what sort of a trick have you played on us?
including discussion on performativity, the division of the self, desire, iris murdoch, and the 1971 film 'The Devils'
You will scream! You will blaspheme! You will NO LONGER BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ACTIONS!
I’d like to bring into play a concept of ‘performativity’. This is distinct from the idea of theatricality, which, to my mind, can really only mean ‘defined by the confines and generic expectations of live theater’. Performativity can be invoked in media, but it’s also something that we see in real life. It is, very simply, when someone plays a role. Typically, it involves a division of the self – after a performative act, no matter how sincere, someone might say, ‘that’s not me’, or, ‘I was caught up in the moment’. Performativity is in play when a person is telling a story that they’ve told before, as they try to make it funnier, more poignant. Performativity is in play when a person desires someone else, and tries to appear a certain way to that other person.
What is remarkable about performativity is that it typically works toward the same desired outcome as intimacy, to the point where, I would argue, they are two expressions of the same impulse with radically different modes. In both cases the subject is representing itself to the other for the sake of eliciting a reaction, typically as a response to desire for love or recognition. The difference between the two is that one involves the shedding of a mask and the other involves its elaboration and use. That the two modes are often assumed to be bipolar, with some spectrum in between, is a pretty terrible error. In reality they’re two corridors, each with its own rules and assumptions, and they are trying to reach the same place. Performativity just has some strange permutations, and often ends with wild results.
I say all of this because I have become more than a little bit obsessed with Ken Russell’s 1971 film ‘The Devils’, which Veronika introduced me to last month. Critical discourse surrounding this film seems to be almost universally reactionary and annoying – there’s a level of hysteria and a fetishization of scandal which I don’t care to talk about. What I’m interested about here are the film’s characters. They remind me, almost, of the writer Iris Murdoch’s characters.
I have seen certain criticisms of Iris Murdoch’s scenarios and characters – they are too artificial, they do not reflect ‘real life’. And yet, I find her one of the most realistic authors I’ve read, not in spite of but because of the sheer artificiality of her scenarios. Murdoch understands performativity. She forces her characters to play many roles. This serves to make them more realistic. Something I’ve noticed about her work is that, because she is able to depict her characters in such a dramatic, artificial light, she can in turn invoke other layers of characterization which stand in sharp contrast to this initial stylization. This creates an image of a highly contradictory person, with conflicting motivations, whims, images of themself… this squares with what I know about people in my personal life.
And yet these characters invite criticism and accusations of unreality, because they are alarming. They demand recoil. There is comfort in a narrative which assumes coherent personalities for its characters. There is a reason why people are so drawn to such narratives – I think it’s because they like to assume a similar level of coherency for themselves. I can’t blame anyone for this, as it’s difficult to move through the world when you think of yourself as a confused jumble of whims, memories, sensory reactions, and desires. Murdoch’s characters embody this confused jumble (it’s no coincidence that they’re always trying to avoid ‘muddle’). They do things because they’re impacted by atmosphere, or even just the particular feel of a landscape. They are overtaken by the charisma of others, but reluctant to admit it. They act out their distress in cryptic ways that often make little sense in the moment. They do not quite know how to parse their childhoods. None of this is really signposted, because the structural crux of the plot is elsewhere, residing in those aforementioned elaborate dramas. The general impression is of absolute chaos broiling under and around a roleplaying game. This is realistic – how many of us have engaged in some tidy plot, expecting a certain outcome, and found that the reality of the people around us is nothing like that which we anticipated?
The luridity and artificiality which mark her characters are also pretty realistic. How often do you have a conversation that feels really natural? How often does someone say something to you that feels forced, or tell you a story you’ve heard before, or use a facial expression that just looks a little wrong? How many times a day do you see someone in bad makeup, or wearing an outfit that seems a bit awkward, like a costume? Have you ever had a screaming fight, a real one? Have you ever engaged in cheap dramatics?
There is something deeply embarrassing about visible performativity. It feels like seeing someone with face makeup rubbed off onto their collar, or with a visible panty line. It throws artifice into the light. This is, in my opinion, part of what makes ‘The Devils’ so difficult and fascinating to watch.
