Abstract
In this chapter, a lack of what Wittgenstein calls “objective certainty” enables further shifting of the subject position and a series of maskings and unmaskings, self-impersonations, and self-corrections. Golub tries on his Jewishness as an Ashke (non)normative ilk-boy in genre fictions and so manifests the anomaly of not/being who or what he is. Themes of comedic masking and assimilation (Lenny Bruce) and of betrayal and forgetting of friendship (Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis) advance the theme of the unsustainable “I.” The “we”-ness of friendship joins the ranks of the other fictional varieties of “we”-ness—family, cancer, Jewishness, history, and origin.
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Notes
- 1.
“What was in all those empty suitcases piled mountain-high by Nazi murderers and their self-serving collaborators at Auschwitz and other European prison houses for mass extermination? Even more horrifying to contemplate, where are their contents now?” Enoch Brater, “Drama Matters: Suitcases, Sand, and Dry Goods,” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XLVI, 4 (Fall 2007). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0046.414;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1.
- 2.
In Punchdrunk Theatre’s choose-your-own-adventure reimagining of Shakespeare by Hitchcock, Sleep No More (2011).
- 3.
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 115–16.
- 4.
Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, §§71, 72, and 74.
- 5.
Lenny Bruce , How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo, 2016; orig. pub. 1965), 7.
- 6.
“Little Boxes,” music and lyrics by Malvina Reynolds, 1962, was made famous by folk singer Pete Seeger.
- 7.
Paraphrase of McElroy, Lookout Cartridge , 7.
- 8.
Jacobson, The Finkler Question, 3.
- 9.
James Van Hise, Who Was That Masked Man? The Story of the Lone Ranger (Las Vegas: Pioneer Books, 1990), 16–18.
- 10.
Although the Lone Ranger is commonly referred to as “masked man,” Lenny calls him “mask man.”
- 11.
Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet, Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 73.
- 12.
Mamet, The Wicked Son, 11.
- 13.
When the town turns against Mask Man, we see a white German Shepherd growling at him viciously, foreshadowing Samuel Fuller’s controversial 1982 film White Dog concerning the unsuccessful attempt to recondition a similar dog that has been taught to attack Black people.
- 14.
Gene Wilder more famously played a cowboy of unspoken but evident Jewishness alongside Cleavon Little’s African-American sheriff “Black Bart” in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974). Both Westerns were comedies. Babel, quoted in Mordecai Richler, St. Urbain’s Horseman (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 35.
- 15.
Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 360–61 and 361–62.
- 16.
- 17.
“It may not be true in all cases, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If the word ‘man’ appears at the end of someone’s name you can draw one of two conclusions: (a) they’re Jewish, as in Goldman, Feldman, or Lipman; or (b) they’re a superhero, as in Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man.” Zeddy Lawrence, “Web Master,” Totally Jewish—Lifestyle Channel (July 8, 2004). http://www.totallyJewish.com/lifestyle/features/?disp-_feature=jHOskA (site discontinued); Friends, “The One with the Tiny T-shirt,” Episode 3.19 (March 27, 1997) wr. Alan Chase, dir. Terry Hughes. http://www.friends-tv.org/zz319.html.
- 18.
Lenny Bruce, “Jewish and Goyish,” in John Cohen, ed., The Essential Lenny Bruce (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967), 13.
- 19.
All three writers of the City Slickers movies are New York Jews. Lowell Ganz was born in Manhattan and grew up in Queens. Marc “Babaloo” Mandel grew up in the Bronx. Billy Crystal, who starred in both films, moved from Manhattan to the Bronx in his very early years and was raised in Long Beach, Long Island.
- 20.
City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold (dir. Paul Weiland, 1994).
- 21.
David E. Kaufamn, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2012), 106.
- 22.
Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (New York: Vintage, 1970), 24.
- 23.
In 1861, John T. Ford converted the former Baptist Church into the theater that bears his name. The original theater burned in 1862 and was rebuilt. It was there on April 14, 1865 that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in the presidential box. Bob Ford was shot to death in Creede, Colorado. Unlike Lincoln at Ford’s, he was not at the theater. http://www.indiewire.com/2013/07/was-the-man-behind-the-lone-rangers-mask-a-black-man-in-theaters-tomorrow-73-166997/.
- 24.
David Mamet, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 2006), 5–6.
- 25.
Roth, American Pastoral, 42–43 and 80.
- 26.
Kushner and Mamet, Five Cities of Refuge, 112.
- 27.
“Talmud (literally, “study”) is the generic term for the documents that comment and expand upon the Mishnah (“repeating”), the first work of rabbinic law, published around the year 200 CE by Rabbi Judah the Patriarch in the land of Israel. Published at the end of the second century CE, the Mishnah is an edited record of the complex body of material known as oral Torah that was transmitted in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.” https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/talmud-101/; https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mishnah/; Debra Shostak, Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 11.
- 28.
Spalding Gray, Sex and Death to the Age of 14 (1979), recorded October 29, 1982, The Performing Garage, New York City, supplemental material on And Everything Is Going Fine (dir. Steven Soderbergh), Criterion Collection DVD, 2012.
- 29.
- 30.
Sontag, AIDS as Metaphor, 176.
- 31.
