What Is So Funny about The Death of Mr.

L!
az!
arescu?

ALINA HALILIUC

The Entropic Humor of Wooden Language

T
HE EARLY 2000S MARKED THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW ROMANIAN CINEMA, AS DIRECTORS
Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, and Corneliu Porumboiu won prestigious prizes at
major festivals and film critics hailed the emergence of a “New Wave.”1 Puiu’s
internationally acclaimed The Death of Mr. L! az!
arescu (2005) is arguably the first to start
this new cinematic wave with an exploration of human interactions played out in a
bankrupt medical system. The film follows Dante Remus L!az!arescu (Ioan Fiscuteanu), a
retired sexagenarian widower, who lives alone in an apartment complex where he spends
his lonely days watching television, talking to his cats, and drinking a steady flow of
homemade drinks. Feeling ill one evening, L!az!arescu calls the ambulance after attempt-
ing to self-medicate with alcohol and over-the-counter drugs. The paramedic’s arrival
sets off a long journey from one emergency room to the next, as doctors examine
L!az!arescu perfunctorily, dismiss him as a drunkard, and refuse to hospitalize him. When
he turns comatose in the ambulance, a medic finally checks him into a hospital. The film
closes with his naked and shaved body waiting for surgery in an empty hospital room.
While the plotline reveals a drama, the movie also provokes laughter and smiles,
which inspired its international promotion as a dark comedy. It is a truism that humor
is both universal and contextual: while we all laugh, we do not all laugh at the same
things, or in the same ways. Laughter gives expression to a breadth of emotions ranging
from acceptance and joy to anxiety or derision. It expresses attitudes toward the world
and its challenges that run from full trust and optimism to suspicion and profound cyni-
cism. This essay is an exploration of the film’s uses of humor to dramatize anxiety and
disengagement as defining attitudes in postsocialism. I argue that The Death foregrounds
wooden language, a socialist idiom of submission to power born out of anxiety, as the
facilitator of disengagement. It illustrates how mannerisms of socialist talk continue to
shape contemporary society and provide refuge from responsibility. Puiu’s film painstak-
ingly documents the journey of “Mr. L!az!arescu” from the private sphere of family
relations into the public one of neighborly and institutional interactions, as he repeat-
edly falls out of others’ care into what the title of the film announces, his death. Heavy
reliance on crowded medium shots, harsh low key lighting available on location, and the
use of hand-held cameras realistically construct an entropic universe of wooden formulas,
gestures, and emotions where death is not an abstract event, but a concrete inevitability.

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2015

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
154
What Is So Funny 155
The severity of The Death is shared by other directors of the New Wave of Romanian
films and resurrects an aesthetic sensibility specific of a global neorealist cinema born out
of the absurd realities of transitional societies. The new Romanian films bring to the fore-
front mundane life that unfolds in unappealing urban settings, anchor the spectator in the
austerity of their shots through the conspicuous absence of musical soundtrack, and draw
the eye to details through an abundance of long takes. Mungiu notes, for instance, that
“the four or five Romanian directors who have been successful [. . .] use long takes, small
subjects, stories that happen in 24 hours, without losing details, and without ellipses,
concentrating on small events” (qtd. in Badt 108). Cristi Puiu speaks of employing an
“observational model” that sees film as “an anthropological tool for investigating reality”
(qtd. in Porton 34). He traces his own investment in cinematic realism back to the disap-
pointment felt at the end of the communist era, when he realized that his beloved subject
in school, history, was full of ideologically-driven fabrications: “When communism fell, I
learned that . . .I had been taught a pack of lies. This kind of manipulation happens with
cinema as well as with history” (qtd. in Porton 35). Like school curricula and other means
of cultural production, cinema obeyed official ideology during socialism. Socialist realism,
the official aesthetic ideology, demanded that directors create inspiring and moralistic
tales depicting life as it should be, not necessarily as it was (Stojanova). The impulse to
imitate life expressed by new contemporary Romanian directors has the ring of an ethical
imperative and bespeaks their need to break from the ideologically driven cultural expec-
tations of socialist times.
What they have created, consequently, are films whose ethical sensibility and esthet-
ics align them with global neorealism. The new Romanian directors’ obsession with
truth telling echoes Roberto Rossellini’s commitment to dramatize “the way things are,”
the originating credo of the post-war Italian neorealist movement “hungry for reality . . .
and . . . truth” (Giovacchini and Sklar 5). Noting a similar documentary-like examina-
tion of mundane lives and an ethical commitment to “truth,” critics have described more
recent Iranian films as neorealist. Hamid Naficy explains that, like Italian post-war films,
Iranian neorealist productions of the late twentieth century “dealt with ordinary people’s
lives, [their] pervasive fear and anxiety,” offering “endings [that] were often unhappy,
ambiguous, and open and sometimes circular” (Naficy 235, 229).2 Romanian directors
chronicle a similar state, poignantly depicting the disorientation and disaffection that
marks late socialist and postsocialist times. Their films dramatize what it means to be a
(post-) socialist subject who negotiates relations, systems, and rules under alienating and
absurd conditions. For example, Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007) meticu-
lously constructs two young women’s psychological turmoil as they procure an illegal
abortion during the last years of the anti-abortion socialist legislation. Radu Muntean’s
The Paper Will Be Blue (2006) follows an enthusiastic soldier abandoning his platoon to
engage in events heralded as the people’s revolution, only to be abruptly killed. Corneliu
Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) features small town Romanians clumsily
managing their identities on television as they argue about their participation in the
highly contested anti-communist revolution. Porumboiu’s subsequent release, Police,
Adjective (2009), documents the frustrations of a young police officer as he tries to deci-
pher the ambiguous relationship among language, the law, and his civic duties, but
remains perplexed and unable to act.
156 Alina Haliliuc

