WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING
With Sandra Bernhard, John Doe, Steve Antin, Lu Leonard, Ken Foree, and Cynthia Bailey.
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If you believe, as I firmly do, that Marilyn Monroe subverts her typecasting and gives a Brechtian performance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes–a portrait of a predator knowingly using her power–then you may be less than infatuated with Madonna’s postmodernist appropriation of Monroe’s sexpot image, an appropriation that peels away all of the Brechtian irony and commentary to give us a sexpot pure and simple, or at least a sexpot that’s purer and simpler than Monroe’s Lorelei Lee. (One could argue in defense of Madonna that she, unlike Monroe, is in full control of her own image–a position that might be easier to sustain regarding one of her videos than regarding Dick Tracy’s peekaboo editing, which seems more in line with the puritanical taste of someone like Jesse Helms. But compare Monroe’s performance as Lorelei Lee with anything in the Madonna canon before you leap to conclusions.)
So how can an assault on show biz and slickness be an example of show biz at its slickest? How can a work of provocation be packaged so skillfully that provocation becomes an overall impression conveyed by the work rather than an integral part of it? How does one construct a confrontational movie that never actually confronts the audience? Or how, to be more specific, does one present a “one-woman show” with 32 other performers, not counting 26 on-screen and 33 offscreen musicians? Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing, a veritable bible of postmodernism, provides a few fascinating clues.
A black emcee (Ken Foree) with a joint comes up to the mike after the song and formally introduces her. Then he introduces another performer, “Shoshanna” (Denise Vlasis), a stripper made up to resemble Madonna, who goes into her Madonna-like number, during which there’s the first of the film’s many cuts to an attractive black woman (Cynthia Bailey) walking outside in an unidentified location. (The press materials refer to her as Bernhard’s alter ego, though I suppose she also can read as her lover; in any case she reeks of the kind of significance accorded to muses in Fellini films.)
What’s missing is anything that registers as personal risk or investment; the sustained tone of facetiousness and the shallowness that comes with it rule out any moment or emotion that doesn’t appear between quotation marks (a hallmark of postmodernism). Despite the autobiographical stretches, it’s well-nigh impossible to know whether Bernhard is baring some part of her soul or putting us on (or situating herself somewhere in between these possibilities), and it’s often almost as difficult to care.
