This Is Running for Your Life (9 page)

BOOK: This Is Running for Your Life
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A mean patch of briar lies between our parallel cravings for stories that are “real” and those with mythic dimensions, and some of our best artists have found themselves tangled up in it. Anyone who has posted a picture of herself toasting champagne with the VIPs from a pit of self-loathing or tweeted the day's workout stats while weeping into a quart of raspberry sorbet has felt a tiny measure of this particular sting for themselves. The Internet is the ultimate realist medium—real people, real time, real messy—yet everything about the way we use it to perform our lives (and to a certain extent our culture) for one another confirms the manufactured terms of our beloved reality entertainment. It's all about the edit.

That we seem intent on forgetting this suggests the extent to which we are drifting from a shared sense of reality. The line between performer and performance is long gone. The line between performer and audience continues its slow fade. In a time when all of the information we consume in a day—whether it's a news report out of Libya or a YouTube search for a Billie Holiday song or a long-forgotten friend's post on your Facebook wall—falls under the rubric of “content,” the line between performers is blurring as well. After national self-consciousness comes a nation of self-conscious individuals, and after that a homogenization of the nation's central precepts: money, property, and public recognition shift from shared values to rights. Which is how they are fed back to us, until suddenly the health of an entire country depends on the constant retail of fiction: stories about homes we might own, stocks that might soar, how we might look, the lives we might lead and more crucially advertise in a kind of panicked, perpetual present haze of—and I would urge you to consider the term—
status updates
.

The new American dream is to build a really bitching personal brand, and the result of all that tap dancing on all those individual platforms is a pervasive kind of narrative decadence. We race to consume and regurgitate the hour's large and small events for each other like patricians in a postmodern vomitorium—to know them first, translate them into bitter capsule form fastest, and be shocked or stirred or perceived as in any way less than totally savvy about these things the least. Even within our self-contained realities we become dulled to what's real and what's not, and further desensitized to what lies behind our fellow performers' virtual scrims. From the vantage of the individual platform, even the narrative of tragic greatness seems less a product of secular anxiety—a sort of surrogate Christian allegory—than one more of the stories we devour out of self-interest. We take heart instead of horror in the idea that anyone can be famous, but we are performers with no interest in dying for each other. It seems related that actual death is by far the most awkward thing for the Internet to handle. Because it's so real.

4

When I was nine, I saved up for my first biography, a pulpy, mass-market life of Michael Jackson, the kind with scratchy paper and those cold, thick-paged pictures in the middle. I didn't own
Thriller
. I didn't need to own
Thriller—Thriller
was circulating in the water supply—but I wanted that book.

For a while it became a part of my body. I carried it around, slept with it, and spent afternoons cradling it on the couch. I studied Michael's modest upbringing, homing in on the first appearance and acknowledgment of his talent. I thrilled to the timeline of its development—from the moment it was discovered, then discovered again, then once again, until it made its way to me. I sought out the story, hoping in some sense to organize the energy irradiating my television screen.

Because despite being an enormously gifted and dexterous vocalist, Michael was first and then foremost a visual phenomenon: See how young he is! Look at those little feet go! And with his brothers, the way talent separates itself! And now see how handsome! How lithe and graceful and
literally sparkling
!

Michael was a dancer, sure, but more than that a
mover
. For what would become the biggest performance of his life, the 1983 Motown 25th Anniversary concert, Jackson chose to lip-synch to “Billie Jean.” I became a student of his charisma that night, convinced there might be some kind of proof for the exchange of energy between his body and mine. For me the charge of his performances always carried a postscript to self—not to get myself famous or become rich enough to keep a baby chimp, but to learn, literally and otherwise, how to
move
.

Movie
is the shorthand that preceded
talkie
. But it's the latter term that faded away. It's the movement that sets the form apart (
Action!
), and the beauty of bright, moving bodies that transfixes. In that sense, Michael was a movie star in the same way Elvis was a movie star even before he shook his business in
Blue Hawaii
. They were basically made for motion pictures. If anything, Elvis's acting career, in neutering and homogenizing him, subtracted from his movie-star-ness. Eventually he reclaimed it with a musical TV special, during the taping of which he famously ejaculated in his pants; even little Elvis died for us. Michael insisted on calling his videos “short films,” and the producers of the Academy Awards, who included him in their 2010 “In Memoriam” montage, apparently agreed.

On a Saturday morning a year or so after reading the Michael Jackson biography, I settled in front of the TV, fast-forwarding through the commercials with my remote arm raised up high. Devoted to keeping my moves current, every Friday I set the VCR to tape
Friday Night Videos
, which aired well past my bedtime. The show often had guest hosts; on the weekend in question it was a tiny woman in welding shades, Yoko Ono, and her sweet-faced son.

They were there to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of her husband, John. His story, sketched out in brief, evocative strokes, shook me to the bottom of my pink flannel jam-jams. I watched the “Imagine” video over and over, contrasting it with the footage of a younger John in pageboy caps and Pierre Cardin suits, the black-and-white Beatles taking over the world. And that was pretty much it. From that moment in 1985 until the year punk broke, I rode out an especially barren period in popular music on a strict diet of John Lennon's Beatles, supplemented—sometimes even surpassed—by every band bio, memoir, and history I could get my hands on. And I did have to lay actual hands on them, back when mining data was a more physical ordeal.

What John Lennon introduced me to, together with the great pleasure of his music, was the culturally engraved narrative of tragic greatness. Where Michael Jackson was at an apex, still walking on the moon, Lennon's death had completed his story. That particular combination of greatness and tragedy punched out a ten-thousand-piece puzzle inside me. His life seemed to me thrillingly, ineluctably merged with his art, and his murder an act against that art so total and devastating it could hardly be fathomed, and never at length.