As the first film to inaugurate neorealist explorations of Romanian postsocialism,

The Death of Mr. L! az!
arescu warrants close scholarly attention. This article examines
how the film dramatizes an entropic postsocialist world and illuminates the communi-
cative features of this cultural milieu. I start with a presentation of literature on
wooden language as a performative mode of relating through passive-aggressive deper-
sonalization. A modality of managing the self under systemic conditions of fear and
anxiety specific of socialist dictatorships, wooden language in Puiu’s film permeates all
interactions. The theoretical preamble gives way to a discussion of politically
contextual uses of humor in literature and film, through which the ensuing close read-
ing of The Death can better illuminate the following questions: How does the film
employ humor to stage wooden language? How, when, and by whom is wooden
language performed? How do cinematography and scenography effectively dramatize
wooden interactions and the relation between language, anxiety, and social change? To
tease out answers to these questions, we must first take a historical and theoretical
excursion through language and anxiety, as they function in (post-) socialist regimes
and strained interpersonal systems.

Postsocialism as an Entropic Universe Steeped in Wooden Language

Totalitarian communist systems forged a special relation between political power, lan-
guage, and subjectivity (Kligman; Oushakine; Thom). Because they aimed at creating a
new type of person and society, these regimes tried to control all realms of their subjects’
lives. The colonization of language was a crucial part of their strategy. What came to be
known as “wooden language” is the idiom of the official communist ideology, recogniz-
able by an abundance of empty concepts, usually spoken in passionate tones. Slogans,
invectives, overused metaphors, passive voice, and other impersonal formulas replaced
critical analysis and reduced communication to the ideological function of positioning
the speaker “with the good” (Thom 141). “The good,” at the time, was the Communist
Party and its ideology. This language has little meaning in itself and functions mostly
as a performance of submission to power by absolving the speaker of responsibility for
the meaning of their words. As Ivana Markov"a comments, “It is the language of alibi.
Words no longer carry meanings for which the speaker is responsible and they become
signs of manipulation and obedience” (99). Not only did the propaganda machine speak
through this language, but socialist subjects were also expected to do so in their public
interactions. Gail Kligman argues that in the Romanian society of the 1980s, people
spoke the way they were expected and, consequently, “duplicity became a mode of com-
municative behavior” in the public sphere (15).
Mannerisms of wooden talk also penetrated informal and private communication,
indicating various degrees of successful interpellation into a totalitarian subject position
(Palmer-Mehta and Haliliuc).3 While the change in political regime in 1989 was fol-
lowed by changes in language, it would be hasty to expect dramatic changes from the
discursive habits of the forty-four-year-long regime.4 As an idiom of power, wooden lan-
guage survives in the world that director Puiu has created. It is performed mainly in
interpersonal triangles that serve to contain and manage anxiety. Murray Bowen’s con-
cept of “triangles” explains the interpersonal negotiation of tension and power in close
relations such as families. According to Bowen, when anxiety peaks between two people
What Is So Funny 157
and outright conflict is avoided, one will involve a third person in the emotional issue.
In the ensuing triangle, the tension is contained, though not resolved. The classic exam-
ple is the couple that cannot resolve their emotional tension and one partner reaches out
to a child or a relative as an ally. If the third person responds in the expected way, the
tension is alleviated and all relations maintained as a triangle, although the power hier-
archy has shifted.
Extending his family systems theory to societal relations, Bowen proposes that in
periods of increased social anxiety people are more likely to triangulate, that is, to
involve others in a conflict so as to gain power in relations they cannot or do not want
to break (385, 426). Researchers of postsocialism have already documented the pro-
found disorientation and anxiety experienced in the transition to capitalism and
democracy (e.g., Kideckel; Oushakine; Roman). The Death of Mr. L! az!
arescu dramatizes
the negotiation of anxiety by staging interpersonal triangles at several levels: familial,
neighborly, and professional. These triangulated relations are permeated by passive
aggressive linguistic and para-linguistic wooden mannerisms that allow characters to
exercise power over each other and avoid interpersonal responsibility. While at times
the interactions elicit charitable forms of laughter, they quickly veer into the dreadful
and the absurd. Triangles are humorous when identification with the characters and
immersion in their story is superficial enough for wooden performances to be non-
threatening reminders of human fallibility. Such performances move into the register
of dread when used to threaten others and maintain professional hierarchies at the
expense of human lives. The Death follows the complicity of benign and threatening
wooden performances, as they pave the way for an entropic universe marked by vulner-
ability, fear, and intimidation.

