A Film Canon

At times, The Jerk resembles a series of Saturday Night Live sketches, or segments of a stand-up circuit, more than a fully integrated comedy - but they're so memorable that it hardly matters, especially since Steve Martin's comic persona is not only remarkably and recognisably fully-fledged for his first film role, but distills his anarchic edge more than any of his subsequent filmic output. The loosely structured, episodic narrative is anchored by two parallel trajectories - the first, a version of passing for white, in which Navin R. Johnson, a wide-eyed African-American boy, moves from a country farm to the big smoke; the second, the relatively new register of passing for black, in which Martin plays the role of Navin, his mantra "don't trust whitey". By the 00s, the comic potential of passing for black has been largely exhausted (not least by Martin's 2002 comedy, Bringing Down The House), so it's a testament to Martin's originality in anticipating it that his vision remains fresh - specifically his anticipation of an African-American mode of consumption that would become a peculiar object of emulation in 80s popular culture. What prevents this from being a smug instance of white, old money sneering at black, new money is the kitsch affection with which Martin invests this consumption, and the way in which it becomes continuous with his own refusal to distinguish between pastiche and sentiment, his body the writhing receptacle of an amorphous, nostalgic Americana that has its roots in cinema as much as anything else, anticipating the collage drama of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. The result is hyper-credulity, wide-eyed and over-enunciated enough to include the entire audience - the genesis of Martin's peculiar speech patterns - as if Navin had been told he were in a film, and still believed it was real life, explaining director Carl Reiner's intervention as what little deus ex machina the narrative needs. It also produces a physical comedy structured around false movement, or mobility - from the spatial "flow" that Navin envisages for his cubicle-apartment, to his relocation of automotive to optical mechanics in the form of the 'Optigram', the invention that corrects his tendency to see further than he can move, and thereby makes his fortune. But, above all, it cements Martin's comic signature as the melancholy farce of whitey passing for white, his prescience of a deracinated whiteness that can only be pre-empted through retro-sentimentality, poised somewhere between sweet and bittersweet, between being 'old-timey' and just a plain jerk.