"The Big Mouth" from ‘Le Monde de Jerry Lewis’
Noël Simsolo, 1969
Translated by Nicholas Elliott
Noël Simsolo is a film critic & historian, a novelist, a comic book author, a screenwriter, and a director. Simsolo co-wrote Paul Vecchiali’s Femmes femmes & appears in Marie-Claude Treilhou’s Simone Barbès, two key films in the Diagonale canon. He has directed documentaries about Cocteau, Hitchcock, and Hawks, and his sole fiction feature Cauchemar (“Nightmare”) from 1980 features Pierre Clementi and Hélène Surgère. In addition to books on Samuel Fuller and Fritz Lang, he wrote Le Monde de Jerry Lewis, which is currently out of print. Here for the first time in English is a translation of the chapter on The Big Mouth, which is screening at BAM in Brooklyn, NY on March 4 in 35mm. A special thank you to Nicholas Elliot for the translation, and to the author himself for allowing us to publish this excerpt.
1967: THE BIG MOUTH
The sea washes away the stains and wounds of the world. - Euripides
Three on a Couch ended between drunkenness and reason, heaven and earth. Its last shot was suspended on the impossibility of finding a real identity, a personal reference, a world both familiar and open. Yet The Big Mouth takes the opposite approach to Jerry Lewis’s previous three films. It’s a narrative that isn’t one, a succession of assertions that invalidate each other, to the point that legends are forced to commit suicide to avoid being murdered. The film features a double, a doppelganger, as well as a cross-dresser; there’s the blonde and the brunette, and the narrator who is presented as the middleman between the film’s story and its making.
1—Phase I
The film’s first shot finds an extremely serious gentleman telling us that everything we’re about to see is absolutely true. Having said that, he turns away and the camera pulls back into an aerial shot to reveal him coming out of the ocean, headed for dry land. The absurd used as an element of surprise reinforces the idea of truth just stated. Since everything is made up, since the introductory shot is openly implausible, it makes sense that all of this was born of a deep truth—that of an auteur and his film. It’s a shot that requires viewers to surrender their realist references. The same idea was found in The Bellboy’s pre-credits sequence, but here it is refined to its simplest expression.
The guide’s opening statement is filmed in a static shot. As soon as the camera starts to move, fiction crops up—a fiction in which the ocean appears, as if allowing for the birth of this film written on water. The opening credits start as we fly over the distance separating the two sides of the cove. Once that space has been covered, the credits end and we pick up with a fisherman we had glimpsed in midflight down on the beach. He is exerting himself, trying to drag something out of the water. The fisherman is Clamson, or rather Jerry Lewis, without mask or makeup, appearing in the guise that cinema presents as real. What he’s just wrested from the ocean is a wailing frogman in his death throes. Rejecting treatment, he asks the man responsible for his presence on the beach to follow his instructions, then hands him a plastic pouch. Clamson is rushing headlong toward his fate, a fate he inflicted upon himself by stealing a creature from the ocean.
2—Phase II
The narrator returns to tell us Clamson’s professional status (he’s an auditor) and that he only ever gets to go fishing during his annual two-week vacation. This information situates the character on a moral level rather than a psychological one. We encountered Clamson alone on the beach; now we know he’s always alone, adding up sums of money or practicing a passive sport. In the company that employs him, his solitude ensures that he is an untarnished element, but he is already corrupted by his occupation: addition and rates. It turns out his fate was hanging on a thread—the line of his fishing rod, which has just revealed that he has unexpected resources. The first person we see him encounter is a victim of his loneliness. On top of that, this person entrusts Clamson with his secrets, making him the heir to a battle which we will discover to be traditional.
The myth of the Lewis character returns to its sources and, since everything comes from the void, whether character or ocean, we suspect divine machinations, a celestial plan identical to those that provide the framework for the best Hitchcock films. But Lewis is the opposite of the master of suspense; if he plays with his cards, it’s to better doctor them and to finally find himself a creative, complete identity. That’s why the double must appear as a more or less indirect creation of his reflection. The frogman fished out of the ocean is the fisherman’s doppelganger, but that frogman is also the one who will reveal the fisherman to be who he is and serve as his hidden guide. Pulled out of the ocean by his spitting image, Valentine is placed in a marginal, physically passive situation, one that is absolutely novel for him. For the gangster Valentine is perfectly integrated into the American system and its techniques, just as Clamson is, but at the other end of the same spectrum of representation. Together, these two doubles form the whole face of America. By the harmless character’s gesture toward the aggressive one, the two faces of the double are made to react to the order of things, and this revolutionary state will smash the structures in which both their groups have lived, grown, and multiplied. Because they don’t recognize each other as doubles, these two beings (Clamson and Valentine) will bring about the destruction of the different but complementary worlds they represent. Only the envoy of the sea, a being at once absurd and logical, can have a creator’s powers over this death warrant carried out in conscience’s guerilla war against the systems in place.