Social Change and Entropic Humor

Patrick O’Neill’s notion of “the comedy of entropy” is a useful tool for grasping the
continuum of emotions dramatized in The Death of Mr. L! az!
arescu. O’Neill distin-
guishes between benign and derisive humor, on the one hand, and black humor, on
the other (88). The former two are reassuring; they “spring from an ordered world of
unimperilled values: the humor of those inside and safe rather than outside and lost”
(O’Neill 89). Indeed, what unifies benign and derisive humor and distinguishes these
forms from black humor is the sense of mastery over one’s world. While benign
humor is warm and tolerant, and derisive humor is cold and rigid, both are expres-
sions of trust in the world, an attempt to correct its flaws using either gentleness or a
bite. By contrast, O’Neill argues, black humor “is the humor of lost norms, lost con-
fidence, the humor of disorientation. Physicists express the tendency of closed systems
to move from a state of order into one of total disorder in terms of the system’s
entropy: black humor, to coin a phrase, is the comedy of entropy” (89). O’Neill’s view
of benign and derisive humor fits the theoretical consensus that humor stems from
incongruity: people laugh at what they find surprising, yet nonthreatening (Berger;
Deckers and Divine; McGhee; Meyer). The break from the norm has to be significant
enough to be noticeable, but small enough not to menace the orderly universe that it
challenges. In entropic humor, however, the incongruity between a disorderly world
and its inhabitants is irresolvable. As O’Neill offers, “entropic humor is based firstly
158 Alina Haliliuc

on an essential incongruity—the comic treatment of material which resists comic

treatment—and secondly on the evocation of a particular response, . . . a sense of dis-
orientation” (90–91).
O’Neill has declared black humor to be the dominant form of humor of the twentieth
century, as the century that brought upon “the loss of belief in our selves, in our socie-
ties, and in our gods” (100). Indeed, postwar novelist Kurt Vonnegut, playwright of the
absurd Eugene Ionesco, and Italian neorealist filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini all
capture the bewildering social and economic destruction brought by World War II.
Wes Gehring sees dark humor in the US as a product of a “frightening vulnerability” to
an unmanageable world marked by the two world wars, the nuclear race, and the war in
Vietnam (5). Robert Kibler regionalizes this type of humor in the twenty-first century
to post-war Yugoslavia, where he sees Bosnian humor as coming from “a deep distrust
of society—even of civilization” (465–66). What Kibler, O’Neill, and Gehring all point
to is the connection between social instability and the darkening of humor. Whether a
twentieth-century world marked by the two World Wars and the nuclear threat, an
America astounded by the horrors of the Vietnam war, or twenty-first century Balkans
transformed by the Yugoslavian conflict, what all these contexts have in common is the
threat to order brought by dramatic societal changes.
While The Death is set in the peaceful Romania of the 2000s, it nevertheless drama-
tizes postsocialist society as an entropic, life-threatening one. The confluence between a
rapidly changing culture and the exceptional state of hospitals overtaken by victims of a
bus accident creates a world of confusion that becomes fertile ground for entropic
humor. For Romanians, the film’s injurious universe hits close to home, as they are all
too aware of the precariousness of medical care.5 The film draws on a true story: the
mass-mediated case of Constantin Nica, a 52-year old man left in the street to die by
the paramedics, after he was sent away by several hospitals (B!alan). Adding personal
experience to common knowledge, director Puiu confesses gaining an acute awareness of
a failing medical system during his 2-year period of hypochondria stirred by an undiag-
nosed Mallory-Weiss syndrome (Puiu).
In the spirit of neorealism, Puiu brings to Romanians nonaestheticized representa-
tions of hospitals and pained bodies. Unlike both socialist Romanian cinema, where
bodies display personalized national strength,6 and emerging postsocialist films featuring
carnivalesque worlds and bodies reminiscent of Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s films,7
The Death’s minimalist treatment of the body follows neorealism’s lead. Neither an
impenetrable symbol of power, nor a frenzied spectacle, L!az!arescu’s body is the resistant
object that both captures and refracts the other characters’ anxiety. Karl Schoonover
explains that canonical neorealist films shoot “physical suffering and vulnerability in a
documentary fashion and in long takes” so as to grant “the imperiled body . . . more
screen time than other narrative elements” (97). L!az!arescu’s highly embodied journey
confers realism to the world his body in pain inhabits, a world where generalized anxiety
and automatism allow other characters to dismiss his humanity. The characters bounce
off of each other’s angst through the use of either funny or terrifying language manner-
isms inherited from communist times. The following pages trace how wooden perfor-
mances and triangulating relations create an increasingly darker and claustrophobic
universe ready to implode and absorb L!az!arescu into its indifferent folds.
What Is So Funny 159

