Dialing Wonderland: Nelson Lyon’s The Telephone Book

Art & Trash, episode 11
Dialing Wonderland: Nelson Lyon’s The Telephone Book
Stephen Broomer, April 22, 2021

Nelson Lyon’s The Telephone Book is a fantasy about Alice, a lustful, wide-eyed New Yorker who is led on a series of comic, erotic encounters in search of a man who styles himself as the greatest obscene phone caller of all time. In this video, Stephen Broomer considers Lyon’s film in relation to the social satire of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, the era of the Playboy lifestyle, the Warhol Factory scene, and the nascent brotherhood of American outsider comedy with which The Telephone Book belongs (alongside such works as The Magic Christian, The Crying of Lot 49, and Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him). Alice comes to learn more about the world from her encounters with perverts, thieves, and frauds - cats without grins, grins without cats, cabbages and kings - and her Manhattan is a utopia where even the most menacing, alienated, and neurotic corners of society present invitations to love.

The Telephone Book is available for rent on DCP from the American Genre Film Archive and has received a limited edition home video release from Vinegar Syndrome.

SCRIPT:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, published in 1865 and 1871, are a perfect storm of fantasy and social satire. Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland setting was a child’s fantasy of an often treacherous world, with its anthropomorphized animals and sense of heroic play, with puzzles of logic and nonsensical wordplay. It was a triumph of nonsense, but its nonsense was guided by a substructure of encounters with deceptive characters. Protagonist Alice, while often at the whim of this setting, demonstrates courage and cleverness in her journey through a dream.

A century later, Nelson Lyon would make The Telephone Book, an erotic fantasy about another Alice, a lustful, wide-eyed New Yorker who has received the greatest obscene phone call of her life. Setting out on a quest to find her suitor, she will be led on a series of comic, erotic encounters before meeting the caller, who styles himself as the greatest obscene phone caller of all time. Lyon was a comedy writer who had a history with the Warhol Factory scene, and the film reflects the manic energy of the underground, pop art, and post-modern New York of the 1960s. As an X-rated, ostensibly pornographic movie, The Telephone Book benefits from the messy boundaries around erotica in the 1960s, an era when Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart declined to find Louis Malle guilty of obscenity with his famous pronouncement, “I know pornography when I see it.” The protected speech of art was becoming increasingly explicit in its depictions of sex as it reflected the changing attitudes of society. The era was marked by a culture war between an adult lifestyle increasingly defined by Playboy, and the prudish nuclear family of sitcoms and advertising. The Telephone Book mocks the world of pornography, preferring the outsider stance of the comedian to the smooth insider ethos of Hefner and company.

Alice spends the opening scenes of the film depressed, bored, alone, phoning an 800 number for a dial-a-prayer message. Her boredom is broken when she receives the obscene call, which comes in ellipses, a strategy that recurs throughout the film wherein explicit sex is concealed by formal disruptions, with truncated speech and text replacing dialogue. Alice’s adventure begins when the caller tells her his name is John Smith, and tasks her with finding him in the telephone book. Her search leads her to a film shoot hosted by the world’s greatest stag film star; encounters in central park with a thief and a lesbian; and a lengthy aside in which she raises funds to use payphones by telling a therapist, equipped with an ejaculatory coin-changing device, about an encounter she had with a man suffering from a prolonged erection. Satyrs are they none: consistently, Alice’s hunger is left unsatisfied as she moves onto the next episode, often at the prompting of Smith, who is able to reach her by telephone wherever she is.

When Smith appears at Alice’s apartment, he tells his story through a paper mâché pig’s mask, worn to preserve his anonymity. Smith’s backstory is the comic highpoint of the film, a tragic confession of his hypersexuality and its hilarious cause: while spending time in zero gravity, training to be an astronaut, he was consumed with an erotic mania. Expelled from the space program, he went home and kicked the family dog, which indirectly led to his life as an obscene phone caller. He is a parody of the wounded macho soldiers of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer novels, and he gives an account of his own military service that emphasizes the innate homoeroticism of it all. His story is funny, but even funnier is his bragging, and his explanation of his skill at knowing and enacting someone’s deepest desires based on how they answer the telephone. He portrays himself as a humble servant of humanity, quick to remind Alice that while he could seduce the president, he won’t.

