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Artists
and Models
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Like Douglas Sirk's melodramas, Frank Tashlin's contemporaneous crazy comedies exaggerate to the point of subversion the popular values and aesthetics of the American '50s. Tashlin's terrain was not the domestic home and hearth but the media-sphere of advertising, TV, movie glamour and showbiz gossip: by gleefully embracing and slyly satirising this plastic arena of clichés and stereotypes, he anticipated much Pop Art. Artists and Models, which provided the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis duo with its finest screen hour, is a dizzily reflexive play on movie illusion. Eugene (Lewis) is a comic book addict whose colourful dreams are transcribed – and secretly sold by Ricky (Martin). (The unofficial source for this plot is the media-panic caused by Dr. Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent, an exposé of the deleterious effects of comics on tender minds.) They are mirrored by two women, sultry graphic artist Abby (Dorothy Malone) and ditzy Bessie (Shirley MacLaine). Tashlin's endlessly inventive game of permutation and combination between these four characters builds to a piece of burlesque mayhem without equal in the annals of film comedy: Eugene and Bessie's delirious détournement of the kitschy romantic ballad "Inamorata". With its plot that launches without warning into an international espionage intrigue (enter Eva Gabor), and its splendid musical demonstration of image-and-sound artifice (the number "When You Pretend"), it is little wonder that the strategies of Artists and Models have subsequently been respectfully echoed in the merry modernisms of Jacques Rivette (Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974), P. T. Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love, 2002) and Australia's Yahoo Serious (Mr Accident, 2000). © Adrian Martin June 2003 The
happiness you find is all a state of mind,
That’s
true, my friend.
And
life is full of happy endings
When you pretend.
The
films of Frank Tashlin, as Roger Tailleur already suggested
in 1958, create “a universe of pure representation”. (1) Everything in them is
artificial, already-constructed, pre-given. Tashlin’s pleasure, a very modern
one, is in the game of arranging and shifting these elements, placing and
displacing them.
There is one side of Tashlin that is often
discussed: his play with the formal elements of cinema, such as his use of
visual distortion, image against sound, and breaks in the self-contained
diegesis of the narrative. But there is another side I would like to emphasise
in discussing one of his greatest films, Artists and Models. Tashlin’s games also question the very basis of narrative
and representation, of stereotypes and the ideology they construct. They
explode from within the central obsessions of the Hollywood cinema: finding
one’s identity and place, reaching the happy endings of adulthood, sexual
satisfaction, monogamy, marriage. Such endings are indeed achieved by the
films, but they are made strange – and the narrative path that leads to them is
nothing if not tortuous.
Interpreting Artists and Models is a
matter of tracing out its various sexual combinations and possibilities, both
explicit and implicit. The initial material of the film is its male pair –
Rick/Dean Martin and Eugene/Jerry Lewis. Two buddies, innocent, asexual, rather
like the characters Eugene creates for his book, Little Goosey Goose and Freddie Fieldmouse. The association
with animals and nature is reinforced by the two friends’ fond reminiscences of
their childhood in the Kangaroo Patrol.
But Tashlin introduces two threats into this perfect, undisturbed male union: homosexuality
and women. The first is hinted at through various marital jokes and tensions
between Rick and Eugene (“You can have full custody of the beans”); while the
second is writ large in the film’s stunning, opening set piece: the two are
‘inside’ a huge advertising billboard of a woman, devoured by a monstrous,
phallic mother (the signifier of her maleness: cigarette smoking) who is
alluring (her red lips) and deadly.
To eradicate these twin threats, the men must
be paired with women – i.e., safe, ‘normal’, heterosexual women. The course of
the narrative will be devoted to reaching that desired destination. But it is
in the process of differentiating the men and their complementary women that
Tashlin begins to play his subversive games.
The brilliance of Artists and Models lies in its use of the pre-existing Martin/Lewis
personae – the difference between them developed and extended very which way.
Rick is, above all, the stereotype of masculinity, the embodiment of
patriarchal power. He is in every sense the Artist, the one in control, who
sets the scene. At one point, he poses for Abby (Dorothy Malone) and becomes
her model, but this is only a momentary ruse: as he sings his seductive love
song (“You Look So Familiar”), he alters her painting so that it is she who
appears within the image and he who places her there. In another scene, when
Abby is unaware of his presence, he pretends that the song he is singing to her
is coming from the radio; he is anywhere and everywhere. He is able to seduce
women of all ages, from Abby down to the little girl who adoringly mimics his
dance steps during the “I’m Going to March Down the
Avenue” number. He is handsome, self-assured, pragmatic – the full-blown,
cultural representation of maleness.
Eugene, by contrast, is regressive and
infantile, with the familiar Lewisian traits of squeaky voice and white socks.