The Humor and Dread of Wooden Language

The Contours of a Character: Invisible Triangles
The opening scene visually and aurally sets up the airtight atmosphere of the film. A
long shot of a Soviet-style apartment building contemplates its drab uniformity, antic-
ipating the poverty of discourse in which characters will be trapped. A cut to the inside
of an apartment crowded with cats, opened food, and plastic-covered appliances, brings
L!az!arescu center stage. The slow-moving camera follows the character’s wobbly walk
through his residence, a severe place in its empty and dark loneliness, yet familiarly
decorated with old furniture and animated by the sound and glare of the television set.
Low-key lighting available on-site intensifies apartment’s gloominess, while the nauseat-
ing shaky movement of the mobile camera makes palpable L!az!arescu’s bodily distress
and anxiety.
He evokes pity, as long close-up shots capture his distressed physique and harsh
lighting accentuate his pained facial expressions. At the same time that compassion is
visually solicited, the opening scene establishes L!az!arescu as a cantankerous, even abusive
communicator. He snaps at his cats, cannot follow the protocol of a phone conversation
when he calls the ambulance, and angrily admonishes his interlocutors in absentia, when
he hangs up. Anxious about his health, he reaches out to his sister, Eva. The phone call
allows for a first detailed examination of wooden communication deployed in tension-
ridden family relations. L!az!arescu does most of the talking. He begins endearingly with
“Hello, Sis!” Yet he immediately admonishes her for having been in touch with his
daughter. The daughter, who lives in Canada, seems to call her aunt more often than her
father. Envious of his sister, L!az!arescu tries to discipline her instead of confronting the
daughter directly. The conversation leads nowhere and does not seem to serve any other
function than to externalize L!az!arescu’s anxiety through moralistic phrases. When the
sister denies his accusations, he insists: “I know very well that she calls you more often,”
“You know very well I’m right,” and “You just don’t do that!” These are all statements
that drive his interlocutor into a corner. In Franc!oise Thom’s terms, wooden language
mannerisms appear in L!az!arescu’s conversation in the “pathos, in the extreme aggressive-
ness of tone, in the allegorical [construction of] the enemy. . . accompanied by an
outburst of emotion which suspends judgment, so that agreement seems obligatory”
(Thom 142). The sister is transformed into an Other through passionate indictments
that leave no room for negotiation.
When he finally discloses not feeling well, the sister retorts with her own moralizing
indictments of his drinking habit. L!az!arescu’s rebuttal is another wooden sermon about
the lack of connection between ulcer, his chronic condition, and drinking. He pedanti-
cally explains that “you get ulcers from helico bacteria,” not from alcohol and sarcasti-
cally reminds her that she does not know better than the doctors. He repeats
emphatically, “I drink at my own expense.” This is a particularly ironic statement given
that he had borrowed money from Eva that he is not ready to return and because that
very phone call performs his vulnerably and need for his family’s care. But wooden lan-
guage refers not to what is, but rather “tries to suppress what actually exists and to sum-
mon up what ought to be” (Thom 95). In this case, L!az!arescu’s statements fit the logic
of the socialist newspeak: it does not matter that his actions contradict his statements,
160 Alina Haliliuc

