The enormous cutaway central set of Jerry Lewis’s second directorial feature The Ladies Man is the most radical use of mise-en-scène in his oeuvre, a celebration of artifice, that, as object effectively speaks to Lewis’s approach to comedy and structuring of filmmaking, in—along with The Bellboy—his most purely joyous film.
Subjectivity becomes mercurial, its very fictiveness a cause for celebration. Again, the gigantic house of The Ladies Man provides an effective analogue: parti-colored and partitioned, the camera at such a distant remove that to see the entire set is to see it as a set, Lewis celebrates its very artifice and the phenomenon of false containment. As the camera pulls back, each room is subsumed by the gorgeous entirety, and if that wholeness is finally defined as provisional and explicitly fictive, it is no less gorgeous for that. (Bukataman 204)
After a prologue, the entire film (with one notable exception) takes place within the women’s boarding house in which Jerry’s pathologically gynophobic postgrad Herbert Heebert reluctantly takes up residence as caretaker. Herbert’s sexual panic and the spatial possibilities of the set form the film’s connective tissue. Like The Bellboy the picture is structured architecturally rather than narratively. Scenes and gags are connected by the construct of the boarding house.[1] The hermetic mise-en-scène is never claustrophobic, because the set acts as a space for imaginative play. Like all great filmmakers in the ‘classical’ tradition Lewis renders the massive apparatus of Hollywood productions weightless. In The Ladies Man Lewis makes that weightlessness his very subject.
The introduction to the house/set, acts as the picture’s statement of purpose. The camera glides from room to room, as the aspiring of starlets of matriarch Miss Wellenmellen’s boarding house perform their choreographed morning routine, it then cuts to Herbert waking up and walking down to breakfast revealing totality of the set. The artifice is present from the beginning; the camera moving between rooms, unencumbered by any diegetic obstructions, women putting on make-up through a empty mirror frame, and the choreography itself, as each woman moves to the rhythm of the simultaneously non-diegetic and diegetic music.[2] The film does not demand a suspension of disbelief, rather it engages with artifice as such. The films pleasures are to be located in the extravagance of the apparatus, to revel in the possibilities inherent in the medium, and it’s capacity for image making. Comedy provides Lewis with an avenue to transcend narrative absorption for aesthetic pleasure.
Unlike The Bellboy, Ladies Man privileges imaginative exploration over joke making. The rigidly delineated artificial space[3] that becomes a space of play and healing for the regressed Herbert. The film’s premise is an extended gag on immersion therapy. In its foregrounded artifice the dollhouse set is the canvas in which the infantile (although somewhat less infantile than in his earlier work) Jerry figure Herbert is allowed free range to enact a variety of fantastical scenarios. Lewis (auteur) creates space for Jerry (icon) to run amok.
Nowhere does this become more apparent then when Lewis steps into a separate diegetic space of Miss Cartilage’s room, and in the process transforms sexual panic into a kind of transcendence. Miss Cartilage’s apartment starkly contrasts the rest of the building that it ostensibly occupies. While the rest of the dollhouse is boldly colored, and cluttered, Miss Cartilage’s room is spare, white, with ornate furniture and chandeliers, calling to mind the room nothing so much as the room in which astronaut David Bowman is reborn at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seven years later, an association that, while specious, does provide a rather apt comparison. Both deal with the contact of man with an unfathomable intelligence; for Kubrick an alien life form, and for Jerry feminine sexuality.
Herbert finds Miss Cartilage hanging upside from the ceiling, as he turns her around, her face is hooded, the pale lower half of her face and bright red lipstick. She purrs, “Hi, honey,” (her only line) and lowers herself to the floor, and slowly pursues the evasive Herbert around the room in an ankle length black dress. She backs him against the wall, and in a theatrical gesture the wall is flown out, revealing a balcony. She moves to play a record. The camera cuts to a medium shot of her continuing the action. As the music comes up Herbert re-enters the frame nonplussed to discover he’s now decked out in tuxedo. Her pursuit continues and the camera pulls back to reveal that the music rather than coming from the turntable is in fact the Harry James Orchestra now occupying the balcony.[4] Vacillating between engagement and avoidance Herbert dances to the music, weaving in and out of the orchestra. When Miss Cartilage becomes entranced by Harry James trumpet, Herbert attempts an escape only to find her on the other side of the door, slamming it, running back he finds her again on the balcony and chases him. He attempts to escape again only to find the door locked. The music ends, Miss Cartilage approaches and Herbert finds himself back in his work clothes. She hands him her hood and goes to sleep in her bed. Lewis looks out on the balcony to find it empty. He exits the room and saying to himself, “Boy what a little imagination can do,” only to discover that Miss Cartilage’s hood in his back pocket. To which he responds with his refrain “MAAA!” and runs off.