He is lost in dream worlds, be they the Bat
Lady comics he reads so avidly or his own Freddy and Goosey inventions. According, once again, to a dominant cultural representation of
childhood, he is pre-sexual: when he innocently asks Sonia (Eva Gabor) whether
he can do anything for her, she knowingly replies, “I doubt it.” Also like a
child he is stuck in his narcissism, a veritable mirror phase. During the
Artists and Models Ball, Rick and Eugene move among the audience to paint
portraits of the guests on the bare backs of waitresses. They both square up
the perspective with their thumb. When the girls turn around, we see that Rick
has painted a person while Eugene has painted … his own thumb.
The respective sexual attributes of the two
men are summed up when they sing the “Artists and Models” theme at the Ball.
Rick touches coloured bundles of fabric and magically materialises women –
artistry, seduction and power all combined. Eugene tries in vain to do the same
but is unable to do so, as he possesses none of these requirements for
masculinity. Only the last bundle he touches springs to life – a monstrous
giant twice his size. His mother, about to punish him for
entertaining wicked thoughts?
The two women mirror this relation of artist
to model, reproducing it. (Ideology is always about the reproduction of a
representation.) Abby is the beautiful female, adorable and intense,
intelligent and practical. Bessie (Shirley MacLaine)
is the female Jerry Lewis: short hair, squeaky voice, nutty mannerisms. As
Eugene is lost in comics, she is lost in astrology. Abby and Bessie as women –
like all the women in the film, beginning with the introductory beauty parade
during the credits – function as models for the desiring gaze of men, their
artists, those who give their life meaning. One of the songs states this baldly
enough, in its dedication “to the gals who look so fetching/to the guys who do
the sketching”, and its reference to “those Greenwich guys …
painting portraits of their pretty little chicks.”
But this basic gender division is not as
simple as it first appears. For whereas Rick chases Abby, it
is Bessie who goes after Eugene. In the film’s final moments, Eugene
points to Rick and Abby – “she’s his” – to which Bessie responds, “you’re
mine”. This follows a very precise ideological logic. If Eugene, a child, is
lacking his maleness, Abby is a failing female. Being a successful artist
connotes being a frigid career woman. Rick tells her, “I can give you what you
don’t have to be missing anymore … What’s the matter,
all work and no playing around?” Through their respective relationships, Bessie
will give Eugene a phallus, and Rick will deprive Abby of hers. This system
could be set out using a loose adaptation of the narrative model of the
semiotic square proposed by A.J. Greimas (2):
Tashlin plays on these set positions. Rick
tells Eugene to wait outside a door and kiss Bessie when she enters. Abby comes
through instead, to Rick’s horror: “I wouldn’t have sent a boy to do a man’s job”.
The richest source of comedy for the film is Bessie’s repeated attempts to be
in a position other than the one that the narrative (i.e., society) allots for
her. She may be fighting for the welfare of the female norm, but she does not
possess Abby’s conventional feminine beauty; this is what she desperately
desires in order for her to seduce Eugene. Early on, the film makes a spectacle
of Dorothy Malone’s legs as she steps out of the shower – a voyeuristic
spectacle for the implied male viewer. After this moment, Bessie often tries to
put Eugene in that same spectatorial position,
displaying her wares to him – but he responds with bewilderment or disgust.
Similarly, Bessie would like to use on Eugene
the same seductive tricks Rick uses on Abby, so she borrows his love song
“Innamorata”. When Rick sings it, Abby runs into his arms, admitting that a
woman can fall in love with a man she has only seen a few times, while birds
coo romantically beside them. But with Bessie, each time she hits the melody’s high
note, Eugene comes crashing down the stairs with his sunbathing gear, foiled in
his attempt to escape her. It is among the greatest anti-musical scenes in all cinema.
The resolution to such sexual dilemmas is
delayed by introducing further complication and splitting. For
Eugene is two people, waking and sleeping – or, rather, two children. The waking child will be cured of his unhealthy addiction to comics through the
correct, parental influence. As in other Martin-Lewis films (You're Never Too Young [Norman Taurog, 1955]), a family
scenario implicitly develops, whereby Lewis attains Martin as his father and,
as here, Abby as his mother. She encourages him to write his ‘good’, clean,
children’s literature, and provides the illustrations using him as the model.
She puts him on a television talk show where he swears off comics in Rick’s
name – i.e., In the Name-of-the-Father.
But for the sleeping child, the Eugene who
dreams and desires, even Bat Lady comics are not enough. His fantasies reach new heights
of excess as he recounts the adventures of Vincent the Vulture and Zuba – tales dripping with sex and violence.
