This the first entry in a new, ongoing column by Shonni Enelow, author, critic, and Professor of English at Fordham University. In Indirect Address, Enelow takes a closer look at the style, technique, and meaning of contemporary screen acting.
Who Goes There?
By Shonni Enelow
The teenager is looking directly into the camera and at a computer screen––we know this right away, because we recognize the composition of the bedroom furniture and the soft edges of her gaze. Her eyes drift around until she looks at us, the us of the computer. We are addressed by her, because this performance, for her computer, is for the “us” of that diffuse and distant online audience. We are that audience, if not diegetically then conceptually. I’m watching this movie on a computer right now.
Like all cultural practices, film acting is a historical palimpsest: new affects, tones, and gestures jostle with older ones, and what makes something feel contemporary is often a matter of some contingency. A certain combination of an actor’s embodiment, a cinematographer’s frames, a writer’s phrasing synthesizes to construct what audiences experience as specific to the present. But looking at contemporary film in the aggregate, it’s sometimes possible to discern a new or newly resonant style of performance that reveals something about how we live today. This is what I argued in my Film Comment essay “The Great Recession,” from 2016, where I described the shift in American film acting away from the big gestures of emotional expressivity that had dominated culturally legible great performances since the mid-twentieth century. During a time of highly publicized anxiety about online surveillance and pressures of self-branding, the young actors I wrote about in 2016 demonstrated an implicit skepticism and mistrust of emotional expression in general––a sense that the relational contract of that expression (I feel; you sympathize) had been broken. This plays out, for instance, in both Jennifer Lawrence’s highly contained performance in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010) and Rooney Mara’s twitchy aggression in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). What these actors expressed was the refusal to express.
But this refusal nonetheless articulated the force of the emotion beneath. Their refusal to perform emotion appeared as a will to preserve a reservoir of interiority, a protected space of personality, that functioned as a kind of audience wish fulfillment. In a surprising number of these films (all more or less mainstream narrative films from 2008 to 2015), this preservation was narratively enacted in the figure of the child who inexplicably maintains faith in an absent or withholding parent (as in Michael B. Jordan’s performance in Ryan Coogler’s Creed [2015]). These movie offspring engaged in a kind of “cruel optimism,” a concept from cultural theorist Lauren Berlant that describes our attachments to clearly inadequate objects that we know will disappoint us.
If that was 2016 (September 2016, I hasten to add, is when the article was published), where are we now? In this series I’m trying to answer that question. Anna Cobb’s performance as Casey, the childlike teenager at the center of Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, offers a compelling place to start. Cobb’s performance, in the context of the film, challenges several basic precepts of realist acting that even recessive performances from the 2010s left intact. To start, its realist foundation––what makes it a recognizably true-to-life portrayal of a contemporary middle-class character––depends on a form of performance that is historically anathema to realism: direct address. Cobb plays much of the film directly to the camera, as Casey records videos to post online within a massive multiplayer horror roleplaying game. Furthermore––again, as part of what makes it realism––the film renders impossible one of the most important directives of realist acting, one of the first things you learn in acting class, preparing, say, an audition monologue: you must know who you are talking to. But Casey, like anyone who posts videos online, is talking to everyone (if not everyone on the internet, everyone in the ambiguously bounded “community” of the game) and no one. This is even the case later in the film when she seems to be addressing one player in particular, a player she knows only by their avatar’s grotesque line drawing and the digitally garbled voice that reads as merely adult and male. Direct address in Schoenbrun’s film is utterly indirect.
What’s more, because we almost never see her outside of her videos, the performance disallows the dual or multiple levels that typically characterize realist acting, in which we often watch a character behave differently in public than she does in private. In what I called recessive realism, the private self remains private––the actor demonstrates her refusal to show her feeling not just publicly in the diegesis but to us, the audience as well––but there is still a sense of public demand (for authenticity, for emotion, for truth) that the actor refuses to meet. But Cobb performs a character for whom performing is mundane, habitual, and largely unmarked––there is no Casey outside of her videos. (Interestingly, Schoenbrun’s film does include a dual-level portrayal in the other player Casey becomes involved with, whom we see alternately as his avatar and as a middle-aged man in a McMansion, scenes filmed with an objective camera in a more conventional style. This emissary from an earlier realist genre throws Cobb’s Casey into relief.)
So, what does characterize Casey’s behavior? Her modes––the up-pitched “hey guys, Casey here” with which she starts every video; her confessional monologues, recorded outdoors, with their banal attempts at profundity; her sleep videos, both creepy and vapid; and later in the film, her psychological breakdown videos, like one in which she dances manically and then suddenly starts screaming––all combine formulaic intimacy and pronounced distance. Her sleep videos are exemplary: the recording promises access, intimacy, authenticity, but actually records vacancy––quite literally, evacuation. On the one hand, she’s entirely vulnerable; on the other, she reveals nothing at all.
If in the 2010s it was possible to understand the pressure to perform as something coming from an outside force––the Hunger Games’ fascist surveillance state, say––in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the drive is lateral. Casey wants to join the game, wants to make these videos, because other people have already done so. Repetition is the motor of this world, as we find when Casey, the reflective glow of the screen visible in the irises of her eyes, repeats the mantra of the game, or “challenge,” like a spell: “We’re all going to the world’s fair.” This repetitive, hypnotic quality of Casey’s actions gives Cobb’s performance a peculiar sense of diffusion and vagueness, even when it’s aggressive: for instance, in Casey’s “Sleep Journal 6,” in which she’s suddenly not in bed; she crawls from the side of the frame, her feline face in extreme close-up, eyes centered, chin tilted down. “I see you there,” she snarls, “even if you won’t show your face.” Notably, given the content of her line, Cobb projects no hidden motives here, no secrets, no desires. In fact, throughout the film, desire is notably absent: after Casey’s snarling address, Schoenbrun’s camera pulls back to show the man watching all her videos, but if his gaze can’t not be prurient, it's also oddly asexual.
In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, there is no repression because there is no interiority. Psychology has been exteriorized, outsourced, into video, like the blank, pretty face in the ASMR video that Casey watches at night who repeats “you’re okay…you’re okay.” The question of the film is not so much whether Casey is really losing her mind, like the game ambiguously promises, but whether the feedback loop that bolsters her experience of immersion is dependent on her sharing of her fantasy with others. In the narrative climax, when the male player asks her “to go outside the game,” acknowledging it was all pretend, she looks crushed: perhaps she had convinced herself otherwise, or perhaps she believed in the relational reality of the delusion––if someone else believed her, it would be real.
“The video’s a fake. But so is all of this,” Casey says––the online world, sure, but also the barren and void anywhere-USA landscape outside. In the intimate impersonality of the computer-as-bedroom, which has no drive except to reproduce itself, the game itself takes over what was formerly the work of subjectivity: to corral chaos into a more-or-less legible frame. In this series, I want to explore what this post-subjective performance does to acting more generally, when actors and filmmakers move away from the computer screen––and consider whether such a move is even possible.