the Fuck to Sleep (and has also been deemed less helpful than any other review).

My suspicion is that The Hangover, for all its purported wildness, makes a lot more promises than it keeps. The scene when the characters wake up amidst chaos, reminiscent of course of Stoppard's After Magritte, and must reconstruct what happened leaves certain details unaccounted for, certain visual promises unfulfilled. The provenance of the tiger may be explained, but not some of the other details that the camera allows us or invites us to pick up. In the same way, the film makes certain promises about deranged and dangerous comedy that it never keeps: we think we're going to be dealing with something really taboo, but, don't worry, we're not even really going there, we'll be smoothing the edges and making sure you don't get too uncomfortable (we'll also come back to this "you") - we'll make sure you know that however shocking it is, it's also harmless. The Hangover is a bit like Las Vegas itself: you want to think the city promises you everything, and while it's quite easy to have a good time there, you won't get all your money back, and when you think about it, when you think really hard about it, you realise that you can see the city watching you as it holds out some small replica of a promise-delivered and you take that replica and convince yourself that the promise has been fulfilled. Didn't nobody tell you the house always wins?