A child who desires, within the representations of our culture, is a monster
child, an abnormality – Artists and Models, it is not fanciful to suggest,
provides a precedent for the figure of Regan (Linda Blair), the possessed
little girl in The Exorcist (William Friedkin,
1973). In the film’s best scene, Tashlin pits opposing child-representations
against each another. George Winslow (who was also in Hawks’ Monkey Business [1952] and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1953]) is a
splendid monster child. His famous ‘foghorn’ voice, his innuendos, his violence
all belong in the adult domain. This child, prematurely adult, meets the waking
Eugene, an adult who is still a child. Each is what the other should normally
be.
But is even this correspondence so clear or
simple? Tashlin never ceases to complicate the character of Eugene for, in his
waking hours, he is subject to mysterious fits of desire. It is, in fact, Rick
who orders him to remain innocent. When Eugene is told by Rick to entertain
Sonia, he immediately takes her to the couch and begins kissing her. Rick
responds with: “I didn’t mean that! Do your bird calls.” And during the
“Artists and Models” number at the ball, Rick chases a
Jerry-Lewis-turned-Harpo-Marx around the stage, keeping him from all the
‘pretty little chicks’. Tashlin poses, with regard to cultural representations,
the complementary question to the one Gilles Deleuze (in The Logic of Sense) uncovers in
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that of ‘what is a
little girl?’. Here one is led to ask: ‘what is a little boy?’
Rick’s position as symbolic father in the
family scenario is also complicated, for he is a very bad father, indeed. While
Abby is the artist for Eugene’s innocent children’s stories, Rick steals his
dreams and makes comic books out of them for the Murdock publishing company.
“If he’s working for Murdock, we’re not pals anymore” proclaims Eugene – so
Rick is forced to lie by pretending he is making money out of ‘legitimate’ art,
a healthy cultural product.
The dilemma posed for the narrative is this:
Rick is the embodiment of the male norm, but he is too masculine – an opportunist, a rake, believing (rightly) the world
is his to conquer, by whatever means. He threatens the basis of marriage as
both a bad father and a promiscuous husband. At one point it is, in fact,
Eugene who is referred to as the ideal man for marrying: “He’s not very
handsome … that makes him safe, a good husband”.
These various loose ends – where the
characters are not yet in their proper place, gendered and socialised – are
tied by the inclusion of the final textual knot in Artists and Models:
the phallic, castrating woman.
Let me warn you, stranger,
that red means danger –
Beware of any gal who
wears it.
I agree she may be
very gracious,
But you’ll find that
she’s kinda vivacious.
Beginning
with the billboard woman and her bright red lips, the danger signs are posted
everywhere around the film. The sexual woman is more threatening and abnormal
than any other cultural ‘mis-fit’ or excess within
the narrative, be it Eugene’s lack of manhood, Abby’s career success or Rick’s
promiscuity. It is her inclusion in the film as a floating signifier that enables
all the other problems to be solved.
Behind the Murdock publishing company,
pushing it to its sordid extremes in the comic business, is a character whom we never see: Mrs Murdock. She ‘wears the pants’. It is she
who institutes an empire of castration. The comics, from Eugene’s dreams, tell
of Vincent the Vulture, whose life and virtue are threatened by the monstrous Zuba –
“That Zuba is all girl!”, as
Mr Murdock so aptly comments. She, too, has luscious red lips – plus three
eyes, “one lavender, one purple, one magenta”. And,
finally, it is the government secrets inadvertently leaked in the comics that
usher in the real-life materialisation of the phallic woman in the form of the
communist spy, Sonia – “where men are concerned, Sonia never fails.”
Sonia’s position/function in the film is
extremely complex. She absorbs all the previous signifiers of feminine beauty
that have belonged, for instance, to Abby – such as dazzling legs – and these
are recoded in terms of danger, the deadly lure. The introductory shot of Sonia
is taken from the waist down and the next scene shows Eugene (literally) aflame
with desire as he gazes upon her legs and she blows cigarette smoke in his face
(the billboard woman). There is an exact narrative rhyme between two moments.
The first is during Bessie’s rendition of “Innamorata”,
a shot of bewildered Eugene taken through her upturned, dancing legs. At the
end of the film, as the heroes fight Sonia and her cohorts, she is disposed of
by being dropped headfirst into a great urn, with her legs flaying in the air.
Passing from Abby to Bessie to Sonia in the textual circulation of the film,
this sign of female sexuality is no longer threatening but contained, defused,
castrated.
A similar rhyme occurs in relation to changes
in Rick’s character. The implied evidence of his promiscuity is Anita (Anita
Ekberg) – another dazzling beauty. Although she is his model, he comes to
choose not to exercise his seductive power over her – as she puts it, “now when
I pose for you, all you do is draw … ”. Later, Sonia
pretends to be a client commissioning and modelling for her portrait. In a
strict inversion of the earlier scene in which Rick turned the tables on Abby,
reinstating himself as the artist by putting her in the image, here it is Sonia
who ‘sets the scene’, posing only in order to seduce him. But now, rather like
the virtuous Vincent in Eugene’s dreams (“defender of truth and liberty, he
fights off her embraces”), Rick escapes from her clutches at the first
available opportunity and rings the secret police.