but that his statements utter what ought to be, and in this uttering he becomes aligned
with the good in the symbolic order. The contradiction between L!az!arescu’s emphatic
statements of self-reliance and his behavior continues when he asks his sister to “stop
lecturing and nagging” him, although the entire phone conversation had been domi-
nated by his ardent disciplining.
Visually, the camera entraps the spectator in L!az!arescu’s nondialogic universe. The
whole four and a half minutes of the conversation is one medium long shot that captures
both the character’s power moves and his powerlessness. This framing and duration of
the shot invite consideration of L!az!arescu as a man of the past. Not only is his discourse
loaded with mannerisms of wooden language from socialist times, the medium shot
frames him surrounded by “staples” of communist-era apartments: prominent gas pipes,
yellow silk paint, transparent nylon drapes, vinyl tablecloths, and recycled plastic bot-
tles. His elderly body sits by the gas stove in the kitchen as an iconic reminder of cutoffs
from central heating during the communist economic crisis of the 1980s, when the gas
stove was the next best available source of heat. Newer appliances are the only indicator
of a postsocialist timeframe, their ungainly presence further crowding the shot into a
claustrophobic long take.
The frame’s persistence during the entire conversation, refusing viewers any cut to
the sister, dramatizes wooden talk’s familiar and constrictive force. L!az!arescu alienates
his family at the same pace that he alienates viewers. No longer the uncomplicated
victim of his health from the opening scenes, the phone conversations transform
L!az!arescu into the co-author of his own victimization. While he intends to reach out for
help, he ends up passionately repeating phrases that discipline his sister and try to save
face. The visual entrapment of the long shot mirrors the characters’ imprisonment in the
reactive automatism of a wooden conversation, as they act out their anxiety but cannot
communicate their needs and emotions.
Wooden Talk in Neighborly Triangles
Unable to communicate with his family, L!az!arescu turns to his neighbors, Sterian and
his wife, Mikki, for company and help. Sterian, although much younger, calls L!az!arescu
by a term of endearment, “Romic!a,” and plays the expert in their relationship. He
pinches L!az!arescu’s cheek the way grandparents do with young children and repeats
emphatically, “Stop drinking, Romic!a! Stop drinking, or you’re going down.” Sterian’s
wooden advice and self-assumed expertise is amusing because it is so incongruous with
his character. As the plot unfolds Sterian’s life appears to be just as troubled as
L!az!arescu’s. He is in poor health, his relationship with his wife is one of co-dependency,
and he, too, has a hard time managing his drinking. Yet wooden advice allows Sterian
to align himself with “the good,” in this case the reformed drinkers who can challenge
and guide the misguided and the weak. Adding more incongruity to Sterian’s character
and humor to the interaction is advice regarding self-medication that assumes expert
knowledge neither man has. Sterian offers pills, recommends rest, and grabs L!az!arescu’s
arm to give him a vigorous massage. He ends this public interaction with a final “wise”
lesson whose confident didacticism is only equaled, in classic wooden fashion, by its
opacity: “So, Romic!a, note the following: First, drinking causes the nausea, and it’s bad
for your stomach. And, second, you don’t drink the right way, you’re mixing drinks.”
What Is So Funny 161
The universe of neighborly relations is staged visually and aurally to be just as a sti-
fling as the one of solitary anxiety, only more animated. The married couple keeps
L!az!arescu in the barely-lit narrow hallway where the light is timed to switch off, repeat-
edly leaving them in utter darkness. The irony is not lost on Romanian viewers who
have experienced the socialist-style illumination systems in similar apartment buildings.
Just like the characters exchange wooden formulas without sensitivity to the situation,
light and darkness run on schedule, without motion sensors, as one would expect. This
rigid universe is surprisingly animated by frenzied movement and diegetic sound that
build up the anxiety: loud bass music from another apartment fills the background of
the conversation, other neighbors go up and down the stairs interrupting, and the couple
itself fights over the cooking of quince jelly when they are not talking with L!az!arescu. A
comic frantic world comes to life in an entrapping long shot that follows the three pro-
tagonists continuously, as they struggle with darkness, interruptions, and each other.
While this negotiation of familiarity and pseudo-expertise among neighbors is amus-
ing, the scene also builds up ominous expectations as L!az!arescu’s problems persist and
the neighbors prove unhelpful. When Sterian and Mikki accompany him to the apart-
ment, they display concern which runs just short of the help actually needed: they offer
dishes L!az!arescu cannot eat, keep him company, yet they extricate themselves from the
paramedic’s request to accompany the sick to the hospital for a faster check-in. Having
internalized the habit of using language to protect themselves and take minimal risk,
the couple renounces the agency needed from them. Through worn out jokes and cheer-
fulness, they send L!az!arescu off alone. The sick is left in the care of paramedic nurse Mi-
oara (Luminit!a Gheorghiu) who, suspecting a cancerous growth, is the first and will
remain the only character who does not try to escape her professional and human respon-
sibilities. In her company, L!az!arescu starts a long journey from one emergency room to
the next, as doctors check him perfunctorily and dismiss him.
The Wooden Language of Terrifying De-Personalization
While so far wooden language has been a mechanism of triangulation in private and
neighborly relations, channeling both amusement and pity toward the characters caught
up in its webs, the rest of the film’s triangles take a turn to the terrifying as Dante
L!az!arescu’s moves through the Inferno of ERs. The first doctor rapidly reduces L!az!arescu
to the status of a worthless object. After he smells alcohol on the patient, the medic
switches to the informal pronoun and peppers his dialogue with “pops,” only to finish
addressing L!az!arescu in the third person as “this kind.” The doctor’s speech abounds in
aggressive moralizing utterances whose outburst suspends judgment and compels fright-
ened agreement: he indicts L!az!arescu for drinking, the paramedic for not knowing her
place in the hospital hierarchy, and both for being part of a category of people that holds
the whole society back.
L!az!arescu’s protests only enrage the abusive medic who yells, confident in his
authoritarian power, “I’ll blow you and your ulcer to bits!” The doctor seems to only
appreciate patients mute and disfigured. As the victims of a large bus accident pour in,
he inspects them with interest and occasionally turns to instruct L!az!arescu on how a
“real emergency” looks. A terrifying wooden language defines this scene: insulting
formulas harshly indict “Others” (L!az!arescu and “his kind”), hail what should be (who
are the real patients worth treating), and absolve the righteous speaker from the
162 Alina Haliliuc

