Hanger (2009) - 2/4

Aristotle claimed that comedy is ideally populated by our inferiors. If that were true in degree as well as in kind, Hanger would be the greatest comedy ever written. As it stands, it is a sporadically amusing comedy disguised as a horror film, more juvenile than any Wayans, National Lampoon, or Adam Sandler comedy and far more intent on disgusting the audience.

Knowing Hanger is a comedy from the beginning may just help in appreciating it. If one expects a horror film, the over-the-top squalor of pimps, prostitutes, victims of disfigurement and mutation, murder, rape, feces-flinging, fetus-ripping, turkey-slapping, amongst many other surprises I'd rather not spoil, immediately strikes one as ridiculous and forced. The Book of the Courtier (which I'm fairly certain has never, ever been mentioned in a review of a Ryan Nicholson film before) recommends the perfect, entertaining courtier practice the art of 'sprezzatura'. Sprezzatura is the practice of making all of one's hard-earned skills and abilities, like musicianship and joke-telling, appear totally spontaneous. The effort behind the activity should be disguised. The grotesque, grimy squalor of Hanger is without spontanaeity. Harmony Korine's squalor shows sprezzatura; Ryan Nicholson's certainly does not. Its sheer ridiculousness, however, is quite effortless. And I can't deny I laughed a partially-forced and partially-surrendered laugh many times throughout.

The film concerns a boy named "Hanger", so-called because his mother's pimp ripped him from her womb with a hanger. Hanger works at a junkyard sorting recyclables with his roommate, a disfigured, tampon-fetishist Asian. Together they watch porn, drink beer, avoid getting raped by the local (disfigured, of course) homosexual, and spy on the always-masturbating, porn-star boss's daughter. Meanwhile, Hanger's dad contrives to get revenge--at last!--on the pimp who killed Hanger's mother.

More an exploration of a particularly squalid, morally vacuous milieu of perverse sexuality and disfigurement than a narrative, Hanger is nearly an unintentional art-film, as non-narrative as Last Year in Marienbad, but with more shots of floppy artificial penises. What could be padding in another film is, in Hanger, most of the film. The revenge plot only occasionally gets in the way of seeing the boss's daughter masturbating or the Asian digging through the trash for porn and tampons.

What Hanger all adds up to is hard to say. The disfigurement is distributed wildly. Hanger necessarily is disfigured and has prosthetic and make-up effects. But the Asian, played by a Caucasian, also has heavy make-up effects and a prosthetic. Hanger's father has a huge, prosthetic nose and, in most of the film, age make-up. The pimp, a black man played by a white man, has a prosthetic nose as well as make-up. Nearly every man, except the boss of the junkyard, is treated to some sort of make-up effect disfigurement. The women, with two exceptions, are undisfigured, leaving their porn-star-perfect faces as intact as their silicon tits. Were the distribution of the disfigurement not so random, one could read something about the ugliness of human nature in Hanger or something about perversion and the subconscious. But I can discern no real pattern. Hanger, the Asian, and Hanger's dad are all rancid people in their own ways, as are the pimp and the film's lovely whores. The disfigurements are just hideous ornamentation upon a world of ugliness and vileness. It's a world where there are just a lot of ugly, awful people and the rest are beautiful, awful people. They all have strange minds that don't quite work right and a total absence of moral reasoning.

For whatever reason, it's this last point that makes it all so funny for me. This is somehow more post-apocalyptic than any Mad Max movie; this is post-human sludge-porn that marries the absurdist bleakness of Samuel Beckett and his casts of degenerates with the gleeful foulness of John Waters, but does so ineptly and with a $2000 camcorder. Hanger is a very stupid movie, but I like it. I would rather not, but I like it.