http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_PmSE6g4Ks

Michael Mann, “Miami Vice” (1984/90 & 2006)

Sometime in the late 80s I watched this show. I was a kid. I watched it with my friend, Nora, who could be mean and cold, and whose actions could be inscrutable, like a boy’s. Who sometimes wouldn’t talk to me for weeks, for no reason, like we were in some romantic relationship that had suddenly, and inexplicably, ended. After a wave of ecstatic bonding, Nora would cut me off. And I would wander the school halls alone, watching Nora flirt with her other friends. Watching Nora seduce new people.

I watched “Miami Vice” with Nora who used to spend every other weekend at her father’s place. She had a TV in her bedroom. I discovered a lot of things with Nora, like sex hotlines, all the rage at the time, Tears for Fears, Channel J, and the first boy I ever loved.

Nora’s father was an artist and took us with him to modern dance recitals, the theater, and parties in Soho. One party was in a warehouse building that overlooked the West Side Highway. Nora and I threw paper airplanes out the window that landed in the Hudson River, which we could barely see, it was so dark, and called sex hotline numbers from the host’s bedroom.

For one party, Nora and I dressed up like Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in “Miami Vice.” We had tried to look like them for a long time. I don’t know where we got the clothes, or why we chose to be those men in particular. I think we already had the clothes and the clothes just dovetailed with the images of the two men. We both had a pair of boat shoes that could pass for loafers. We wore them without socks. We had linen jackets and pants. Bright pink t-shirts. We rolled our sleeves up. I had short, dark hair, like Philip Michael Thomas.

All this was before I discovered Blaine (Andrew McCarthy) and Steff (James Spader) in “Pretty in Pink.” Blaine and Steff are pitched as emotional opposites, yet both are rich and dress the same way. So how can you tell them apart? The movie is about that. Even Blaine doesn’t know the answer until the end of the movie (in the movie’s original ending, which was reshot six months later due to audience disapproval, Blaine didn’t know the answer by the end of the film either). But Andie (Molly Ringwald), who is different, sees how he is different from his friend Steff.

Steff, like Blaine, is attracted to Andie’s difference, but only because he can’t assimilate it. On the other hand Andie isn’t able to really appreciate Duckie’s difference (or his love for her) because Duckie’s difference doesn’t require recuperation (Duckie is played by Jon Cryer). It’s too “pure.” Difference, the movie says, has to be rescued. Difference is a damsel in distress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcSMDqXT52s

Howard Deutch, “Pretty In Pink” (1986)

A lot of teen movies in the 80s were about exteriorizing one’s socio-economic aspirations and formalizing them into adulthood in the form of mature clothing. Clothing that signified a kind of subjunctive adulthood and mainstream success. Even if you weren’t an adult, you were in training to be one, and the clothes — the suits, jackets, and ties at school that weren’t uniforms in the strict sense — meant you could transition into adulthood because, really, there was nothing to transition from. Adult or formal clothing — “power dressing” — was a way of being part of the world, the status quo, which in the 80s was about identifying with the tropes of materialism, power, wealth, greed, success, access. It’s no accident, then, that the business suits women sported in the 1980s as they entered the corporate sphere were referred to as “power suits” (the power suit was parodied to great effect by David Byrne in “Stop Making Sense“). Your life was your business and business was your life. This was before we found cheap ways to look expensive, or expensive ways to be cheap. This was before you could cheat at being rich.

Wearing grown-up clothes in the 80s (see “Less Than Zero,” “Saint Elmo’s Fire,” even “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) was thus a way of being tied — primed — to the conventions of the world even before you were emotionally and chronologically prepared to be primed for them. Through your clothes you could look like the outside world. You could show the world you were part of it by dressing like and for it. The market, personified by the yuppie — the market in the flesh — became an identity. Brand names became increasingly important in the 1980s. Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein became household names.

In “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Ferris, a high school student, plays hooky like a child or adolescent, but spends his day off acting like an adult: dines at a five star restaurant, drives around in a Ferrari 250, goes to an art museum, impersonates adult voices, wines and dines his older-looking girlfriend in the manner of a middle aged, married man. Even the songs Ferris sings at the parade he crashes — “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles and “Danke Schoen” by Wayne Newton — are songs for and by an older generation. Observe, too, all the adult “costumes” Ferris sports in the clip below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-P6p86px6U

John Hughes, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986)

But as much as the 80s were about mainstreaming the alternative, and maturing and commercializing the juvenile (teen movies, The Brat Pack…), it was also about the avantgardization of the mainstream, a time when clothing signified identity and when everything started to get mixed up. As conformist as the 80s were, it was also a decade that was refreshingly incorrigible about its fashion faux pas. We had nefarious teenage-adults like Steff (who wore job clothes. Power clothes), but we also saw people like Andie, Duckie, and Andie’s older, mother-figure friend, Iona, in “Pretty In Pink” (who goes corporate, at least in dress, by the end of the movie), who were retro, romantic, anti-label; “mutants,” as they’re called in the film; whose clothes reflected their anti-conformist sensibilities and interests, signifying not just who they were, but who they weren’t.

What appeals to me most about “Pretty in Pink” is that Andie doesn’t have a good time on her first date with Blaine. She is miserable at Steff’s party. She wants to know why Blaine’s brought her there. Andie shows her disgust. Voices it. Has integrity. But Blaine doesn’t understand. He’s always embarrassed. Unsure of himself. Weak. Andie and Blaine go upstairs to Steff’s bedroom, where Blaine says they can be alone. Instead, they find Steff and his girlfriend, Benny, who bullies and mocks Andie at school, running around half-naked and drunk. Steff is a mixture of self-contempt, cruelty, and arrogance. But he also always knows what Andie’s thinking better than Blaine does. And what Andie’s thinking is what Steff is secretly thinking about himself.

As a woman, Andie has the power to make men question who they are. That’s why she has a man’s name. Andie and Blaine are watching the spectacle of Steff and Benny — the 80s — like it’s a movie inside a movie. A time inside a time. The 80s are turned into a primal scene and “the room becomes a code,” as Jeanette Winterson writes in “Written On The Body,” “that you only have a few minutes to crack.” Blaine is attracted to Andie’s difference — both respects and fears it — and yet he also tries to insinuate Andie into the very things (structure) she is different from because he has nothing different to offer himself. Blaine wants to be different, but he doesn’t want to do anything differently. He wants difference without the difference.

