"No film could be more devastating, more bitter in its humor, more brackish, with the richness of the invention constantly aggravated by the poverty of the situations, with the uneasy spectator at first forcing an unwilling laugh, then feeling ashamed, laughing again mechanically, seized in a pitiless mesh of imbecilities, and ending by roaring with laughter because it isn't funny at all. It is, in other words, an acme of stupidity...." Jean-Luc Godard on Artists and Models (in Milne, Godard on Godard). Dean Martin is the "artist," a designer of horror comics, Jerry Lewis, the Greenwich Village idiot hopelessly addicted to the stuff. He spends his days enamored of the image of Bat Lady and his nights in a horror comic of his own subconscious creation. Meanwhile, Shirley MacLaine, the model for Bat Lady, lives with roommate Dorothy Malone in a world straight out of fifties glamor photography. Director Frank Tashlin, a former cartoonist himself, retains something of a cartoon surface, speed and iconoclastic inanity in his comedies, which, as critic Ian Cameron writes, "(chronicle) the mutation of America, land of promise, into a land of illusions." Together they depict the almost total immersion of the individual into the media: TV, advertising, rock'n'roll, cinema, comics, the movie star cult, and the cult of the big-breasted blonde goddess.