This is a key moment in the film. Rick’s
desire is finally socialised, brought under the jurisdiction of the law – which
is equally a sexual law, for the act marks Rick’s acceptance of monogamy, just
as his preceding decision to quit working for Murdock reinstates him as a good
father. But all this is not without irony. The secret police order him to
‘detain’ Sonia if necessary. He protests, but is assured that it is his
patriotic duty; he remarks: “Boy, if I had have known that, I would have joined
the FBI, not the Kangaroo Patrol”. His excessive desire is not castrated – it
is simply sanctioned by law.
Sonia solves the problems that beset Eugene
and Bessie as well. Throughout the film, Eugene’s love is the Bat Lady, whom he
sees in the flesh early on. What he does not know is that it was Bessie inside
the costume; since her earnest advances do not interest him, she could not have
possibly have been this mythic person/creature. He desires a bad woman, a
superwoman, the woman of his abnormal dreams – abnormal both for the child that
he is and the man that he should be. It is Sonia, logically, who should be
wearing the Bat Lady costume, and this is exactly what happens. She locks
Bessie in her dressing room at the ball, puts on the Bat Lady outfit, seduces
Eugene, transports him to her secret castle and significantly tempts him out of
his Freddie Fieldmouse costume – the innocent child led fatally astray.
But Sonia’s kisses cannot arouse Eugene; he
realises his preference, after all, is for Bessie – “when she kisses me, the
tops of my shoes pop open” – and indeed, it is her kiss which brings him out of
the hypnotic trance Sonia drugged him into, giving him access to a new-found
masculinity. Now he can help Rick dispose of the villains. All of Eugene’s
problems disappear in a single stroke. He is cured of his desires for the Bat
Lady, both in his waking and in his sleeping – under the hypnotic drug, he can talk only of Freddie and Goosey – and Bessie then gives him his phallus, his path to
manhood no longer blocked, miraculously accelerated. As the
final song declares: “Things turned out just fine.”
Or almost. Tashlin reserves for his dizzy narrative play one
final irony, one final excess. Rick, in relation to Abby and in relation to the
world, has come under the limits and requirements of the law. But when Eugene
is transformed by Bessie’s kiss, at last a man like Rick, his frenzy and
strength are too great – after knocking cold the villains, he obliviously
proceeds to do the same to all the available policemen. After so much effort,
the film derides the notion of a complete ideological and narrative closure. It
is a typical Tashlinesque twist.
Tashlin’s particular, dazzling presentation of Hollywood conventions is best summed up in
the title of a song in Artists and Models:
“When You Pretend”. His films are inextricably caught
up in a familiar perpetuation of illusions and myths, both ideological and
cinematic – where, ideally, the form of the film is invisible along with its
message, its cultural project, which should appear natural and commonsensical.
But Tashlin never ceases to demonstrate when he is pretending, constructing,
spinning the text of his films. As Eugene avows, “I have everything when I’m
pretending.”
An example: to efface the marks of its
narration, its contrivance, the Hollywood film often appeals to a supposed
external force which is guiding the events within the fictional world: God,
destiny, heredity are some examples – think of Frank Borzage’s great films. In Artists and Models the stars in the sky fill this role.
Bessie explains that she moved into her new apartment because her astrology
guide said she would find her true love there, and it predicts correctly the
moment of her first meeting with Eugene. Abby, too, wants to be influenced by
the stars; she asks Bessie, “What does your book say about Rick?”. But Tashlin sabotages this naturalising device by having
Bessie arbitrarily switch mid-film from astrology to numerology, a ‘science’
which, in her hands, is itself completely arbitrary, and which always produces
the same result: “Zero – Eugene again”.
The film’s happy ending arrives – the result
of all the complicated narrative manoeuvring, the pretending that has gone
before it. But, as in the cinema of Douglas Sirk, the
illusion is obvious, over-marked, the effort is too great: miraculously, as the
two couples sing, their costumes change to wedding outfits. Everything that
ideology desires for and imposes on its subjects is at hand – marriage, this
visible, legal seal on the sexual law of monogamy. And as the camera pulls back
to show the audience at the ball cheering this perfectly harmonious resolution,
one cannot help but think that Tashlin means to include us, implicate us in
that applause – we who are, perhaps, equally relieved that “things turned out
just fine”. The film turns back on itself, endlessly, on its positions, its
systems, its codes, its seduction … in a word: its pretending.
There always comes a
time for wedding bells to chime.
That’s true, my
friend.
And life is full of
happy endings
When
you pretend.
© Adrian Martin 1978 MORE Tashlin: The Disorderly Orderly, Who's Minding the Store? |