In “Pretty in Pink,” a great deal of emphasis is placed on diagnosing what makes Andie different and what Andie’s difference makes of her. When Andie refuses Steff’s advances, for example, Steff responds with: “I don’t know what makes you so different.” But of course that isn’t true. Steff knows exactly what makes Andie different, and part of that difference is her disavowal of him. Later, at Steff’s party, Benny tells Andie, “You’re an asshole. I don’t want to know what you are,” and Steff is visibly disgusted by Benny. By the things he has. By what and who is like him.

In Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel “Bright Lights, Big City” there is a line about not crossing lines. Lines that don’t exist anymore. About how yuppies wouldn’t go below NYC’s 14th street in the 1980s. Now the yuppie wears the artist and the artist wears the yuppie. Scorsese’s 80s movie “After Hours” offers a parodic rendition of this cross-pollination, where the yuppie is literally encased in art/ist, and the avantgarde/alienaton is Soho at night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLHM-wPecz0

Martin Scorsese, “After Hours” (1985)

Nora and I wanted to go to the Soho party as boys, maybe even as men, because we thought we could pick up boys that way. Attract them by being some version of boys ourselves. We thought we could know and access the world that way too. We knew that boys liked to talk to other boys. We knew that clothes were also about whose bodies they were on. We were power dressing too. But why dress like grown men, in another city, on TV, in a hot climate, like we weren’t two New York girls with alternative, bohemian parents going to a party in the dead of winter in summer clothes? Why did we decide to ape two middle-aged men whose job it was to drive around and capture other men?

I was always more interested in looking than being looked at. Before I knew that I could think what I wanted to think, and feel what I wanted to feel as a girl, I was a boy in my head. As a little girl I was obsessed with male beauty (still am), instead of being concerned about the potentials or logistics of my own. In a culture where to a large extent only women’s beauty is meant to have real value and cache, male beauty mattered to me because I felt that while I might never be a beautiful girl, if I fashioned my outside to match my inside, I might be able to pull off being a cute boy. Moreover, I could probably be the kind of cute, thoughtful boy, cute, thoughtful boys sometimes liked girls to be. More importantly, I thought I could access the strength of girlhood and womanhood through boyhood.

Nora and I thought images belonged to men. We thought images were the road to adulthood and independence. We thought boys could be what they wanted to be. Images taught us, even if our parents didn’t, that men, not women, were independent. Romantic. Creative. We didn’t see the girls we wanted to be onscreen, so we thought being some kind of boy was to be some kind of image.

So how do we tell things apart and draw lines today and why has wanting to still tell some things apart become such a bad thing? In a seen-it-all-before, see-it-all-the-time, interchangeable global world, where can difference be found? Let it be clear that I’m not talking about racial or sexual stereotyping in order to distinguish the “bad guys” from the “good guys,” something our current War on Terror culture and the 80s relished in. As a decade, the 80s was obsessed with classifying and categorizing people. It divided and subdivided (see “The Breakfast Club”: The Jock, The Brain, The Princess, The Criminal). There was always a gap. A hierarchy. A delineation.

The case has and will be made again that all this mixing and matching — mashing-up — blending and blurring is a good thing because it allows us to be free of categories and rules; free of fixed signifiers and binaries; to look like anything and anyone without necessarily being committed to actually being anything (Lady Gaga epitomizes this “freedom”). The Other is now the one who looks like all of us, and all of us look like the Other without actually having to live through and with the alienation (and edification) of Otherness. “I am only well when I am what is necessary to be the other,” writes Pierre Guyotat in “Coma.”

There is a part of Andie that is also still invested in who she isn’t. In having what she doesn’t have. I preferred it when only people like Steff wore Lacoste and Ralph Lauren; people with real money wearing clothes that signified their real socio-economic and socio- cultural position in the world because it allowed me to know my place in the world. It represented a cognitive gap. I knew who and what a Steff was, the world he came with and the world that came with him, the way Andie in “Pretty in Pink” knows who and what a Steff is, and therefore keeps her distance from him. But how can you keep your distance from something or someone if you don’t know who or what that thing is? If you can’t tell anything apart? If that thing looks like you and you like that thing. You can’t, and since you can’t, you don’t, and when you don’t, differences and distinctions are eroded. Dangerously blurred. Sometimes a book is a cover.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35tfXSINbCQ

Howard Deutch, “Pretty In Pink: The Steff Edit” (1986)

And

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qggFXvR6y0

Howard Deutch, “Pretty In Pink: 25th Anniv. Extras– James Spader” (1986)

Everything is an image now and the image is now everything. Not just part of who you are and where you came from, the image is now the thing you see, the thing you are, before you do anything. Think anything. Want anything. There is no you first. But there is a me that performs, that is a commodity, which is a notion that comes from a culture of images that are meant to act for us. Instead of us.

While some aspect of difference was clearly the motivation for my identification with gender-bending, with “Miami Vice,” because I was little, I also misjudged what was similar. What I really wanted to be like, and not like, which was not a man with power at all. But a girl who did not want to be divided. I didn’t know yet what power could turn a man, or the world, or me into if I tried to act like one. Nora and I thought about the sameness we were accessing in the form of difference, but we did not think about the difference we were erasing by performing an imitation. By copying a commodified body onscreen offscreen. By trying to be the same when we wanted to be different.

In “Pretty in Pink,” Andie, who makes her own clothes, makes her famous pink prom dress by deconstructing the status quo gown that her father buys her. Andie remakes the dress into something unique, something money can’t buy, in order to transcend her class shame. Money is how the rich kids in the film get what they want. Andie conquers and subverts her desire to be the same, to have what everyone has, by re-establishing her difference. By turning a dress that is for everyone into a dress that is just for her. A dress that money can buy, but difference can re-make.

There can be no real, unco-opted difference without gaps; without distance and deference and shock; without the unfamiliar; without the truly weird and incongruous; without carefully distinguishing between the alternative and the mainstream. The only difference that makes a difference is the kind that is challenging, off-putting, even threatening. That kind you cannot instantly appropriate, recuperate, neuter, or sell. Historically, the avantgarde and alternative movements were born of alienation and distance. A gap. Yuppies refusing to go below 14th Street.

In his book “Non-Stop Inertia,” Ivor Southwood calls for a recovery of negativity (resistance):

“Reality TV and social media have eliminated offstage space, destroying mystery and celebrating banality; art slides into decorative commerce; rebellion is commodified and marketed like a fashion brand, as in supposedly alternative rock groups whose superficial revolutionary posturing is belied by a deep musical and cultural conformity and tiresome job-interview positivity. Former punk icons are now insurance salesmen and property developers. New cultural forms based upon ‘distance and reflection’ rather than ‘empathy and feeling’ are called for, to break the stalemate.’”

