Steve Martin, Roxanne, and Great Sex with God

“Now that I’m dying,” says monk Brother Terrel (Feodor Chaliapin, Jr.) in the 1988 horror movie Catacombs, “I can confess that, maybe when I die, I’ll have great sex with God.” I was reminded of this offbeat and rather off-putting piece of dialogue recently while revisiting Steve Martin’s 1987 romantic comedy classic Roxanne, a film I propose to interpret on two levels – one racial, one ethno-spiritual.

Martin’s screenplay is a loose adaptation and modernization of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, which tells the story of the selfless, knightly devotion of a poetically inclined soldier with a humongous nose to an elegant lady named Roxane. Robert Zaretsky observes in The Forward that Rostand “was an ardent Dreyfusard: a supporter of the French Jewish captain who had been falsely accused of treason. Though Rostand himself never made the association […] it is intriguing that the attribute he gives his hero – one Cyrano overcomes through integrity and intelligence – is the one so central to anti-Semitic stereotypes.” [1]

Martin transforms the protagonist into Charlie “C.D.” Bales – his initials echoing Cyrano’s – and he is a firefighter rather than a military man. The talented Bales serves as chief of the Nelson Volunteer Fire Department, leading a crew of embarrassingly accident-prone amateurs. (Roxanne was filmed in Nelson, British Columbia, which stands in for a picturesque and provincial American ski town.) Fire, as I have argued previously, is sometimes employed in postwar Jewish symbolism to evoke the “Holocaust” or the proverbial torches and pitchforks of gentile populist wrath [2]. Bales, as a subtextual Jew in ascendancy, has the task of preventing and putting out fires and ensuring that outbreaks of anti-Semitism are quelled.

Nelson’s volunteer firefighters nearly set fire to the station.

Multiple details in Nelson conjure Central Europe, the theater of the Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century. In addition to the skiing, the town hosts an Oktoberfest celebration and is home to a shop called Bohemia Gifts. Roxanne (Daryl Hannah) reveals that her surname is Kowalski – which Bales, tellingly, finds distasteful – indicating a Polish presence in the community. Moreover, Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube” plays during a montage of firefighter training and is reprised when the volunteers respond to their first fire call. Nelson, though a mostly quiet and idyllic place, is potentially dangerous for Bales, a strange-looking outsider whose access to power – he sometimes confers with Mayor Deebs (Fred Willard) – falls far short of hegemonic security. All he has in the way of help in preventing the Nelson Oktoberfest from turning into the Nuremberg rally of the future, furthermore, are the bumbling Shabbos goyim of the Volunteer Fire Department. “Maybe I’m in the presence of greatness,” Bales remarks sarcastically on the locals’ lack of sophistication: “Maybe I just don’t know it.”

New firefighter Chris gets distracted by a hot blonde outside Bohemia Gifts.

One of two WASP bullies calls out to Christ at the approach of the biggest nose either man has ever seen.

The first indication of nativism and anti-Semitism in Nelson is Bales’s encounter with two WASPy-looking and intoxicated sporting enthusiasts (Kevin Nealon and Ritch Shydner) who insult the fire chief’s appearance. The prideful and hot-tempered Bales feels obligated to beat them up to the audience’s amusement. Making the world safe for Jews is sometimes a violent business, as Bales demonstrates again when he knocks out a brutish bar patron (Thom Curley) who has called him “Big Nose”. Enforcement of Jew-safe civil order entails a selective regime of censorship as Andy (Michael J. Pollard), one of the firefighters, explains to a new recruit. He warns him never to mention the boss’s unusually large proboscis, because “things kind of accidentally slip out, and then, you know …” he draws his finger across his neck in a throat-cutting gesture.

Other possible indicators of Bales’s stealth Jewish identity are his verbal dexterity, knack for comedic extemporization, and the fact that his closest friend, Dixie (Shelley Duvall), is a well-to-do landlord. He also carries a credit card in a toolbox to gain access to locked doors – finance being the classic Jewish entrée into power.

“Why don’t you just get that nose job?” Dixie asks him. “No,” Bales replies. “It’s the word, ‘rhinoplasty’. I mean, it’s so unpleasant. It ranks right up there with ‘hemorrhoid’.” After realizing that inamorata Roxanne loves another man, however, Bales is temporarily determined to alter his malformation. In a scene that almost makes the movie’s ethnic dimension explicit, Bales visits a Jewish plastic surgeon (Israeli actor Brian George, who would later furnish the voice for the character Parasite in DC’s animated Justice League series), reclines as if in a psychiatrist’s office, and demands, “This time I want you to do it, Dave. I want you to cut the thing off!” He wants “the American beauty”. The doctor, however, is reluctant to agree. “Look, C.D.,” he attempts to console him, “have you ever thought that you were born with this nose for a reason?” Has C.D., in other words, considered that he has been chosen? “Oh, what happened?” he mocks himself: “Did your parents lose a bet with God?” “The Lord giveth,” he further kids, “and He just kept on giving, didn’t He?”

Roxanne’s spiritual preoccupation is first suggested by the film’s opening credits, which appear over a roseate sky full of clouds. Bales, when the viewer first meets him, is on a downward trajectory as he nervously descends a flight of stairs, talking to himself and offering neurotic commentary on his actions as he goes. The hero’s pursuit of Roxanne, however, will obligate him to ascend. “God, I hate heights,” Bales will kvetch; but Roxanne’s house is on a mountain. “God, I haven’t climbed this many steps since I went to see the Maharishi,” he also complains as he helps her lug a heavy telescope up the stairs to her home. There is something religious about the experience of climbing these steps. A further association of Roxanne with heights occurs when Bales leads her up a particular path to enjoy a pristine mountain vista.

