Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere. ‘ So wrote Katharine Hepburn in Me: Stories of My Life .
“Now he was ready for the morgue boys. He was a big star, they would have said. A box office god of those who don’t do it anymore »so writes Jim Carrey in Memoirs and Misinformation.
There is autobiography, That of the Canadian actor, written jointly with Dana Vachon (journalist and, as a former financial investor, author of the book Mergers & Acquisitions in which he recounts that terrible world), resembles him. It is not easy to remain faithful to a style even when the subject on which to pour commiseration, resentment and then balm on the wounds inflicted is the same one who looks at us from the mirror in the morning.
And considering that the lies are already in the title (better, “misinformation”, or the art of providing false or inaccurate information, especially those intentionally intended to mislead) it is very likely that what the book tells is all true.
The autobiography is a point of arrival in the path of a public person. There are those who print more than one in the course of a career. To update, of course, if longevity dictates it ( Anjelica Huston wrote two just one year later , the first to tear her father to pieces, the second Jack Nicholson). Others burn the times, Drew Barrymore wrote his at 15 , but he had already lived a lot: he called it Little Girl Lost , lost girl. Still others put more energy into the construction of the myth than the scaffolding of the book, such as Matthew McConaughey who, close to launching into politics, wanted to let the world know that to write his memoir Greenlights, allegedly exiled himself to the desert for 52 days. And by candlelight. More than a literary award, the actor of True Detective and Interstellar aims at a career as an anchorite.
Jim Carrey on the other hand does not use even an ounce of energy because we believe that he is “one of us”. He talks about himself in the third person and does not drag us into his story, rather he keeps us on the sidelines. No one who knows even the slightest bit about Jim Carrey’s history and career would want to feel part of a club that counts him among its members. And nobody wants to be inside Jim Carrey’s head, probably not even him.
Too talented not to suffer from it. Too much character not to inevitably carry Jim Carrey as a heavy burden in each of the things he does: the role of a movie, (the shadow of) himself in a documentary like Jim & Andy, an interview, even the catwalk on a red carpet. Like the one hardly traveled a few years ago (the evening was dedicated to fashion shows and a famous fashion magazine) in which, to the unfortunate’s questions, she answered not telegraphically as is done in these cases and worrying not to say absolutely anything, but with something to half between the pamphlet and the confession . “All this is completely meaningless, I was looking for something that was completely meaningless and here I am … I don’t even think she exists.” Look into the room of the incredulous reporter: “But Jim, you are an icon and tonight you are very well dressed up.” Answer: “It’s not me. They are just clusters of tetrahedra swirling next to each other … We count for nothing, absolutely nothing: and this is good news“.
Not just masterpieces
The video of the vent on YouTube, from 2017 to today, has been seen by a scant six million. There is an audience for Jim Carrey. And not only when he delivers The Truman Show to the world , the film we’ve been thinking about automatically for 25 years whenever our reality seems too much like bad television. O If you leave me I will cancel you , the only really crafty choice for the visions of Valentine’s Day (but also on other days of the year).
Jim Carrey didn’t just make masterpieces, quite the contrary. But for him an audience is right to be there even when he collects failures like Love at first sight – The magician of the scam , the film that brought him to the edge of the artistic and emotional disaster . Or when, to get back in the loop, he shot the shotgun A Christmas Carol , another misstep, and Mr. Popper’s Penguins.
Clusters of swirling tetrahedrons in the novel / memoir of the actor who has practically left the scene for a decade can see several: the scenario is the hills of Brentwood, Los Angeles, and we are at the dawn of an apocalypse . The city “was turning into hell, with completely dry reservoirs and hot days without interruption, the reading of the weather seemed like a sadist’s lottery ticket.” He is in bed, unshaven, in the company of “two identical, steel-toothed twin Rottweilers who both answered the name of ‘Jophiel'”.
A true movie star
“If you had seen him at that moment from a hidden security camera you would have hardly recognized him, mistaking him at first glance for a Lebanese hostage.” And yet: ‘I know this man, I’ve seen him on all the morning cereal billboards. He’s a movie star: Jim Carrey. ‘ While he cultivates a self-destructive solitude badly protected by his publicists and talks to the security system – “’Tell me I’m safe again,’ Carrey said. “And loved”. “It’s safe. And loved “. “Tell me something nice about me”. “His monthly water consumption has dropped by three percent” »- the actor-author reviews his life .
“His early years were marked by the economic problems of a beloved father, Percy, whose smile had disappeared in direct proportion to his family’s money. Her mother, Kathleen, felt misery viscerally at times, imagining she was dying. Doctors prescribed codeine and nembutal. The woman developed an addiction to painkillers, like many other people. He played her first comic gags to try to make her feel better , a nail-thin seven-year-old boy walking into his bedroom in his underwear, pretending to be a praying mantis attacking, head crooked, claws out of order. , making her laugh despite the pain, which grew with time.
But Carrey’s story, comic, tragic, sci-fi, to the usual graphic with descents and ascents to which every story of greatness has accustomed us to whether it has screens or stages at the center – from Sunset Boulevard to Eve against Eve to Fourth Estate – unites kitsch the culture of celebrity is imbued with, that of Bodyguard and Notting Hill so to speak. And it’s not an easy cocktail to shake.
The myth unmasked
“A lot is known about a society seeing who it chooses to idolize,” said Judy Davis in Woody Allen’s Celebrity , a film that shouted for help : “Help” is the sign that appears in the New York sky as an entree. It was 1998, and there weren’t even social networks … Yet even then anyone needed a lot of help who entered that infernal circle that leads to the desire to live on the front line and which Jim Carrey had so effectively mocked (as long as it was possible doing it, in the 90s), with The Mask – From zero to myth , the story of a nullity who, wearing a mask, assumes cartoon powers. Playing for sanity. The parable of celebrity.
“That frenzied, obscene search for fame typical of the era of triumphant television, today is everyone’s daily newspaper in the age of the internet,” explains Adrien Dénouette, author of an essay on the actor, Jim Carrey , “l ‘America unmasked ”, interviewed by the French weekly Les Inrockuptibles . They are therefore the truths disguised as lies of Memoirs and Misinformation a medicine or just another salt on the wounds (“He slept dreaming of swallowing sandpaper”)? Perhaps even from the most unnatural condition, celebrity, something human can be drawn: “There, in more than atrocious circumstances, his mind, as in a confession, revealed the truth of what he really was, and as if his were there. ‘only mind in the world, and its perceptions of reality at that moment the last recorded impressions of its species… The final plot of the tale of an abused species ”.
