It isn’t until the next morning that Lewis reveals not only the throng of 30 gorgeous women with whom Herbert will be sharing living space (the film’s on-screen universe), but also the mind-bogglingly immense dimensions of the ant-farm set that is meant to represent Wellenmellon’s mansion. (It’s worth noting that both women are portrayed as being emphatically past their sexual prime, so Herbert isn’t threatened.) They hire him and sneak him up to his room through the back hallways. Lewis (the director) effectively validates Herbert’s mistrust of women by having the boarding house’s owner, the regal Miss Wellenmellon (Helen Traubel), and maid, Katie (Kathleen Freeman), go out of their way to obfuscate the nature of their establishment during Herbert’s “job interview,” which consists mainly of an impromptu psychoanalytical session wherein Herbert gets his disappointment in women off his chest.
So where does he find his first job? In a women’s boarding house, naturally. (Ten minutes in, Lewis is already wallowing in a Freudian quagmire of repressed homosexuality, amplified by Lewis’s one-shot cameo in drag as his own mother.) After discovering his girlfriend making out with a letterman, Lewis seems to regress on the spot into a total presexuality, an adolescent form of misogyny that dictates that he can’t be around women, period. Heebert (more than once, the shrill manner in which some of the female characters yell out his name ends up more closely resembling the epithet “pervert”). Lewis stars as a disconnected graduate from Milltown (“a very nervous little community”) magnificently named Herbert H. At any rate, the comment isn’t so radically out of step from the Jerry Lewis who made the masterpiece The Ladies’ Man, which even though it could undoubtedly be taken as a manifesto on machismo, also happens to be a bizarre, sexually ambiguous, cantankerously skeptical burlesque on the ascent of feminine independence and the resulting commodification of masculinity, especially of the domesticated variety. In a career with its fair share of public relations blunders, probably the most notorious faux pas made by Jerry Lewis was his 2000 proclamation that he has never liked any female comedians and that he considers women’s function in the general scheme of things “as a producing machine that brings babies in the world,” either the woeful words of a severely disillusioned man battling various physical and mental ailments or a misguided, Andy Kaufman-esque attempt at performance art stand-up.
0 kommentar(er)