If we know rich is cheap, talk is cheap, wealth is fake, fake is valuable, real is futile; if signs have been totally demystified, confused, and emptied out; their mystique and power exhausted and drained, then what possible significance and signification can signs — identity — have? How and what can we still signify? Does anyone mean anything they say or do anymore? How do we read signs that are no longer signs, or rather, signs that no longer mean what they signify? How can we read what has become unreadable? How does anyone take a stand with their bodies, their sexes, their faces, their clothes? How do we decipher what’s indecipherable? With a behind-the-scenes to everything — the knowledge of how all things work and what all things become — what power can things still hold and what still holds power? What remains a priori in a posteriori world?

Instead of fashioning his rebellion against the white middle class bourgeois suburban adulthood in which he’s been brought up, Ferris Bueller goes deeper into the fantasy, so that it’s not rebellion at all, but a sign of things to come. Of his life in the future. Of the gap closing. And Ferris’ rivaling sister knows it.

- Masha Tupitsyn

The post Prettier In Pink appeared first on Ryeberg Curated Video.

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David Lynch, “Lost Highway,” (1997)

On the subway all fifty of us had on our headphones like idiots trying to block out the world, or put music to it, since the world on TV and in the movies always has music. I remembered listening to The Stills while driving cross-country with you. Our first stop: North Carolina to see your sisters. On the way there, we stopped in a Target parking lot, turned the popped trunk into a café awning, and made our own soy lattes with the aero latte frother I bought on a flight to London once.

On the trip, the road was polarized, half-horror, half-romance. We thought we were going to get killed half the time, which was romantic because dying with someone always is, and we were going to die together, die trying not to die, and I even started praying in the dark just in case. The trucks on I-90 were so big and fast, silver bullets shooting through the werewolf highway, Duel-like, except real men were driving them and we had nothing to ward them off with. No cinematic formula. We just pulled over and stopped the little red car we were in, a tiny bloodstain moving across the big picture of the road. The woman at the gas station said, “Be careful. This stretch is known for its bullies,” the way that life is a stretch known for its bullies, and everyone, but my mother, laughed at us for being scared when we told them what happened. Remember when we used to tell people how we felt? I often asked you that. The memory of trusting people, confiding in them.

I was so terrified that I left you alone by falling asleep for half an hour and when I woke up the road was all ours, like at the end of a movie where two characters get to live, or a post-apocalyptic space that’s yours but ruined. Yours because it’s ruined. In sleep, in love, we dozed in and out of each other, in and out of the world, lanes criss-crossing, like the characters in “Lost Highway”, except I wasn’t the dark playing off the light, or the dark playing off the blonde (you). And for the last forty minutes, after the coast was clear, when all the bullies were finally gone, we cruised along the asphalt and held hands under the music. The astral road was stripped of cars, lit up and silver, like that path in the Redwood forests of “E.T.,” or the moon over Elliott’s levitating bike, and it was just us, a punk-rock version of Adam and Eve, us against everything, us there first, or last, except I didn’t come from you or any garden.

What’s that movie where the road is interior? A personality? A light switch? It was like that.

It wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill love story. It was movie love. Love you could film. Love you remember seeing somewhere. Love you remember seeing all your life. Love that changes you or that you change. Love that could mean something to the people looking at it. Big and rare and photogenic.

I kept you awake by squeezing you every now and again because I don’t drive. You said you needed my help, and more than once I saved you from crashing, and now, now that you’re gone, I would replace you if I could, but I’ve never even seen a face I think I could even remotely know. I never see a single face.

In “Julia” (1977), Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) tells her life-long friend, Julia (Vanessa Redgrave): “You still look like nobody else,” which is the best compliment I’ve ever heard. Lillian means that whatever Julia is on the inside is what makes her matchless on the outside. Someone you can’t lose in someone else or double with an opposite or split into parts or dream up again.

Listening to too much music is like being underwater or having cotton in your ears. It’s a lot of pressure on what you’re feeling. The music weighs in. When it comes to feelings, listening to music is the equivalent of framing a picture. Framing a face. You can have your picture feelings up on the wall without a frame, but it doesn’t look as put together. It doesn’t look as good. It doesn’t stay there. With music, you can hang your feelings up and look at them, and so can other people.

-Masha Tupitsyn

The post Lost Highway appeared first on Ryeberg Curated Video.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGelOOcePs

David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, “1984” (1973)

The alien can do this because the alien plays with time. Even though it is actually 1974, not 1984, Bowie, as the alien rock star Ziggy Stardust, doesn’t have to be in real-time. That is, in time physically. Bowie is in the meaning of time regardless of where time actually is, which is at the heart of all science fiction. For Bowie, time is drag, a keyhole (note the black keyhole costume Bowie is festooned in when “Ziggy” is uncloaked on stage).

Wikipedia describes Ziggy Stardust like this: “Ziggy is the human manifestation of an alien being who is attempting to present humanity with a message of hope in the last five years of its existence. He is the definitive rock star: sexually promiscuous, wild in drug intake and with a message, ultimately, of peace and love; but he is destroyed both by his own excesses of drugs and sex, and by the fans he inspired.” This is a classic biography of fame and the way the desire for it corrupts, as is the celebrated 2010 film “The Social Network.”

As The Thin White Duke singing “1984,” Bowie is the year 1984 even before the year came around. While the alien/omniscient Ziggy at London’s Marquee Club warns us that the year is coming, The Thin White Duke in New York informs us that the year has landed, and it has taken residence in his body.

It has been widely reported that between the years 1975-76, Bowie made pro-Fascist remarks, expressing his admiration for Adolf Hitler and his wish to rule the world. Whether or not Bowie was actually a fascist, he performed and aestheticized fascism as identity, as costume; affecting its authoritarian politics as artifice.

In Hollywood movies, aliens are almost always accused of wanting world domination. Their presence is typically about supremacy. Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, has essentially been accused of the same thing in “The Social Network.” If The Thin White Duke is Bowie shedding his mutable, androgynous alien status in order to enter the hardness of the 1980s and its potent male superpower symbolism, Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s 21st Century antidote to social dominance and immunity (in “The Social Network,” the seeds of Facebook are sown after Zuckerberg’s girlfriend breaks up with him. In other words, when he is at his most dejected and vulnerable). Zuckerberg can thus be read as a digital and corporate analog to Bowie’s Thin White Duke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH9WnSOISv0

David Bowie as The Thin White Duke, “1984” (1974)

Bowie’s Duke has been derided as “a hollow man feeling nothing,” “ice masquerading as fire” (As the Duke, Bowie claimed to subsist on a diet of “red peppers, cocaine, and milk,” ingredients that could easily be the recipe for fire and ice), “an immoral zombie,” “mad artistocrat,” and “an emotionless, Aryan Superman.” Similar qualifiers have been used to describe Zuckerberg. Bowie, who called his Duke an “ogre,” was not unlike Zuckerberg’s rogue brat in “The Social Network.”

