At the dawn of movie-making,
there were no stars. Indeed, as film historian Michael Newton writes, the
actors were:
“… puppets, mannequins, and not
expected to reveal through their external image a complex inner life. Those
early bioscope models were anonymous, subordinate to the piece of film itself;
indeed, the earliest films were ‘performed by people who were anything but
actors’, sometimes literally just folk picked up in a café.
3 Erwin
Panofsky remarks that the cast of a prestige 1905 production of
Faust are
‘characteristically “unknown”’.
“Even then, however, the camera
seems to pick out certain people. Newton cites a short story by Rudyard Kipling,
Mrs. Bathurst, in which the narrator sees a film that documents a London crowd
crossing a bridge and sees someone he knows, Mrs. Bathurst: ‘There was no
mistakin’ the walk in a hundred thousand’ and ‘She walked on and on till she
melted out of the picture – like – like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle.’ The
film transmits the unique ‘blindish look’ she has, preserving in light that
something that was hers, while not being her, merely a trace, both a mere
picture and a mock-up of the real thing.”
It is a commonplace to say that
Mary Pickford was the first star. Newton accords that honor to a French
comedian, Max Lindner. It is clarifying,however, to remember 19th
century theater and opera, for
definitely there were divas and “stars”. By the end of the 18th
century, the great actor or actress had even become respectable. Before the 18th
century, theater was, technically, a demi-monde for the Church – both Catholic
and Protestant. In one of those moments in the French Revolution that seem to
cast shadows down to us, the Assembly debated making actors and executioners
full citizens – and ended up adding Jews to that list. Clement-Tonnerre made
the speech introducing the civil rights bill.
“Passing
to actors, he demonstrated that, in their regard, the prejudice is established
on what they are under the dependence of public opinion. “This dependence makes
our glory and it flays them,” he cries. “Honest citizens can represent on the
stage the chef-d’oeuvres of the human spirit, works filled with the healthy
philosophy that, thus put in a position where every human can appreciate it,
has prepared, successfully, the revolution that is now in operation, and you
tell them: you are Comediens du Roi, you occupy the national theater, and you
are criminal (infame)! The law must not let this crime subsist.”” (from Gaston
Maugras’ Les comediens hors la lois).
What was the eeriness of the
actor about? I’d suggest that we look at a doctrine made famous by Ernst Kantorowicz’s
study, The King’s Two Bodies. The Sovereign was invested with a pollical body
as well as one of flesh. Similarly, the actor is both the actor and the “part” –
an uncomfortable parody, perhaps, of the miracle of the Eucharist. There was a “star
system” in the 19th century, in which opera and theater were the
great popular as well as high cultural arts, but it was metaphysically
different from what happened with the movies. Though Rachilde [Proust’s
composite portrait of the great diva] played the part of Berenice, people did
not go to the theater to see Rachilde, they went to see Rachilde play the part
of Berenice.
But in the movies, the character – with the character’s name – is swept
up in if not identical to the actor. Even as the actor is more than the part.
Jake Geddes is different from Jack Nicholson, but it is forgivable if people
substitute Jack Nicholson for Geddes when they talk about the movie. A theater
part lives on – Hamlet did not die with Garrick, nor with Olivier – but the
movie part is a more ambiguous kind of aesthetic creature.
…
I am pulling all this out to try
to explain my impression of the cinematic quality of Rachel Kushner’s novels.
We still use the old Greek system for thinking of the novel, with the hero or protagonist
and the secondary characters – the rounds and the flats, to use E.M. Forster’s
terms. The roundedness is supposed to refer to some psychological completeness,
some depth that can be evoked but not, if the round effect works, exhaustively
shown. Myself, II think it might be more interesting and capture more of the
way we read novels – or the way I read novels, given all the cultural syrop I’ve
absorbed through every medium – by referencing the star system. I’ve read many novels
with round and flat characters, but the novels that mark me with being of my
time, so to speak, have stars. Both Reno in The Flamethrowers and Romy
Hall (named for a star, Romy Schneider) in The Mars Room are bit parts, extras,
but both are written as stars. The seem at once to be perfectly integrated into
their parts and to be playing them – a sovereign shuffle. They are unknown
celebrities.
I would like to be able to
explain this quality by reducing ii to its devices.
....