“Davis doubled down on Lewis’s metaphoric cancer —the Black, the Jew, the Immigrant, the Native American (i.e., the Indian) the Urbanite, the Entertainer, the Liberal as alien, other, cancer in the fascist lexicon of miscegenation.” Sontag , AIDS as Metaphor, 83. One thinks also of Coleman Silk in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2001), a black man whose counternarrative is to pass not only as white but as a Jew.
- 32.
Martin’s biographer Nick Tosches describes him at age 54 filming the unmemorable Western Something Big (dir. Andrew V. McLaglen, 1972) as he (Tosches) imagines him (Martin) saw himself, “wearing a toy gun and all dolled up like Giovanni Mack Brown” (a reference to B-movie Western star Johnny Mack Brown). Ironically, “Howard Hawks’ instructions to Dean Martin who showed up in an almost comical cowboy outfit on the first day of shooting (his best, most famous Western, Rio Bravo , dir. Howard Hawks, 1959), were not to play a cowboy but just play a drunk.” Before Martin signed on to play the drunkard “Dude,” Hawks tried to get Martin’s good friend Frank Sinatra , who always looked out of place in the painfully comic Westerns in which he starred. Nick Tosches, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (New York: Dell, 1992), 1 and 17–18. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053221/trivia?ref_=tt_tr.
- 33.
See most recently, Quentin Tarentino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) which uses this Western trope as its premise and its plot.
- 34.
I discuss The Searchers in my book Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 233–38.
- 35.
When Dean is trying to smooth talk Jerry out of something that is rightfully his in Hollywood or Bust (dir. Frank Tashlin, 1956), the film that un-partnered them, he addresses him as “old buddy, old pal.”
- 36.
Cancer has been metaphorically linked to the repression of energy, of feeling, emotions. “The tumor has energy, not the patient.” Sontag , Illness as Metaphor, 18, 62, and 63.
- 37.
Although, it was Dean rather than Jerry who manifested cancer’s early associations with “idleness” and “sloth.” Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 14.
- 38.
Ibid., 40.
- 39.
“Gaon is the modern Hebrew for genius. In the Bible, gaon means glory or arrogance, depending on the context.” The term was later used as an honorific for particularly distinguished rabbis. https://www.thejc.com/judaism/jewish-words/gaon-1.7355; http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rabbi-eliyahu-of-vilna-the-vilna-gaon.
- 40.
Aside from scattered references to Roth and Lewis’s common birthplace, there is little in print that links them in either a factual or fictional way. Scott Bukatman mentions in an endnote that the “Jewish self-hatred ” Lewis performs specifically in The Nutty Professor maintains “the parallel between Lewis and Philip Roth,” but this parallel line is not sighted or cited beyond this and another brief mention in which Bukatman generally notes the similarity between Roth’s self-flagellating (my term) novel My Life As A Man and (again) Lewis’s The Nutty Professor. Scott Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis’s Life as a Man,” in Andrew Horton, ed., Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 203, 204, n. 7, 8. There is one brief mention in an article discussing an independent film’s screening states, “[Alex Ross] Perry’s film [The Color Wheel], a feast of eruptive performance, harsh physical comedy, and ideal comic distance, has something to do with Jerry Lewis and is also inspired significantly by the work of Philip Roth.” This same article compares the work of Frank Tashlin , perhaps the greatest director of Martin and Lewis’s as well as of Lewis’s solo films, to that of Alfred Hitchcock , whom Tashlin greatly admired. Richard Brody , “What to See This Weekend: BAM’s Independent Lineup,” New York Magazine (June 22, 2012). http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/what-to-see-this-weekend-bams-independent-lineup.
- 41.
Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin clearly sets forth his idea of dialogism in his book The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1982), as well as in Problems on Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
- 42.
Roth, Operation Shylock, 358; Shawn Levy, King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), ix.
- 43.
Roth, Operation Shylock, 332, 333, 334, and 335.
- 44.
In a non-historical footnote (which I’m aware this footnote inexactly doubles), “The New York Review assigned Philip Roth to cover one of Lenny Bruce’s [public obscenity] trials. But then Bruce got sick, the trial was postponed” and Roth went to the Yaddo’s writer’s retreat, presumably to work on his fiction. Howard Junker, “Will This Finally Be Philip Roth’s Year?,” New York Magazine (January 13, 1969), 46. Appropriately, if you read this article online and follow the long line of ciphers in the website page address to the very end, you arrive at Philip%20Roth%20and%20Jerry%20Lewis&f=false.
- 45.
Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner , with his ever-present pipe-in-mouth and creepily avuncular manner plays the role of undiscerning psychiatrist/audience for Lenny’s improvisational session-player monologue. “Lenny Bruce’s Playhouse Penthouse 1959.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh09K-4R69I.
- 46.
McElroy, Lookout Cartridge , 142, 144, 145, and 147.
- 47.
McElroy, Ancient History, 203.
- 48.
Ibid., 236–37.
- 49.
Pinter, Old Times, 8, 9, 10, and 28.
- 50.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), §305 and 177.
- 51.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil,” in Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2000), §376 and 194.
- 52.
Ibid., §376 and 194.
- 53.
Bob Dylan’s title song to Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid contains the refrain, “Billy, they don’t like you to be so free.” Dylan (a.k.a. Zimmerman) appeared in the film as a character called “Alias.” Soundtrack album to the film (Columbia, 1973).
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Golub, S. (2019). Form of Life. In: A Philosophical Autofiction. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05612-4_6
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