While Zuckerberg, Jewish and middle-class, is not an Aryan Superman, money has enabled him to become a corporate Superman (as Napster founder Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, informs Zuckerberg in the movie, “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what is cool? A billion dollars.” This takes Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” 80s ethos in “Wall Street” to a whole new level).

Bowie’s Thin White Duke is addicted to cocaine, jumpy, famous, polished, superior, icy, polymorphous, and is dressed like a character from “The Damned,” the first film in Luchino Visconti’s “German Trilogy.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFRZZ2k2iGk

Luchino Visconti, “The Damned” (1969)

Like the Nazi character Martin von Essenbeck (Helmet Berger, Visconti’s real-life lover), Bowie is masculine and powerful in a way that is purely symbolic—not physical. Essenbeck’s fascist polymorphism (Essenbeck first appears onscreen in drag impersonating Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel,” which, made in 1930, is considered to be the first major German sound film, and in 1933 was banned in Nazi Germany, though it is reported that Adolph Hitler viewed the film secretly on a number of occasions) suggests that he can do anything to anyone (in the film, Essenbeck is secretly molesting his young cousin and a poor Jewish girl. He later sexually assaults his mother and joins the SS), and that he can be anything and anyone because he possesses the right body at the right time. In a scene that has now become iconic, Essenbeck’s theatricalized subjectivity as Dietrich suggests the permission to perform anything, no matter how scandalous.

While in “Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era,” Susan Jeffords argues that the hard body right-wing, masculinist politics of the 1980s were developed into a hard male body equivalent, in “The Male Body,” Susan Bordo points out that “’hardness’ alone is not sufficient to make a phallus, and well-defined muscles are not enough to make a master of the universe. The master body must signify an alliance with the gods rather than the masses, the heavens rather than the earth.’” This is where Ziggy Stardust (the otherworldly alien) meets the fascistic, Aryan God, The Thin White Duke. Translated from Italian, “The Damned,” “La caduta degli dei,” literally means, “The Fall of the Gods.”

Both Bowie and Essenbeck are examples of phallic symbolism. They are not literal hard bodies, but symbolic ones. “Increasingly, masculine power and authority,” explains Bordo, “were seen to derive not from nature, but from God—not a god of procreation like Osiris, but the God of Immortal Forms, Disembodied Spirit, Pure Reason.” The actual penis became less significant and, in some sense was even believed to be an obstruction to male rationality. Potency had more to do with will, and hardness was less about the hardness of an actual penis, and more about having the right kind of “upward-pointing” body.

“The penis’s potential for ‘hardness,’” writes Bordo, “and all that it suggests has been displaced onto the whole male body, where it can function more unambiguously as a symbol of strength, power, and upward aspiration. Where it suggests Prometheus, not Priapus.” Because they possess the right kind of culturally signifying bodies, it hardly matters that Bowie and Essenbeck flirt with androgyny and sexual ambiguity, or that they look like or play women. Both literally and metaphorically, their bodies permit them to be and to exploit other bodies.

Zuckerberg, with his Jewish body, is not endowed with the same cultural privileges. However, his male superiority does fall under the paradigm of male intellect and rationality, particularly if we think of Facebook as the ultimate exercise in the Disembodied Spirit. It is this paradigm of masculinity that allows Zuckerberg to “rule the earth.”

Radiohead released their debut single “Creep” in 1992, an anthem of alienation that “The Social Network” exploits in its trailer (covered by the Belgian choir group Scala & Kolacay Brothers). As the Duke, Bowie was largely derided as a creep too. Using “Creep’s” famous lyric, “I’m a freak/I’m a weirdo/What the hell am I doing here?/I don’t belong here,” as its mantra, “The Social Network” encapsulates Zuckerberg’s invention as the move from material to immaterial exile (In “1984,” Bowie sings, “I’m looking for a vehicle”). Thus Zuckerberg’s culturally representative anomie evaporates—or liquidates, to use the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s term—into Facebook, a vehicle that enables us not to be anything or anyone; or, everything and everyone.

But Facebook also represents Zuckerberg’s sexual, ethnic, and class anxieties about not belonging at the elite and exclusive Harvard and crafting an elite (elite not in usage, but because Facebook endowed him with money, power, and fame) electronic surrogate to treat his disaffection. Likewise, “coming to earth” as the vulnerable alien Ziggy Stardust ameliorated Bowie’s own British export status, an alienation that his Thin White Duke attempted to resolve.

As The Thin White Duke, Bowie, the man, was on the brink of total disintegration. His recovery, both creatively and mentally, is reported to have taken place in Berlin, where Bowie lived (some say hid out) for a time, and, like Visconti, made his own “German Trilogy,” the famous “Berlin Trilogy” with Brian Eno (“Low,” “Heroes,” and “Lodger”).

Bowie’s song “A New Career in A New Town” from “Low” documents some of the themes in Bowie’s life at the time. As does his song “Move On” from “Lodger.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NGc1nlWOiU

David Bowie, “Move On” (1979)

Respectively, Zuckerberg sought refuge from his discontent on the internet, not by simply using it, but by designing it in his likeness (God) and bending it to his will (Superman). According to “The Social Network,” Zuckerberg has mixed loneliness, avarice, and resentment, making him simultaneously alien and duke, and turning Facebook into the new egoistic poetry of disaffection. To quote Zygmunt Bauman, “And so we seek rescue in ‘networks,’ whose advantage over hard-and-fast bonds is that they make connecting and disconnecting equally easy.’”

Bowie’s alien in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film “The Man Who Fell to Earth” is an amalgamation of Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke. Thomas Jerome Newton, Bowie’s humanoid alien in the film, has the red hair (fire) of Ziggy and the short slicked back white hair (ice) of the Thin White Duke. Newton’s planet, Anthea, is sick, starving for water (the way Los Angeles is starving for water in “Chinatown.” Not coincidentally, The Thin White Duke could easily be a noir character; the kind of mercurial, menacing, and fatalistic noir identity that Martin von Essenbeck symbolizes in “The Damned”).