responsibility he has for the patient. Suspecting something wrong with L!az!arescu’s liver
and afraid of potential repercussions, the doctor does not completely dismiss the patient,
but sends him to another hospital for a CAT scan. This scene and the following journey
leave L!az!arescu petrified and desolate. As his condition worsens, he becomes less talka-
tive and more helpless, less of the cantankerous man we met at the beginning of the film
and more of a universal victim of a bankrupt system. As he fades out of focus through
his silence, the dramatic center is taken up by the medical personnel and their negotia-
tion of care-giving through games of linguistic evasion.
The Wooden Language of Gendered Negotiations
A CAT scan reveals the patient’s ailments as caused by a brain growth in need of emer-
gency surgery and by an advanced liver cancer. Despite the severe diagnosis, doctors at
the following two hospitals use wooden discourse to navigate gender and professional
hierarchies and dismiss a patient for whom they have no time, resources, or empathy.
Unlike the medic before him, neurologist Breslas!u’s (Mihai Br!atil!a) wooden talk is
no longer terrifying, but emotionally confusing. He delivers disciplining remarks with
the same ease with which he recites hospital jokes. In the CAT scan room, Breslas!u
playfully orders his aids to put the patient “down the slide,” referring to the MRI
machine, and jokingly advises L!az!arescu to “jump up and down to warm up.” He theat-
rically announces his diagnosis as he examines the computer screen: “it turns out the
good doctor was right. These neoplasms are Discovery Channel stuff. It deserves a snap-
shot, doesn’t it? Smile please.” “Tzac!”
Paramedic Mioara sees a more relatable medic in the neurologist’s hospital jokes, and
she shares her own early suspicions about L!az!arescu’s cancer. She is caught off guard
when Breslas!u, with a deadpan expression, instructs her to abstain from making diagno-
ses. The chilling comment effectively reinstalls hospital hierarchies between paramedic
and doctor, as the silenced and visibly fearful Mioara receives Breslas!u’s subsequent pal-
liative, “I was joking,” with incredulity. Medium shots consistently framing the neurolo-
gist and two female nurses heighten the feeling of claustrophobic anxiety in which their
gendered relation is negotiated. The neurologist’s delicate feminine features come in
contrast with compensatory masculine performance such as aggressively chewing gum.
In Bowen’s terms, Breslas!u manages his relation with his young beautiful assistant
(played by model Monica B^arladeanu) by involving Mioara, the paramedic. At times, his
formulaic phrases aim to win the assistant’s favors by showing good will toward Mioara,
while in other moments he solicits the assistant’s attention by dispensing threatening
wooden formulas to the paramedic. As the assistant, a friend of Mioara’s, maintains her
professionalism and does not side with him, tension builds up for Breslas!u. The steadi-
cam’s trepidations during a long shot that crams all three characters in the frame draw
viewers into Breslas!u’s anxious attempts to maintain his authority with the two women.
His recitation of hospital humor ultimately serves to relieve him from the responsibility
of operating on L!az!arescu. Like the doctor before him, Breslas!u releases the helpless
patient, dispensing sarcastic instructions to “take this one to Filaret [another hospital],
quickly operate, so that he can die of cancer at home.”
Mioara and an almost unconscious L!az!arescu barge into the third emergency room, carry-
ing Breslas!u’s instructions to operate immediately. She finds her sense of urgency
unmatched by resident female doctor Laura S!erban (Rodica Laz!ar). Feeling her authority
What Is So Funny 163
threatened by Mioara’s rushed tone, the doctor starts a tug of war through which the two
women discipline each other into awareness of their lower position in the medical hierarchy.
Where !Serban quizzes Mioara on medical terms, the latter holds her ground in the power
struggle by drawing attention to their age difference and to !Serban’s status as a resident.
The triangle of wooden interactions enlarges to include a male doctor, Dr. Miric!a
(Mimi Br!anescu) who enters the room and sides with !Serban by becoming pedantically
meticulous about hospital procedures. In the triangle formed between the ambulance
nurse, on the one hand, and the doctors, on the other, the latter use L!az!arescu as a stabi-
lizing third element to avoid responsibility and to save a face that Mioara has challenged
directly. Miric!a insists on instructing an almost comatose patient about his condition in
thick medical terminology. The doctor’s wooden performance of scrupulous care culmi-
nates in asking L!az!arescu to sign a disclaimer accepting the risks of brain surgery. In a
declamation meant to position the doctor on the moral side of the medical community
and scare off L!az!arescu, the physician concludes: “The surgery is not without risks. It is
my duty to inform you about them. Some colleagues don’t do that, which I don’t think
is fair. The patient must be fully informed. Because that’s what’s right . . . There is a
risk of paralysis, that is true. Losing control of the limbs.” When L!az!arescu catches the
word “paralysis,” he clings to it and refuses to sign. Taking this refusal as an excuse not
to operate, this doctor, too, releases the patient. Camera work dramatizes the doctors’
use of language as alibi by crowding the four actors into a medium shot. The characters
fill a screen space in which Mioara is visually sided with the patient. The ascending line
of action between the paramedic and the two doctors stage the unequal power dynamic
in which the protagonists are caught. The disclaimer L!az!arescu is asked to sign blends
in the color-scheme of the room, while the intent facial expressions exchanged by charac-
ters accentuate its role as mere alibi in the power dynamic at play.
Back in the ambulance, the patient becomes comatose. Mioara takes his pulse and
notices out loud that he no longer smells badly. L!az!arescu’s odor has been a marker of his
discomforting presence throughout the film, triggering disciplinary comments and
actions. From the smell of alcohol that allowed neighbors and doctors to judge him, to
the smell of urine that started to accompany the increasingly sick patient, L!az!arescu’s
smell has signified the man’s full humanity, his fallibility, and nuisances. As his body and
cantankerous personality fade into the background and the medical personnel come to the
foreground, L!az!arescu’s fallible human characteristics also wither away. By the end of the
film, he has become the pained and silenced embodiment of a universal victim.
The mute L!az!arescu is finally sent into surgery at the fourth hospital where he arrives
at dawn. The film’s final minutes meticulously capture his transformation into a non-
person, a naked, shaved, and cleaned body, left to wait alone for surgery in an empty
room. It no longer matters whether he dies before surgery, during the long-delayed
operation, or later on, of cancer. His (lack of) treatment during the erratic, excruciat-
ingly long, and humiliating journey has dramatized the experience of being a dying
body in a universe without justice, protection, or care.

