Bob Fosse Diagnosed Modernity

How a 70s Movie Musical Presaged the 21st Century

“There’s a lot of narcissism in self-hatred,” said David Foster Wallace in an interview. Bob Fosse’s autobiographical All That Jazz is the brilliant cinematic expression of that axiom.

Through his stand-in Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), Fosse subjects himself to an indulgent, almost uncomfortable degree of self-loathing. But at the same time, enmeshed in and feeding upon that self-loathing is an equally indulgent, equally uncomfortable degree of self-regard. He has a love/hate relationship with himself, and it’s maliciously entertaining to watch it play out as a surreal musical theater extravaganza.

For those who’ve never seen All That Jazz, it’s a fictionalized version of the turmoil Fosse endured directing his ex-wife, Gwen Verdon, in an upcoming stage musical (in real life, the original Broadway production of Chicago), while at the same time editing Lenny, Fosse’s biopic of Lenny Bruce (starring Dustin Hoffman). The stress was intense, as was Fosse’s alcohol and drug use, leading him to suffer a massive heart attack that necessitated open heart surgery. While Fosse survived, All That Jazz is his dream-like meditation on his life and death, his soaring artistic success and his deep moral failures.

Fosse’s narcissism is all-consuming. It both gives birth to and devours his art. It ensnares everyone in its reach and makes them its servants. Above all, it forces us to look.

In that sense, All That Jazz is not simply the story of the great choreographer/director and great narcissist, Bob Fosse. It’s the story of the modern condition, especially in this internet age.

The Birth of Gideon/Fosse’s Narcissism

Experts debate whether narcissists are born or made. In Fosse’s case, I think the answer is the latter. In his biography Fosse, Sam Wasson describes Fosse’s parents as, while perhaps not intentionally neglectful, still absent. Fosse’s father’s job as a traveling salesman kept him from home, while his mother’s excessive weight and poor health meant she wasn’t the most actively-involved of parents.

More importantly, Fosse’s mother encouraged a young Fosse to begin his career by performing the burlesque circuit circa 1940, without supervision. It’s hard to say whether she deliberately turned a blind eye to the potential hazards or was simply clueless to them. Either way, the result was devastating. As a thirteen or fourteen-year-old, Fosse was molested by the adult strippers performing in the burlesque halls. As Fosse related forty years after the fact:

I can romanticize it but [the burlesque circuit] was an awful life. I was very lonely, very scared. You know, hotel rooms in strange towns, and I was all alone, thirteen or fourteen, too shy to talk to anyone, not really knowing what it was all about, and among — not the best people . . . I think it’s done me a lot of harm, being exposed to things that early that I shouldn’t have been exposed to, it left some scar that I have not quite been able to figure out.

All That Jazz depicts the brutality of young Fosse’s sexual abuse. Early in the film, we see a young Joe Gideon forced to ejaculation by naked strippers, directly before he has to assume the spotlight and perform a tap dance — wet crotch on display — for a hostile crowd.

This sequence is the genesis of both Gideon’s narcissism and his genius. His helplessness at being molested by the strippers, his humiliation in front of a jeering audience: these form the core of shame that will fuel his future misogyny, cruelty, and artistic ambition.

Female victims often describe the experience of rape as a death; in their loss of agency, they disassociate from their bodies and become more “thing” than human. Young Gideon’s tap performance embodies that transformation. When he is assaulted he becomes an object – in this case, one of derision, desperately tapping away as the audience laughs at his mortification.

It’s a cleverly-devised scene because it implicates us as viewers, too. You watch Gideon’s ordeal a little guiltily, maybe with the passing impulse to avert your eyes. Fosse’s asking what, exactly, it is that we consider “entertainment.” The public humiliation of the vulnerable? Are those drunks on-screen howling at Gideon much different than the millions clicking and sharing viral videos mocking ordinary people – often poor or disturbed ones – for their mishaps and mannerisms?

The abuse/tap dance sequence is the death of Gideon’s innocence – a death he will reenact again and again through his relationships and his art. In All That Jazz, death is fused with sex is fused with performance, to a degree unrivaled by any film I can think of save Eyes Wide Shut.

Even the sets reinforce the message. Gideon’s bedroom is painted pitch-black, and above the bed where he has his way with a rotating line-up of women hang two pictures of lit gothic arches. Against the black wall, they evoke the silhouettes of gravestones – or perhaps they’re entrances to portals, foreshadowing Gideon’s final passage at the end of the film to the Angel of Death, Angelique. Given their even spacing, the pictures also resemble eyes, suggesting a disembodied, pervy viewer enjoying Gideon’s sexual escapades, much in the same way the nameless men sitting in those dark burlesque houses where Fosse started out enjoyed the strip show.

