Without Us, She’s Nothing : In her new movie, Sandra Bernhard finds meaning in the artifices of pop culture

“I like show business,” Sandra Bernhard says. “Of all the worlds I dabble in, it’s the most honest. In its harshness and phoniness, it’s more real. You get what you see, and there are some good people in it.”

You have to watch out for someone who loves show business the way Sandra Bernhard loves it, crushing its iconic images to her scrawny breast like a homecoming queen clasping a devotional bouquet. There’s a twistiness about her affection that puts her closer to the Noel Coward who wrote: “It’s amazing how potent cheap music can be,” than to the True Believer earnestness of Arsenio Hall. Inside every bravura Bernhard pose is a tiny meow of almost predatory recognition: She’s caught another cliche on the wing.

Along with Bill Murray, Bernhard is the only comedic figure to get out of the ‘80s with her sense of irony intact (the comedy Zeitgeist right now has either soured into artless derision or hardened into celebrity sycophancy). She’s also brought a keen sense of how the burgeoning narcissism of the last few decades in America has at last crested into a kind of uninhibited self-infatuation in which aggression supersedes talent.

“I have this hard-to-believe face,” she says dreamily to her dressing room mirror at the outset of her new movie, “Without You I’m Nothing,” “beautiful, sensual, sexy, dangerously beautiful.” The even, trancelike intonation of her voice makes us feel as though we’re peering in on an onanistic rite. Those small, flat-lidded eyes. That gaudy, almost prehensile mouth. Her plaintive monotone. Does she believe it? You bet she does. Does she really believe it? Who can tell?

“Without You I’m Nothing” is essentially a one-woman show, set in a night club, with a lot of other people in it, including a jazz ensemble, a country-Western singing group, undulant back-up singers a la The Supremes, ballet dancers, Lu Leonard playing Bernhard’s personal manager, actor Steven Antin playing himself as one of her friends, and children carolers. Cynthia Bailey plays an inner city sylph named Roxanne who glides inscrutably through South Central Los Angeles in some kind of racially inverted mirror of Bernhard’s moony self-regard--at one point they buck and cleave, more or less, in flagrante delicto. Denise Vlasis periodically breaks loose in the house as a character named Shoshanna, a deliberately undisguised reference to Madonna, and struts and poses like a Bauhaus dominatrix.

“Without You I’m Nothing,” co-written with John Boskovich, who directs, is based on Bernhard’s play of the same name that opened in New York City’s Orpheum Theater in March, 1988, and ran for seven months. The movie version is set in the Parisian Room, a now-defunct black jazz club once located at the corner of Washington Boulevard at La Brea. The appearance, Lu Leonard confides in us, is Bernhard’s attempt to regain her roots--success has gone to her head.

But it seems that’s where it’s always been, a fantasy stalking its chance. Bernhard adores the artifices of pop performance, the transports, the postures, the attitudes, the costumes, the fake aura of complicity with the audience, the powerful undercurrent of star noblesse oblige. The program is a compendium of a lot of the entertainment styles that have come and gone over the last 15 years or so, a semi-autobiographical melange of emotionally found art. We hear “Little Red Corvette,” “Me and Mrs. Jones,” “I Never Meant to Hurt You” “Do You Wanna Funk,” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” among others.

We also hear a number of Burt Bacharach tunes, such as “A House Is Not a Home,” “I Say a Little Prayer for You” and “The Look of Love.” How could we ever have been so banal? We wonder as we watch and listen carefully to see if this is all an exquisite sendup. But Bernhard never drops a sardonic clue. Her comedic hem is perfectly straight.

Why the choice of a black setting for the movie?

“I thought it was an interesting metaphor of being on the outside, and showing how much blacks have influenced white culture,” she said.