Here, Lewis is no longer merely tackling his own self and the fragmented universes he traverses, but the very notion of a universe, leading to a cosmic and profoundly free film. He understands that it’s through the entire universe that he can access an understanding of his identity. He does continue to settle a few scores along the way, but the score-settling is no longer what yields the critical dimension of his work, an apparent labyrinth whose paths lead to the same reasonable, intoxicating, and insane point: a woman to love serenely and passionately.
3—A contretemps
But the universe doesn’t let itself be pushed around that way; the men don’t want to become serene and wise. Thus they will each want to kill their doubles in order to crucify something for fear of finding a messianic element in it; the battle will be political and philosophical and if for the first time one of Lewis’s creatures (Valentine) appears bloody-faced here, it’s because the search for life must involve blood—the blood of birth or lapidation.
As soon as the doubles have been separated in space, they are in danger. Three other frogmen come out of the water to kill the gangster. It’s their appearance that reveals the physical resemblance between the fisher and the fished. This gives them a responsibility for the filmed spectacle, but also leads them to be the most affected by the struggle. They try to destroy the inert body, but with each attempt, a cough reveals the man’s immortality. Their leader fires a torpedo (he’s on a boat, the only isle of safety from the doubles) but isn’t any more successful. If Valentine died, the film would be returned to the void. A similar risk was already taken in the pre-credits sequence of The Patsy, but here it is filled with a mystical and pataphysical substance, in this world where the obvious is stated to stack the cards in the most absurd manner, using a method worthy of Cocteau that consists of making every square the same color, plunging the figures into the most unreal disorder. Death seems to be the motivation for a people to come before a camera, but the gangsters in rubber suits will be the victims of their own desires for oblivious self-destruction. The similarity of appearances and their certainty in the face of the plausible will drive them to madness. Their Aristotelian vision of life is poorly compatible with their impulses: identical things may exist, but they refuse to admit it or even suspect it. They get everything mixed up and can’t bear the results of their muddled fear. Too eager to belong to a pre-defined world, they force themselves to have a single perspective on a fixed point. This allows viewers to have fun with their own state, given that in several shots of the previous films, they had refused to see the double and took it for a shallow illusion. With The Big Mouth, Jerry Lewis lets viewers know from the beginning, managing to abstract their projection and turn each of them into an amused consciousness. This crazy, simple experiment allows the audience to enjoy the traps Lewis sets for himself, forgetting the pleasure he derives from making bombs he knows everything about and whose fuse he can remove anytime he wants. This secret is present in the work, but since it’s never made explicit, it’s best to accept that Lewis knows “how far he can go too far.” Which reminds one of Auguste’s declaration to Antoine in Henry Miller’s The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder: “To be yourself, just yourself, is a great thing. And how does one do it, how does one bring it about? Ah, that’s the most difficult trick of all. It’s difficult just because it involves no effort. You try neither to be one thing nor another, neither great nor small, neither clever nor maladroit…[…] You do whatever comes to hand. You do it with good grace, bien entendu. Because nothing is unimportant. Nothing. Instead of laughter and applause you receive smiles. Contented little smiles—that’s all. But it’s everything…more than one could ask for. You go about doing the dirty work, relieving people of their burdens. It makes them happy, but it makes you much happier, do you see? Of course you must do it inconspicuously, so to say. You must never let them know what pleasure it gives you. Once they catch on to you, once they learn your secret, you are lost to them. They will call you selfish, no matter how much you do for them. You do everything for them—literally kill yourself in harness—so long as they do not suspect that they are enriching you, giving you a joy you could never give yourself…” The reader will forgive me for this long quotation, since it allows us to put our finger on what matters to Lewis without forcing him to betray himself.
Acting with himself, Lewis cannot however escape his fate—even if he chooses this fate among other parallel and more tempting ones.