More clues: A piece of pop art that reads “Oh Wow” and hangs in Gideon’s apartment makes its way into the dreamscape where he flirts with the Angel of Death. “Oh Wow” – an appropriate response to a show-stopping dance number or a sexual climax, take your pick. (In a prescient turn, “Oh Wow” happened to be Steve Jobs’ last words before he died). Gideon’s decor also includes a neon sign depicting a dancer in top hat in tails – the same uniform young Gideon wore when he performed following his assault. The sign not only signals the adult Gideon is still That Kid. It signals that the fusing of death, sex, and performance is, to Fosse, the essence of Show Biz.

The Narcissist Must Consume

The fusion of death/sex/performance is Fosse’s particular vision, the movie playing in his head. There are other visions, of course. Most people have their own movies playing in their own heads. But Fosse’s a narcissist, so he’s not going to recognize or respect any of that. All externalities are subsumed and shaped by his internal reality. Any artistic property, any person, is a vehicle for his self-expression.

In All That Jazz, this is exactly what happens when Gideon choreographs and directs Take Off With Us, a number in the fictional musical within the film. Paul Mann (Anthony Holland), the musical’s flamboyant lyricist/composer, first introduces us to Take Off With Us, performing it as a crowd-pleasing, upbeat showtune about airline travel. Clearly, Mann, as well as the musical’s producers, expect Gideon to give the number a likewise crowd-pleasing, upbeat treatment.

Instead, Gideon hijacks Take Off With Us, turning it into a soft-porn, orgiastic dance exploration of sex and death. He takes a catchy tune designed for a Sinatra cover and transforms it into a musical-theatre passion play about his own lost innocence and the underlying smuttiness of Show Biz – all to the stunned silence of Mann and the producers. The maneuver echoes Fosse’s real-life hijacking of the musical Pippin, which was written as a fairly heart-warming coming-of-age story, to explore his own preoccupations with self-destruction and the impossibility of monogamy.

(Heads up: the linked video is explicit and NSFW).

Is Gideon’s hijacking justified? After all, his choreography and message is compelling and audacious. One can certainly argue he infused a middlebrow, pedestrian showtune with genius. That’s what his ex-wife Audrey suggests when she turns to him following the performance and, with tear-filled eyes, praises the work as his “best.”

But true to form, Fosse layers Audrey’s words with ambivalence. In one sense, her praise means that the brilliance of Gideon’s art redeems whatever selfish liberties he took with Mann’s song (not to mention all the selfish liberties he took with countless women). Yet knowing as we do that Fosse not only scripted the character Audrey’s praise but directed the actress’s delivery of it, it’s impossible to take her words at face value. It's just as likely Audrey’s praise is Fosse’s wish fulfillment, a self-aware dig at his own insatiable need for validation.

The Narcissist Must Be Seen

In the final dream sequence of All That Jazz, Gideon’s death is enacted as a lavish funk rendition of the Everly Brothers’ standard, Bye Bye Love, re-fashioned as Bye Bye Life (again, witness Fosse’s compulsion to consume and re-make everything in his own image). Gideon/Fosse is the star of the number; the audience is his ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, ex-lovers, colleagues and competitors – even the strippers who molested him.

It's a disturbing scene because it reduces everyone in Gideon’s life to members of an adoring, clapping crowd. Gideon dives into the rows of seats to bid each audience member farewell and, in turn, each audience member pays him fond and respectful tribute. The viewpoint is one of total subjectivity; we realize the audience members don’t exist as human beings in their own right, but only as characters in Gideon’s self-flattering/self-loathing inner narrative. The one exception is Gideon’s daughter – the untainted innocent of the film – who seems genuinely distraught she’ll never see him again.

It's no coincidence Gideon’s daughter wants nothing more from Gideon than his affection, attention, presence. Can the same be said for the other characters? Gideon’s an influential genius, after all, the kind that makes-or-breaks careers.

I felt for Fosse here: It must be a great burden to be a narcissist with great talent and the worldly status and acclaim to back it up. In Wasson’s biography, he describes how Fosse would interrogate his former girlfriend, Ann Reinking: “Do you like me because I’m me or because I’m a success? . . . If I was a janitor, would you like me?” A later girlfriend, Phoebe Unger, related Fosse’s inability to trust that she valued him as anything other than a “stepping stone.” The predatory nature of Show Biz, where everyone’s using each other to get ahead, could only have reinforced the emptiness at Fosse’s core.

The Bye Bye Life sequence elicits our own awe and appreciation of Fosse/Gideon because – well, because it’s so damn Fosse, and at the height of his powers. The visual vocabulary is cool, stylized and insanely watchable. Its narcissism – both the self-hating and self-loving variety – is seductive, just as Gideon/Fosse’s artistry is seductive. You the viewer become part of the crowd clapping and fawning over Roy Scheider, which is why, at the end of the sequence, it’s such a sucker-punch to the gut to see Gideon being zipped up in a body-bag. You realize all the clapping and fawning was, and always has been, illusory, that Gideon is fundamentally alone.

