Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy sits at a kitchen table doing his homework. Women move around him on the business of the house, because the house is a brothel and his grandmother runs it. Pryor stages this as chores, rules, traffic. Nobody in the frame is being lurid on the boy's behalf. That decision, executed through blocking rather than dialogue, is the moral center of the only narrative feature Richard Pryor directed, and it tells you what he came to do. Not confess. Testify, with the furniture in the right places.

The film starts somewhere else. Jo Jo Dancer, stand-up comedian, sets himself alight freebasing. While the burned body lies in a hospital, his spirit steps out of it and begins talking to him in the second person. Your life is calling is a stage page, the summons to come out and be seen. Everything after is the spirit walking the body's life.

Deleuze split cinema in two, and this film lands hard on one side. In what he called the movement-image, a person perceives a situation and acts to change it; the act resolves things and the cutting carries you from problem to solution. His other cinema begins where that circuit breaks and a character can only look. He calls such a figure a voyant, a seer, and calls the moments they are stranded in pure optical and sound situations — opsigns — where seeing and listening are all that's left. Most films labor for an hour to strand a hero like that. Pryor does it in ten minutes by burning the body off his. And the lens earns itself here, because the coma isn't suspense scaffolding. It is the film's actual question: a man who cannot move has to decide whether he wants to keep living, and watching is the only faculty he has left.

So what does he watch? Deleuze separates two kinds of past. The recollection-image is the ordinary flashback, a former present dated and filed and replayed. Sheets of past are something else: the past as a place with regions, which you move through instead of retrieve. Jo Jo has both. The tour itself runs chronologically, childhood to rise to decadence. But the transitions are motivated by the alter ego's attention — memory arrives when he turns toward it — and Donn Cambern, who cut Easy Rider, brings the flash-cut grammar he built there, pre-lapping fragments of the next scene into the tail of this one. The past stops being a reel and becomes a corridor. That architecture is lifted wholesale from 8½: the stalled performer, immobilized by his body and his handlers, walking his own memory as a spectator while the remembered figures are staged as a procession he can watch and cannot alter.

Then there are two of him in the frame. Optical composite, done unshowily, mostly by eyelines and staging. Deleuze calls this kind of image a crystal: an actual thing and its virtual double, present and reflection, circling until you can't say which one is the original. Pryor makes the crystal out of two performances. Jo Jo is charm as armor, fast, deflecting, always working the room. The alter ego is quiet, exhausted, faintly contemptuous, a man who has heard all the material before. The sound splits the same way: the performed voice on the stage microphone against the unamplified voice of the spirit. The film keeps asking which one is telling the truth. Jerry Lewis had already built the comedian-auteur's split self in The Nutty Professor, where the second persona is the seductive, self-destructive public act. Pryor doubles the bet by putting both men in one shot and letting them argue.

Here the older idea that films don't lie starts to buckle, productively. A biopic promises: this happened. Pryor signs his with a false name that fools nobody, about a fire he had already turned into the most famous routine in Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), and which he would later call a suicide attempt in Pryor Convictions. Same event, three forms: bit, scene, confession. Deleuze called this the powers of the false, which isn't lying but truth that has to be made rather than reported, by a figure he names the forger. A stand-up is that professional. The routine is the truth shaped until it lands in a room. It explains something critics noticed and read as failure: the dramatized sections play more conventionally than the man at the mic, because the mic is where his truth-machine actually works.

Watch the rooms and you can see the film's real argument. John A. Alonzo, who shot Lady Sings the Blues and its amber club interiors and its descent-into-junk grammar, splits this film's palette: the hospital present cool, lateral, static; the remembered past warmer, mobile, lit by lamps and marquees and spots. The early clubs are cramped, crowded, tactile. The later ones get bigger, colder, more mirrored, with Jo Jo alone in them. The stage light does the rest — the follow spot that Fosse's Lenny established as the comedian's tragic frame, carving a lone figure out of blackness so the routines read as testimony. That pool of light is what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever, a space that has quit being a setting and become pure affect, the audience present only as an absence. And the emptying follows what he calls a line of slope, the irreversible downward gradient of appetite: the same hunger that needs the room needs the pipe. Notice where Pryor refuses to put that slope. Genre would put the rot in the brothel. He puts the brothel's staging where Sweet Sweetback had it, as a working household where the women are family and labor at once, and reserves the ruin for the mirrored suite.

One posture carries the whole social argument. Deleuze's gest is an attitude that exposes a relation nobody states out loud. Jo Jo sanding his act down for white rooms is a gest: he succeeds, and comes out hollow. Pryor then places the reclamation of his own voice before the fire, which means it doesn't save him. That refusal of the recovery arc is a harder piece of writing than anything in the plot.

The ending has been called a retreat — after ninety minutes of dramatization the film simply returns a man to a stage and a microphone and lets him tell the audience the truth. Read it instead as the crack in the crystal. The mirrored world had no outside; the fissure is the door he walks out of, back into the only apparatus where his life gets made in public. Deleuze has a word for that act: fabulation, story-telling that invents its subject rather than recording him. Jo Jo chooses to live by choosing to tell it.

Columbia paid for this because Pryor was a top-ten star, under the Indigo deal that was supposed to open the studio pipeline to Black filmmakers and produced no lasting slate; this film is the deal's principal artifact. It reached theaters weeks before Len Bias died and the crack panic hardened, which is to say a film asking Americans to sit inside a Black addict's interiority arrived exactly when the culture decided to stop. Three months later She's Gotta Have It opened and the independent road became the road. What Pryor invented survived anyway: the comedian's self-autopsy, run by a second self who prosecutes rather than narrates. Eddie Murphy took the star-directs-himself form into Harlem Nights with Pryor in the cast. Chris Rock answered the whole film in Top Five. And the tradition where a Black childhood is the subject rather than the backstory runs from here through Crooklyn, Eve's Bayou, Antwone Fisher, Moonlight. A Richard Pryor biopic has been in development for twenty years and has never been made. It may be that the job was done. He got there first, played both parts, and spared himself nothing.

When you watch it, keep score of the voices. One has a microphone and a room. One has neither. Ask yourself which one you believe, and then ask why the film ends by handing the man back the microphone anyway.