The King of Comedy
New York. October 1986. Dan Rathers is walking home from a dinner party when he is waylaid by two men on upper Park Avenue. One of them keeps demanding “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” as they both strike at him. Dan Rathers escapes with minor injuries, but he never satisfactorily learns the motive.
The safety and privacy of celebrities is always in danger. They have no choice but to build up walls (stucco fortifications surmounted by cypress trees, as seen on celebrity home tours in L.A.) against the public, certain members of which want things from them they can never give. This is the subject of Scorsese’s dark comedy, The King of Comedy, which he made in 1983: 3 years before Rathers’ tango with the surrealist assailants, and 2 years after John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Hinckley did this to catch the attention of Jodie Foster, with whom he had become obsessed. He was playing out a scene from Taxi Driver, the Scorsese film in which Jodie Foster starred.
In The King of Comedy, Robert De Niro plays—with A quality, like everyone else in the film—Rupert Pupkin, a 34-year old dreamer who still lives with his mother and will not settle for anything less than being “the king of comedy.” Early in the movie, he has a brief encounter with Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), the host of a late-night show similar to Johnny Carson’s. Rupert openly professes and seems to believe that Jerry and he are best friends. He is convinced that the workers at Jerry’s office are keeping him from seeing Jerry, who would love to listen to his act and then immediately put him on his show.
Rupert is delusional and the first part of the movie focuses on the extent of his fantasies. The editing captures them effectively, and at times, the viewer doesn’t know whether it’s reality or one of Rupert’s chimeras that is being played on the screen. The line between the two is ominously blurred and De Niro’s acting hints at future catastrophe. Any minute now, we think, he’s going to lose his strained cool and explode with the violence hinted at beneath his overly mannered gestures and manifested in his fantasies. Scorsese’s expressionistic technique further evokes Rupert’s madness. In his basement, we see how lost he is in his own world and how meticulously he has created his madman’s shrine to ward off reality.
His refusal to accept reality is almost too much to bear and the viewer is given little comic relief, until Masha (played to perfection by Sandra Bernhard) becomes more prominent in the action. De Niro and Bernard have a rare and extraordinary dynamic that is darkly hilarious. She is a fellow Jerry Langfordite, but has a more intense desire than Rupert has; she loves Jerry to the extent that she’ll dine him while he’s taped down to a chair at her house. Rupert and she have a strange, intense relationship that’s, as Bernhard states on the DVD’s featurette, familial. They may bark at each other, but they understand each other perfectly and help satisfy the other’s desire by kidnapping Jerry together.
Jerry’s an interesting character himself. He’s a huge success, who lives a solitary life. We see him come home after fighting off a crowd of admirers, to eat a dinner in a large and silent apartment alone. Scorsese wants the viewer to understand the life of a celebrity. Walking through New York, Jerry is accosted by nearly everybody he passes and he is a nice guy about it. He’ll listen to them, respond, make a few jokes, even sign a couple of autographs. Yet an elderly woman still curses him because he won’t talk to her relative over the pay phone. These people are impossible to satisfy. On the DVD featurette, Scorsese observes that the populace’s attraction to celebrities is that “they represent a dream.” Rupert’s actions support this theory, since he doesn’t want Jerry as a friend, but as a stepping-stone to his career. He doesn’t want to know him; he wants to be him.
The script, written by the late Paul Zimmerman, is fully developed. Every character is realized and the dialogue is both quirky and strongly thematic. We learn about Rupert and Masha’s motives: he, to avenge his past ridicule and win the love of a woman, and she, to have the love she missed as a child. Zimmerman develops Rupert’s relationship with Rita (Diahnne Abbott), the girl he has loved since high school, as an alternative to fame—a chance to have what he wanted in his youth. However, entertainment has so deluded him he will accept nothing less than superstardom as vindication. The movie hints that Rupert has essentially wanted Rita, and tragically, he might have had her if he relinquished his fool’s errand.
Like a great satire, the film holds up a mirror to our society, pointing out its obsession with celebrity. The way it’s overvalued, how so many see it as an achievement in itself, how it’s paganistic in the way we idolize our stars—conferring a demigod status upon them so we can then praise or slay them depending upon our needs. It’s a peculiar paradigm and the movie hopes to deter us by exposing all sides. While the film may sound overly didactic, it never once feels that way as it plays.
Overall, the film is an A, even though it may be too dark for some. It is my belief that 23 years after its unsuccessful premiere, in an era of irony and high-pitch celebrity gossip and infatuation, more people will finally get it.
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