The Bell Boy film: My namesake Stanley by Chet was tribute to Jerry Lewis

In my first year of college I was dubbed "precocious" by Chet, (now a well-known film critic in New York City). That descriptor was during our first meeting with his advisor. I didn't realize I had put Chet on the spot, so to speak, with his film professor. I was mute in our meeting and oblivious to the repercussions. Chet soon after dubbed me Stanley and I had no idea it was in honor of the Bell Boy, a film I just viewed for the first time tonight - since I was called Stanley starting 28 years ago!

This shouldn't be too difficult to believe as Chet has a series on Jerry Lewis in the Believer rag.

And yes I confess my life was and continues to be "played" as a joke on reality, much like the brilliance of Jerry Lewis. I was new to film and Chet (in honor of Chet Baker), initiated me into the subject. He showed me whatever film he wanted to - for years. We had our upsets but remained friends off and on for ten years.

Chet introduced me to Chet Baker and much more music but we had a fundamental disagreement - Chet favored the words while I insisted music was better without words. haha.

Our parting of ways had something to do with 9/11 and me visiting New York soon after my deep qigong initiation - after my energy was all messed up and poor Chet had to deal with my even deeper, more dramatic "Jerry Lewis" humor. We talked on the phone once a few years later.

One of the first films Chet showed me was Jacque Tati's classic, Mr. Hulot's Holiday. (you don't need subtitles to watch this film). NY Times:

  Lewis delivered the Tati-esque “The Bellboy,” playing a mostly mute ...

And so watching the Bell Boy tonight for the first time I saw the immediate connection. (google book link). I had immensely enjoyed Mr. Hulot's Holiday and my personality was very close to how Jerry Lewis played Stanley. The match was perfect. I was mostly mute (and still am).

The Jerry Lewis articles are behind paywall but cited in this Jerry Lewis book.

So it's quite ironic that I didn't know I was named after Jerry Lewis - not until he died at 91 years old, recently.

Because of all the films my friend Chet showed me over 10 years - he never, and apparently very deliberately never, showed me the Bell Boy.

I knew the French loved Jerry Lewis and when I saw Jerry Lewis films, I knew why. But I also knew Jerry Lewis was greatly underrated in the U.S.

an ideal masculine image and an anarchic, manic acting out of the inability to assume this image.

 It reminds me of the story I told the qigong master who befriended me.

I used to tell stories like that to Chet - it was very dry deadpan humor that was also self-deprecating. The qigong master was laughing so hard, I never heard someone laugh so hard. He thought my story - about my life - was so so hilarious. He was crying he was laughing so hard and his laugh was deep Yuan Qi healing energy. It was very beautiful.

The qigong master would ask me a question about my story. I would give my dry deadpan answer - the supposed truth of reality when in fact it was a Jerry Lewis-eque moment of truth. As soon as I gave me self-deprecating truthful response the qigong master would bust out laughing on an even deeper level. Why? Because each answer I gave him was a new twist to the truth - it was something even more unbelievable and yet so blatantly the truth!!

I watched the Disorderly Orderly tonight as well - and Jerry Lewis was a tantric expert. He had S/M humor as tension down to an art. Let's see what that academic book says.

Not much of a preview. Right:

Tati had no interest in plots or dialogue, which he felt interfered with his comedy. He produced, instead, loosely connected gag sequences enhanced by music and sound effects. The filmmaker's influence became clearly evident in the sixties, particularly in the work of Jerry Lewis and Peter Sellers.

Lewis' The Bellboy (1960) is an outright attempt to capture the style of a Tati film .

ENFANT TERRIBLE! Jerry Lewis in American Film - fred mcsherry

fredmcsherry.com/mobi/download/asin=0814767060&type=full

... Films of Jerry Lewis. 211. Dana Polan ... beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers in .... If, too, Jerry were only “being himself” onscreen, only manifesting what some ..... sumption that the man is nothing if not an obsessive performer, relent- .... Polan suggests that Jerry Lewis's films, although be-.

Wow that's a full pdf book.

So there is an interview with Jerry Lewis for the TCM showing - of the Bell Boy, how Jerry Lewis had Stan Laurel edit his film scripts - if Stan Laurel said to not shoot something, Jerry Lewis would remove it!

Jerry Lewis then shares how Stan Laurel refused to accept an award from Hollywood since the award would not honor the group effort of his achievements. Chet states:

It may seem less surprising that such sensations can travel even through the blocky intermediary of the console controller when one considers that such physical empathy is, I would argue, an important component of movie watching too: an Astaire dance, the perfectly calibrated gesture of a Bresson model, Stan Laurel with a crab down his pants—all of these register first in the muscles.

It was this scene of the Disorderly Orderly that I liked the best - his nervous identification disorder - where he felt the pain of his patients, so much that he became more sick than his patients!

 Can we say that Jerry Lewis got that inspiration from Stan Laurel? It appears we might be able to.

And so the friend who showed me so many films is now making his own!

And with the Full Moon now this is quite apropos.

These are Chantel Ackerman inspired vids.

 Wow she died young, before Jerry Lewis!

But what did she think of Jerry?

 So discussion of Chet's writing on Jerry Lewis.

