After reading Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice, a book that turned my head around, I'm hyper-attuned to anti-theatrical tropes which seems to pop all over the place in many different contexts - particularly in politics, but even in a discussion of football and the unexpected almost-triumph of the England Team....
Here's Hugh Muir in the Guardian on Gareth Southgate, for instance - but also taking a swipe at Boris & Co:
"To me, he is just a prominent example of a British type we used to revere: thoughtful, strong-willed and confident but not flashy, centred, emotionally intelligent and decent. If he seems exceptional now, that’s not just about him but also because our lives are being shaped by characters who mask any pretension to decency or seriousness or even intelligence to succeed in the pantomime that is political life.
"Worth noting that, away from the hullabaloo, there are others like Southgate in our world-beating creative arts, in public administration, in our big and small commercial companies, and together they support one conclusion; there really is no need in our public sphere for so much showboating and immaturity."
There are ironies here, given that the histrionic arts are clearly part of football - the hamming up of injuries in the hope of getting a free kick or a yellow card on an opposing player, the rolling around in agony that dissipates suspiciously quickly as soon as the spotlight moves on.... the arms-wide gestures of appeal made by players to the referee etc
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Here's one of the most striking examples of anti-theatricality I've come across recently(ish). George Monbiot on Twitter last November bemoaning the prominence of actors in our public life and suggesting it is literally a measure of our decadence:
"This might sound strange, but I think we can judge the health of a public culture by what I call the Actor Index. This measures the proportion of featured interviews in the newspapers that are devoted to actors. The higher the proportion, the greater the trouble we’re in
"Now I have nothing against actors. But, by definition, we value them for their ability to adopt someone else’s persona and speak someone else’s words. Fetishising actors reveals an obsession with images, rather than with the realities they obscure.
"Guy Debord argued that “the spectacle” (the domination of social relationships by images) is used to justify the “dictatorship of modern economic production”. It disguises and supplants the realities of capitalism, changing our perceptions until we become “consumers of illusion”.
"I don’t have the stats to support my impression (hello media students). But it seems to me that the proportion of featured interviews devoted to actors, rather than to people whose skill is to speak their own words and do their own deeds, has been rising steadily for decades.
"It has now reached the point of absurdity. I'd guess that roughly 60% of big featured interviews are now with actors, rather than with fascinating people in thousands of other walks of life. Something strange is happening, and it astonishes me that so few people seem to notice.
"Of course I don’t mistake the media for society. I know that most media organisations have an interest in avoiding what is true and troubling, and directing our minds to the s But there’s clearly a market for this obsession, so I think it’s fair to see this apparent phenomenon as reflecting public culture, while recognising that this culture is shaped to a large extent by the private interests of the press. spectacle, disguising the realities of capitalism.
"Debord’s book Society of the Spectacle, published over 50 years ago, was remarkably prescient. I think it describes to a frightening degree the world in which we now live, but which was only beginning to take shape when the book was written.
:But how do we know how far we have progressed towards his frightening vision? I would like to propose the Actor Index as a measure of the extent to which we have succumbed to the spectacle, and have become consumers of illusion. In other words, as a measure of our sickness.
"As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live - Debord".
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The accusation that a politician is an actor rather than a legislator or the real-deal is a common trope - there was a whole right-wing conspiracy theory that A.O.C. was an actress reciting lines she'd been fed rather than a serious, well-informed politician. Here's an example of the trope coming from the other, left-wing angle:
Michael Marshall Smith says of Marjorie Taylor Green:
"As with Boebert — they aren't politicians. They both literally just got elected. They have done zero legislative work. Their only job is saying stupid, inflammatory things, to dumb our politics down yet further, to read the Fox and MAGA script. They got cast, rather than elected."
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Trump commentary is littered with theatrical tropes:
" Trump is an increasingly symbolic figure — Norma Desmond with the nuclear codes and sycophantic butlers in his ears on a West Wing Sunset Boulevard soundstage"
- Olivia Nuzzi (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/capitol-riot-senior-trump-official-calls-him-a-fascist.html)
from the same article:
“This is like a plot straight out of the later, sucky seasons of House of Cards where they just go full evil and say, ‘Let’s spark mass protests and start wars and whatever,’” the senior administration official said.
"With no evidence that Republicans have really thought about the implications of a victory in the courts, I think we can say that these briefs and lawsuits are part of a performance, where the game is not to break kayfabe (the conceit, in professional wrestling, that what is fake is real). Still, we’ve learned something from this game, in the same way we learn something about an audience when it laughs. We have learned that the Republican Party, or much of it, has abandoned whatever commitment to electoral democracy it had to begin with. That it views defeat on its face as illegitimate, a product of fraud concocted by opponents who don’t deserve to hold power." - Jamelle Bouie, New York Times
Earlier post on this blog about Trump and anti-theatrical tropes.
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Even an avowed glam believer and supporter of artifice and image-excess like Mark Fisher could get tangled up in the politics of authenticity:
"Camp centres on play-acting & distanciation: that's why it's the form of postmodern subjectivity par excellence: I don't believe but nevertheless I play along.
"Dysphoria, meanwhile, involves both a disdain for play-acting & an inability to achieve any distance, including oneself."
