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Lenny Bruce

The film is of immediate relevance to New Zealanders in that it once again, both explicitly and implicitly, brings to the fore the subject of censorship.

Unfortunately, it is most unlikely that Lenny will provoke the kind of serious discussion which would ultimately lead to direct political action toward the abolition of censorship in New Zealand. For one, because films are viewed primarily as entertainment here, and not as serious statements, as a mode of expressing and developing ideas; and also, the film's own lack of appeal.

This last aspect is not very surprising. Lenny Bruce was an unlikely candidate for the smooth processing of synthetic American heroes.

Fosse attempts, in a superficial way, to stick close to his protagonist, and winds up with a contradictory and paradoxical film The paradoxes, in my opinion, spring from the very fact the Lenny is an American film, and the typical difficulties of American film-makers to come to grips with American reality;

Thus Dustin Hoffman probably gives one of his finest character portrayals here and director Bob Fosse competently enough presents what must be—in terms of filmic story-telling—a rather complex fable, switching time-levels effortlessly, following leitmotifs, relating documentary-style interview sequences to narrative re-enactments of Bruce's viata. In spite of this, Lenny is, artistically and otherwise, a wash-out.

The real Lenny Bruce was—perhaps unknown to himself—what in Europe, especially in Germany, is known as a "Kabaretist"—a "Kabarett"—performer. It is this aspect that links Lenny up to Fosse's earlier film, Cabaret, starring Liza Minelli and set in a pre-third-reich, nazi-thug-infested, 1931

Cabaret and Kabarett are not merely two different modes of spelling the same word, but two very different concepts. The former implies the familiar musical and silk-stockinged nightclub attractions, the latter denotes a satirical, and often subversive, political stage troupe or one man act. Lenny Bruce did American Kabarett in a Cabaret setting;

Characteristically, this could only happen at the crossroads between two related but different cultures, new world and old embodied in the American Jew.

Lenny Bruce was obsessed with his Jewishness and sported a language heavily laced with Yiddish, to the point of—at times—virtual unintelligibility to non-New Yorkers. It was this clash between cultures that sparked off Bruce's insight into the "hypocrisy" extant in American society. Bruce's social criticism is essentially a rapid succession of focus shifts between Jewish and Waspish perception of American values.

The sparks flying between these poles of his dual personality, in a way, accounted for his quick-fire staccato speech, and the moral dimensions of his associative wealth.

As a person, Bruce was unexceptional. The Bruce persona is common enough, existing somewhere in everybody s life in the form of a particularly lively narrator, salesman, parliamentarian, street-corner philosopher or classroom clown. The professional Master of Ceremonies, too, is a common enough derivative of the type. As such, Bruce was relatively undistinguished, as a comedian often second rate, doing lousy impersonations, often throwing away and garbling up some of his best lines.

What was new—for America—was the way Bruce dramatized ideas. The traditional nightclub environment hardly invited intellectualized, insightful esprit. In Europe it was quite common practice say, for Juliette Greco to perform chansons (songs—Ed) penned by Prevertm Sartre, or Boris Vian in the cabarets of Paris' rive gauche (left bank Ed). In America it would take another ten years for the likes of Bob Dylan, Tuli Kupferberg or Frank Zappa to synthesize a new "hip" culture. But between 1958 and 1963 there was only a small sub-cultural group of beatniks, hipsters, jazz-musicians and collegiate intellectuals that could relate to Bruce's "alienation" from American culture.

In those days wearing corduroy was almost as much a cult-thing among middle-class teen-agers, as long hair would become to the Woodstock generation; it was an infallible indication that one had "been to Europe' and found it difficult, after seeing the Palazzo Piti in Florence to relate to the lack of "culture" in America. Self-definition, the quest for a new American identity was foremost on their agenda.

America and things were American were constantly being challenged—it was possible, to be sure, for the Russians to beat America to the launching of a Sputnik, but on the whole America was Number One, the grandest nation in the world. But economic and military power seemed not to coincide with a cultural predominance..

The arrival of the cold war period largely prevented effective political dissent. Alternatives were confined within the terms of the two party system of American parliamentary democracy, and not between monopoly capitalism and democratic socialism.

Hardly surprising blues singers and folk songs were dug out, jazz musicians turned toward their "African" roots, adopting Islam on the way. And other diffuse journeys of exploration into drugs Zen and other "way out" human experiences were undertaken.

Bruce figured as a mental divining rod, articulating what often he himself was not totally aware of. What was novel in this process was that Bruce could surprise himself, functioning as a medium, a pure instrument of free association. By tapping his own he seemed to give expression to the collective unconscious—especially of his peer-group audience (which he himself located as that group then in their twenties to forties).

Bruce was self-educated, displaying all the semiliteracy and lack of discipline of an untained intellect—amplified perhaps by the performers need for immediate articulation and improvisation.

It was not as an intellectual, however, but as an intelligent performer that Bruce became famous (and later notorious) and his achievements in this form or oral literature were considerable. His artistry was a completely cerebral act, making very deliberate use of the hipster idiom.