The Realism of Entropy: A Conclusion

The Death of Mr. L!az!
arescu’s uncompromising examination of the relation between moral
weakness, social anxiety, and language makes it is an uncomfortable film to watch. It
164 Alina Haliliuc

documents how L!az!arescu’s precariousness is deepened with each sharp remark, worn-out
phrase or joke, or disapproving silence meant to put one in their place. The film’s
chronicle of the small, yet consequential ways in which social identity is managed at the
expense of morality found little traction with Romanian audiences, who are generally
uninterested in the New Wave films. Rodica Ieta explains the local disinterest when she
offers: “Everyday life [is] too hard to stand anyway; why would anyone want to see it
repeated ad litteram on the screen? . . . Audiences want to be either entertained or put to
interpretation tests [to] extract some higher . . . meaning and thus derive intellectual
satisfaction and feel moral retribution” (Ieta 29). The film’s low popularity with domes-
tic audiences is not new to neorealist films. From Italian postwar to Iranian neorealism,
these “films attracted spectators only in large cities” and abroad, their international
success often stirring domestic controversy about representations of the nation abroad
(Naficy 227).
Domestic unpopularity is a small price to pay for directors committed to dramatizing
social-political transformations in the spirit of uncomfortable sincerity about bewilder-
ing realities. As Naficy explains about Iran, transitional societies have experienced
enough “sociopolitical and psychological disruptions and turmoil to make [their] film-
makers . . . hunger for unvarnished reality” (230). Their directors display neorealism’s
ethical impulse to make “statement[s] about the world [through] a moral poetics [that
seeks] to promote true objectivity,” in order to “force viewers to abandon the limitations
of a strictly personal perspective and to embrace the reality of the ‘other’ . . . with all the
ethical responsibility that such a vision entails’” (230). The Death of Mr. L! az!
arescu is an
exemplar of neorealism’s ethical commitment to have viewers witness the reality of the
other. Puiu’s film brings audiences viscerally close to an experience of protracted dehu-
manization induced through wooden performances that erase interlocutors and ignore
the needs of the weak. Securing a high position in the symbolic order takes precedence
over responsibility and care. In scenes set outside of medical institutions, the film invites
ironic or derisive detachment toward fallible characters. When the stakes are no less than
human life and dignity, the wooden interactions on screen become recognizably horrific.
This ominous world is made tangible through the claustrophobic aesthetic of neorealist
cinema: shooting on location, long shots, unflattering available light, and crowded
frames. Romanian New Wave films also eliminate the nondiegetic, orchestral musical
scores characteristic of original Italian neorealist films. The absence of a musical score
makes these films’ social vision even more uncompromising and difficult to watch. As
such, they mark a significant departure from both the triumphalism of socialist-realist
cinematography and from the entertaining popular comedies of postsocialist directors.
Puiu recreates an entropic universe that becomes a cinematic reflection on how
language is used to escape one’s responsibility for others and to deny one’s available
agency. The director intended The Death as a meditation on neighborly love inspired by
the Biblical command to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” the first film from a series of
“Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest.” Neighborly love seems absent in the
world of the film, and Puiu’s genius lies in illuminating the absence of compassion as a
process. Indifference is staged as a recurring interpersonal dynamic, marked by anxiety
and managed through a language whose habitual use during communism has left a
strong imprint on one’s sense of self in relation to others. By meticulously dramatizing
What Is So Funny 165
performances of wooden talk that dehumanize L!az!arescu, the film forces its viewers to
contemplate their own status as postsocialist subjects at their most vulnerable.

