In 1972, Luis Buñuel released Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), a dramatic comedy that surrealistically exposed the hypocrisy and narcissism of the French upper middle class. Representatives of that class live inside personal, albeit socially mediated, phantasms, which makes their interaction grotesquely pathetic and feckless. Even the final drama fails to restore their connection with the real world, when the entire group becomes a victim of the Marseilles mafia. The tragic meeting with reality turns out to be just a dream of one of the characters.International recognition, an Oscar and a fairly successful box office also confirmed Buñuel’s diagnosis. The narcissism of the prosperous everyman had made him insensitive to criticism directed at him. The director’s irritated sarcasm was perceived by the viewer as light irony, a completely painless vaccination that only strengthened his immunity to social reproof.
In the half century since the film’s release, its title has become a meme. “Discreet charm” is a formula that combines an admission of guilt and a denial of responsibility; a reproach indicating deviation from moral imperatives and an affirmation of the attractiveness of such deviations. It works as a kind of indulgence, washing away the sins of those who are ready to shamelessly admit them. The degree of frankness is directly proportional to the painlessness of the consequences. Ironic self-denunciation not only softens guilt but seems to completely free from it the one “repenting,” victoriously insisting on his inner rightness.
The ambivalence in this formula is based on the dialectic of cynicism, which makes disregard for norms humanly charming and respect for them aesthetically vulgar and emotionally repulsive moralizing. “Discreet charm” works as a discursive alibi, as a self-reflexive gesture with which one can openly demonstrate what one is forced to hide because of social norms (ethical and even legal). This is a proactive technique that devalues the moral foundations of a potential critic. The mimicking embodiment of this formula is the reassuring grin of a scoundrel, confident in his impunity, that is meant to demoralize his opponent.
The first decades of the still short 21st century gave rise in Russia to their own forms of ‘discreet charm’ and their own type of bourgeoisie, which increasingly overlaps with the serving bureaucratic class. There were also examples of its satirical reproof, which have managed to masterfully balance a critical attitude and a benevolent intonation of social reconciliation, the result being a loud dud. In recent years, the Russian TV show industry has been able to create a recognizable image of the “discreet charm” of the Russian bureaucracy: an amalgam of a formally reproduced mass demand for justice and substance-removed social contradictions.
At one time, Nikolai Gogol, trying to fix Russia, resorted to comedy with “tears invisible to the world beneath any visible laughter” (Dead Souls). His “successors” want to leave everything as it is, and therefore use laughter as a therapy designed to dry the tears on the faces of the audience, making real social problems funny and therefore harmless – like a monster unexpectedly speaking in falsetto.
It is no longer laughter through tears but laughter to tears. This laughter offers a palliative and effortless way out of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. It allows the latter not to enter into a struggle for power, satisfying the slave with a fictitious and affective superiority over the satirically exposed master and coming to terms with the master’s power in the real world (in fact, this type of social satire makes public that tradition of jokes ridiculing the political leadership of the USSR – from Stalin to Brezhnev – which in Soviet times functioned exclusively in the private sphere).
