From the Vaults: 'All That Jazz'

When you’re on your deathbed, when you’ve finally eked out all the distraction you can from cigarettes and sex and amphetamines, when you’re hooked up to a machine that tells you every day how much deader you are than the day before, how do you deal with the fact that nothing you have ever done has had any lasting value, and the only meaningful thing you have ever accomplished is causing all those around you pain and disappointment?

Good question.

What do you do when your career, from your wet-crotched stage debut in your father’s vaudeville hall to your final, disastrous read-through with your producers, has amounted to nothing besides a long series of highly anticipated failures, punctuated by just enough ephemeral success to remind yourself and those around you of your immense but wasted potential?

Good question.

When the show is over and the only people left in the audience are yourself and Death, what do you do?

Good question.

Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical “All That Jazz” gives a pretty simple answer—you deal with it.

Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is a successful choreographer whose struggles to finish editing a Hollywood feature while also directing his new Broadway musical, all while still dealing with the personal demands of his ex-wife, daughter, and girlfriend. Dexedrine and cigarettes keep him going until he suffers a heart attack in his doctor’s office, at which point he is carted off for several weeks of “bed rest”—during which he drinks harder and womanizes more than even his usual habits demand. He has increasingly vivid hallucinations of wooing the Angel of Death (Jessica Lange).

As his health continues to fail, one by one his friends and associates abandon his cause. His ex-wife gives up on him; realizing that his insurance will make his unfinished movie profitable, his producers start rooting for his death; his girlfriend abandons him. By the time the second heart-attack hits, he is alone.

As his heart fails, Gideon imagines his death as a magnificent television-benefit dance concert. His former professional associate O’Connor Flood (Ben Vereen) introduces him: "What can I tell you about my next guest? This cat allowed himself to be adored, but not loved, and his success in show business was matched by failure in his personal relationship bag—now, that's where he really bombed. And he came to believe that work, showbusiness, love, his whole life, and even himself and all that jazz was bullshit. He became the numero uno game player—to the point where he didn't know where the games ended and the reality began. Like, to this cat, the only reality was death, man. Now, ladies and gentlemen, let me lay on you a so-so entertainer, not much of a humanitarian, and this cat was never nobody's friend, in his final appearance on the great stage of life (you can applaud if you wanna)—"

Joe Gideon is a choreographer. He creates order out of bodies. For his final feat, he creates order out of his own body’s collapse into physical chaos, which creates emotional order out of the competing strands of his life and brings it all to a close. Death, the great irrationality, is reconciled to the dance of human life. Dancers representing his vascular system writhe in violent but perfect harmony. In a perverse parody of the old Everly Brothers song, he sings happily, “Bye bye life; bye bye happiness; hello loneliness—I think I’m gonna die.” It’s all a show, so we may as well make it a big one.

And seeing that movie is how I accepted death as a reality.

—Jude D. Russo can be reached at jude.russo@thecrimson.com.