“The Man Who Fell To Earth” can be interpreted as Bowie’s creative and personal trajectory, for what is Bowie but the ultimate humanoid alien simultaneously corrupted by and corruptor of the earth? At one point in the film, Newton tells his earthly red-haired lover, Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), “If I stay here, I will die,” which really means, if we stay here (in this state) we will die (all of Roeg’s films are arguably about this), for the alien is always warning us about ourselves (see “E.T.“).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKF5lHcJY9k

Nicolas Roeg, “The Man Who Fell To Earth” (1976)

In The Thin White Duke performance of “1984,” Bowie looks vaguely like Christian Bale playing Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho,” if Bateman were emaciated and being played by the Bale of “The Machinist,” and if Bateman weren’t the classic American 80s hard-hard body. No longer merely symbolic, The 80s male body was largely about indestructibility; the smug and inscrutable ideological armor that housed masculinity and stood for the indefatigability of national identity.

But it’s the 80s soul that’s on display in this performance about the legendary year (in the case of “American Psycho,” it’s the 80s imagination). And, like “The Social Network” (a conduit for the 21st’s), the Duke’s performance of “1984″ is affecting and arresting and chilling because it is Bowie commenting on the 80s—singing about them—while being them. It’s the world in a body, just like “American Psycho” is about the world in a (male) body or the male-body world of the 1980s. It is also being inside your body while singing about your body, or singing about your body while being in your body (in the film version of “American Psycho,” Bateman literally revels and luxuriates in his body). And this is also what the alien narrative dramatizes. The alien uses its body to comment on and receive the world.

In an abstract sense, “The Social Network” is about this too—using the technology of Facebook to articulate what it means to live in a Facebook world. It is about using while using, as well as the kind of disembodied body you need to live a Facebook existence (see “Avatar“). Facebook is about us being us right now. “The Social Network” is thus perhaps the closest reflexive example that we have of being thoroughly reflexive. To being, metaphorically speaking, instantaneous. That is, the moment of watching the moment we live in as we live it.

After all, what better account could we find of becoming electronic, of filling up on nothing—of the sentiment, “I don’t belong here” moving from a material world and relocating to an immaterial one—than “1984’s” line, “They’ll split your pretty cranium/And fill it full of air?” Radiohead’s idealistic and in-your-body “Creep,” on the other hand, is still betting on a real place to really belong to in a real way.

When the petulant and detached Zuckerberg is asked at one of “The Social Network’s” deposition hearings if they have his “full attention,” it is a question posed to us, Facebook users. What or who has our full attention? Zuckerberg, distracted by the “rain” outside, turns to face the attorney (us) and answers, “No.” When the attorney follows up with, “Do you think I deserve your full attention? Zuckerberg, bored and seething, grudgingly turns to face the room, and elaborates: “You have part of my attention. You have the minimal amount.”

What could describe Facebook, or the internet age for that matter, more succcintly? On the internet, and because of the internet, we all give and get part of each other’s attention—only part. Only the minimal amount. Jesse Eisenberg then concludes his now celebrated and quintessentially antisocial, egoistic speech by falling silent, again, shooting his competitors a homicidal look, and wryly cocking his head to the side.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mehUC5l-lGM

David Fincher, “The Social Network” (2010)

This last gesture is eerily malevolent and reminiscent of Michael Myers’ own head tilt in John Carpenter’s “Halloween” just after he’s skewered a teenager to a door (1.31 to 1.46). Both are almost parodies. Spoofs on human behavior.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4IgpiUaQM

John Carpenter interviewed by Mark Kermode (1999)

While Myers’ head tilt takes a comic form because he has reacted to something horrific with a surprisingly naïve and human gesture—curiosity—Zuckerberg’s authoritarian scowl takes almost horrific form because he comes across as so utterly contemptuous and callous.

In that same interview with John Carpenter, film critic Mark Kermode calls Mike Myers’ masked face, “the blankest of anti-heroes.” Carpenter provides a definition for Myers’ monstrous apathy: “it’s almost like the comedy-drama mask. It’s just blank. You read into it, as opposed there being anything there. It’s not a personality. It’s a force of nature.” This is as much a description of Zuckerberg as it is of Facebook.

In his first television interview in 17 years, the singer Morrissey launched a scathing attack on Bowie in 2004, saying that he was “showie” and a “business.’” Morrissey claimed that the public only fell in love with Ziggy Stardust, while “the visuals for Ziggy were dreamt up by someone else.” But one could easily say the same thing about Facebook: a social networking phenomenon that feels like it’s ours, that we have claimed as an alternate for ourselves, but whose visuals (codes of conduct, modus operandi) have been dreamt up by someone else (Mark Zuckerberg, who went from being Facebook himself to making a billion dollar empire out of his own alienation, and by proxy, ours. If Bowie’s musical career is a cautionary tale about becoming all business, I’d rather be a business than a social network).

“(He is) not the person he was,” Morrissey goes on to say. “He is no longer David Bowie at all. Now he gives people what he thinks will make them happy.” This switch also charts Bowie’s course from Ziggy Stardust (heaven) to the Thin White Duke (“an ogre” on the brink of disintegration), or, for that matter, our own arc from being not who we were, or how we were—not happiness per say—but a prototype for happiness we can all assert as and on our own.

Simply put, “The Social Network” (Facebook) isn’t significant because we all use it. It’s significant because we are it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB95KLmpLR4

David Fincher, “The Social Network Trailer” (2010)

The following anagrams can be made from David Bowie: Via Web Id Do. Bad Void We I. Part of the anagram for Mark Zuckerberg is Czar.

If 2012 is the new number of the foretold end, the end of the end—as in no more ends at all—”1984″ was the end of one way of living and being in the world, and the beginning of another. That’s why the number still counts. That’s why Bowie—as if he were beaming the year out into the world with his voice, carving it into the earth—chants it eight times as Ziggy. For when it comes to postmodernity, “1984,” like the movie “The Social Network,” is the year that tells time. That tells us where time went.

As the “1984″ song lyric informs: “Times are a-telling/And changing isn’t free.” The 80s. The 80s talking to the 60s and 70s. It’s the 80s taking charge of everything before it. Of everything that was. Sponsoring the present. This isn’t Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin,” where things get better—maybe—and where, as Bordo notes, the earth, not the gods, matter. This is: forget about what once was. Forget about existing for free. Forget about time. Forget about stopping, because, as Bowie sings, “tomorrow’s never there.”

