daring the
mirror to reveal someone else
by Douglas Messerli
Joan Rivers in Joan Rivers: (Still A) Live at the London Palladium / 2005
Ricki Stern (screenwriter), Ricki
Stern and Anne Sundberg (director) Joan
Rivers: A Piece of Work / 2010
Can we talk? Let me began by
asserting that—however wonderfully kind, supportive, loving, groundbreaking and
whatever other attributions you might use to use to describe the comedian Joan
Rivers as a mother, friend, acquaintance, and performer—Rivers’ later career on
stage and television was marked by an embracement of the crassest, most outré,
and out-rightly bigoted of American values. Surely Rivers felt she could
represent herself as the outspoken supporter for all anti-correct-thinking
attitudes, in part, because of her almost giddy acceptance of a somewhat
absurdist Jonathan Swift-like position which she honed, with her rapier-sharp
commentary on not only whatever her audiences thought was not only beyond the
limits of good taste, but outside any one’s definition of what might be seen as
subjects of humor.
In her 2005 performance at London’s Palladium, for example, Rivers
tackles a wide range of inconceivable topics from death, suicide (both animal
and human), murder, cannibalism, racial and sexual prejudice, extreme
extensions of human body parts (including breasts, testicles and vaginas),
bodily smells (most specifically farts), Queen Elizabeth II’s crotch, Liza
Minnelli’s marriage to a gay man, her “friend” Julie Andrews’ throat damage,
Helen Keller’s deafness and blindness, the 9/11 bombings, and, by implication,
even the Holocaust! Where can you go from there? Perhaps it isn’t an accident
that at one point Rivers stretched her body out flat upon the stage floor.
While one might suggest that Rivers’
frenetic hate-fest incorporating most of these jokes (she “hates, absolutely
hates old people,” she “hates” all children; she’s convinced that all
Filipinos consume their dogs, and that every actor in Hollywood has had facial
surgery; Anne Frank, she argues, was a “whiner” in need of a nose job; her own
mother-in-law, she mugs, could only complain when Rivers attempted to cremate
her—alive!) is a kind of black humor that has its roots in Kafka, Beckett or
even Sade; even more troubling, I would argue, are the things that the seemingly
fictitious persona of Rivers absolutely loves, which includes nearly every
bourgeois element of what used to be described as the American dream. Rivers’
persona mostly admires beauty and money, and everything that comes with that:
marriage (no matter how meaningless; an unmarried woman who lives with a man is
automatically an “absolute slut!”), financial well-being, a grandiose house
filled with possessions, a fashionable life (beautiful clothes, glittering
jewels, and elaborate (even if time-worn furs) and, finally—the natural
apotheosis of all of these qualities and things—celebrity.
Arguably these “desirable” things are simply the mirror-opposites of
those dark forces of which the comedian makes fun, thus appearing to
incorporate a gigantic satiric portrait of American life. But Rivers herself,
in her own numerous admitted attempts to beautify herself through countless
“nips-and-tucks” of the plastic surgeon’s knife (“I was the ugliest girl in the
little town of Larchmont”), her life-time predilection for wearing beautiful
gowns, jewelry, and furs, and her clear infatuation with celebrities and her
own celebrity-status creates a severe problem if we might wish to credit her
humor with any irony.
When she reports that her daughter, Melissa, “stupidly” turned down an
offer to be a Playboy model, berating her child and herself for refusing to do
something with which she felt uncomfortable (based on values, she admits, with
which she brought up her daughter) when she might have otherwise earned a great
deal of money, it is somewhat difficult to know whether the joke she is telling
is based on Swiftian overstatement or a real, gut emotional response.