5

My only clear and openly publicized objective for the future, from the time I began to consider it, was to get myself to New York. At sixteen I rode a Greyhound into Manhattan with the rest of my drama class, where the objective crystallized into a many-pointed ache. We visited the Actors Studio and bought fake IDs in Times Square; I finagled permission to stake out the Letterman show. It was as I thought—the city where you made yourself happen—and I swore I'd be back. A dedicated drama geek, I quelled private ambitions to act with a steady course of magical thinking, frustrating my teacher more than once by auditioning and then ditching on the callback. I thought I was battling the Canadian impulse against distinction, the mortification of wanting something too much.

It took me several years and one disastrous monologue from
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
to understand that being temperamentally unsuited to acting didn't mean I couldn't find a way to
perform
. Though all of my daydreams were about standing in front of people and holding their attention somehow—emoting, dancing, yodeling—I lacked the wiring to connect a growing shyness in the world with my inner showbiz slave. If every fantasy musical sequence in every teen movie ever is correct, the specific quality of that longing is a condition of being a modern teenager. In many ways high school is just Hollywood without money: we make stars and audiences of each other. We watch each other all day and, if it can be arranged, all night too. We learn how to behave and what we're drawn to, the people with presence. I made studies of the kids around me, drawn almost gravitationally toward those who held my attention. I longed to observe my classmates undetected but refused to wear my glasses. With their faces softened I couldn't tell who was looking back.

When I think of this I think of Luke, the enigmatic power forward I followed around until he gave in. If Luke felt like a flesh-and-blood star, I had chosen better than I knew. Older, a diffident hockey player with a brother in the NHL, he was the first one to put me on his knee and get me onto both of mine. The last time I saw him he was naked and rampaging through a party-ruined backyard—the way all of those nights ended. But there was something new and unpleasant in the slant of the evening, something precipitous. The outdoor lights were blinding, whiting out the faces that weren't cast into shadow. We crashed into each other helplessly, as though the years of studying and negotiating these same bodies had finally driven us mad. As though suddenly aware of having stayed too long and clutched too many red plastic cups at the carnival. His antics were getting darker and more dangerous; there was a new viciousness in the way Luke hurled his body around. I can see his Vitruvian silhouette cut out by the floodlights. I hadn't yet graduated but high school was clearly over. He was shaking both fists above his head and roaring when I turned to a friend, chilled, and said I didn't think he'd make it to twenty-one.

In fact he got to twenty-eight. From what I understand, he had fallen into the traps set by his beauty, which was extreme. Modeling, bodybuilding, and the attendant obsessions and excesses. He always told people he'd go young, we all remember that now. I saw him in a dream the night I heard, clearer than I had in a decade. He pulled me into the center of a party to slow dance, but his phone kept interrupting with text messages written in coded gibberish. Soon he slipped out of my arms and walked out the door, the exact walk I didn't know I remembered so well. I followed him one more time and found him running toward a pier. I'd just started to make up some ground when I saw him skitter off the platform and hit the water with a smack. A few days later I was told it was suicide, but no one knows for sure, or wants to say.

6

Jack Warner, the head of Warner Bros. studio, did not take the news of James Dean's death well. He had placed a sizable bet on
Rebel Without a Cause
, which was weeks away from its release, and the star had made a sucker of him. “Nobody will come to see a corpse!” Warner scoffed. Well, isn't it pretty to think so.

Times were changing; even the experts were still figuring out this new medium's special dispensations. It had not yet become as clear as it would in the wake of Dean's death that part of the pull of the movies was the way that they intertwined heavenly visions of human life with the suggestion of death and resurrection. Quentin Tarantino makes indelible use of this interplay in
Inglourious Basterds
, when a woman is revived moments after her death—on a disintegrating screen and then an undulating veil of smoke—to deliver a vow of vengeance. Although the movies would seem to provide a modern platform for the work of Greek tragedy, it's probably not a coincidence that we began to lose touch with the conditions of death and loss just as a potent medium and its proofs of immortality came into view.

We don't really favor body viewings in this country. There seems to be some class snobbery in it, as if only religious peasants could be into something so earthy. Our leaders no longer lie in state in the traditional sense; their caskets are covered in flags or smothered in lilies and laurel. (Ironically, the ever-present photographic threat may have much to do with that; it seems telling that most of us still agree that recorded pictures of a corpse are disrespectful, if not sacrilegious.) Call me a Catholic peasant, but I think there is something to the viewing ritual: in our private lives it reminds us of the limits of our bodies and confirms a loss that can otherwise seem unfathomable; with public figures it provides essential evidence that even the great and powerful must die. Today we watch the big funerals on television or online as spectacles, performing our responses to performed death in real time. Perhaps the closest we get to a culturally bound reckoning with mortality is the way we study the final scenes of a star's life, as though they might yield the abiding secret—again, a secret embedded inside the moving image—of how a human being can be here one second and gone the next.

Needless to say, the kids went a little crazy for
Rebel Without a Cause
, and Jack Warner was obliged to eat his stubby tie. Since Dean and
Rebel
it has become something of a tradition that a posthumous artifact be delivered as part of the celebrity mourning ritual. As news carries ever quicker and video clips stream ever faster, that ritual begins in the seconds after a death announcement hits the Internet. Instead of waiting six weeks to watch a final film (although we still do that too), a kind of impromptu farewell performance is cobbled from 911 recordings, often pathetic final public appearances, B-roll of a body being wheeled from a building (the footage of Marilyn Monroe blanketed over on a stretcher and the peeks into the room where she died is a point of origin for this kind of thing), surreptitious morgue snaps, autopsy reports, and bleary security clips (Diana on a haunting loop, forever passing through that revolving door).

BOOK: This Is Running for Your Life
9.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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