Maurizio Nannucci, “Changing Place…” (Peggy Guggenheim, Venice — 2003)

- Masha Tupitsyn

The post David Bowie & Mark Zuckerberg Play With Time appeared first on Ryeberg Curated Video.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYk2IaHxUeA

Sidney Lumet, “Dog Day Afternoon: Opening Titles” (1975)

Maybe it’s because the 70s is the decade I was born at the tail end of, like a zodiac sign. Brushed up against the edge of it, ships passing in the night. Me and the 70s. I was there and I wasn’t there. Only now I want Los Angeles too, which, as a born New Yorker, never really occurred to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvQOFZiHZ1I

gapocari, “Greetings From LA1978!” (shot in Super 8, 1978/2006)

Los Angeles was never really real until one day, last November, I saw Thom Andersen’s video essay — “Los Angeles Plays Itself” — and then it was. Los Angeles, like someone I didn’t notice until it was too late.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-DWcJLrSuU

Thom Andersen, “Los Angeles Plays Itself” (2003)

I want actors before the screen aged them, even though everyone is always aging, screen or no screen. Even me. Hence this thing about time. This thing about screens. Wanting time on and off other people, as well as myself, as though time were a fancy dress to put on, to take off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAEDkNHpdY8

Hazelnutcake, “Jane Fonda Describes Growing Up” (2008)

Movies make me cry. Right now, good ones and bad ones. Everything makes me cry right now. People crying makes me cry. People I don’t like, crying, makes me like them. Like when Jean-Claude Van Damme recently started crying in an interview, saying that he had “fucked up his life.” That made me cry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5F6tKVPz8w

Jean-Claude Van Damme vs. Somluck Kamsing, “Announcement of ‘Real Fight’”” (November, 2010)

Everything and everyone and every city and everything and every time. I want to be 7. 10. 18, 19—still my favorite life number. I want love. Sometimes even old loves. I want the loves that came then mysteriously blew out like the tire in Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out.” Then everything turns into noir. You investigate. Rewind. Rescind. Reconstruct. You know something, then you don’t. You have something. Then you don’t.

When the tire blows out in “Blow Out” a nation ruptures, expires, and Jack Terry (John Travolta), a microcosm of that nation, goes careening.

Brian De Palma, “Recording The Blow Out” (1981)

I think my ex thinks—as Donald Berthelme notes in “Me And Miss Mandible”—“I am sorry to be the cause of her disillusionment, but I know that she will recover.” How does he know this? The boyfriends that cause disillusionment are like leap years. A decade. They don’t come every year. It takes a special kind of man to disillusion you.

The 70s were about disillusionment. You see everything break down, then you face it and ask questions. And decide whether you want to go on. Disillusionment in the 70s was the equivalent of mortality.

In “Taxi Driver,” Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), the disillusioned man par excellence, writes: “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere: in bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores. Everywhere.” Bickle said this in the 70s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEJkjMkxJh0

Martin Scorsese, “Taxi Driver: Trailer” (1976)

But what if the stores, the bars, the streets became so new, so perfect, so polished that everything—places, streets—became even lonelier than they were when they were poor, messy, broken, split. Empty. Because empty doesn’t always mean empty. Before the 70s, the city was a set, a fantasy. Fiction. In the 70s, people had jobs and a social class.

I look at everything thinking: I didn’t know it. Thinking: I could have. Thinking: I did. Thinking: I won’t. I feel the way Travis feels, only Travis is psychotic and a man, and I don’t know what I am. But this is a diary too.

If time—a time—has a mood, I am not in the mood for this one. After he made “Velvet Goldmine,” the filmmaker Todd Haynes said that the 70s were the last truly progressive decade. The last decade to show its seams.

Film—the screen—used to feel a lot quieter. Like there were breaths between the frames. Horizon. Digital means no breath. Digital means seamless. Means the image never shows.

There is something about the way the 70s screen did things.

Did water.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zkYRD51I34

Steven Spielberg, “Jaws” (1975)

Did cities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP_7ZopT6oM

William Friedkin, “The French Connection” (1971)

Did bodies. Did people’s faces like they weren’t just something you picked up at the doctor’s office. Even did a shark, still on the cusp of real and unreal. Machine and imagination. When they couldn’t get the fake to run smoothly, they simply used the projected unconscious and conscious dread about what’s underneath the surface of the water, which is real.

In the 70s, Hollywood actors often wore clothes to the Oscars that people wear outside (scarf, jacket; rumpled blouse), in the fall, on their way to the store for milk.

Oscars, “Diane Keaton winning Best Actress Oscar® for Annie Hall” (1977)

The 70s did dissolution, which the decade admitted to. That falling apart is not glossy and a city doesn’t always look pretty or expensive while you do it.

Trust was an issue in the 70s—we stopped trusting—police, politicians, government, media, consumerism, capitalism. Trust had to be earned, rebuilt and replaced with something else. The 70s were both an end and a beginning. “Is it safe?” the infamous Nazi war criminal Szell asks Dustin Hoffman repeatedly in “Marathon Man” just before he drills into Hoffman’s unanestheticized tooth. “No,” Hoffman finally succumbs (realizes), “It’s not safe.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYt24hq5nbM

Sidney Lumet, Attica Scene from “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975)

When Jill Clayburg died, film critic Ty Burr wrote an article about her and called her a 70s actress. “It was the 70s,” writes Burr, “and we didn’t trust glamour gods just then.”

And computers weren’t skin. The skin of skin. The skin of an image. The skin of life.

Paul Mazursky, “Jill Clayburg in An Unmarried Woman” (1978)

- Masha Tupitsyn

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I could relate to watching Daniel (Ralph’s iconic character) get the shit kicked out of him, his mouth packed with sand by a gang of rich blonde villains on his very first day in perfect-California, followed by a black eye two days later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTIWhXnsmzI

John D. Avildsen, “The Karate Kid: Daniel Bullied” (1984)

The blonde villains had no problem annihilating Daniel. In fact that was their goal. The 80s were live or die when it came to cultural archetypes. During the movie’s crucial (Halloween) beating before the tournament finale, Daniel is almost gang-bashed to death. The hawkish quintet sports skeleton costumes. Not only does the death troupe signify death, but as symbolic cadavers they also signify the dead body of Daniel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAGjECcGDyI

John D. Avildsen, “The Karate Kid: Daniel Saved” (1984)

In a 1984 Washington Post article titled, “Blond and Bad: The Advent of the Preppie As Screen Villain,” Rita Kempley writes, “inevitably, blonds became the establishment villains. The trend represents more than the ancient rope-tug between haves and have-nots. ‘It’s the reemergence of the American dream,’ says Richard Stephens, sociologist at George Washington University. ‘We’ve had such bad world press on our divisiveness. It’s a calculated thing on the part of the producers to show the other faces of America.’”