The Kaufman Counterpoint

Not many films end with a surreal musical sequence that lays the protagonist’s narcissism bare whilst killing him off, but in that regard, it’s useful to compare All That Jazz to Charlie Kaufmann’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Kaufman’s film also depicts an entirely subjective reality: the one playing in Jake’s (Jesse Plemons’) head.

Like Gideon, Jake can only conceive of others as characters in his internal drama; the viewer comes to understand that his ostensible girlfriend, Lucy, is not his girlfriend at all, but rather an amalgamation of Jake’s own wish fulfillment, repressed feelings, and longing for recognition. Like Gideon, the final moments of Jake’s life are marked by his fantasy performance before an appreciative audience – here, Lucy and an auditorium of people assembled to celebrate Jake’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. (In the video below, note the similarity between the makeup on Lucy and the other audience members and the robotic faces in the Bye Bye Life sequence. Was Kaufman purposefully alluding to Fosse?).

Unlike Gideon/Fosse, however, Jake has no talent, and we the audience know it. Where Fosse fretted that Reinking wouldn’t have loved him if he were a janitor, Jake literally is a janitor, not to mention an awkward, alienated human being. His performance is not the seductive razzle-dazzle of Bye Bye Life, but a rather wooden delivery of Lonely Room from the musical Oklahoma! As all you Rodgers and Hammerstein fans know, Lonely Room is sung by Judd Fry, the weirdo misfit who longs for, and is rebuffed by the heroine Laurie. And if you listen carefully, the lyrics are devastating:

And the girl I want
Ain't afraid of my arms
And her own soft arms keep me warm,
And her long, yellow hair
Falls across my face
Just like the rain in a storm.

[But then] The floor creaks,
The door squeaks,
And the mouse starts a-nibblin' on the broom.
And the sun flicks my eyes—
It was all a pack o' lies,
I'm awake in a lonely room.

Lonely Room is the crux of I’m Thinking About Ending Things, because it reveals the desperation for human love and connection driving Jake’s solipsistic dreams. At bottom, what he really wants is the give-and-take of an embrace, “soft arms” that will receive his own. The tragedy of Jake is that you believe he may have been capable of loving and experiencing love, had he only been able to get out of his own way and out of his own head.

In contrast, Bye Bye Love reveals the driving force behind Gideon/Fosse’s fantasies – and indeed, his life – as the desperation to be exceptional, a Legend, a Star. The tragedy of Gideon/Fosse is that he is incapable of loving and experiencing love in the real sense. The closest Scheider-as-Gideon comes to it is via his relationship with his daughter. Otherwise, he accepts applause and awards as love’s substitute; in fact, he’s in thrall to and addicted to the external validation of an audience, every bit as much as to his Dexedrine.

Fosse understood this about himself. It’s why he has the character Davis Newman (Cliff Gorman) tell Gideon:

I’ve got insight into you, Gideon. You know what’s underneath? The dreadful fear that you’re ordinary, not special.

More importantly, Fosse understood this about us. He knew the dreadful fear of being “ordinary, not special” infected just about everyone in the age of mass media. It’s the reason he chose the artistic projects he did. Cabaret, the story of a seedy Berlin nightclub singer with pretensions to “specialness” and stardom (or at least that was the intended story. In my opinion, Liza Minelli was far too talented a Sally Bowles). Star 80, the story of a psychopath who exploits a young woman’s beauty in a shameless bid to achieve celebrity. (Notably, Fosse described Paul Snider, the sleazy killer of Star 80, as himself “if he hadn’t been successful.”) Chicago, the story of two murderesses more than willing to exploit their crimes for publicity and top billing on the marquee.

Fosse understood the urge to be seen and stand apart from the crowd makes us all too susceptible to using others as mere “stepping stones” to gaining self-distinction. He knew this urge turned even non-performers into performing seals, transforming modern life into — in the words of Chicago’s Billy Flynn — “a circus kid, a three ring circus. These trials, the whole world, it's all show biz.”

And in that sense, Bob Fosse forecast the internet age. The women selling themselves on Only Fans; the endless crop of TikTok or YouTube “influencers”; the engagement farmers on X and Instagram — every one of them doing their own frantic tap-dance for views and likes.

I can sneer at their desperation, but on a much tinier scale, am I so different? Isn’t every one of my posts inescapably a bid to call attention to myself, to establish a “presence”? When I comment or Restack, am I not also inescapably using another person’s work as fodder for the algorithm, as a “stepping stone” for my own visibility? Has social media made narcissists, promoters and users of us all? Are we nothing more than the dancers in the cattle call that opens All That Jazz, all of us vying to make it to the front of the stage to be seen?

I really hate to think that’s the case. But Fosse and my gut tells me: Kid, it’s all show biz.