4—Toward the caress of the sun
But the immortal and indestructible negative double steps aside, vanishing to allow Clamson to become aware of his reality. Whether encountering the police, lost in their routines and the comedy of the uniform; hotel management; or various forms of communication (the phone, signals), the little auditor can’t make himself heard. Only Susan, the marvelous Susan, will listen to him, placing a filter of gentleness and serene insouciance between life and the character.
To meet this woman, Clamson will have to cut the phone line, the real umbilical cord that was keeping him tied to the past world of bureaucracy and civic logic. With Susan, he will walk undisguised, while simultaneously dressing up as the absent-minded, garrulous Kelp for his solo comings and goings. Pursued, and pursuing some undefined quest, Lewis-Clamson uses disguise to escape destruction, to preserve his metamorphosis. Inside the social reservoir of the hotel (see The Bellboy), Kelp’s appearance leads him to consciously destroy external contingencies, whether physical or otherwise.
But the secret of Valentine is both too weighty and too vague and Clamson finds himself unable to form a real couple with Susan. Abandoned on the shores of subversion by what he doesn’t know is his double, he becomes powerless to find the balance required to enter the adult world and keeps up the mother-son relations he had with women in his previous film. Disguised as Kelp, he is aroused by the sophisticated blonde who teaches him the fundamentals of tennis. Faced with the consumer product of a world in which a woman is a sexual object and fixation, Clamson allows himself to be overcome by his most impure instincts and runs the risk of revealing his identity by letting himself be seduced by what is only illusory. A perverse adolescent, he’ll have to go through multiple ordeals to tear off his handy mask.
His true face saves him and puts him in danger. The three gangsters who wanted to murder Valentine go into shock when they see Clamson. One is paralyzed and turns into a dog, another loses his teeth and his mind, and the last stutters and shakes. All three suffer nervous and mental disorders. They are momentarily out of action. But other gangsters appear and confuse Clamson with Valentine, thus letting him in on a secret he didn’t know. Clamson will be forced to put on an act to get himself out of a bad situation—in vain. Ultimately, Clamson will be saved by a real madman.
Pursued by everyone—those who know he is Clamson and those who think he is Valentine—he has to put on a Kabuki mask and step onstage. This is the moment when Lewis returns to the world of Everett Peyton, the clown who hates kids in The Family Jewels, and Stanley Belt, the title character in The Bellboy and The Patsy. With his back to the wall and death on the horizon—a death that would make it impossible for him to form a couple, leading to the definitive destruction of the world of cinema and of life—Lewis puts his character back on the track he had strayed from. He gives him a new life, which Susan will allow him to accept.
In the end, Clamson retreats to the beach with his girlfriend, where he thinks he is saved. He takes Susan in his arms, but they start shaking in unison. Every single victim of Clamson’s destructive behavior—through his own actions and those of his double—charge at them, preventing them from being a couple. Then bloody-faced Valentine emerges from the ocean as if he were suddenly their child. Valentine drags the cardboard monsters and plasticized figurines back into the ocean they sprang from. Everything returns to the mysterious void, into the sea caverns Freud so precisely defined. Yet neither Freud nor Lewis appears now, but the narrator, to reiterate that it’s all true and that he’s of perfectly sound mind. Then the camera reveals him in full: he’s walking away, headed for land with no pants on (a sight that plunges him into an absurdity too facile not to be ambiguous). Now that the land has been freed of its defects, it’s all his: The last shot of the film reveals that Susan and Clamson have left it to him. They walk wrapped in each other’s arms, happy lovers between land and sea as the sun sinks over the horizon. Only the stars watch over them.
5—Conclusion
In order to be born, the director Jerry Lewis had to hit a speedbump, a rupture forcing him to put a mask on again and return to the stage. But in fact this is exactly how he can set things straight. The mask and the stage are indissociable when poetic acts are needed to express the truth of the world and Lewis’s own. On either side of this moment in which theater justifies telling lies, we find water, the ocean throwing its wrecks onto shore before swallowing them back up packed with new waste. Water allows Lewis to place himself above his country and the tension it engenders. Now that he’s serene, he can join the brunette Susan to walk along the marine elements, for together the two of them are the whole world—life and the promise of life.
At the end of the actor-director’s eighth feature, a man is born: his name is Jerry Lewis.
© Noël Simsolo
Translated from French by Nicholas Elliott
