Both films stand apart from the tide of mainstream comedy at the time and have myriad connections to his earlier TV work. Both are more complex than such superficial reference points would suggest, with themes, idiosyncrasies, and fixations all Ayoade’s own: fractured identities, the psychology of delusion, reality testing, fragile masculinity, mediation as a defense mechanism. Both drew easy comparisons to Wes Anderson’s diorama aesthetic and Terry Gilliam’s maladroit dystopias, respectively, which Ayoade famously resisted. He’s since settled back into a comfortable groove - acting in indie films (like Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and this year’s The Souvenir: Part II), doing a fair amount of voice work ( Boxtrolls, Neo Yokio, The Mandalorian), holding down a day job as a TV-host-cum-talk-show personality ( The Crystal Maze, Question Team, Travel Man, frequent appearances on The Graham Norton Show), and writing satirical memoirs (in which he reenacts some of the persona splitting and footnoting that dots his filmography) - but sadly he doesn’t have any more directorial projects in the offing.īoth his features are visually inventive and deeply referential.
He seemed to be leveling up and developing an authorial voice. After punching the clock, and picking up a BAFTA for acting on the great sitcom The IT Crowd, Ayoade filmed Submarine, an adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s novel, and The Double, based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in a burst of creativity. (The Weinstein Company)Īyoade’s modest collected works as a director start with Darkplace, pivot with a handful of music videos for key aughts-era indie bands ( Arctic Monkeys, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, Kasabian), and culminate in these two lovely, unassuming feature films. Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) with his love, Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige), in Submarine (2010). The fragility in Ayoade’s performance of Learner opened up a lane for Submarine’s Oliver Tate and The Double’s Simon James, who are polar opposites of Marenghi, but with that same underlying disquiet. The protagonists of his film are self-aware introverts, wallflowers, dreamers, and romantics. Darkplace’s Marenghi and Learner are manly in the ’80s mold - pig-headed, misogynistic, entitled, and needy. This gulf between ego and reality, of multiple personas overlaid, would later fuel Ayoade’s signature brand of comedy and world-building in his two feature films, Submarine (2010) and The Double (2013). This is just the earliest example of how Ayoade peels apart the male psyche. The cigar-chomping producer façade completely disappears. As an actor, he goes stiff and delivers all of his lines in a stilted, unnatural, uncomfortable, adenoidal rapid-fire. Under the harsh gaze of the cameras, the smooth patois Learner affects “off-camera” crumbles spectacularly.
But Ayoade’s character on Darkplace, Garth’s producer/publisher/enabler Dean Learner, aka Thornton Reed on the show within the show, is as prime an example of delusion as his meal ticket. Garth is a blowhard buffoon who has constructed a fantasy world around himself to bury his real dark place - his deeply repressed repository of insecurities and inadequacy issues.
#Submarine 2010 link plus
The show within the show was meant as a monument to Garth’s multi-hyphenate genius (as an “author, dream weaver, visionary, plus actor”), but instead it exposes the limited intellect of its fictional creator and his persistent industry failure.
It takes skill to make something so shoddy, self-aggrandizing, and incompetent on purpose.
#Submarine 2010 link series
Mimicking and spoofing everything from hacky horror TV shows, Stephen King adaptations, and the Lars von Trier series Kingdom, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is perfectly terrible looking. The bulk of the program is a straight-ahead replay of the shelved episodes, padded with present-day talking head commentary from the principal “actors” - Garth Marenghi (co-creator Matthew Holness), Dean Learner (Ayoade), and Todd Rivers (Matt Berry). The premise alone is dense: washed-up horror author Garth Marenghi digs into his archives to unearth a vanity project from the ’80s, a failed TV show that networks didn’t pick up, about doctors packing heat at a low-rent hospital located above the gates of hell. For a show that seems like a low-stakes sendup, its stylistic roots and thematic layers run deep. The Channel 4 cult classic set the template for creator/director/star Richard Ayoade’s art. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace(2004) is the skeleton key. I am exciting and delicious.” - Graham Purvis, Submarine Oliver O’Sullivan looks back on his pair of films, two nuanced character studies that are deeply in conversation with each other Ayoade hasn’t directed a feature since 2013.
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