All That Jazz (1979)

directed by Bob Fosse

Oscar Mancinas

He lay motionless in an ICU bed. Mechanical air pumped through his lungs, infrequent beeps the only hints of life. Family had swarmed into town from all over, some making the journey from México while others arrived from the fringes of Arizona and California. Despite the fact that I lived around the corner, I also had to hop on a plane—abruptly ending an East Coast trip to reconnect with friends—to see my dad in the hospital.

*

The first time I watched Bob Fosse’s 1979 not-really-but-actually-very-autobiographical (-and-prophetic) All that Jazz, I was shaken by how much I recognized protagonist Joe Gideon. I knew immediately where the movie intended to take him, and us. The compulsive behavior—smoking, drinking, womanizing, pill-popping, working, not sleeping, working, fighting, working, working—grabs the viewer by the throat, simultaneously inviting us to join the party and assuring us this will end in death. No lament. No moralizing. No excuses. This is how Gideon (and, by extension, Fosse) is wired, and any compunction quickly dissipates like a puff of cigarette smoke or the fading notes of a song. What else should we do but try to enjoy it while it lasts?

Of this compulsive behavior, I’ve never read anyone ascribe to Gideon—nor Fosse, for that matter—the adage of having “an immigrant work ethic.” And yet, how better to describe someone who cannot cease their laboring, cannot sit still long enough to reflect, to enjoy the fruits of their labor, or to lament all they’ve sacrificed? That’s my dad. Reduced to his most essential habits, for my entire life, my dad awoke before the sun, performed physically-demanding labor outdoors in the Sonoran Desert, and then came home and unwound. His preferred method to unwind, to forget the day’s frustrations or to celebrate, involved drinks, smokes, and some mix of Mexican música campesina with Motown, funk, and disco. I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination to speculate how often this behavior concluded in a cool, uneventful night versus how often it ended in ugly confrontation. Suffice it to say, there’s really only one way such behavior tends to end for good.

*

My dad was still alive when I first saw him in the ICU (something I wasn’t sure would be the case due to the sorrow and fear in my sister’s voice when told me over the phone “come home as soon as you can.”) Days earlier, he’d awoken my mom in the middle of the night, pleading with her to take him to the hospital because he couldn’t breathe.

At the risk of sounding blasé, this kind of episode wasn’t new. In August of 2020—before vaccines were available—my dad contracted coronavirus and, despite worsening respiratory symptoms and uncertainty about how long the illness would keep him, he refused to go to the hospital. Wearing an N-95 mask, I sat outside of his bedroom window, where he was quarantining, and asked him why.

“I don’t wanna die alone, shoved away in some dark corner while doctors and nurses attend to other emergencies” is the best way I can translate and paraphrase what he said.

What I recall, though, is not only his words but the attitude behind them. He sounded wounded and afraid, but also angry and annoyed. Maybe he hated having to be cooped up, maybe he was sick of us bothering him, maybe he was mad at his younger self for all the smoking, drinking, and working he’d done.

He recovered, ultimately, after nearly three weeks, but not without consequences. A permanent cough, asthma, and a general weakening of his body stayed with him, reminding him of his near-miss. Four years later, he didn’t have strength or breath enough to argue, he could only beg for a hospital before being admitted and intubated.

*

It’s not clear why Gideon does what he does, but this is a feature, not a critique, of the film. Throughout the runtime, he tries to explain—to his girlfriend, to his daughter, to his ex-wife, to a stunning embodiment of death herself—that he’s a perfectionist, that he craves the “highwire act” of public performance, that he’s got something inside him he can’t quell unless he commits himself fully to his art. And each woman calls him on his bullshit. To which Gideon can only smile like a boy caught telling a harmless lie. Again, no moralizing, no garment-rending soliloquies about rough upbringings or unfair turns in life, no boastful proclamations of maximizing life’s brief pleasures, either. Simply the back-and-forth around a force everyone can see and feel but no one can fully explain.

Likewise, I could—and have—reached into my dad’s past to try to understand him. A few months after his birth, prompted by economic and social catastrophe, my grandparents took their eight children and fled our homeland in southern Chihuahua’s Copper Canyon. However, any notions you might imagine of bootstraps and grit must stare down the realities of Mexico’s mid-twentieth century volatility and the U.S.’s all-too-eager participation in and exploitation of the very same. My dad, grandparents, aunts, and uncles wouldn’t find anything resembling stability, at least not while together. Instead, he and everyone else became migrant laborers, scrambling from mining encampment to construction project to agricultural camp to any town or city that could offer a night or more of hospitality or relief. This was his life as a child alongside his elders; then, at thirteen, it became his inheritance as he wandered alone and, eventually, north, where his Indigenous Rarámuri diaspora joined, as a background extra, the ongoing show of Mexicans crossing the stage called The Border. He was eighteen or nineteen when he migrated to California, twenty-two when he met my mom in Arizona, twenty-nine when I was born.