When my English students, long ago, were confused by Swift’s insistence
that it may be useful for the British to eat Irish children, I could always try
to point to the language itself to make his “real” values more apparent; but in
the case of Rivers, it is nearly impossible, at times, to separate the artifact
from the apparent fact that she has almost become everything that she claims to
value; and one wonders, accordingly, whether or not she truly hates or at least
devalues all those things she purports to so honestly speak out against. Her
distasteful jokes and her ridiculous values are only laughable, it seems to me,
if we can inherently imagine that Rivers, as a real person, is simply
presenting a shtick, a series of
bizarre one-liners that, at heart, represent values that she actually disavows.
Yes, Sophie Tucker, may have been a coarse figure, slyly insinuating
sexual fables that shocked some in her audience, but no one truly believed that
Tucker was actually spending her days enacting her reports. Even the would-be
femme fatale Mae West, anyone with even a little bit of smarts knew, was
probably more beloved by the gay boys whom she eventually incorporated into her
act, than by any significantly endowed male heterosexual. Lucille Ball may have
played a loud-mouthed, lying ditz, but we also recognized that she was a
beautifully smart lady of great cleverness. Phyllis Diller (who, at moments,
Rivers—at least in her commentaries on her married life—seems to imitate) may
have dressed the part of a badly clothes-coordinated street lady, but we knew,
or at least guessed, that behind her façade of self-demeaning put-downs, she was
a grand lady. The sometimes seemingly potty-mouthed “tramp” through which Bette
Middler vamps, we all know is a cover-up for the sweet, slightly sentimental
gal she is at heart. As I have noted earlier in this volume, anyone with a
stitch of brains realized that if Elaine Stritch was a tough broad, she was
also a permanently naïve lover of life.
Rivers celebrated none of these obviously deviously comic personae.
Rivers did, in fact, look quite lovely, was well-dressed, her hair
professionally retouched and cut. She looked like a lady, but spoke as if she
had lived in the sewer for most of a life that she had spent scratching to get
up and out.
When onstage The Palladium she seems disappointed with the size of the
purposeless orchestra (for which she claims, she had to pay for herself), we
can’t imagine that she’s lying to us. She wants, she claims time and again,
everything that money can buy. Her outrage for getting six and a mirror for the
12 players she ordered up—even if they perform briefly only upon her entry and
exit—seems utterly genuine. Although she may perform anywhere and everywhere
just for the love of an audience—several of whose members she demeans
throughout her skits—we truly believe she would like the stage to be filled, as
were some corners of the Palladium, with flowers and plants. A great part of
her personae, in fact, depends on our belief that she is utterly honest—which
is why her audiences let her escape with the numerous expressions of
intolerance and hate; in a sense, she’s asked for and gained our permission to
dish out the worst before she serves up what she proclaims in the best of life.
But what if the audience, such as the English one at the Palladium,
doesn’t want or even comprehend all that American straightforwardness that
ultimately advertises its own emptiness of moral values and convictions? What
if her audience doesn’t know who Paris Hilton or the countless other irrelevant
“celebrities” Rivers mentions are? In several instances, the poor camerawoman
of her Palladium performance seems to have had almost to jump over seats with
camera in hand to show us a few laughing youths to create any sense of
response.
If nothing else, you have to give Rivers credit for walking that
tightrope between who she pretended to be and who she just might been night
after night. At times like the ugly Queen in Snow White, Rivers dared the
mirror to reflect back someone else.
The above comments were in reaction
to watching the Joan Rivers video of her performance at the London Palladium,
which I watched after the news of her death last week (September 4, 2014), a
few days after she suddenly stopped breathing during what was to have a minor
operation. For the same reason I also took time out to view the 2010
documentary about Rivers made by directors Annie Guldberg and Ricki Stern.
That film, both directly and indirectly, brought up many of the same
issues I discussed above. On one the level the film portrayed an absolutely
level-headed and smart business woman struggling to keep her career going long
after the age (75) at which most comedians and actors have given up any hope of
performing. There is something endearing about a woman who cannot imagine
retirement, and who clearly is a fanatic about her ability to continue doing
what she loves most, to stand alone upon as stage (“The only time I am truly
happy”).
