What Judaism has become in its projection into a popular culture is indisputably a messy construct, to speak in minimizing terms. Putting aside the immediacy of our political contexts for just a moment, we observe, here, in Daniel Robbins’ Bad Shabbos, the self-image of Jewish neurosis. Noticeable in Jewish imaginations, often through Ashkenazi positionalities across AmeriCanada, is a depiction of Judaism that is totally defined by a kind of vacuous signification, isolating through caricaturist sensibilities a grab-bag of emphatic gesticulation that orbits stereotyped characterization, as to denote the aesthetics of Jewishness. This will typically surmount the relationship between the subject (our characters) and their identity (Jewishness). This is a method of self-portrait rife with internalized perceptions, in dialogue with a certain gaze of their Jewishness that placates the masses (a Christian populism that sees Jewishness as other), who will be ingesting these narratives. History, a prime and foremost faculty of this cultural group that this writer is a part of, is excised. In lieu of unchallenging representations that speak to the properly discursive and dialectical rigor of Jewish thought and practice, we are instead treated to what could be determined as convenient shorthand: Jewishness as mannerism.
Bad Shabbos circulates a comedy of errors, hijinks with context that becomes increasingly destabilized as the stakes of one night purportedly grow larger. For Friday night dinner, David (Jon Bass) and his fiancée, Meg (Meghan Leathers), invite her parents to meet his for the first time. What should be a rudimentary evening of pleasantries and cautious anxiety becomes a deteriorating facade of inadequate deceptions and even worse performances to uphold the ruse. The general direction taken by the film quickly becomes broad and obtuse, writers Robbins and Zack Weiner orchestrating a too-solitary medley of narrative furcations and conflict, each progressive fiasco never amounting to an effect that the film hadn’t already played out. It’s rinse and repeat for around 60 minutes, until it’s clear that there’s just not much left to prolong. There’s such little gravity offered to the relationship each character has to the central predicament that it deflates both tension and a necessary vigilance, the film ultimately stumbling into the identity of an extended cover-up sequence, sprinkled with ornaments of “Jewishness” and an encumbering passivity it can’t quite shake. That the project hinges itself on a single joke in its first act — a moment that is the funniest the film ever gets — and rides the momentum of the joke’s implications until its punchline in the final minute, suggests a fundamental limitation rooted in simple juvenilia. If the film had tried harder to carve out a distinct personality, one might be inclined to suggest that its varnish of Judaism is plagued with internalized anti-semitic tropes that many Ashkenazi Jews in AmeriCanada have repurposed, as to reconcile with the erasure of cultural specificity beyond immediate aesthetic means. But, it doesn’t do that. It makes no leaps — or even steps — to articulate its perspective as one not lost amongst a convention floor’s crowd, as one not built of meager tropes based in stereotypes.
It’s here that we can return to “Jewishness as mannerism.” Bad Shabbos is packaged and disseminated across regions and cinemas with predominant Jewish communities, and Jewish-focused film festivals are where the film has found its most ardent success. Robbins’ project, as just another in a long line of Jewish-centric comedies, sells Jewishness back to audiences as a means of signifying and insulating its cultural expression. Bad Shabbos plays out an insidious, though unintended, facet of contemporary Ashkenazi positionality. It is a totalizing, Ashkenormative self-negation made of trope and passivity, where the stereotypes of our familial units are augmented in the name of authenticity and humor, and Jewishness is made othered in relation to the hegemony of Christendom, which is here positioned as the observer — the outsider to the film’s ethically dubious narrative hook. This nebulous character is important to the critique, for its position enables a defamiliarization, where the shenanigans of Judaism become objects of affectation, with no weight or meaning if an attempt is made to link back to Jewishness. The argument of othering ourselves before it is done unto us can be made, certainly, though without any reflexive or textual intervention into these machinations, that argument becomes moot. In the end, the Jews are made alien — though not as alien as the sole Black character and his farcical role in the tumult, which enacts a greater extrapolation of the form racialized identities exist in throughout the film — and the vagaries of their Jewishness make clear the aestheticized function it upholds in cementing the abstracted, estranged tenets of Jewish thought, being, and selfhood. It seems, to this writer, that the film craves for us to laugh at just how little we know of ourselves.
DIRECTOR: Daniel Robbins; CAST: Milana Vayntrub, Kyra Sedgwick, Ashley Zukerman, Jon Bass; DISTRIBUTOR: Menemsha Films; IN THEATERS: June 6; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 24 min.
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