Notes
1. For example, among the most prestigious recognitions, Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days won the
Golden Palm award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival; his Beyond the Hills won the award for Best Screen-
play at the 2012 Cannes Festival; Porumboiu’s films received the Cam"era d’Or prize in 2006 and the Jury
Prize in 2009 at Cannes; Puiu’s Cigarettes and Coffee won The Golden Bear for short films at the 2001 Berlin
International Film Festival and his The Death of Mr. L! az!
arescu was awarded the Un Certain Regard prize at
the Cannes Film Festival, the Silver Hugo Special Jury Prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, and
the Grand Prix du Jury at the Copenhagen International Film Festival in 2005. Among the scholars first to
identify a “New Wave” of Romanian cinema, see C!aliman, Chirilov, Teodorescu and Munteanu.
2. Naficy dates Iranian neorealism as flourishing between 1969 and 1979 and reemerging since the 1990s
through the work of filmmakers like Dariush Mehrjui, Bahman Farmanara, and Abbas Kiarostami.
3. Palmer-Mehta and Haliliuc illustrate how 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days reveals the extent to which people
engaged in wooden language in the private sphere. From conversations among friends and relatives gathered
around the dinner table, to lovers negotiating action in view of arranging an illegal abortion, wooden lan-
guage was used in private to defend social hierarchies and absolve its users of personal responsibility.
4. Serguei Oushakine illustrates how the post-Soviet society was unable “to provide language with which to
speak” and created subjects who fell on “discursive and cultural regressions and substitutions” from the
socialist past to express thoughts about postsocialist realities (944).
5. Vlă descu et al. report that the “average life expectancy is 6 years shorter than the EU average, and infant
and maternal mortality are among the highest in the European Region” (xiii). A mix of political ineffi-
ciency, corruption, and poor funding has perpetuated the crisis of the medical system. Romania spends on
medical care less per capita than any other country in the European Union, which leaves hospitals without
basic supplies and the medical staff underpaid (Vlă descu et al). As a result, since 2007, one in ten doctors
has emigrated to Western Europe for better pay (Lungescu). Another route that overworked and underpaid
doctors take is receiving or asking for bribes. Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog com-
missioned by the European Commission ranked Romania in a 2009 report as the second most corrupt coun-
try in the European Union (Bilefsky).
6. Embodiments of national strength are found in the Nationalist Epic cycle represented, for example, by Serg-
iu Nicolaescu’s The Dacians (Dacii,1966) and Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul, 1971), Dinu Cocea’s 1970
The Seven Outlaw Riders (Haiducii lui Saptecai), and Mircea Dragan’s 1974 Stephen the Great (Stefan cel Mare).
7. For example, Nae Caramfil’s Asphalt Tango (1996) and Philanthropy (2002), the other best known post-socia-
list features preceding the New Wave films, construct liminal worlds where school teachers and organized
crime intersect in a fast-paced unintelligible frenzy.

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Alina Haliliuc is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Denison University. She

researches and teaches in the areas of rhetorical theory and criticism, performance studies,
and feminist theory. She has worked on projects examining the role of television, film,
music, and museums in negotiating social norms both in the United States and Romania.
Her most recent work can be found in Communication, Culture & Critique (2015), Aspasia.
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender
History (2013), and Text and Performance Quarterly (2011).