In The Man Without Qualities, an
important Habsburg official, Count Leinsdorf, is shown in relation to Ulrich,
the MWQ himself, and Diotima, his cousin, a socialite who is determined to be a
“spiritual” force in Austria by holding a salon in which she mingled noteworthies
of various types from finance, art, academia, and politics. Count Leinsdorf is
the main attraction in the salon; he goes out of friendship, but, as well, because
he thinks of Diotima as holding an “office”:
“Every person,” he would say, “performs
an office within the state; the worker, the prince, the artisan, are all civil
servants.” This was an emanation of his always and under all circumstances
impartial way of thinking, ignorant of bias, and in his eyes even the ladies
and gentlemen of the highest society performed a significant if not readily
definable office when they chatted with learned experts on the Bogazköy
inscriptions or the question of lamellibranchiate mollusks, while eyeing the
wives of prominent financiers.”
The duality of the person and the
office – which is extended here indefinitely – is structurally like the difference
between the actor and the part in a movie, or like the “vehicle” and the gene
in neo-Darwinism, or like the King in his body and the King as the body
politics in early modern theory. There are enormous variations in the
signifying of these dualities. For the novelist, there is always the temptation
to make the character stand in for the type – to give the character, as it
were, an “office within the state”. This way of reading character is mainstream
among critics, I think, who suffer from an obscure embarrassment with regard to
stories – it seems that the story can’t justify itself, except with children. The
story has to be justified by reference to its “office” in the state – to its
illustration of ethico-political principles.
There is that. And there is ordinary
life, in which people do indeed take characters as role models, but mainly in
terms of excitement: it is some taste of existential excitement that ordinary
life craves in music, in movies, in novels, in poems.
Movies, I think, long ago became
the central aesthetic object in the West due to the way that the part and the
actor seem to merge and separate – the dancer could and could not be told apart
from the dance, either on the screen or in “real” life, which unrolled like a
movie itself, in celebrity-centered media.
The axis of the Mars Room is just
this kind of duality: Romy Hall, as a stripper named “Vanessa”, attracts a
mook, a fan, who becomes her stalker: Creepy Kennedy, as Hall thinks of him.
How can we tell the stripper from the strip? Creepy Kennedy can’t: he can’t
understand his own relationship, as stalker, to “Vanessa”.
Reno – another nickname, or star
name – in The Flamethrowers takes a job at a film lab as a “China girl” – that is,
she is used, filmed, in order to get the fleshtones right for films in something
called a “film leader” – all artefacts of analogue film of the period. She is
anonymous, her job consisting of looking as “representative” as possible – which
means Caucasian and “comely”, in spite of the name of the “official function”.
“Most people didn’t know China
girls existed. The lab technicians knew. The projectionists knew. They had
fovorites, faces of obsession, and evn if I liked the idea of my own fleeting
by, I knew the technicians looked at the frames more closely, and I liked that,
too. I was and was not posing for them. Pieces of film leader were collected
and traded like baseball cards. Marvin and Eric preferred a polished look. “The
problem with the girl-next-door thing”, Marvin said, “is that with recent
Kodachrome its actually the girl next door. Her name is Lauren and we grew up
together in Rochester.” The girls, mostly secretaries in film labs, weren’t exactly
pinups, but the plainer-looking China girls were traded just as heavily. The
allure was partly about speed: run through a projector they flashed by so fast
they had to be instantly reconstructed in the mind. “The thing suppressed as an
intrusion,” Eric said, “is almost always worth looking at.” Their ordinariness
was part of their appeal: real but unreachable women who left no sense of who
they were. No clue but a Kodak color bar, which was no clue at all.”
The China girl is the anti-star,
the bit player par excellence; at the same time, the China girl, too, has a
double existence – shares, on the most miniscule scale, the division between
the actor and the part. This is the abyss – molecular, suppressed – which Kushner
finds worth looking at, and elevates into a principle of character
construction.
As well, into a principle of form.
In the Flamethrowers, the form of the monologue – the characters are always
telling stories, giving the novel a sort of “All about Eve” feel, without Eve
here having any ambition at all – surrounds the substance, which is about an
art scene in which film has a central role. The New York art scene of the 70s.
In The Mars Room, while there are many movie references, the whole movie motif
is absent. This is an underworld, a dangerous classes, novel, split up between
the monologue and the quasi-indirect mode of discourse, which Pasolini hailed as
an important resource of film. These characters are just the type who do not “fulfill”
a state office, who flee from the office – strippers, drug dealers, chiselers, mooks,
dopers, uncared for children, careless parents, growing up in the interstices of
society and waiting – not to be discovered by Hollywood, but to be discovered
by the Incarceration state, as they inevitably will be.
