performance and artifice

i'm sorry i am one year (perhaps even ten years) late to this discourse

The love duet of 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain swells with all the Technicolor romance of its era. In “You Were Meant for Me,” Debbie Reynolds’ eyes are icy in the silvery light, her pastel dress dancing gently against her skin. Gene Kelley croons about love under lavender skies. It’s all standard Golden Age fare, with one subversion: the scene takes place on a movie set. The light in Reynolds’ eyes is a spotlight, the wind against her dress a blast from a massive fan. The sky is a backdrop. At intimate moments, these machinations are almost forgotten, the camera zooming in on the actors’ expressions to obscure the artifice of the setting. But the ladder is always a central prop, a reminder of the movie magic at work. In the final moments of the number, the camera zooms back out, and the audience bears witness to the machinery. Nonetheless, the romance of the pair is undeniable. Their chemistry, the sense that they were fated to each other – this is all made genuine, rendered in clarity because of, not despite, the artifice of the moment.

It’s an idea that is nearly subversive now, when everyone from Oz to Gotham insists upon the “authenticity” of their worlds. Films are washed in gray, high-definition sluice in service of “fidelity” to the real world. I suspect this is part of where our modern anxiety about “performativity” arises from (forgive all the scare quotes). In an artless world, performance is the great sin. When we warily eye the “performative” man reading bell hooks on the train, we are worrying that he – like that gauzy, Technicolor art – is lying to us.

Or, perhaps our impulses toward muted authenticity actually arise out of disgust for our increasingly absurd, vomit-green digital world. Under siege by hallucinatory stimuli, alternatingly incomprehensible, evil, incomprehensibly evil, we retreat into pale neutrals and numbing sound baths as organizing philosophy. In Synecdoche, New York, playwright Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) finds himself bewildered by his surreal world. His doctors speak to him in clipped, unreal sentences about his litany of mysterious illnesses. His wife leaves him for art world stardom in Europe, bringing along their toddler daughter, who in a matter of minutes becomes a 12-year-old nudist exhibitionist. In an interview with Screen Anarchy, Kaufman said, “… it was my goal this time to… take the interior life of Caden Cotard and put it outside of him in the actual landscape of his existence, in his interactions with other people, the way things happen, the more dream-like elements of the story, and try to create an emotional landscape.”

Turning to his own work, Caden seeks sanity in truthful realism, spurred on by MacArthur Award funds to mount a play. But this realism is unwieldy: he hires floods of actors to reenact intimate scenes of daily life in an enormous, life-size set of New York City, complete with its apartment buildings and narrow streets and sidewalk tragedies. Caden has his actors recreate scenes from his own life, its nightmarish melodramas, but can never get the scenario quite right, letting years, decades pass by without ever showing the play to an audience.

Roger Ebert, reflecting on the film, wrote that “…we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds.” Caden interprets the world subjectively, so his attempts at creating an objective artwork always fall short. The project grows larger and larger, like a treatment regimen of drugs used to treat the side effects of other drugs. Coming down from the high, struggling to remember what ailed you in the first place. The project collapses, its years wasted, its memory evaporated. The synecdoche remains just that: the part can never become the whole.

Kaufman here is writing about authenticity, the impossibility of it in the face of our always failing ability to see the world, to see ourselves. But it’s so tempting, that doomed project. We’d like to be sure of something, for once in this godforsaken world, so sure of it that we can recreate its contours and intricacies in the artistic medium that we have won a Genius grant for. Katy Waldman identifies a “reflexivity trap” that has emerged in contemporary literary fiction among authors like Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan, whose characters’ self-conscious inner monologues nod at an intellectual awareness but flatten meaning and plot. (I am, of course, a Sally Rooney fan, and I would probably be enthralled by her grocery list!) This, too, seems to me an artistic dilemma that authenticity presents: characters are laden with the torpor of their own self-criticism, neuroses masking as honesty. The characters are being “realistic,” perhaps, but are rarely narratively propulsive.

Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs (as similarly commented upon by Malavika Kannan) proposes an alternative solution. If authenticity forces a narrowed set of creative options, why pursue it at all? Cash’s characters are more thinly drawn than are their recent predecessors, pulling from archetypes of suburban American families. The narrative paints in super-saturated tones, invoking billionaire shipping magnates, cults, and online radicalization. These extremes of reality might strike readers as untruthful, but the satire they create is ultimately in service of ideas about family and belonging. Cash’s funny and disarmingly tender prose buoys the characters, drowning in their absurd disorientation and loneliness, to more livable surfaces. The plot events serve as maximalist expressions of suburban anxiety: the nuclear family in the face of a shifting moral code, the instability of religion in the face of its systemic rupture. If handwringing about capitalist complicity is narratively limp, blood-drinking elites ought to get our attention.

The novel and its success may, you might argue, point more to a media literacy (sorry!!) issue than an issue with the concept of authenticity itself: are audiences so didactic that they can only understand theme through plot-driven romp? But I think the enduring legacy of Lost Lambs and work like it (see One Battle After Another dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) will be its ability to make fable of our current moment, to be the viscera that metabolizes political crisis. The creative inventions of Lost Lambs inflate ordinary life so that it comes into contact with “society”, as it were, touching it, rubbing up against it, remembering that hot friction. If the novels of the “reflexivity trap” sought to elucidate how it feels to live in a body, in a mind, Lost Lambs seeks to elucidate how it feels to live in the world.

The literalists complain that artifice misleads its audiences, representing a wish of the world rather than the actual truth of it: who one wants to be rather than who one actually is. I think, though, there are few more earnest expressions of humanity than the willing of a self you want but do not yet possess. Performance is an interrogation of effortfulness, the straining of the imagination toward new realities. There’s no point at which we can be certain our internal motivations are sincere enough, at every layer of our subconscious, that we can then start to do good deeds. We just do our deeds, and hope that the alchemical output of who we are and who we say we are is a person worth the 550 square feet of prime metropolitan real estate we occupy. To want to be someone, to want to be more well-read, more kind, more thoughtful – is there anything else our lives are really about? Why not confess to the wanting, then, encourage it? It might get us somewhere anyway, despite our so-called insincerity. Maybe one of those performative men really does love tote bags now, after all of his posturing. I almost certainly haven’t read enough theory, taken enough craft classes, conducted enough research to confidently justify the 10 minutes of your time I have stolen from you. And yet, here I am, at the end of a thousand words on film and fiction, hoping that I’ve gotten away with something, hoping that someone, you or I, has come away from this having gained something. I am pretending. I am writing.