Like Fosse, my dad never got anything resembling a childhood. Instead, the time many of us might recall in our own lives as relatively carefree or otherwise simple was replaced by body-weathering work and membership to the permanent underclass of the Global South.

As I said, I try to reach into his past to decipher why he became the man he became, but with each detail learned, I understand less. How he, or anyone else, emerges from those unspeakable brutalities eludes my practical grasp. Never mind the smoking and drinking, the emotional reserve, the occasional outburst of anger or irritation; my dad making it as far as he did is a fucking miracle, and the fact he told me anything—often with no inflection in his voice or, crazier still, with laughter—should be enough.

But it’s not.

*

A day or two after the fact, I called my mom to wish her a happy fifty-first birthday. This was during my first semester in college, and I had finally made time to fulfill the admittedly minimal task any college student can do in the age of cellphones. Outside of a dorm party, I told her I loved her and asked how she’d spent her day.

“Your dad and I got dinner together,” I remember her saying. “And guess what?” she continued with a sigh and a chuckle. “Your dad finally quit smoking as a present to me. ¡Que maravilloso! ¿verdad?”

I had to suppress my own laugh. While my mom waited for me to share her excitement—after more than three decades, my dad had finally quit a habit most carry to the grave—I looked down at the slow-burning cigarette in my own free hand. 

“Sí, amá,” I finally said. “That’s great news. I can’t believe he quit.”

As far as any of us know, this stuck, and we never saw him smoke again.

I, meanwhile, smoked on and off for most of my twenties, dropping and recovering the habit the way people do an instrument they never quite master. I rationalized it in all the familiar, cliched way. I was young; I still exercised regularly; it was an easy go-to when in large, outdoor social gatherings; it helped quell my anxiety; it paired great with certain meals and drinks; it was an easy crutch for meeting and talking to people; it helped heighten the alcohol buzz, “which, actually, if you think about it, means I’m drinking less than I might otherwise.”

This last reason proved the most disingenuous and, by extension, the most dangerous. I battled alcoholism and binge drinking for most of my early adulthood. Like smoking, I picked up the habit in college, reasoning it was a normal part of being young and social. In the face of all evidence to the contrary—obnoxious and self-destructive behavior, unhealthy weight gain, relationships rotting to ash and vomit, emotional and physical hangovers spent in abysses so deep, it’s a wonder I reemerged and showed up to class—I told myself I didn’t have a problem, and, even if I did, it wasn’t my fault so there was nothing to be done.

As a someone who loved and admired writers and artists, did I also tell myself that I was just as fucked up and broken as the people I looked up to, and, therefore, I had to perform this ritual? C’mon, who do you think is writing here?

One of the very few nonwhite, working-class students floating around an elite private school in New England, I haphazardly overlayed misbegotten social and political significance to my alienation. Stay away but pity me, I simpered with each drink, each drag. Tell me I’m destined for good things, and I’ll feign I’m too cool to care.

Thankfully, I hit a genuine rock bottom. As I recovered, I stopped wallowing and dedicated real time, energy, and thought to the art I loved. Fortunately for me, I found a supportive community, as well, and, as of this writing, I haven’t touched alcohol in over nine years.

My rock bottom is another story for another piece of writing. I cite it and provide this brief detour detailing my own dance with compulsive, self-harming habits to say: I’ve felt the fringes of my mortality and, lucky for me, so did others around me. And those others pulled me back from the ledge. Behind and alongside anyone who endeavors to live, and to make art with their life, is a coalition of people who care for that person and keep them going. I hope you all know who you are, and I hope you’ll accept my gratitude.

*

I suspect for anyone still reading, we can agree Fosse made a masterpiece with All That Jazz. Intimate, visceral, funny, cynical, dazzling in its blend of stage and screen production—it’s no wonder why so many performers, writers, and filmmakers bow at the altar of the film. A spectacle such as All That Jazz, combined with Fosse’s other efforts, could even be used to excuse the man’s behavior—which, for those unfamiliar, is as ugly as his art is moving. I’ll save my own judgment and simply say, in essence, the intoxicating, enthralling ends are often cited to justify the exploitative means.

Again, we know how this ended.