The Telephone Book has clear debts to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, not only for the naming of its character, but for its embrace of nonsense and the structure of this Alice’s dream. While it is a decidedly adult offspring of Carroll’s work, it is not a lampooning of the Alice stories but a film that resurrects the original’s themes of courage, deception, and the good fortune of cleverness, into another kind of subterranean world. And it is a fairy tale like no other, its form drifting between Alice’s episodic narrative and talking-head faux-documentary confessions of outlandish perversity. These confessions, which bear a superficial resemblance to sex education documentaries, are scripted with a sense of surreal wordplay reminiscent of the great American humorist Terry Southern. Indeed, the relation of The Telephone Book to Carroll’s Alice stories is much like the relation of Southern’s Candy to Voltaire’s Candide, an act of contemporization, with Carroll and Voltaire offering a fixed frame for social satire, and Lyon and Southern respectively tailoring that frame to send up a new society. The film’s humour belongs to an American tradition of outsider comedy the sprung up in the 1960s and 70s, aligning it with Southern, Thomas Pynchon, double-talk standup Professor Irwin Corey, performance artist Brother Theodore, and surreal radio comedy troupe Firesign Theatre. Its talking-head confessions are often prolonged to a point of absurdity and featuring surprising punchlines. By the time the fourth and final confession plays, it has become a series of discontinuous, surreal jokes.

Nelson Lyon’s skill at satirizing his contemporaries and their approaches to filmmaking isn’t limited to the educational sex film: in its original form, the film featured an intermission in which Andy Warhol would sit and stare out at the audience, eating popcorn slowly, a parody of his infamously durational structural films such as Eat, Sleep and Blow Job. Appearances by Factory personalities Ondine and Ultra Violet further the authenticity of this association. And there are various sequences that integrate styles of the nightly news, the mod comedy, and the Baudelairean avant-garde movie.

The Telephone Book might simply be taken as a series of episodes through which the central character comes to learn more about the world from her encounters with perverts, thieves, and frauds - cats without grins, grins without cats, cabbages and kings. Alice’s encounters are largely defined by her boundless, infectious enthusiasm. The film’s sense of wonder at eros and taboo is maintained possibly because of its playful rendering of the colossus of urban life, the great Mannahatta, city of hurried and sparkling waters, city of spires and masts, city of slums and skyscrapers, and for Alice, a city of bountiful pleasures. That The Telephone Book is about the city is made especially clear in the penultimate sequence, when Alice and the Caller have their encounter, in two side-by-side telephone booths. Separated by glass, the lovers occupy and subvert the apex metaphor for urban isolation, all while intercut with animation in which an anthropomorphic building is mounted by a towering woman. This animated sequence represents yet another presentational style, one where the screen is freed up of its associations with reality to resemble more closely the most amateur fantasy, the scribblings on a bathroom wall.

In The Telephone Book, New York City is more of a utopia than Wonderland ever was, a silver metropolis where every body flows with love energies like trees with sap, where lives are interwoven in a constant migration, and where even the most menacing, alienated, and neurotic corners of society present invitations to love. This diverse medley of experience is echoed by the film’s enclosure of various styles of communication: substitutions of text for speech, exaggerated sound effects, and other self-conscious, new wave disruptions that eclipse any attempts at naturalism. This freeform approach enhances The Telephone Book’s critical, satirical vision of society at large, but it also subverts imaginary values of moralistic ‘seriousness’ with which the subject might elsewhere be treated. It is thus a searing spoof of the educational sex film, of both permissive and conservative social attitudes towards sex, and of the lifestyle of the Playboy, the smooth operator as a mad hatter. This reinforces the film’s conviction that sex, or perhaps more generally, the pursuit of pleasure, escapes simple definition as well as ownership: that the pursuit of pleasure is a wild, often bizarre and unpredictable crusade of knowledge seekers, of charlatans, of living rhymes, of faceless grins floating in the air.