She was sitting at a table at the Beverly Hills’ Four Seasons hotel during its quaint approximation of afternoon tea--one of the Southern California entertainment community’s anomalous and faintly pretentious homages to its idea of chat among the London intelligentsia. She wore oatmeal-colored slacks and a white blouse. She’s a tall woman, about 5 feet 9. Her mouth looks less omnivorous than it does on film, or on stage for that matter. Her eyelids cut straight across her smallish brown eyes, lending her a faintly pained, reproachful look.

The locked-in misery of the outsider is something she’s felt keenly. Born in Flint, Mich., she moved to Scottsdale, Ariz., with her family when she was 10.

“My father’s a proctologist,” she said. The memory of every joke about proctologists told deliberately within her earshot, and the apprehension of every snide reference that ever could be made about proctologists, flashed through her eyes in a nanosecond.

“My mother’s an artist. He’s re-married. I wasn’t popular in high school, which was very white and racist. A good healthy dose of alienation was my feeling. I wasn’t studious either. I dreamed of traveling the world and pursuing show business. I was always moved by its excitement and glamour. I grew up with musical comedy, when the theater was more romantic and alive than it is now. I was obsessed with Barbra Streisand. I thought I’d be Streisandesque.”

Instead of trying to crack into show business after high school, however, Bernhard went to Israel to live in a kibbutz for eight months. “You had to earn your keep there,” she said. “It was all about the work ethic. You didn’t think about rewards and finance. It was a good lesson about discipline that kept me going night after night at the Comedy Store. It keeps you together when you don’t know where you’re going.”

Bernhard came to Los Angeles in the mid-’70s and worked as a manicurist during the day while she tried to get a stand-up career going at night in places like Ye Little Club and the Comedy Store. That was the time when Jay Leno, David Letterman, Arsenio Hall, Paul Mooney and Lotus Weinstock, among others, were starting out locally to create a lot of the style that later led to the stand-up boom. Bernhard was never very good at it, however. She was the personification of raw, unfunny aggression, and a trial to watch.

“I love Woody Allen and even Borscht Belt schmaltz, but I hated the contrivance of stand-up,” Bernhard recalls of that period. “I developed that hostile style to get control. It was me on a lineup with 15 others, usually men, and a few self-deprecating women. I was angry in that space. I was fighting for attention.”

The trouble with the act was that once she got attention, she couldn’t hold it. She couldn’t get an audience conditioned by fusillades of one-liners and setups into her allusive frame of reference.

“I was 20 years old. I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I wanted to express myself. I like to get people to react--Bette Midler was a great influence on me then. I don’t think I was in touch with my sensuality and sexuality. I was very insecure and naive, yet very aware. After two or three years I started to know where I was headed--towards expressing my discomfort with the manipulation of people by current ideas of fashion and beauty. Since I was never your typical blond Aryan beauty, I was always aware of people’s discomfort.”

The 1983 success of her role in Martin Scorcese’s “The King of Comedy” (she’s made four movies) enabled her to begin re-thinking her career. A drive home from the Comedy Store one night with her friend John Boskovich convinced her to get out of stand-up.

Boskovich has studied art history in Madrid, literature at Trinity College in Cambridge, law at Loyola, philosophy at USC and Fine Art at CalArts. That background has afforded him an extraordinary perspective on how disparate currents in contemporary style and attitude link up in a kind of grand electronic theater of the air in which everyone--artists, performers, rock promoters, politicians, magazine editors, fashion designers, advertisers, journalists, TV and movie producers and even acquisitive corporate execs--is caught up in an ongoing media extravaganza obsessed with novelty, status and self-promotion.

Underlying it all is a kind of bedrock cultural nihilism; Bernhard was too young for the 1968 Summer of Love but not too young for the subsequent long winter of our discontent that has followed. At 35, she’s part of a generation that has grown up without heroes and looks to celebrity to fill the gap.

“The days of somebody saving you are over,” she said. “The ‘80s were about digesting the ‘60s and the ‘70s. There’s been a lot of confusion. A lot of failed relationships. After AIDS, I became hyper-aware of friendships. My expectations about people are not super-high. To have fun and make things exciting--that’s how I see my role.”