When Daniel and his mother pull up to their new home, Daniel is told to “Wake up.” Then the camera crawls into the car to watch him sulk. The dream, which is a nightmare, begins. To Daniel’s mother, the fairytale is launched the moment they step on to California soil (“Welcome to paradise,” she tells Daniel), introduced by a triptych of sky-high palm trees. But California Dreamin’ isn’t for slight, working-class, ethnic boys raised by single mothers, especially not in the 1980s—the decade of the hard body and the rich blonde villain. Like a movie role, the best parts are only doled out to certain kinds of people (“Those are the breaks,” Daniel says later when he doesn’t make the rigged soccer try outs).

To Daniel, the command “wake-up” is the unleashing of class-based dread. Just as he suspects, “paradise” is a rundown, motel-style dump in Reseda, and the luxurious pool in the brochure that his mother’s been luring him with is all dried up. A saggy rubber swan lies at the bottom of it, shipwrecked. In a matter of minutes, the aspirant dream is deflated. After that, things only get worse.

Possessing and being possessed by Ralph, reminds me of what another Masha (played by Sandra Bernhard) does to Jerry Lewis’ talk show host, Jerry Langford, in Martin Scorsese’s mass media satire “King of Comedy,” where, argues film scholar Robin Wood, obsession with celebrity is Oedipal due to the celebrity’s “prestige and authority.”

Wood calls this the desire to be in “Father’s shoes,” for father, in the symbolic sense, signifies ultimate acclaim. Held hostage by Robert De Niro’s fame/father hungry Rupert Pupkin (a name that has the longing for kin-ship built into it) and Masha, Bernhard serenades a taped-up Langford with “Come Rain or Come Shine.” “You’re gonna love me/like nobody’s loved me,” she purrs, or in my case, by being Ralph, I was gonna love me/like nobody loved me.

Martin Scorsese, “The King of Comedy: Masha Sings” (1982)

Similarly, in the movie “Marley and Me,” Marley, John’s (Owen Wilson) beloved dog and confidant is really John. The restless, rootless John is never sure that his life has meaning, so whenever he tells Marley that he loves him, that Marley’s life means something, that Marley’s life holds infinite value and purpose, he is really saying that his life has value and purpose. And when Marley is put to sleep due to old age, and John whispers into Marley’s ear, “I love you more than anything” (more than even his wife and children apparently. The film’s title alone suggests the family’s exclusion), John is really saying that he loves himself—his primal, infantile, unsocialized self—more than anything.

“The Karate Kid” is of course an Oedipal drama too. Mr. Miyagi, Daniel’s Karate sensei and savior, becomes the father symbol Daniel’s never had and desperately needs in order to survive in the world. The film makes it clear Daniel has no use for his mother. He cannot acquire approval or social status if he remains fatherless (both “denial” and “lead”—which without a real father, Daniel cannot do—are anagrams of Daniel). Miyagi doesn’t just teach Daniel Karate, he teaches him everything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PycZtfns_U

John D. Avildsen, “The Karate Kid: Wax On Wax Off” (1984)

Even though Mr. Miyagi is a Japanese immigrant (an outsider) and speaks broken English, some father, the film insists, is better than no father, or more specifically, father is always better than mother. And yet, with Miyagi as surrogate father, the father deal is never really sealed, forcing Daniel to limbo in and out of power in the movie’s ongoing Oedipal nightmare (see “The Karate Kid II” and “III”).

In my six-year old mind Ralph and I weren’t strangers. But when it came to the exact nature of my relationship with him, I didn’t know what to call it. Was I just a fan?

In his book, “Celebrity,” sociologist Chris Rojek points out that the physical remoteness of the star is “compensated for by the glut of media (fanzines, press stories, TV documentaries, interviews, newsletters and biographies), which personalize the celebrity, turning a distant figure from a stranger into a significant other.” Given that I was generating some of the mass media myself by reshaping what I’d seen and read into my own yarn, and in the process concocting the self (“I”) I wanted Ralph to possess, I was acting as one of the cultural intermediaries in charge of Ralph Macchio’s personality, for I literally wrote him into my life.

Years later, while traveling through Mexico one summer after a bad breakup, I ended up in a video store in San Miguel de Allende one night with a group of people. Half-drunk, we were a motley crew who spoke different languages and barely knew each other, so no one could agree on what to rent. As I split off and walked around a sea of banged up video titles, I came across “The Karate Kid.” I hadn’t watched or thought about it in over a decade. I studied Ralph Macchio’s brown face suspended and disembodied, like some big moon, over the Southern California Coast line and started laughing. Sarah, my best-friend, walked up to me and asked what was so funny. “I look just like him,” I told her. “We’re identical and I’d never noticed that before.”

When I was eight I found out that Ralph Macchio was making his theatrical debut in “Cuba & His Teddy Bear” at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City. Written by Reinaldo Povod, a 26 year-old Hispanic playwright raised on the Lower East Side, the play starred “Rocky’s” Burt Young (directed by John J. Avildsen, who also directed “The Karate Kid”) and Robert De Niro in his first stage production since 1970′s “One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger.”

When the off-Broadway run of “Cuba” sold out in three hours, the Public Theater started selling closed-circuit tickets. The play became “filmed theater. That ideal point,” writes film historian Richard DeCordova, “at which the theater and the cinema…seamlessly merge.” Watching Macchio on a surveillance camera in another room added a layer of voyeurism I was familiar with and rivaled the secret feeling I’d always had of wanting to catch an actor in the act. There was no editing room to alter anything Ralph did. No cuts. No body doubles. No special effects. It was profilmic. I was watching raw footage. Unlike a movie, the play, even in closed-circuit, would take place in real time, and this meant Ralph and I would be in the same building, together, while it was happening.

My mom and I watched the live TV play upstairs while the actors performed onstage below us. An old hardwood floor replaced the barrier of the screen. I was getting closer and closer. After the show was over, I figured out that I could wait for him in the lobby if I wanted an autograph. I was the only kid in the theater. I was also the only audience member left in the building after the play ended. No one had even stuck around to meet De Niro, who at that point, I knew only as the Devil with the trick name—Louis Cyphre (Lucifer)—from “Angel Heart.”

The play finished at midnight. I asked my mom to wait outside while I sat on a long wooden pew-style bench with the playbill in my hand, along with the pen she had given me. I had a Louise Brooks-style bob and I was wearing my mom’s non-matching silk blouse and skirt.

