Editor’s Note: April 16, 1997 is the anniversary of the passing of French artist, novelist and actor Roland Topor, who left us at the too young age of 59. Freeline Media takes a look back at Topor’s deliciously creative mix of dark humor, paranoid horror and nihilism, an approach to cinema that soared in 1970s Hollywood.

ORLANDO — In the early days of Hollywood, the film with the happy ending was king.

During the Roaring 20s with its thriving economy, during the misery of the Great Depression, and during the horrors of World War 2 and the booming 1950s, Hollywood movies wanted to end the picture by putting a smile on the audiences’ faces. Good times or bad, the characters always seemed to triumph at the end.

It’s what sold those tickets.

“Our lives are messy and confusing and overwhelming, but in Hollywood films, we find perfectly packaged, easily understood morals,” wrote Olivia Schmitt in an essay for Strike Magazines. “The good side will always win, they promise. Helping others always leaves you better off. Even the worst life events offer some future reward. We usually don’t stop to ask whether these lessons are applicable to our own experience. What about when evil people occupy positions of power?”

Great question!

Hollywood’s vision would start to get darker in the 1960s, then considerably more so in the 1970s — the period of Watergate, stagflation, the Vietnam War, the bombing of Cambodia, and the Iran hostage crisis — when movies reflected that cynicism. The grim ending was in!

By the 1980s, the happy ending seemed to have staged a comeback. Today, films go back and forth between pessimistic endings, and ones that suggest happiness can win out.

But is cynicism such a bad thing? How about its even tougher cousin, nihilism?

A nihilistic outlook turns some people off. Too negative. Who wants entertainment to bring them down and make them feel like everything is hopeless?

Others, like me, find it engaging and stimulating, particularly if the nihilistic vision is matched by a wickedly dark sense of humor. In these strange times we’re in, of non-stop talk of a new Civil War, calls for political violence and scenes of political assassination blanketing the news, a nihilistic viewpoint in art sounds like an artist with their eyes wide open. These days, I find myself drawn more often to the macabre vision of the French artist, author and playwright Roland Topor.

What is the Concept of Nihilism?

Nihilism has a boatload of meanings, depending on its proponent. Over the years, there have been different nihilist positions. Some conclude that life is meaningless, and others say human values are pointless. A deeper knowledge of how we got to where we are today seems frustratingly impossible, many scholars of nihilism have concluded.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was contemptuous of nihilism, noted Kaitlyn Creasy, an associate professor of philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino. In an article she wrote for Psyche magazine, Creasy notes that “Nietzsche enjoins us to reject the belief that life is not worth living. But he does so not just because he finds such a belief unsavoury, but because holding such a belief puts us in grave danger: it tends to detach us from life and make us averse to this life and world. This belief is literally lethal.”

To which I respond: Nonsense.

To me, one benefit of cynicism is that you find yourself focusing on survival. Human survival. Emotional survival. Particularly survival in rocky terrain and potentially ghastly circumstances, all accomplished by virtue of a clear-eyed conception of what your fellow man in capable of.

It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about the books by Topor.

Who is the author Roland Topor?

Roland Topor was born in 1938 in Paris to a Polish-Jewish family that had fled Poland when it was clear Hitler would invade the country (similar today to those fleeing Ukraine as Putin’s army took aim). After the Nazis conquered France and began imposing the Final Solution, in a horrific twist of fate, it was the Topor family’s own landlady who reported them to the SS for being Jews; the entire family went into hiding and Roland barely survived.

Despite this terrifying start to life, Topor was always laughing. After his death on April 16 1997, journalist Margie Goldsmith wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine about her first meeting with Topor: “I first met Roland Topor at La Coupole in Paris in 1967. I was smoking a Marlboro. A few tables over sat a short, stocky man with huge eyes who looked like Peter Lorre. He started making funny faces at me, so I made them right back. Soon, a waiter arrived at my table with a silver serving dish. He lifted the cover and presented me with a bowl of green pea soup, in the middle of which floated a pack of Marlboro Reds. I asked who had sent it, and he pointed to the funny man with the big eyes. The man was Roland Topor, who became my buddy and my friend.” 

Humor as the coping mechanism.

Thinking back to his landlady, this problem with neighbors concept was applied by the author to his best known novel, The Tenant (1964, Le Locataire Chimerique in France). A quiet, polite young man named Trelkovsky desperately needs an apartment in overcrowded Paris, and finds one available only because the previous tenant, a young woman, threw herself out the window. Suicide becomes a means of making housing available.

But after a Saturday night party with friends angers his grumpy neighbors, there are constant complaints about Trelkovsky, including that he’s too noisy. Trelkovsky becomes intent on conforming, becoming as quiet as a church mouse. But it doesn’t help. He begins to suspect a deadly plot unfolding, to force him to follow the same fate as the previous tenant, including her devastating suicide.

The book, which became the basis for Roman Polanski’s 1976 cult classic movie, is a delirious mix of cruel, loutish humor mixed with intensely paranoid horror. For Trelkovsky, the decision to conform, to simply obey whatever rules the neighbors set down, turns out to be the worst decision he could have made. It’s similar, I suspect, to Paris Jews in the 1940s who thought the SS could be “reasonable.”

Social conformity also takes black eye in Topor’s 1969 novel Joko’s Anniversary, about a factory worker named Joko who discovers that rich people want him to carry them around on his back so they don’t have to use taxis. He refuses, but when he learns that everyone at his factory is shuffling these rich folks on their backs for extra cash, Joko is humiliated and decides to become the absolute fastest and most efficient human taxi in town. That decision turns out to be as horrifying a miscalculation as Trelkovsky’s conformity was. Joko’s Anniversary is even stronger in it’s mix of brutish, barberic gallows humor and vicious, gory horror. Like The Tenant, it’s a classic of either comedy or horror, take your pick.

Topor died at age 59 from a stroke, but he left behind some potent works. No matter how grim the subject was, the author was always laughing along the way, and I like that. Humor is great medicine for the soul, but humor doesn’t always need to be sweet and innocent. It can be very dark indeed.

A cynical and nihilistic viewpoint accepts that the worst could very easily happen so it’s best to be prepared for it. That’s totally understandable coming from a Jewish artist who, by a miracle, managed to become one of the survivors of a Holocaust that claimed 6 million of his European Jewish compatriots.

But I also think it can seem like a refreshing viewpoint today, when warnings about political violence about to explode are more common than soap commercials. Being able to find some humor in hostile times and surroundings is far better, I think, then allowing your emotions to rev up your anger and fury until it explodes.

I suspect Topor, had he survived, would have understood exactly what I’m talking about.

_{Have an essay or think piece on movies, the history of cinema, profiles of film directors or actors, or exploration of a popular movie genre? Contact the Movie Talk column today at Freelineorlando@gmail.com.}

Michael Freeman is an Orlando journalist, playwright and author of the terrifying book “Bloody Rabbit”. Contact him at Freelineorlando@gmail.com.

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