Last week, Slate writer Bill Wyman intercepted a private response to Keith Richards' new autobiography written by none other than Mick Jagger. In a startling coincidence of postal mishandling, columnist Matt Margini also received a piece of secret celebrity correspondence. Without further ado, "A Response to the Trailer for 'Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son,' " by Eddie Murphy.
Confound Martin Lawrence.
Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. I see him in those fat suits, jowls hanging loose like a lazy bloodhound, and see only the most sniveling mockery.
When we were together on the set of "Life" in 1999, we made a pact — a gentleman's agreement, an artists' territorial gerrymandering. He could have the action buddy-comedies, with their chase scenes and unprofessionalism and whatnot. My domain — my everlasting domain — would be the scatology of the common home, the quiet truths of fat asses farting at the dinner table.
Little did I know he was planning to pierce my latex with a poison dagger.
A year later, he releases "Big Momma's House," preempting "Nutty Professor II: The Klumps," the second work in my Obesity Cycle, by a single month. Five years after that, just as the shame of treachery seems to have cleared the air, he comes out with "Big Momma's House II" — imagine Brutus revisiting Caesar's grave for another go! By the time Tyler Perry arrived with his Medean aspirations, the poor huckster was copying the crudest of forgeries.
Now Lawrence has gone and duplicated the "Big Momma" character, molesting the structure of the family unit in a way that begs for the resurrection of Dr. Freud. Father and son in fatsuits, subjected to the same existential gauntlet from different sides of a generation gap? I can only assume that he broke into my home and bribed my manservant Enrico for the script to "Norbit Jr."
Perhaps there is a little Harold Bloom, a little "Anxiety of Influence," in the deliberately Oedipal nature of this misbegotten sequel. If the son becomes Big Momma, there can be no room for the father. The father must die. This I know from experience, having been ousted so violently from my throne as Prince of Whales by a tactless, artless charlatan.
And yet, despite a few bruised testicles here and there, despite the inherent instability of two men occupying the role of Big Momma at once, the trailer indicates that father and son are cooperating. Collaborating, even. I wonder: Is Lawrence reaching out to me through his work? Is he stepping out of the traitor's den with an olive branch, pleading for the possibility of a harmonious master and apprentice reunion?
I banish these thoughts when I see him fall flat on his fake, stolen ass.
What he took from me will never be mine again. The Klumps were slain by his ambition. But I believe the real tragedy is artistic. He has not done anything new with the archetype; he has not even tried to expand his repertoire. Has Martin Lawrence ever talked to animals? Has Martin Lawrence ever played an animal, besides the egregiously anthropomorphic bear in "Open Season"? I remember the days before his betrayal, when he would still seek my counsel. Masculinity was all he wanted back then, in his insecurity and his narrow vision. I tried to get him to imagine the world from a corpulent female perspective. I tried.
"Eddie," he would say to me, "I love you, but empathy is not my métier."
And yet, here we are.