Despite admittedly difficult times with her daughter, Melissa, moreover,
the documentary makes clear that Rivers deeply loves her and, even with the
always present specter of her career—which Melissa argues stood always as
another “being” in her mother’s life—worked hard with her husband Edgar to give
her a “normal” life.
Certainly, Rivers, admittedly, plays the Diva—even if the Diva is often
lonely—but she is also absolutely humble in her willingness to take on almost
any job offered her, including ads for Depends adult diapers and gigs in small
towns such as the one we witness of her performing in Wisconsin. As she makes clear,
given the fact that she must pay not only for her only quite lavish penthouse
life, but also helps with the education and support of several relatives, she
needs money. Money, however, seems almost secondary compared to her need to be
“loved” as someone who daily makes people laugh.
If on stage Rivers “hates” the old, children, and even those who suffer,
every Thanksgiving morning she delivers (the year of the documentary with her young
grandson) meals to those who, ill and dying, cannot get out of their
apartments. In the afternoon, Rivers invites relatives, friends, neighbors, and
even a few homeless people to dine with her.
Even if Rivers comes off as psychotically insecure and needy, in short,
she is also presented as a savvy and loving individual who comprehends
precisely the outsider comedic vein she is mining. When, during her Wisconsin
performance, an audience member virulently reacts to one of her jokes about the
deaf (he has, so he announces, a deaf son), Rivers abuses him right back,
insisting upon her right to use anything to make human beings chuckle; but
later she admits that he comprehends his hurt. She has, after all, made her
career, as she puts it, “going into places you shouldn’t go.”
And despite the shell of toughness she near-perpetually projects, we
also glimpse throughout in A Piece of
Work, the difficult times—Johnny Carson’s refusal to ever speak to her
again after she took on a show on Fox Network, the (related) suicide of her
husband Edgar, and the overall ups and downs of her career—which has helped, as
she admits, to make her “furious about everything” that is not right and just
in the world. As an agent friend reports, Rivers is stoic in her insistence
about “standing out in the rain” to wait for the lightning to once again
strike.
Yet watching this sensitive film, one is also struck with just how
perverse Rivers’ personal values are. Her penthouse may represent great wealth,
but in its faux Marie Antoinette French interiors it is a kitsch ginger-bread
conception of great wealth (“Marie Antoinette would have lived it if she could
have afforded it?). The gold leaf upon its walls may really be gold-leaf, but
the whole concoction represents no one’s personal taste as much as it does a
taste acquired by someone who has leafed through too many lavish decorators’
catalogues. Even in her own home, we recognize, Rivers lives in a kind of
stage-set—despite the fact that all the
objects in it represent the “real” thing—as Henry James might have joked.
In fact, beyond the obsession to “recreate” her own body, an astute
observer easily perceives that Rivers never lived in a “real” world. Everything
in her life was an image of an image; language for this comedian was never
something that actually might create reality but merely something that stood
in, like a metaphor, for some reality lying always just outside her grasp.
Perhaps the most telling moment of this sometimes brutally honest
deconstruction of the Rivers “semi”-legend comes when she begins to describe
her love of acting. I always wanted to be an actor, she claims. “I got into
comedy only as a way to make money so that I could act.”
In brief, we realize, Rivers herself is
a work of “art,” not truly a “real” being, but something she has herself
created. Her career, she insists, is an actress’ career, and “I play a
comedian.” We must admit that as a comedian-performer she certainly gave her
all, literally “dancing as fast as she [could].” But sadly she interpreted her
audience’s laughter—and no one’s jokes better fit Henri Bergson’s definition of
laughter being intertwined with hostility or even hate—as showering her with
acceptance and love.
Sadly, it becomes apparent, when Rivers looked into the mirror there
was, most often, absolutely no one there!
Los Angeles, September 17-18, 2014
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2014) and World Cinema Review (September 2014).
