Ryan Gosling & Rachel McAdams, MTV 2005 Best Kiss Award

This is perhaps the most self-assured public kiss I have ever seen from two movie stars. I know, I know, I am far behind and millions of people from all over the world have already seen the kiss. But I only just saw it today.

At the time of this win, they were a couple. But they are also a couple of actors. Naturally, any couple winning an award would want to kiss to celebrate. But is a kiss by actors who are celebrating a win—before an audience—actually a kiss between a couple, or is it a performance kiss? Is it an authentic kiss?

I watched the clip twice to find out, but couldn’t. It’s certainly a very sexy, slow, well-orchestrated kiss, and both Ms. McAdams and Mr. Gosling seemed to know that she would stay on his hip as he walked to the award table.

Of course, the question of authenticity is all out-of-whack. For of course actors are actors, and so a kiss between actors that is acted is deeply authentic: it is perhaps more authentic for two actors to act a kiss when before millions, then to actually kiss.

If this is an acted kiss, then, but acting requires drawing on real feelings—and sometimes, in rare moments, produces them—a more bewildering question might be: are they, in acting this kiss, drawing on the feelings they had kissing each other in real life? Or are they drawing on the feelings of kissing other people that they drew on to kiss each other when they first started kissing while shooting the movie? Or are they drawing on the performance-kiss feelings of kissing in the movie, to mask what might be their real-kissing feelings in their moment of victory?

I like that last possibility best: that this kiss is a squelching of a real kiss for the sake of good ole showbiz.

When they kiss later, for real, will they—as actors always do—be stepping back from themselves and saying to themselves, “Remember this kiss, what it feels like to be kissing”—so they can use it again?

- Sheila Heti

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Tomboyfriend, “The End of Poverty”

This is a music video by my friends Margaux Williamson (images) and Ryan Kamstra/ Tomboyfriend (music). The reason I love it is not only because I think it’s great, but because my friends made it. That is, it’s not only because my friends made it that I think it’s great, but it’s great because my friends made it.

One of the main functions of art, as I understand it, is to soothe the fears or anxieties of the artist by making external and plastic what is ephemeral and inner and haunting – to make one’s feelings about life manifest in a form, in the hope that doing this will somehow tame them.

I know the context in which Margaux and Ryan made this video. I watched Margaux downloading clips of teenagers from YouTube to collage together; I’ve seen Ryan singing in his room. It’s incredibly meaningful to me because the world as I live in it has been made flesh. I talk to these people every day, we pound the same sidewalks and eat in the same shops. We talk about the same things over and over again, in the same ways. I know what keeps them up at night. Their anxieties are my own, and I can see them objectively in this video.

There is something about this art that makes it feel made for me—no less than the art that I make is, in large part, also made for me.

That’s because this is literally true. The art of your friends really is for you. All the art of the world is also for you. But don’t you feel like those artists whose work most moves your heart are, in the most profound sense (whether or not you could or would ever want to meet them) your friends?

All day on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere people have been reminiscing about Michael Jackson, who died on 25 June. A friend who is utterly unsentimental about his friends and never keeps in touch, seems to be crying into his keyboard from Vancouver.

Something interesting happens when an artist becomes a friend; what does it mean for an artist to be one’s friend? I think it means that they share the same anxieties, the same fears as you do. Their art makes it feel like you’ve been talking, like their fears are your own.

Michael Jackson, “Thriller” (1983)

If “Thriller” wasn’t actually the first music video I saw, it certainly is the first one I remember seeing. And it scared the shit out of me. But I stayed pressed into the couch, a little girl. I knew that the fear it inspired in me was the good sort of fear, without knowing quite what that meant. In retrospect, the good sort of fear is the fear you already have; it’s the fear that great art reminds you of—of all the things that you’ve been hiding, that you can see now clearly for the first time.

In the case of the video above, “The End of Poverty,” the people who made it actually are my friends. But what’s most amazing is not only that this is true, but that it feels like they’re my friends—the same way it feels like Manet is my friend, or Charlie Kaufmann, or Michael Jackson. The streets they pound are my own.

Because they had the courage and heart to show it, I know what keeps these artists up at night. It’s what—unbeknownst to me until I saw their work—has been keeping me up my entire life, too.

Update: A friend recently pointed this video out to me: a perfect mixture of Margaux’s technique with MJ’s style:

- Sheila Heti

Marlon Brando (1947)

This video of a young Marlon Brando gets particularly interesting around 3:50. He stands there, a rising star in the theatre, perhaps never before tested by the screen, perhaps eyed by the cameras for the very first time.

We see him follow the instructions of a disembodied female voice that bids him turn, show his profile, now can they see the back of his head?

He follows these commands easily, supressing a grin, innocent of any criticism that could be levelled against his beauty. He knows simply, without shame or modesty, exactly what he’s got, and that it’s something no one could find any flaw in. This is not irritating or sickening, but wonderful! We agree with him. Darling, you’re incredible! You’re absolutely right!

Have you ever seen pride expressed as sublimely as it is here? He makes the sin seem like a charming, irresistably beckoning quality; just a happy, off-hand way of sharing the gifts of God’s great earth. If this was all we knew of humans, we’d surely classify pride among the seven heavenly virtues.

But so when is pride a virtue? How does he effect this trick? Can beautiful people get away with anything, like Dorian Gray; be forgiven what the rest of us cannot? Can beauty turn what’s sour sweet? Or is this not vanity on display at all? Is it just the wholesome confidence of an apple-seller who plucked good apples from the orchard that day?

- Sheila Heti

This is a screen test of Dominique Swain, who ended up being cast in the 1997 film version of “Lolita” with Jeremy Irons. As a movie, it wasn’t much, and it certainly wasn’t as good as this screen test at capturing absolutely the heart of Nabokov’s novel.

I would wage this screen test is not only the best adaptation that any film of this novel could hope for, but perhaps the best film adaptation of any novel, period. Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain read from their prepared lines, but what happens between these actors and the director (Adrian Lyne) around and outside the lines could not have been planned, same as the best novels seem to come galloping out of the author’s head as the author, terrified, pulls back on the reigns of this dark horse that even they cannot control or know. This video gives one the same feeling: humans revealing their darkness despite themselves. And the darkness that’s revealed is the darkness of “Lolita.”

Wait for Jeremy Irons hitting Dominique Swain across the face, taking her by surprise. Watch how she reacts as the scene continues, and how she reacts when the scene is done. It’s a kind of horror and truth that the script can’t capture. But it’s here in this video. Also watch Swain, being tested for all her Lolitaness, and how she embodies the part both inside her lines and out.

- Sheila Heti