Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Joan Rivers takes us on a ride, in this documentary directed by Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg.  Here, Rivers attempts to frame her life in show-business, or perhaps, more so, as show-business herself.

Rivers understands show-business, particularly because of brutalities the ambitious must swallow and endure. And she endured, because she's driven. Workaholism has been her vehicle to success, fame, respect, wealth, and, yes, disrespect as well. For her, work is air, perhaps the only way the lungs of her ambitions can inhale.

I assume she has an over-active imagination, full of ideas, brilliant, bizarre, stupid, or otherwise. And like many successful comedians, who have been through numerous hurdles in show-business, she is smart and calculating. At seventy-five*, it's amazing how energetic this woman is, performing to this and that city, traveling, hungry for something that's not merely money or fame, or even a sense of power, but some sort of fundamental continuity and rhythm in her life, to not fade out of entertaining people.

I'm tempted to say her workaholism is an expression of madness, of trying to control some beast inside her, one that cannot be domesticated, or must be liberated out of its cage through stage performance. And perhaps this is what glamour in show-business is, the liberation of what refuses to be domesticated, into a savage space, the space of spectacle, which, in unequal parts, is: Entertainment, Enlightenment, Farce, and, even Pollution, or simply Air.
[ * Her age when the film was made. ]

Hard As Water

We are falling into rhythms in footprints, railroads, entangled wires. I can feel the erosions, their fortified twilights, gleaming, incandescent as your elusive excuses. There are deformations in store windows I want to be, traps, tones, gothic melancholies, weekends. There are lines of movie-theaters in these deformations, broken lines, thin, large, vague. We fit in the lines, like sprockets, reeled into dispositions conditioned for modest, breezy illusions. Glamour takes my heart, cuts it into saturations of success. I am falling into a mob of eyes, into their crowded gloss. The car-chase finds its eternity, the heart of its driver's engine. Streets integrate into a lost city, a generation of dreams. We are falling, turning into prayers still inventing unsuccessful amens, reviving depths in our closed eyes. The language of premonitions is as tasty as cold water, sinking, becoming sea. This certainty is baffling, alluring as green in tropical spaces.