Roxanne, whose name derives from Greek and can refer to the sun, the dawn, or a “bright star”, is an astronomer. Bales, described by Dixie as a living “encyclopedia”, at first tries to impress Roxanne with his comparatively shallow knowledge of the cosmos, but this remarkable woman’s familiarity with the celestial humbles him. Who is she? A clue as to Roxanne’s subtextual identity is to be had from her first meeting with Bales. Accidentally locking herself out of her house without her clothes, she has recourse to the firehouse, where she asks for help while concealing herself in the shrubbery outside. Arriving at Roxanne’s house, C.D. promises to avert his eyes and tells her, “You can hide in that bush over there, and I won’t see your nakedness.”

The scene appears to be intended to evoke the encounter Moses has with Yahweh on Mount Horeb as related in Exodus: “And the Angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.” Moses “hid his face,” the account continues, “for he was afraid to look upon God.” Like Moses, Bales will hide his face when, insecure about his appearance, he allows another man to take credit for his impassioned love letters. Chris (Rick Rossovich), the handsome but inarticulate firefighter who courts Roxanne with Bales’s self-denying assistance, is described as a “Viking”, his name indicating that he represents the Christianized European who, perhaps mistakenly, believes himself to worship the same god as the Jew. Bales and Chris, therefore, can be read as representing rival forms of faith and affection for God. Romantic attraction to the Almighty might seem puzzling at first; but, as the Song of Songs illustrates, the love between Yahweh and Israel has sometimes been characterized as erotic. Whereas Bales expresses his yearning for Roxanne with inspired eloquence, Chris is rather crude when, for example, he confesses to C.D. that Roxanne makes him “horny”, focuses on her legs and oafishly tells her, “Your breasts are like melons”, or offers to “boogie” with her.

“God, we’re gonna meet. Really? God,” Chris exults at the prospect of a date, but he has to consult C.D.’s expertise about how to approach an intellectual woman. When Chris visits Roxanne’s home and proceeds to parrot the lines fed to him by C.D. via radio, he is the Christian uncomprehendingly mouthing the Jewish scriptures. “I am, and I will always be, the one who loved you without limits,” Bales insists of his love. He frets that his “words have to rise up and they’re having trouble finding you” whereas “your voice floats down” as from Heaven, he tells Roxanne in a scene in which, pretending to be his rival, he addresses Roxanne from a hiding place. “Oh, God, your name is like a knife,” he declares, also confecting a vision of them “connected by a tunnel of light” – an image, at once spiritual and anatomical, that may call to mind the pillar of fire with which Yahweh guided the Israelites in the desert.

The number of times God’s name is spoken during the movie is truly startling, and belies the seeming meaninglessness with which it usually occurs. “Oh, my God!” exclaims sleazebag Chuck (John Kapelos) on first glimpsing Roxanne: “Who is that?” “Oh, God,” Roxanne herself gripes when she locks herself out of her house. I must advise against making a drinking game out of the invocation of God’s name in Roxanne, however, as anybody attempting it is likely to keel over dead from alcohol poisoning. “Thank God I have the key,” C.D. proclaims at the end of the film, having gained access to Roxanne’s house and heart as the camera pans up to the night sky for the end credits to roll to the accompaniment of composer Bruce Smeaton’s heavenly saxophone theme.

The two levels of meaning in the movie that I indicate are arguably incongruous. Is Roxanne God or an Angel of God, or is she just plain Roxanne Kowalski, the blonde beauty won by an outsider and underdog in accordance with Hollywood’s tradition of Jewish sexual conquest? Am I reading too much into Roxanne? In view of the fact that Martin’s “old nightclub act […] included references to empiricism and metaphysics […] and, he reveals, the title of his first major film (The Jerk) was inspired by Dostoevski’s novel The Idiot”, I think not [3]. A 1989 Orlando Sentinel profile of Martin offers that, “had he not become an entertainer, he might have ended up as a professor of philosophy.” The Sentinel piece continues:

In college, he majored in philosophy until his senior year, when he switched to theater. By that point, he says paradoxically, he “had learned that the arts really have a lot to offer, philosophically.” The comment indicates that this is a man who loves the play of words and ideas: There’s a lot going on in that head of his, even if there once was an arrow stuck through it. This thoughtful side of Martin continues to be present in his work, for those who care to see it.
“I just think that it’s all multileveled,” he observes in a calm and quiet (but somehow strongly inflected) voice […] “It’s like, if you can do something that a 5-year-old can like on one level and a 50-year-old can like on a different level, I think that’s the ultimate.” [4]

The presentation of Jewish spirituality as deeper and more intimately connected to God may annoy some readers as philo-Semitic, and Martin does give the impression of being somewhat in awe of Ashkenazi intellect. “He thinks he’d enjoy getting to know Woody Allen, but fears he would act like a ‘goofball’ in the presence of the bespectacled filmmaker,” the Sentinel reveals [5]. Roxanne exhibits a hint of Woody Allen’s romantic sensibility, and with 1991’s L.A. Story, which Martin dubbed “Manhattan-West” [6], he would craft an overt homage to Allen’s work. As C.D. Bales, however, Martin is never convincingly Jewish, his inherent likability overpowering any such pretense, even at the level of the esoteric; and Roxanne, however viewers choose to read it, remains one of the finest and most endearing comedies of Martin’s career.