A Film Canon

This magnificent comedy identifies prohibition culture as the genesis of sexual subculture, collapsing the eve of the Great Depression into the dawn of the 1960s, and reducing the intervening period to those cinematic genres - screwball comedy, the gangster film, and even noir - whose syncretic rehearsal paves the way for Wilder's most exquisite mastery of carnivalesque, reducing every object, value and utterance to an incongruous contiguity and immediacy: "Which side's port and which side's starboard?" "That depends on whether you're coming or going". Given the narrative premise - a duo of musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) forced to disguise themselves in a women's band to avoid detection by gangsters, during which they encounter the voluptuous 'Sugar' (Marilyn Monroe, in her most delightfully innocent, credulous incarnation) - this finds most memorable expression as an almost surrealist identification of the sexualised human body with so many musical instruments, in which the points of visual, or ostensible focus, are subordinated to a fetishistic fascination with the integral role that even the most peripheral, or unconventional, organs can have in 'playing' it. The result is a hyperbolic circulation - or alcoholic transfusion, given the repeated references to blood groups - of affect, whose economic corollary is the fantastic circulation of capital around which the narrative revolves (allowing the down-and-out protagonists to co-opt the two most coveted American subject positions - the industrialist and the celebrity), and whose most glorious moment comes with 'Daphne''s (Jack Lemmon) whole-hearted, jouissance-fueled subscription to her disguise, as her whole body experiences the awakening that 'Josephine' (Curtis) fakes to gain Sugar's trust, contorting with unbearable, indescribable pleasure into an enormous pair of maracas.