Oliver Reed’s character, Father Grandier, though excellently drawn, has gotten enough analysis. Vanessa Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne des Anges has also been talked about quite a bit, although I’d like to treat her with a different lens here, and look at her alongside Michael Gothard’s Father Barré. For context, Sister Jeanne is a nun who has accused Father Grandier of possessing her spiritually and forcing her to do lewd things. Father Barré is a ‘professional witchhunter’ who arrives in the town of Loudon halfway through the movie to investigate the case.
There is not a lot of love for this latter performance. I understand this, to some degree. It’s absolutely batshit. He spends a good amount of his time on screen screaming, contorting his face grotesquely, running around wreaking absolute mayhem. His costume is deeply strange, seeming to sit somewhere between ‘Friar Tuck’ and ‘John Lennon’. I am not sure why he is wearing wire frame glasses. It is an off putting and often confusing performance.
Yet, for the second half of the film, Vanessa Redgrave (and her band of nuns, which essentially mimic her) plays opposite this character. Their hysterias and fanaticism feed into each other. Without the both of them there would be no real basis for the famous ‘rape of Christ’ scene, nor would Barré’s torture and eventual burning at the stake of Grandier be so frenetic. The point that I want to make here is that, through what is basically mutual roleplay, the two manufacture an environment of such horrific, hallucinatory intensity that a man ends up dead and a town destroyed. This is one aspect of their performativity – it creates a world of its own.
The second, less immediately noticeable aspect of their hysterical ‘overacting’ is that it offsets something subtler and more complex, a set of unstated and often contradictory implied motivations which make both of their characters rather destabilizing. Of the two, Jeanne is centered and is therefore the more complicated – she rapidly vacillates between lust, malice and contrition toward Grandier, able to admit to herself after reflection that she’s ‘wronged an innocent man’, but, when face to face with him, accuses him of detailed crimes and hisses that he is a ‘devil’. There is no fixity or narrative thrust to her character. She acts based on whichever emotion is most present at the time, often masking them with shame and aggression.
It’s an incredible, nuanced performance, but I would argue that Gothard’s as Barré is equally nuanced, even if we are given less of a look into his inner world. This character is destabilizing because he is two things at once: a religious fanatic and a sadistic pervert. This isn’t a particularly unusual combination, but what is unique about Barré is that neither side ever overtakes or justifies the other. The viewer never gets the satisfaction of being able to say, ah, he is using his fanaticism as a cover for his sadism; nor do they get the opposite satisfaction of waving his character away with something like, ‘fanatical religion is inherently perverted’. There are times when he seems motivated by genuine belief, times when he seems motivated by weird desire, and there is no reconciliation. The overexaggerated fire and brimstone of the religious fervor only sets off the odd moments of self motivation, leaving us with a character which, like Sister Jeanne, is complex and irreducible to a clean narrative arc. In the end, he leaves Loudon quietly, with no explanation or apology.
Both of these people are fundamentally embarrassing characters. They take their roles too far, and their own motivations, lurking in the background, are a bit too visible. But this is what performativity is about – taking desire, elevating it, forcing it into some kind of story, forcing it into action in the eyes of others. It occurs to me now, after giving these examples, that performativity often takes the form of someone trying desperately to fit their unbearable private emotions into a narrative that can be acted out in public. It is, paradoxically, a way to hide from oneself while expressing oneself. It is a way to distance oneself from one’s feelings while enacting them in the world, with real consequences.
Often, at the end of a Murdoch novel, someone dies as the result of another character’s performative scheme. It’s this intrusion of reality into frenzy and fantasy that often brings the other characters back to themselves, that makes them realize exactly what it is they are doing, and what they really feel. But I don’t think performativity is, all in all, a bad thing. At its best, it’s a space for people to forge new realities that aren’t quite dictated by logic. At its worst, it can involve, I suppose, a reasonably innocent man being tortured and burned at the stake by a lunatic. My purpose of laying this all out is so that people (including myself) might ask themselves the following questions:
When do I feel abstracted from myself? What roles am I playing during this time?
What narratives am I trying to incarnate in my world? Who else is a character in these narratives? Do they have a victim?
What do I say my motivation is, and what is my actual motivation?