Bruce was immediately out of his depth though, when abandoning his narrow catalogue of themes, junkies, Hollywood minority groups (Jews especially), sexual aberrations, four letter words and the whole complex of questions stuck in the Judaeo-Christian schism of "double standards". Politically. Bruce always remained typically American, that is, naive, and never lost his admiration for the Kennedies and capitalism. His views on communism, while far removed from the cold war hysteria of the time, were summed up in one line: "Communism is like one big phone company—you're screwed."

Fosse, in Lenny duplicates Bruce's original dilemma in failing to understand the class nature of American society; hence Lenny becomes a victim of an American judicial system that abuses its powers for such reasons as personal nearsightedness, volitional evilness, inhumanity, bureaucratic petrification—but is never understood as a class-judiciary.

Here, Lenny is placed into a contact which remains privatistic and anecdotal. The reduction to this level does not help to explain the historical determinants accounting for the particularity of social developments and the personages involved in them.

Thus Lenny emerges as an unfunny comedian, persecuted and prosecuted for his extensive use of dirty words. On the surface, this seems to be true, especially too in the light of the kind of treatment the film received in New Zealand today, which seems to repeat, with an appropriate time-lag, the treatment handed to Bruce in the early sixties.

The fact that a film can be banned outright, for its contemporary American language content, throws a telling light on the New Zealand scene: the conceptual and hence linguistic paucity of an isolated; insular largely agricultural society, with an almost complete absence of self-definition and self-identiy. But the non-simultaneity of social developments occasionally reduces the suitability of certain materials for local application. What has become safely marketable in the United States (a watered-down treatment of Bruce's more outdated ideas) could, in New Zealand terms, become subversive. If one is to believe that offending the Pat Bartletts of the nation could consistute an act of subversion.

No - the firm's subversiveness is of a more implicit nature, and despite any insistence to the contrary, has nothing to do with its diry word content. Bruce himself believed (and Fosse is eager to repeat it) that obscenity was mainly a semantic problem, that "cocksucker" was a dirty word because of the way we page break relate to words The problem is slightly out of focus here; what we have in hand is the incongruity of the capitalistic concepts of reality with a given reality of capitalistic society

What Bruce in his role as a Jewish Copacabana Jesus failed to see—and herein lies his greatest shortcoming, is that the absurdity and irrationality, the elementary perversion of society he wrestled with had very little to do with double standards of morality. He was, in fact, expounding the abstruse contradictions of capitalist ideology—while being perfectly unaware of this fact. In bourgeois ideology, ideas move the world, and suppression of ideas guarantees the status quo. Ideas are considered dangerous; the terror of the word might lead to terrorist action.

This is of course absurd. And Bruce's funniest scenarios resulted directly from his unceasing bafflement by this absurdity. To the law and order enforcers of the day his semantic terrorism sounded like a public espousal of the communist manifesto. Thus the vilification and legal harrassment, the repeated visits by cops brandishing pistols in his face ("Here's my warrant!") could not reasonably be explained with his essentially harmless provocations. The case of Lenny Bruce, clearly, is one of accidental martyrisation: he never was a threat to capitalism.

And indeed as Lenny points out (twice) it is ironic that Bruce should have been convicted for what has become a part of everyday life today. The problem that Bruce, involuntarily, poses is that the rationality of capitalist ideology is in fact thoroughly irrational. The censorship enacted upon Bruce is merely an instantaneous example of the general presence of censorship under capitalism: which derives from a basically antidemocratic factor inherent in capitalism: from a form of government by force and governmental violence.

The ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class, the predominant rationality is the rationale of the ruling class, and its representatives in government, to stay in power. Censorship is the all-embracing prevailing mode of presentation of reality under capitalism.

It is most apparent where the presentation of reality is directly involved: in the mass media and the press. Freedom of the press is the freedom of a few rich men to suppress the opinions of the majority, to censor out that part of reality that could threaten them.

If one was seriously to consider an R 40 or R 50 rating for films in New Zealand (to which censorship de factor amounts) the absurdity of it would become immediately apparent. To give the vote at 18, but to bestow upon a film an R 20 rating immediately throws a significant light on what that vote is worth.

Censorship is, in fact, the channelling of reality perception in one given direction; its purpose is to block out, smoke-veil and blurr the inconsistencies and contradictions of capitalist reality. The monumental mistake in Lenny—and the fact of its initial banning—is to draw attention to the existence of censorship. The reality of censorship is a de factor, tacit admission of the existence of existence of classes in New Zealand, especially of a ruling class, belying the myth of classless democracy. Any modification of the Censorship Act in no way alters this basic fact - it merely serves as a reminder that censorship continues to exist. Censorship in a capitalistic society is an unbelievable stupidity of the ruling class - as it has ways and means to filter out any undesirable opinion. Thus, for example, the distribution of advertising money for newspapers is not pooled and distributed equitably, to ensure a wide variety of opinions, but is distributed according to capitalistic conformity of the respective publisher's editorial policy—thus censoring out non-conformist views.

Lenny, in its way, serves as a reminder, that the innate viciousness of capitalism strives for total eradication of dissent, that capitalism strices, ideally, toward totalitarian rule. Democracy is its ideological cover, totalitarianism its reality. Bruce, a Jewish rationalist, was "obscene", because, in typical inversion of reality the American ruling class set its own obscene state of mind as the standard of normality. Lenny has lessons galore for us New Zealanders—and so, by the way, has Lenny Bruce. But above all, thank God, he is funny.