Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, a
documentary by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, opens with a very
obscene but very funny joke by la Rivers, who at the age
of 75 (at the time of filming two years ago) was still doing live
stand-up comedy in seedy little clubs — and any other sort of
gig she could get. To some kind of night club audience she
recounts how her daughter, Melissa, received and rejected an
offer to pose topless for Playboy at a fee of $400,000.
The joke doesn’t really work without the obscenities, but let’s
just say that mom, unlike daughter, will do anything, as
she and various of her intimates tell us more than once in the
movie, to put on a show that people will want to come to see. A
self-described “work addict,” she says at one point, “You want to
see fear? I’ll show you fear,” and holds up an appointment book
opened to a blank page. Her own appointment book, reassuringly,
is densely scribbled over.
“Joan will turn nothing down. Nothing,” says Billy Sammeth,
her sometime manager from whom she is now estranged — because,
according to a lawsuit he has since filed against her, her
sacking of her oldest friend with obvious to-the-camera regret
made a better story for this documentary. Even if that’s not
true, just about everything else in her life is grist for the
movie’s mill. Even her multiple facelifts are now made part of
the Joan Rivers brand. “First I was the pioneer, then the poster
girl, then the joke” of plastic surgery, as she cheerfully
admits. It doesn’t seem to matter to her which of these she is,
so long as it contributes to her iconic status in the public eye.
That’s obviously something you need to bear in mind as you watch
this movie, which is clearly yet another bid for public exposure
— which is to say, as she herself is very frank about it, fame
and money.
We have all grown used, by now, to the paradox of “Reality
TV” — namely that, as soon as you put reality on TV it ceases to
be real. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it becomes
more unreal even than the sitcoms and scripted dramas that used
to be on TV and maybe even more unreal than the news. Not that
anybody cares very much about this. But one consequence of our
willingness to go on living in this twilit world of unreal
“reality” is that the need to discriminate between real and
unreal — on which, in more primitive times, survival itself once
depended — ceases to seem very important to us. I write not from
some position of hypothetical superiority but as one who is
himself as amazed and bemused by the confusion as anybody. In
order to watch Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, one has to
be capable of living in this state for at least 84 minutes
without going crazy, a feat that is probably within the capacity
of most of us these days.
Sometimes, the perpetual performance reveals its variance
from reality. Another joke, told to the club crowd come to listen
to her stand-up routine, is about her staff. “I say to them,
‘Staff!’” she says, adding parenthetically, “I don’t learn their
names because they’re like you: they come, and they go. I say,
‘Staff, I’m lonely. Who’s going to f*** me tonight?’” Being a
slut, like being someone with multiple facelifts, is all part of
the shtick, though the former, unlike the latter, seems patently
nothing but a “bit.” At another point she tells a story against
herself of how she once told a joke about the casting couch whose
punch-line went: “I’m Joan Rivers, and I put out!” Jack Lemmon,
who was in the audience, walked out, she claims, saying: “That’s
disgusting.” Did it happen? It hardly seems to matter. The point
is that the joke is only really disgusting if you’re
naive enough to believe it’s true.
Another joke, as she shows us around her fabulous Manhattan
apartment, goes: “This is how Marie Antoinette would have lived
if she had had money.” Yet, at another point in the film she
claims that, “Since 1968, they have been sending limousines for
me, and I never step into one that I don’t thank God I am so
chosen.” Is that part of the act too, or is it true? Elsewhere
she confides, seemingly without self-conscious pathos, that “No
man has ever told me I was beautiful.” How about that one? True
or false? Or we see her on a radio talk show talking with the
hostess about plastic surgery and the superficiality of
appearances. Doesn’t she want someone to love her for her soul?
asks the radio gal.
Joan Rivers replies: “I just want to be loved.”
I don’t know. That one I can believe, though it’s also a
great joke — at least for the iconic Joan Rivers to tell. She
tries to give to her workaholic habits and her lust for
performing in public a sense of calling, even of mission. “Ask a
nun why she’s a nun,” she says. “I had no choice.” But then, at
another point in the show, when wearily descending into yet
another night club, she claims: “If I had invested wisely, I
wouldn’t be doing this.” Both things cannot be true, can they? If
not, then all you can do is ask, which is the more
Joanish?
In the end, the movie is an indispensable document for
historians of America’s celebrity culture — though it doesn’t
get us any closer than we ever have been to finding any grace or
loveliness in that culture.
