The cinema of Jerry Lewis is nothing if not bodily, and its capacity to formally display certain anxieties regarding the physical relationship between himself and his audience can sometimes result in feelings of discomfort and aversion in the viewer. Lewis, as filmmaker and as performer, draws upon the kinetic devices of multiplicity and metatextuality in order to correlate cinematic images with forms of sexual hysteria and corporeal discomfort. If Lewis’s work can be categorized simultaneously as an expression of the body and an expression about or against the body, it is first important to understand the role that the audience plays in his films. Because all of Lewis’s self-directed films function as elaborate explorations of spectacle, it is necessary that they contain both elements of performance and an audience or viewer to receive this performance – Lewis’s comedy often plays on the duality or tension between himself and those who are watching him. Chris Fujiwara, in his excellent critical essay “The King of Comedy,” asserts that, “In Lewis’s work, identity is always performed; there is no private self… A person in a Lewis film is a collection of traits (rather than a ‘subject’).” Because Lewis, like Andy Warhol, displays a kind of refusal or inability to conceive of people with any sense of psychological interiority, the material world of surfaces and appearances becomes intensified in his work. In this regard, the settings in his films often act as large-scale receptacles which contain the “play” or performance that he enacts. (more…)
