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Jerry and Me
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First,
the cross-cultural shock: Jerry Lewis dubbed
for the Iranian market. (We will learn that, in later life, Jerry sounds
exactly like the guy who dubbed him back then.) Not to mention John Wayne in Rio Bravo (1959): a handy subtitle
informs us that he is now saying, exasperated, as he walks out on Angie
Dickinson, “There is no god but Allah”.
Jerry and Me by Mehrnaz
Saeedvafa (sometimes rendered Saeed-Vafa) begins by proposing this estranging “view
from elsewhere”: Lewis in the distorting mirror of another culture. Film
history, as it has generally been written, only occasionally gives us a glimpse
of this kind of shuttle-action across cultures, nations and audiences: a Latin
American star such as Carmen Miranda as seen “back home” via the detour of her
Hollywood productions; or the cult of certain US actors in Japan. But an entire
treasure-trove of spectator experience opens up once we loosen the bounds of
territorial belonging, as Saeedvafa does here. It is a different Lewis than the
one we are used to encountering in film criticism.
But
that is only her starting point. The fate of Lewis’ films handily mirrors an
Iranian history through which the filmmaker has lived: born in the early 1950s
during the ascension of Mohammed Mosaddeq as Prime Minister, through the heady
period of modernisation in the ‘60s (evoked in wonderfully gaudy colour
newsreel footage) during the Shah’s White Revolution; later, the Iranian
Revolution of the Islamic Republic. Where Lewis’ movies (among others) embodied
American-style modernity during the ‘60s – a theme taken up, from different
perspectives, by commentators including Miguel Marías and Chris Fujiwara – the ’79 Revolution marked a radical turnaround in
cultural values: the lush picture palaces were closed or burnt, and a new sort
of cinema production was enforced by the authorities. Meanwhile, Hollywood
decadence was replaced by previously unseen art cinema such as Rome, Open City (1945).
Saeedvafa
had begun seriously learning about cinema in the early ‘70s, abandoning other,
more conventionally pragmatic studies in order to attend film school in London
(where she discovered the work of Robert Bresson). Back in Iran, when the
Revolution hit, she turned – as did many of her contemporaries – to making a
film centred on a child. Then the eight-year war with Iraq started; Saeedvafa
had to abandon the film in an unfinished state, and came into conflict with her
producers. In 1983, after a first marriage that foundered on differences of
religious practice, she left Iran for the USA, where she has been based ever
since, employed as a Professor of Film and Video at Columbia College in
Chicago. Her films before Jerry and Me include The Silent Majority (1987), A Tajik Woman (1994), Saless Far From Home (1998) and A Different Moon (2008).
What
is most fascinating for me in Jerry and
Me is the quality of something I could call fan psychoanalysis. A type of
self-analysis, arrived at through (to use the classic psychoanalytic couplet)
introjection of, and projection onto, a beloved object: in this case, the
performances, films, image and career of Jerry Lewis. It quickly becomes much
more than a conceit of the personal documentary or essay-film form that clips from
Lewis movies stand in for absolutely everything in this piece, whether good or bad, as tokens of Saeedvafa’s lived, social
experience.
The
Iran/Iraq War is summed up by Jerry dodging debris in a battle zone. Mehrnaz as
an uncommunicative, unreachable teenager is embodied in a catatonic little boy
who Jerry yells at on stage. Her wish to magically transform into someone else
– such as someone with light skin – finds its symbolic correlative in Julius
Kelp becoming Buddy Love, via magic potion, in The Nutty Professor (1963). Shots of Jerry in Cracking Up (aka Smorgasbord,
1983) stand in for Saeedvafa’s own exhaustion and despair in the US during the
‘80s, before the period when her son was born.
And
on it goes, for the entire thirty-eight minutes: the range of inventive,
wittily metaphoric substitutions of Jerry-images for absent (often
unrepresentable) real-life footage is really impressive. (It is also intriguing
to compare the film with Saeedvafa’s Jerry-less account of her life for the
1992 interview included in Zohreh Sullivan’s Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora [Temple University
Press, 2001].) It must be said, though, that the relative sound mix levels on
the version I saw left something to be desired.
Gender
and a feminist coming-to-consciousness play a crucial part in this
self-analysed life-narrative. Jerry, once again, fills all roles available for
men in Saaedvafa’s developing imaginary, from childhood through to adulthood:
he is the cold, indifferent womanising man (like her father), in a cowboy hat;
he is Jerry in drag, wishing to cross the all-too-real line of gender
difference; he is a gentle, sentimental, almost effeminate comedian.
But,
as she remembers it, she could never get into the place reserved for women in
even his best films: the supplicant partners – Mad Men-style ‘60s career women ever-ready to chuck in their
careers – who always end up saving this eternal boy-man. And this, too, in a
boomerang way, reflects back on Saeedvafa’s Iranian history, in which calls for
“today’s woman” collided with crushingly restrictive patriarchal rules. And a
certain sexual panic crystallises for her in the images of the “loose” Western
woman as embodied by Stella Stevens in The
Nutty Professor.
Like
many self-analyses (whether on film or in life), Jerry and Me proceeds (and this may also be a result of its
condensed running-time) through dramatic, block-like shuffles: at times it
seems as if Saeedvafa views her whole biography in terms of a Lost Paradise in
her Iranian childhood that she can barely recall, and then idealised
projections – such as distant, exotic, America – that then come crashing into
grim, depressed reality once encountered. There is an almost desperate need to
identify, to belong – as when her son is born (a moving sequence of the film),
and she tells us that, at last, she felt she had “become American”.
The
very making of Jerry and Me – which,
the work itself tells us, was difficult for her to “bring together” – appears
to get her to at least a provisional point of equilibrium: teaching a course on
Lewis and being able to “reprocess her past” while giving her students an
Iranian and Middle Eastern perspective on this American icon; and being able to
observe, up close in person, the live Jerry of the mid ‘90s who makes casual,
racist jokes against Arabs – and still be able to thank him, in the final
frames, for “having given me countless hours of pleasure”.
Pleasure
in cinema – pleasure in a star, a body, a genre, a gag – is never simple. This
is the cross-cultural field that Jerry
and Me opens for us.
© Adrian Martin January 2013 |