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Indie rock is tortured by the contradictions of being a performer and trying to present truth. Example: the song "Pop Lie" by Okkervil River
"The song's lyrics, like other lyrics from The Stand Ins and its predecessor, The Stage Names are about the misconceptions and deceptions that surround the perceptions of fame... With a barely hidden hint of the bitterness of a disillusioned fan forced to grow up and throw away dreams, yet also with the wearily resigned acceptance of a performer now charged with creating them, Sheff has lived the lie from both sides and implies that we are all participants in it. Some of us tune in more knowingly than others, of course, but most of us are willing, wanting, even begging to believe. And who can blame us for being complicit with the chorus Sheff has crafted here? As the song closes, Sheff names himself the liar, but when presented so perfectly, even this admission of insincerity can only add up to adulation. In fact, everything about this track seems engineered to inspire exactly the sort of devotion it derides. The "Pop Lie" is persistent" - Christel Loar, PopMatters
".... Will Sheff's emotional victim King-Lear-played-by-Jonathan-Richman mode can go both ways; here he is simply handing down utter contempt, and it is glorious. It's intriguing that the arrangement is more bubblegummy than you'd expect from their usual hankering after resonance, so it invites consideration as the cultural target, but it's synth pop from 1979–80 that is no particular pied piper threat today—much more something, well, I'd like. I've made more peace with popular content than Will, and I'm surprised at how enthusiastic I am to hear such an articulate denouncement of it. What a joyous emotional tangle this is—betrayal seething, our singer is in a condemning mood, but the invective keeps pointing straight back to the very man on stage with the microphone. One of the most sophisticated pieces of social science in years looks at the pop fandom system, and is utterly horrified: fans carefully select entertainment whose self-serving lie best propitiates their self-serving vanities. In Sheff's unimprovable words, "the man who dreamed up the dream that they wrecked their hearts upon." Half the rhymes in the song are to "-ated," and with that constraint, dig the social architecture set up in the following: "Get completely incorporated/By some couple who consummated/Their first love by the dawn/A falling star wished upon/That fried in the sky and was gone." This isn't just he done her wrong, this is, for one thing, a bunch of people: crowd dynamics. This is, okay, the first couple witnessing the second couple, and getting "incorporated." The fourth wall of the relationship in isolation is broached, and we see the pop lie at work: fame, peer pressure, whatever, mediated the romance, but it is not really a guiding star. It steals what it needs for a third party's music career, or whatever, and then is gone over the horizon. "
- from Scott Miller, Music: What Happened?
"Pop Lie" lyrics
All sweetly sung and succinctly stated
Words and music he calculated
To make you sing along
With your stereo on,
As you stand in your shorts on your lawn
Get completely incorporated
By some couple who consummated
Their first love by the dawn
A falling star wished upon
That flashed in the sky and was gone
And, mouths wet and blonde hair braided
By the back room the kids all waited
To meet the man in bright green
Who had dreamed up the dream
That they wrecked their hearts upon
He's the liar who lied in his pop song
And you're lying when you sing along
And you're lying when you sing along
So, here's to car seats so cruelly weighted
And here's to faces already faded,
At the end of the day
When they just threw away
The only good thing that they owned,
And now they're pinned down and strangulated
But, at the food court, the float's inflated
And people line up to see
The man who dreamed up the dream
That they wrecked their hearts upon
He's the liar who lied in his pop song
The liar who lied in his pop song,
And you're lying when you sing along
Oh yeah, you're lying when you sing along
Week by week it climbs up and comes on,
And we're feeling all right, though we know it's all wrong
I'm ashamed to admit that I cannot resist what I wish were the truth but is not
And I truly believe we're not strong
And we'll sing until our voices are gone,
And then sink beneath that manicured lawn
This is respectfully dedicated
To the woman who concentrated
All of her love to find
That she had wasted it on
The liar who lied in this song
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Punk too, is, hopelessly confused on this issue of how the Real can be presented on stage and on record, how to exorcise the inherent theatricality of performance....
Johnny Rotten's struggles with this are worth a separate post, but for now, how about this -
anti-theatricality oozing out of this Malcolm McLaren commentary on the Royal Family from 2002 I came across, which is ironic given the role of agit-prop theater / publicity set-pieces in his management style:
"The royal family is a celebrity brand with an immense PR machine behind it. It's just another business, except we pay for it and they profit by it. A neat trick. However, the royal family is England's biggest show business act. They are people who are brought up to a certain way of life, who are given the means to extend their knowledge and to extend their understanding. But they are not given the opportunity to use their minds in connection with it. They are a brilliant metaphor for all that is pretentious, deluded, selfish and insincere about England. They made me finally face the fact that I had to be a rebel in this society - to be an outsider - with all of the penalties this would entail, or else accept the hypocrisy of England and its monarchy.
"On golden jubilee day, will those TV cameras, acting as part of some Ridley Scott production and image-making apparatus, eventually burn the Queen out? Maybe the media will top itself and ultimately become responsible for turning the monarchy and its golden jubilee celebration into simply another super-expensive beer commercial for fascism? And include the rest of us as unpaid extras on the most expensive theme park on the planet. This is show business: Paul, Mick and all will no doubt be there for Ma'am."
Earlier post on anti-Royalist / Roundhead / undandy Jeremy Corbyn and the discourse of anti-theatricality.
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