I have this thing for Peter Sellers.
I mean who, with any taste at all, does not share this thing?
Sellers was the king of self-erasure. He would become entirely who he was directed to be for his audience. When the audience was not sufficiently large enough–say, family, women, his children, friends–he would feel he was no one, nothing, someone with out self. But that was what he wished was true, what he wanted to be true. He wanted to be tragic, misunderstood, hollow so when you tried to aim your finger at the monster, there was nothing. Just shadow.
He hated himself. So he inhabited others.
He said, “Me? There is no me.” Here, you can see him confess this himself. To Kermit the Frog. In a Viking’s helmet. It’s the truest thing he’s ever imagined so he tells it to a puppet. Even the puppet wants to change the subject.
Follow that public confession with Richard the III’s soliloquy accompanied by musically tuned chickens, however, and top it off with “Shave and a Haircut”? Well that is just genius. The liminal gray space between comedy and tragedy, the truest of the true. So there’s a conflict of interest here, isn’t there? “It’s all part of life’s rich pageantry,” isn’t it?
I wonder how much of it is, about the self. When he was swaying between lucid and senile moments just before his death, he often would confuse himself with Chase. He fought to make that film, he loved it fiercely, it was like his epitaph. One whose name was writ in water, yet again.