Herbert’s encounter with the arachnoid Miss Cartilage both explodes and defines the practice of the film thus far. It plays out in miniature the existing psychological themes, while taking place both within and without the rigorously defined diegetic space of the rest of the film. The scene acts as a sublimated sexual encounter, a (just barely) symbolic loss of virginity. As Chris Fujiwara notes:
The Miss Cartilage sequence represents not only a private episode for Herbert, self-contained and without antecedents or consequences in the narrative, but also a dangerous encounter with the figure of Sexual Woman, from which he has been in flight since his sweetheart’s traumatizing betrayal. It is, furthermore, a fantasy in which he momentarily asserts a mastery of performance (and a slick wardrobe) not revealed in the rest of the film. (68)
The Miss Cartilage sequence represents not only a private episode for Herbert, self-contained and without antecedents or consequences in the narrative, but also a dangerous encounter with the figure of Sexual Woman, from which he has been in flight since his sweetheart’s traumatizing betrayal. It is, furthermore, a fantasy in which he momentarily asserts a mastery of performance (and a slick wardrobe) not revealed in the rest of the film. (68)
Unlike the rest of the women portrayed in the film—each as neurotic Herbert—Miss Cartilage’s supreme self-possession is portrayed as alien even within the context of the film’s heightened reality. It follows that she would inhabit a separate space. What distinguishes the sequence from the other flights of fancy is the way in which it is a “private episode.” It is a moment of self-contained abreaction that momentarily heightens the conflict—both thematic and structural—of the rest of the film. The mutability of Cartilage’s quarters reflects and deepens the dream space of the boarding house by departing from it. What Fujiwara describes as a “private episode” embodies the narrative in miniature.
Just as the Miss Cartilage sequence plays out the psychical and structural conflict of Ladies Man in miniature, the film itself embodies the larger concerns of Lewis’s work. Using methods he deployed previously in The Bellboy, Lewis expands his practice. The earlier film acted as a parody of an object.[5] Here, the hermetic mise-en-scene allows for an exploration of a psychical space. The comedy in Ladies Man becomes one of subject: Herbert/Jerry’s neurosis. The plasticity of the space embodying the medium’s plasticity. The two subjects become inseparable, especially within the context of the perpetual performativity of the film’s characters. The women of the boarding house are all aspiring performers, and the film’s gags are built around Herbert’s attempts to integrate himself in these performances, of which the Miss Cartilage sequence is but one example. The set then becomes a mutable proscenium arch. It is this that leads Fujiwara to write, “Lewis’s universe is one of total mediatization” (74). Herbert performs his neurosis and in doing so identity becomes performative. In The Ladies Man the act of performing identity, becomes for Lewis a healing act, the dollhouse set the space in which that performance can place. Lewis’s next three films serve to complicate this narrative while never negating it.
[1] That the set resembles a dollhouse and is filled with women is perhaps something of running joke.
[2] Lewis’s act, before he met Dean Martin, was known as a “record act.” In which he would lip recorded music while making funny faces and performing various pratfalls. Refined examples of this can be found in The Bellboy where conducts an imaginary orchestra in an empty concert hall, and The Errand Boy where he pretends to be an executive to Count Basie’s “Blues in Hoss’ Flat.”
[3] This could actually just as easily be applied to ‘actual’ location of the Fontainebleu Hotel or the renamed Tantamount Lot.
[5] The Fontainebleau allows Lewis to mock celebrity worship, dieting, class, etc. The film itself, though, parodies them from the outside. The Ladies Man begins the project of a direct interrogation of the medium itself.
Sources:
Bukatman, Scott. "Paralysis in motion: Jerry Lewis's life as a man." Camera Obscura 6, no. 2 17 (1988): 194-205.
Fujiwara, Chris. Jerry Lewis. University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Sources:
Bukatman, Scott. "Paralysis in motion: Jerry Lewis's life as a man." Camera Obscura 6, no. 2 17 (1988): 194-205.
Fujiwara, Chris. Jerry Lewis. University of Illinois Press, 2009.
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