When Ralph finally came out, he was—amazingly—alone. No entourage or bodyguards. Just Ralph. Just me. His hair was wet and he had a white towel around his neck like he’d been swimming. I handed him the playbill and he asked my name. I said, “Maria” because it was easier to pronounce than “Masha,” but also because it sounded Italian. Like him, not like me (I’d switched over to Maria in second grade because Maria, my full name, sounded culturally neutral and was easy to pronounce, unlike Masha).

Ralph was quiet and sweet. It was just the two of us. On my playbill, he wrote, “Maria, all my love. Ralph Macchio.” Later I drew a heart around his face and the messy inscription below it. Two years ago, while digging through some boxes in my parents’ basement after a flood, I found the moldy playbill still intact despite all the water floating around it. In it, Ralph’s black and white face is disembodied, just like on the “The Karate Kid” poster.

Today the playbill is in a zip lock bag in my apartment, stiff as a board. I look at it for laughs. Of course, it locates me more than him. I’d found a way to condense and autograph my own essence. To serenade myself. I might as well have written across my own face, “Maria, all my love.” More specifically, “I’m gonna love me/like nobody loves me.”

In “The Beaches of Agnes,” Matthieu Demy, son of French New Wave filmmakers, Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy, stars in one of his mother’s films as a child, and says, “If I’m not happy, what’ll we do? If he’s not happy, what’ll I do?” He speaks on the behalf of adults.

The following year, I managed to get actual Broadway tickets to “Cuba & His Teddy Bear.” Before the play my mother made lasagna and lemonade, which I ate and drank in Ralph’s honor. It was November, sometime around Ralph’s birthday. I brought a teenage friend along to see the show. A girl I’d coaxed into loving Ralph just like I had been coaxed into loving him.

- Masha Tupitsyn

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Persuaded, I asked my mom and dad to take me one night in July. The summer movie had been playing for weeks. We went to the two-screened theater wedged between Town Hall and what used to be Café Euro, a reggae-themed bar and restaurant in the center of town. “Bambi” was playing across the street in a theater behind a stained-glass shop. I dressed up for the occasion and we all walked down Commercial Street together. I was into denim and plaid and Converse that summer because it seemed cool and boyish to me. But I also carried a little purse that my mother picked up in Greece. It contained a plastic, see-through wallet full of stickers, movie stubs, and candy.

John D. Avildsen, “The Karate Kid” (1984)

When Ralph Macchio (Daniel Larusso) first turns his face to the camera, almost four minutes have flashed by and he is sitting in a run-down station wagon after a grueling cross-country drive with his mother that begins in Newark, NJ and ends in Los Angeles, California. Until then, Daniel is only a petulant acoustic, all “Maaa’s.” An accented teenage voice pitched against high vistas of American landscape. Arizona desert. Canyon. The kind in movies and postcards.

American movies in the 1980s often portrayed the struggle to be American (when the car breaks down during their cross-country move, Daniel’s mother’s urges Daniel to, “Push, push. Gimme all ya got, kid.”), which is the struggle to stay in the picture, specifically Daniel’s struggle to stay in this picture. At seventeen, he is world-weary and literally the movie’s sore subject; a soreness that is later reconfigured as physical suffering.

Though “The Karate Kid” isn’t technically about fame, it is, among other things, a frontier story and an acquisition story. A dream factory fable (“This is the garden of Eden,” Daniel’s mother rejoices) that comes directly from the way in which movies portray dreams (dreams we wouldn’t have were it not for the movies telling us what to dream) and the way those dreams are located in the representation (not the experience) of place.

But in the usual mix-up over real life and fiction, Daniel’s mother confuses proximity with access. It’s where you are, not who you are. The problem of course lies in the fact that representation, unlike actual places, is uninhabitable and thus inhospitable, and Daniel understands this instinctively. One cannot live in a picture or the places that pictures make. This is why when Daniel’s mother sings, “California, here we come!” during the opening travel montage and then asks, “What’s the matter, you don’t like my singing?” Daniel moans, “I don’t like the song, Ma.”

I was hooked. Ralph Macchio looked thirteen, but to everyone’s surprise, even the film crews’, he was twenty-two. Since our bodies were the same, slight and prepubescent, it was easy to pretend he was ten. Ralph had no body hair and the waist of a twelve year old.

On his birthday, I cooked lasagna, reportedly his favorite food, and drank lemonade, reportedly his favorite beverage. I even tried to sit through a hockey game on TV because I’d read that he loved the sport. I knew what town he lived in in Long Island. I even knew he was engaged. I wrote to Ralph and about Ralph in a fanzine that I “published” on a weekly basis and read to my parents (my sole audience), manufacturing my own form of press, in which I was simultaneously journalist and reader. I played both sides of the fence and covered all bases. I acted like an intimate and a fan. I treated him like an actor and a person. I did what any good girlfriend does: I took an active interest in the things my “boyfriend” cared about. I sang Ralph’s praises and watched every single one of Ralph’s movies, aping his walk and mannerisms, and even memorizing his lines, so that I could talk like him, and in the process become not just an actor myself—part of the fiction—but, by doing what Ralph did, I became Ralph.

At a young age, I understood the power and theater of clothing. The way in which it helped me have what I didn’t have. Do what I couldn’t do. Years later, as I watched the somnambulistic “Donnie Darko” ride the Carpathian Ridge on his ten-speed, I was reminded of my own solitary rides around Provincetown. Whenever I rode my bike down Commercial Street, I was dressed in tomboy wardrobe and makeup: short hair, plaid shirt, jean jacket, jeans, Adidas sneakers, walkman—a gender-bending, outsider ensemble I had self-consciously assembled based on the movie boys I’d seen. Movies like “The Outsiders,” in which Ralph had starred.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tgJqnVMAtc

Francis Ford Coppola, “The Outsiders” (1983)

I added a soundtrack to much of what I did, building a mood around my excursions, cruising around a town full of adults, and was aware, even then, that I was enacting a dramatized (cinematic) image of aloneness and autonomy; the story of girl solitude, which I thought I could only play as a boy, or which I had only seen boys play (“the emotions of youth” that “The Outsiders” purports to capture is really “the emotions of boys”).

Whenever I wasn’t watching a movie, I was screening an image of aloneness for other people’s benefit, which was my benefit. I imagined it as revenge. I was both in and outside the theater of myself. When I was alone, I was Ralph being alone. I was acting alone. Movie stars offer such powerful affirmations of belonging. When it came to Ralph, I could belong to his not belonging because he belonged to a commonality of representation. He belonged to the screen.

- Masha Tupitsyn

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