Between them, Boskovich and Bernhard know that the satirist bears the same relationship to a subject that the expert forger bears to the work of art about to be palmed off on a credulous patron--temperamental affinity and the skill of undetectable approximation. The musical and production values of “Without You I’m Nothing” are first-rate (as are Raymond Lee’s witty costumes). Patrice Rushen’s arrangements and original music--and their execution--easily stand on their own. The Hank Williams tune “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is just as beautiful as it was intended to be--there’s no joke here.

Still, irony is distance, and you never know quite what relationship Bernhard bears to this quasi-autobiography and fantasy piece. Or to the audience. Is giving pleasure an end, or is it yet another avenue toward narcissistic self-regard?

“No one speaks of pavilions anymore and that saddens me,” she says, with the same plaintive earnestness a performer might use to stop the show with a dedication to the rain forests. The banal solemnity of the moment is comical. But if Bernhard wants to use a black jazz milieu as a paradigm of hip, and of self-identification, you have to wonder if she’s not unintentionally implicating it in a strange self-negation as well. Her slip of a body is absurdly lost in that big Earth momma African dashiki and turban as she sings Nina Simone’s “Four Women.” And she’s dead-on as Remy Martin, the Nancy Wilson-style performer who pegs her audience on its astrological signs.

If black is hip, the black audience plainly (and deliberately) doesn’t get what Bernhard is about; it’s bored, and eventually filters out to leave her alone on stage. The stoned emcee can’t remember her name (he keeps calling her “Sarah Bernhardt”). Her lovely, silent, sinuous doppelganger Roxanne writes “Sandra Bernhard” in lipstick on a tablecloth. At first it seems a tribute until she removes her arm, revealing the ultimate expletive above the name.

Off to the side, the musicians look a shade suspicious. The black world is accustomed to having its stylistic innovations endlessly ripped of by white culture, but the inside vibrations of “Without You I’m Nothing” are too obscure to read. “Patrice Rushen is very sensitive. She didn’t think it was racist,” Bernhard said.

“Without You I’m Nothing” sends out a lot of mixed signals, and so does Bernhard. In one respect she’s true to the credo Lorne Michaels and his “Saturday Night Live” bunch sent out to a generation: “Comedy shouldn’t be left to professionals.” That is, by presenting herself as a gifted amateur. In one respect, “Without You I’m Nothing” is a top-of-the-line vanity production. That’s part of the pop appeal of our time as expressed by Madonna’s line in “Vogue”: “Don’t just stand there, let’s get to it/Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.”

But there’s a darker genius here as well that realizes how much commercial time has speeded up in America, which makes every cultural impulse instantly convertible to kitsch. To define something is to render it passe. She recognizes therefore that the interview process itself is not an exercise in revelation, but just another part of the act.

Bernhard couldn’t explain the meaning of the sex scene with Roxanne, or even offer a coherent interpretation after she emphasized that “Roxanne is not an alter ego.” And her talk of what the movie was about didn’t quite square with what we saw.

“It’s about phony liberalism,” she said. “It’s a comment on the exploitation of women.” How does her stripper’s bump and grind with a sequinned American flag G-string express that? Particularly when she says, “If the camera had just shown that quickly, it wouldn’t have had any meaning.” And of the final rebuke? “I call myself on my own bull,” she said. “I always beat myself to the punch.”

It may be that her best intuition, as we’ve seen elsewhere--on the Letterman show, for example--is in seeing how every stylistic intention quickly curdles into cliche. The best, the truest, the most meaningful, is properly left approached but unsaid. Entertainment after all is not about sentiment but sentimentality, and if irony is an attitude, it’s also a refuge.

At the end of the interview she rose and proffered a cheek and an air-kiss moue . “Bye, honey,” she said, in a black affectation. In an earlier era of show business, the catch-phrase was: “You gotta have a gimmick.” Now it’s: “You gotta have a style.” It’s that or nothing. Or, as Bernhard suggests with oblique cunning, it’s that and nothing.