Never one for song, dance, or film, my dad, nevertheless, had his art. Despite being migrant to Arizona, he quickly learned the seasons, the sun’s trajectory, and the craft of landscaping and gardening. Over the course of three decades, he almost single-handedly transformed our house’s yard into a lush, shaded refuge. A lemon tree provided us a steady supply of citrus year-round, and the timed irrigation system he installed—after teaching himself the technology—kept my mother’s flower bed and the cacti and trees around our home’s perimeter vibrant and ready for showtime. All this he accomplished on weekends or with whatever energy he found after a 9- or 10-hour shift at work.

When my wife and I were lucky to find a house of our own, he asked us if we had any plans for our then-desolate yard. Over the following year, he planted three trees, a lemon and orange tree which bore fruit within months and a Palo Verde which will blossom for its first spring soon; he built us a garden box, where we grew and harvested tomatoes and green onions; he put down a paved path leading to our back porch; and he installed a timed, drip irrigation system, so we only had to make sure everything was functioning as it should.

Often, he would come over while I was working from home or otherwise doing something around the house. I’d drop my task and ask if he wanted any help or company while he worked; he’d politely but sternly wave me off with something like “I got it” or “I prefer to work by myself. You just keep doing what you were doing.” At least he let me bring him water and briefly interrupt his work to catch up for a few minutes, I told myself. Who am I to judge, after all? I’ve been unnecessarily late to things or missed important bits of conversation because—like now—my head was buried in a draft of something I couldn’t quit until I felt it was done. I tell myself, as I’m sure others who get lost in work must tell themselves, that there will be time to catch up, to be present at important events, to live and enjoy the rewards of our labor. 

Then my dad got sick. 

*

Once in the hospital, Joe Gideon is powerless to prevent his fate. The outcome is no surprise, but the final leg of his journey—a litany of astounding, agonizing, hallucinatory, song-and-dance numbers performed by the women Gideon has wronged or neglected, as well as his own final curtain call (an adaptation of “Bye Bye Love,” performed alongside a cackling, entrancing, almost-demonic Ben Vereen)—leaves the audience gob-smacked and craving more. Truly, does a better death sequence exist in all of cinema?

Fosse clearly knows as much and chooses one last punchline to let us know all: this is it.

It’s over. 

Done.

After 90 minutes of Gideon waltzing toward this end, the finale engulfs him. Everything fades to black. What else is left to say?

*

“Vi demonios. Caras de demonios riéndose, y me decían que iba a morir.”

These were the brittle, barely intelligible words my dad said when he awoke in his hospital bed. He described demons’ faces appearing in the ceiling pattern of his room, laughing and growling that he was dying and no escape remained.

After he awoke, but before he was completely lucid, my dad had fought to remove the various tubes and wires keeping him alive. My cousins and I had to hold him down, so the nursing staff could tie his arms to his bed while he came to his senses. He cursed at us, insisting we were trying to trap and kill him, and all we could do was laugh in relief—in between straining to pin him down—and reassure him he was alive and all right. In subsequent days, my dad repeated his words about the faces he saw and the voices he heard on death’s door. We could do nothing but chuckle—the kinds from unclenching jaws, unheld breaths, and resisted tears.

Since his release from the hospital, we’ve had a few scares—moments he’s felt faint, dizzy, cold, or otherwise sick and weak. Thankfully, he’s been near his bed or medical staff each time, and he’s recovered. On a regiment of new medication, he’s quit drinking, quit unhealthy meals, quit working nonstop. Home more often, he spends time helping out with babysitting the newest generation in our family. Seeing him walk around and play with his grandchildren and great grandchildren evokes a cautious joy, like watching a highwire performer leap and nearly lose his balance over and over. Without a doubt, he’s lost physical and emotional vitality, but we’re all thankful he’s still around. Him, too. The way he lights up around the little ones is a welcomed contrast to the terror and anguish we witnessed in him as he came back to us.

One of these days, I’ll see my dad alive for the last time. I don’t write these words to elicit sympathy nor with doom in my heart. We only get so many rehearsals before it’s showtime. I have no idea what my dad will see when he steps onto the final stage awaiting us all, but I hope it’s a warmer reception this time, one that makes him smile.

Oscar Mancinas is a Rarámuri-Chicano poet, scholar, and prose writer. He was born, raised, and still resides in Mesa, Arizona’s Washington-Escobedo Neighborhood. His published works include the 2020 short story collection To Live and Die in El Valle, as well as the 2022 collection of poetry des__: papeles, palabras, & poems from the desert. Find more of his work or contact him at oscarmancinas.wordpress.com.