Mask Theory

Friday I had a phone conversation with someone at the end of my work-day so truly frustrating I got so angry after it I felt as if I weren't going to be able to think for the whole weekend.  It was one of those fumy, funky feelings you get when you are confronted with a point of view so completely outside of your own it feels as if you've been kidnapped and thrown in a basement for a while. 

The different point of view has to do with all kinds of stuff, but mainly the topic of heated discussion was about the people with developmental disabilities we were both trying to support.  I'm not going to get into anything specific because it's not worth it here, but I figure I might as well blog about the Big Issue which is:  how do you separate people from their historical origins, from their tropes?  How do you pull the "type" away from the way you talk about and connect with them? 

The person on the other end kept laying claim to people, as in "my clients," or "my people," and I just don't do that.  That "my" becomes plantation-esque somehow, indicating an ownership that feels grounded in institutions and brainwaves from the past.  I think the fury I felt truly came from that alone mainly, hearing that "my" over and over and over, and then today rehashing the whole thing I thought about Diane Arbus' photographs of people with developmental disabilities taken during a Halloween party at a state institution back in the early 1960s.  One of them is above.  Somehow that "my" is trapped in that same moment above, that cryptic, masked sense of no-self, no-determination, no-ambition, just a group of identities only given identities as a group.  

How do we help get rid of those masks?  How can we separate the way we think and act from that instant classification, that instant knowing what's best, that "my-ness"? 

One way I guess is by always knowing what's up, and by not saying the "my" and also knowing why you don't say "my."  Still that's just semantics, still just a version of self censorship.  The move to make might be empathetically created (as in "I wouldn't only want to be thought of as only part of a group," etc.) but also it has to be functionally practiced.  We often think of ethics as only connected to an HR training or a high school course we took and slept through, rules that don't really matter outside of saying they do, ephemeral pontificating.  But ethics, in the way I'm trying to figure them out, are only important when acted on, as in erasing that ownership sensibility by understanding its weirdness and unkindness and moving forward from that, outside of platitudes, outside of words.  Doing something about it.

It was words, of course, that pissed me off so much on Friday.  That and the fact it was Friday and nobody wants to get into a work argument or any kind of argument on Friday afternoon.  But the words highlighted something very deep:  you can't take action until you figure out what's wrong with the way you're thinking about the actions you take. 

In this stuff, ethics are so important because they can allow you to unmask yourself.  And without a mask you, and everyone else, can see exactly who you are.

   

Welcome to the Monkey House

Diane Arbus:  "A Woman with her Baby Monkey, New Jersey 1971"

Andy Serkis as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Movies do things to you, even movies that you think you are too good for.  Like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a late summer blockbuster that seemed like a waste of time, one of those "franchise" movies trying to squeeze whatever juice it can from a mostly dried up concept:  monkeys ruling the earth.

So I saw it on TV the other day and I was floored.  Emotionally crippled for a little while. 

The movie has the grace and pace and eeriness of an early Cronenberg masterpiece like Dead Ringers smashed together with the popcorn glee of the very first Planet of the Apes.  Rise tells the story of Caesar, a chimpanzee born in a medical lab whose mother, Bright Eyes, is being injected with an experimental drug that supposed to eradicate Alzheimer's.  At the very beginning of the picture, Bright Eyes goes berserk because she does not want her secret child discovered.  Once he is discovered, however, James Franco's goofy. sweet, intense scientist adopts him, and they become linked parentally, spiritually, and morally.  It's the Moses story spliced with Spartacus. 

What allows Rise to escape its conventions is Andy Serkis.  Through the "magic" of motion-capture technology, Serkis portrays Caesar without wearing a monkey mask.  He is transformed digitally into his chimpanzee-ness, but that transformation somehow increases the emotional power of what he accomplishes as an actor.

It's all in the eyes.

Rise reminds me of how intimate, creepy, perfect, and simple movie-acting should and can be.  Serkis's eyes carry the movie through its many plot machinations, as if behind all those glossy computer-generated cosmetics are beams of light so strong you are allowed to forget the fakery and enter a place where chimpanzees actually do feel, talk and organize themselves into a kick-ass army about to take over Planet Earth. 

But the quintessential moment of the movie, for me, comes in a scene early on, when Caesar is taken for a walk in the park and he sees a dog on a leash, and then realizes he himself is on a leash too.  The expression in his eyes is one of disappointment, terror, fear, and hurt:  all this time he was actually thinking he was the equal of his human counterparts.  Now he knows he is not, and that knowledge is our doorway into his pain, and the movie's triumph.

I remembered a photograph taken by Diane Arbus while watching Rise.   It's titled  "A Woman with her Baby Monkey, New Jersey 1971," and I saw it in September at a retrospective of her work at the Tate Modern in London.  A skinny, ghostly and kind of ghastly-looking lady holds a baby monkey in her lap.  Both sets of eyes look right into Arbus's camera, as if to challenge us out of mockery.  And then as you look deeper you see there can be no mockery because this is life:  this is kindness, weirdness and bravery.  The baby monkey is being protected by this possibly insane lady, and yet the baby monkey seems also to be protecting the lady from something all of us fear:  being alone, being disconnected from the world, shattered and lost.  That baby monkey on the lady's lap is her connection to us somehow.

When Caesar recognizes he is just a goddamn dog on a leash I felt that same sense of displacement, and the movie guides us into an understanding of how horrifying and eventually empowering choosing not to be a dog on a leash can be.