*Content warning: Mentions/ depictions of (attempted) suicide
When explicating Freud’s theoretical ideas on humour, Simon Critchley notes that, according to Freud, humour is resultant from the splitting of the ego, whereby the super-ego, representing one’s ‘parental agency’ and internalised moral standards, observes the ego from a superior position, and thus finds it ridiculous (Freud). This process enables an individual to both make fun of and criticise themselves as if they were somebody else entirely, by treating their ego as an ‘abject object’ from the standpoint of their super-ego. This creates a ‘dark, sardonic, wicked’ humour that acts as an ‘antidepressant’, offering temporary relief for the melancholic individual (Critchley).
I would like to examine the ways that Freud’s theoretical account of ‘humour’ and ‘melancholia’ are manifest through the darkly sarcastic, self-deprecating remarks of the suicidal Ray in the film In Bruges, as he copes with his grief after accidentally killing a little boy on his first job as a hitman.
During the park scene, Ray uses the kind of dark, self-deprecating humour common to the melancholic individual (according to Freud) to manage his guilt and acknowledge the absurdity of his situation. After examining the gun that Ken, Ray’s partner, was going to use to kill Ray, Ray laments that his own gun is ‘a bloody girls gun’. Here, Ray is arguably viewing his ‘childlike’ ego from the standpoint of his ‘grown-up’ super-ego in fairly literal terms, by acknowledging that his gun is so small and emasculating that it is fit for a ‘girl’ (Critchley). Contained within this remark is the ‘unhappy black bile’ characteristic of Freudian ‘dark’ humour, as the gun that Ray is frustratedly making fun of for its pathetic size and power is the same gun that moments earlier he was going to use to kill himself. As the scene progresses, Ray’s mask of humorous self-deprecation eventually gives way to pure melancholia, as his super-ego engages in a ‘laceration’ of his ego as a loathsome, ‘abject object’, and he breaks down in guilty tears, exclaiming ‘I killed a little boy’.
In a later scene, Ray once again utilises dark humour as a tool to temporarily liberate himself from his melancholia through ‘self-mocking’ ridicule, sarcastically remarking, ‘great hitman I turned out to be’. Arguably, when Ray makes this comment, he’s observing his own tragic failings as a hitman outside of himself from the position of his parental super-ego, criticising his failures and highlighting the irony of his situation as a way to offer some kind of momentary ‘emancipation’ from his guilt at accidentally killing a little boy (Critchley). Critchley contends that through this kind of dark, Freudian humour, one can acknowledge the ‘limitedness of the human condition’ (Critchley). Similarly, Ray’s dark, self-deprecating remarks demonstrate a kind of ‘self-knowledge’ that is common to the melancholic individual, providing an introspective awareness of his personal limitations and failures as a hitman, and its dire consequences.