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A Shot in the Dark presents the first roll-out of Clouseau’s many signature disguises, none of which works for the purpose of disguising him; he’s the easily identifiable balloon seller standing outside the jail when Maria Gambrelli is released from custody. When she’s released a second time, there’s Toulouse-Lautrec kneeling on the sidewalk. In similar fashion, A Shot in the Dark’s broad physical comedy only barely disguises the fact that, like The Goon Show, the movie is an essentially philosophical enterprise. The film historians Peter Lehman and William Luhr get it right when they point out that “reason is likely to be not a guiding light but a Judas goat” in the Pink Panther films. Clouseau, they write, “exudes logical disconnectedness,” a paradox that calls into question the basic assumptions of civilization. For these clever critics, Clouseau is a ceaselessly disintegrating protagonist, a character much more in synch with the absurdity of late twentieth-century life than anyone else. That’s how he’s able to continue functioning in the face of an unending series of calamities.

As an example of what Lehman and Luhr call Clouseau’s merely “vestigial” rationality, they cite the sequence from A Shot in the Dark in which “instead of walking through a doorway, he walks behind the door into a wall [and] attempts to regain the dignity he never had by declaring that the architect should be investigated.”

The servant Maurice, responding to Maria Gambrelli’s claim of innocence, utters the word “ridiculous.” This sets Clouseau off. It is he who is necessarily the arbiter of postmodern incoherence:

“I will decide what is ridiculous! I believe everything. I believe nothing. I suspect everyone, and I suspect no one. I gather the facts”—he is examining a jar of cold cream at close range and places it to his nose—“I examine the clues”—his nose emerges with a white tip, and—“Before you know it, the case is seulved.”

Told by Maria Gambrelli that he should get out of his wet clothes because he’ll catch his death of pneumonia—he has made his entrance by falling into a fountain—Clouseau responds with resignation: “Yes, I probably will. But it’s all part of life’s rich pageant, you know.” (Many years later, this line inspired the title of an R.E.M. album.)

Soon afterward, he sets his trenchcoat on fire. “Your coat!” Maria cries. “Yes,” says Clouseau, “it is my coat.”

He trails her to a rustic summer camp. Despite the fact that everyone he sees is completely undressed, Clouseau cannot comprehend what he sees and must be specifically instructed by a guitar-strumming naked man, “This is a nudist colony!” (The naked man is played by Peter’s friend Bryan Forbes, credited pseudonymously as “Turk Thrust.”) Clouseau jumps backward in shock and alarm. “A nudist colony?!” he cries, appalled. He emerges a few moments later stark naked, holding the guitar as his fig leaf, and immediately encounters an absurd nudist orchestra absurdly playing “Theme from A Shot in the Dark” by Henry Mancini.

Moments later, language itself loses its logical foundation and devolves into a series of Goon-like sounds when Clouseau comes upon what he sees as a slumbering nudist. Maria calls to him from the bushes:

“That’s Dudu!”

“Dudu?”

“She’s dead!”

“Dead? Dudu?”

Then he faints.

• • •

To say that Clouseau illustrates the modern human condition is also to say that he is a jackass, an imbecile beyond either hope or contempt. Chief Inspector Dreyfus proceeds to lose his mind under the threat to rationality that Clouseau’s brainless anarchy represents. Dreyfus is correct in his response:

DREYFUS (agitated): Are you saying that this man—the man Maria Gambrelli is protecting, her former lover—killed eight people because he was jealous?!

CLOUSEAU (calm): Insanely jealous.

DREYFUS: So jealous he made it look like Maria Gambrelli was the murderer?!

CLOUSEAU: He’s a madman. A psychotic.

DREYFUS: (increasingly agitated) What about the maid? Was he jealous of her, too? He strangled her!

CLOUSEAU: (calm) It’s possible that his intended victim