Issue 2: Book Reviews
Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis in American Film
By Murray Pomerance (ed.)
Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-19-818293-7. 294pp. £50.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-19-925902-X. 294pp. £16.99 (pbk)
A Review by Kathrina Glitre, The University of the West of England, UK
Reactions to Jerry Lewis are usually extreme: according to cliché, the French adore his films, and Americans cannot fathom why. The fact that Lewis and Dean Martin were the biggest stars in the US in the early fifties is often forgotten, as is the genuine innovation and experimentalism of Lewis's film work, on both sides of the camera. This edited collection offers a valuable range of essays on his film career, with some discussion of stage and TV performances. The book boasts an impressive line-up, with contributions from established authorities like Shawn Levy and Frank Krutnik, and scholars such as David Desser, Leslie A. Fiedler, Lucy Fischer, Andrew Horton and J. P. Telotte. That such luminaries should be interested in writing about Lewis is perhaps surprising, but also telling. His position within American culture seems to be a source of fascination and repulsion – like watching a car crash. Not one contributor admits to actually liking his films, but Pomerance comes closest: "When I watch Jerry Lewis onscreen, I am often stunned to reflection and meditation. Moved to laugh or not, I see something startling and suggestive, even profound" (2).
The book has four parts, each focusing on a different dimension of the Lewis persona: the role Lewis has played in the lives of Fiedler and Levy; the multi-faceted onscreen personality of Lewis as star; the ideological and cultural meanings of Lewis's performances; and his self-described status as "total film-maker". This structure allows for different approaches, but also creates continuities, flowing through a variety of films and performances with minimal repetition. Pomerance has done a good job in editing and introducing the collection and the quality of the writing is consistently good.
In terms of critical and theoretical thinking, however, most of the articles seem to be treading water, rather than breaking ground. "Doubleness" emerges as the dominant paradigm: while it is certainly an important theme of the films (stemming from the partnership with Martin), a reliance on oppositional structures to theorise Lewis's work has drawbacks. Firstly, each writer identifies a different source of crisis. Thus, Fischer writes about the sick and healthy body, Krutnik about the "handsome man and the monkey" (Martin and Lewis), Dana Polan about labour and leisure, and so on. In most cases, the writer acknowledges there are other, simultaneous, dimensions to these tensions, but the reader is left slightly dazed by the sheer number of cultural anxieties Lewis seems to embody. Secondly, such oppositions are often reductive. For example, in a pertinent attempt to deal with changing public perceptions of mental disability, Mikita Brottman conflates mental disability with mental illness, and occasionally falls into "us" and "them" expressions (e.g., 131). Finally, oppositional models expect certain kinds of resolution: either the "good" side wins out, or a compromise is reached between the two extremes. This expectation creates difficulties for Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt in particular. Despite recognising that The Nutty Professor offers a trichotomous notion of masculinity and that none of these types is presented as ideal (201), they find the resolution unsatisfactory, blaming this on Lewis's "inability to resolve the mind/body dichotomy" (205). But why should Lewis seek to resolve such a false dichotomy? The Lewis-directed films often refuse (rather than fail) our expectations in this way (the scene in The Errand Boy, for example, in which Morty/Lewis does not drop all the boxes he is carrying). As Barry Keith Grant notes (235-7), his films break with mainstream narrative conventions, and especially with realist traditions of unified identity. In this respect, oppositional models prove inadequate to the task of explaining the films' deliberate fragmentation of identity and narrative; there is more than mere "doubling" at work.
Grant argues that Lewis is an auteur precisely because "this lack of unity […] is fundamental to Lewis's vision" (237). Scott Bukatman, too, recognises that Lewis's persona precludes "the comfortable illusions of self-sustaining selfhood or any coherence at all" (191). This kind of disunity is undoubtedly why Lewis has held such a shaky position in the Hollywood pantheon, since it is all too easy to mistake disunity for poor filmmaking. It is a shame, then, that the opportunity to analyse Lewis's aesthetic is only partially grasped. Mention is made of such achievements as the large-scale cutaway set for The Ladies Man, and Polan writes very interestingly about ostentatious visual style as a marker of creative production in the fifties. Pomerance contributes a piece on language and linguistic power which begins to deal with sound in The Errand Boy, but the wider resonance and dissonance of sound in Lewis's work is relatively neglected. Perhaps most surprising, very few of the articles attempt to deal with Lewis's status as comedian. Polan's essay is one of the best, partly because he recognises "there may be a need to challenge the very premise of the question of funniness in relation specifically to the cinema of Jerry Lewis. […] whatever its comic effects his cinema is also an exercise in abjection, and often excruciating displeasure" (212). Certainly, the extremely uneasy relationship between comedy, pathos and abjection is crucial to the films and their reception. Landy wonders if the "negative reactions" by US critics indicates a "critical failure to properly identify the sources of Lewis's comedy" (61), but – although providing an illuminating account of American and European critical responses to Lewis – she does not quite manage to identify this source herself.
Enfant Terrible! is an engaging, stimulating book. Each essay illuminates a facet of Lewis's persona and work, to kaleidoscopic effect. As the pieces accumulate, a strong sense of the Lewis phenomenon emerges, creating a tantalising feeling that there is more to be said. But then, I like Jerry Lewis movies.