Joseph Neff

over 8 years ago

 your mindblowing two-part article on Jerry Lewis from The Believer. Okay, it’s a tie. Just continue working B., and keep us informed of the fruits of yr labor….

 So clearly the Jerry Lewis articles by Chet made an impression; they are cited and discussed.

HE TRIES EARNESTLY, HE TRIES DESPERATELY, BUT JERRY JUST CANNOT ESCAPE JERRY.

DISCUSSED: Jerry as the Anti-Keaton, The Jerry Smear, Levels of Funny and Unfunny, Jerry’s Multiple Personalities (“The Kid,” Kelp, Buddy Love), Physical Empathy, The Void, Sad Clowns, Scenes of Unperformance, The Clown Messiah, Attempts at (Nonphysical) Empathy, Disability-Rights Activists.

 Yep.

Of course Chet naming me Stanley may have been just as much due to us watching the Shining at least 10 times or so. 

  the telepathic communications of “shining” itself, another vehicle for the pictographs of “pure cinema.”

 It is quite ironic to me that I have had actual experiences as portrayed in the Shining - I discovered the Shining for real!!

One time Chet was disgusted with me and make some acrid comment about some hypothetical person he knew who wanted to find enlightenment and how self-indulgent it was of such a person. The fact is I was obsessed already in my first year of college with what the truth of reality was. I was technically a "philosophy" major at Hampshire College although I approached philosophy through music. Chet taught me neoformalism through film and literature. He had me reading Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, among others.

Chet and I were both completely fascinated by the Shining:

My reading has always been that until that moment
Kubrick made his kind of horro movie -- a more
cerebral one about the breakdown of and malleability
of minds.
The pivot point is when Jack is "let out" of the meat
locker -- then the movie becomes a conventional
horror movie complete with illogic.
I don't see why the former is necessarily more "his kind of movie", Kubrick
certainly had an interest in metaphysics and the notion of survival in some
form after death appears to be one of the things that drew him to the project.
Also, many horror stories teeter between mundane and supernatural
explanations before landing in one camp or the other (and a few, like THE INNOCENTS,
even keep their precarious position). I don't see this as any failure of nerve
on Kubrick's part, though I suspect many critics would have been more
comfortable with the film if it either remained ambiguous or offered a purely
psychological explanation (perhaps Mike's theory of realist bias applies here).
"The larger issue of why a Black man can bring the
rescue vehicle, but is killed despite his "abilities"
remains fuzzy."
Shining appears to operate elliptically and sporadically in the film. One
could likewise ask why Danny's bathroom vision didn't tell him everything that
would happen at the hotel. Think Kub said in an interview that if shining
were perfect, there would be no story.

 And back to the other Stanley:

Stanley, whose role throughout much of the film consists of unintentionally undermining and frustrating others’ escape attempts, functions as an agent of truth, a catalyst for the revelation of reality, turning the film into a critique of the fantasy as commodity. At other points in the film, Stanley, like other Lewis characters, is the privileged subject of a private, non-commodified fantasy, which Lewis-as-director shares with the audience: notably in the sequence in which Stanley conducts an imaginary and invisible orchestra (whose sounds are audible on the soundtrack).

 And to that pdf book:

Lewis often brings about the collapse of order through his unrestrained and overeager servitude.

Exactly. In fact this is the method that Slavoj Zizek recommends for revolution. Just follow the rules literally and the paradoxes of logic and the inarticulate commands of the masters will undermine themselves!

 As Steven Shaviro writes in The Cinematic Body, the Lewis character “is an anarchist not in spite of, but because of, his hyperconformism: he disseminates chaos in the course of earnestly trying to do exactly what bosses, psychoanalysts, media specialists, and other technicians of normalizing power want him to do” (110.1).

 And so Chet and I had developed a collaboration called the "Detective Aesthetic" - glad to see he has built on this

The detective story carries an emptiness within (Borges: ‘A mystery is always more satisfying than its solution.’) That emptiness can itself be seen as a sign, or symptom, of a pervasive cultural nostalgia for the speaking object, a concept which reveals itself differently under two, possibly opposed, lights.

Yes this is it!

In so doing he establishes (or continues–perhaps there are earlier examples) what has become a standard Modernist trope, Oedipus as the primordial gumshoe, the detective whose quest ends by implicating himself. This is materialist myth, another closed circuit, and the gulf between organic and inorganic has become absolute.

This makes me feel very good that my long discussions with Chet didn't just evaporate - he has 4 different versions of that article published!!

The last film I ever discussed with Chet was the subject of this essay - I mean I discussed it with him when the film was in the theatres - at this point I told him I had to go into full lotus in the theatre!

Chet considers David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. in the light of the Vedanta-inspired spiritual philosophy that underpins all the director’s work.

the spaces of Lynch’s films are consistently trembling with immanence and humming under the pressure of another space potentially asserting itself. The drones and thrumming reverberations with which Lynch likes to line his environments also serve to remind the viewer of his or her own peculiar interiority, like the ringing in the ears that asserts itself when one is alone in a silent room. The central mystery of Lynch’s work lies in this tension, the perpetual folding between outside and inside.

 Chet's greatest claim to fame is being quoted by Martin Scorsese!

 As the film critic B. Kite wrote, you haven’t really seen Vertigo until you’ve seen it again.