This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  I take comfort, between dodging cameras and sending threatening e-mails to strangers, in the fact that Sontag was a reluctant subject herself. “Although reason tells me the camera is not aimed like a gun barrel at my head,” she wrote, “each time I pose for a photograph portrait I feel apprehensive.” Immobilized by the camera’s scrutiny, she felt somehow hidden behind her face, “looking out through the windows of my eyes, like the prisoner in the iron mask in Dumas’s novel.” After considering the reasons for this apprehension—puritan anxiety, moral narcissism, plain self-consciousness—she decides it is mainly the dismay of being seen: “While some ninety percent of my consciousness thinks that I am in the world, that I am me, about ten percent thinks I am invisible. That part is always appalled whenever I see a photograph of myself. (Especially a photograph in which I look attractive.)”

  Maybe that 10 percent is the place where serial killers hang out while hacking up their victims. I tend to think it’s the portion that keeps the other 90 percent spiritually solvent. It must be the part, anyway, that maintains our connection to the whole of human history prior to 1850, in which lives were lived and identities forged without the benefit or the interference of photo-reflection. Those eras we now think of in terms of their “costumes,” and an inherent suspicion of the dramatic fakery modern life has set right. All those hidden lives of Middlemarch, and their humble contributions to a continuum of social good.

  But then, like the best novels, the best photographs remind the pure, invisible observer in me of the things I want to know, don’t know, or have known, and the ways I want to be known myself. They remind me, in other words, of the world beyond images, and beyond me. But the rest—the vast majority—seep into me or slide by with the opposite effect, deflecting or confusing memory, canceling each other out, numbing my sense of the world beyond images, and beyond my own relentless consumption of them.

  * * *

  On a winter weekend several years ago, after heading to the Brooklyn Museum, I drifted from the usual panoply of impressionists to a retrospective of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs. In making this transition I was reminded that the pleasure of looking at a painting combines the beauty of the image with the feeling that something of the artist lingers within the work itself: you are standing where the artist stood, and every brushstroke is tangible evidence of her life; the part of her memory embedded there seeks a place in yours. With photographic exhibits, the pleasure feels more purely aesthetic: the image was captured and in some sense abandoned by the artist. You look where she looked, literally, and try to place yourself where she stood, perhaps, but the emphasis is on what can be seen—on the image itself. I always laughed when a Dutch friend of mine referred to “making” a photo—a translation glitch he couldn’t keep straight. I just thought it sounded funny, but there is something strange about the one art form we talk about in terms of taking, and not making.

  Many of the Leibovitz photos were already well known from magazine covers and portfolios: celebrities and luminaries, each transformed by the photographer’s signature, statued postures and bloodless pallor. Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John and Yoko arranged into a melancholy paragraphus. Then, at the far end of the exhibit, as the glossy photos ceded to personal snaps, there were a few shots of Susan Sontag, Leibovitz’s partner of some years. Here Sontag appeared vital, that defiant glint of white hair taken up in her eyes; there she was stretched out on a couch, spent by sickness, as we had come to know. Then, arranged in the exhibit to punctuate those that came before, was a framed photograph of Sontag’s corpse. The end of the story.

  My first reaction was the basic one: here is another thing I did not care to see that I have now seen anyway. Here now my own memory of this woman—the feeling of having shared some space in her mind—would forever be presided upon by this bully, this empty body, which had nothing to tell me about its subject, though it spoke of some other loss, to be sure. It clarified the extent to which the modern image feels taken, representative mostly of its own theft. It didn’t have to be digital to feel that way.

  In my memory, anyway, Sontag seemed to shiver at the idea of images turning reality into a shadow. But my memory is overlaid with the compost work of time and distortions of perspective; it’s what makes it mine. She might bristle at being thought anything but stoical and dispassionate about her own theories and conclusions. She might point out that it’s highly unlikely that the tumbling, drunken toddler footsteps my father recorded in Super 8 during the years when she was coming to those conclusions were the first ones I took. The very first steps probably happened earlier that morning, or maybe the day before, and were re-created in the nicest room in the house, with my brother standing dutifully by. I don’t have a memory to consult on that score and never heard the story. The images, being all that remain, have asserted their privilege. I’m grateful for it too. It seems close enough to a truth I wouldn’t otherwise have.

  It seems obvious, as well, that it was I who shivered reading Susan Sontag, standing where she stood and feeling her there with me. Because she was more right than she could have known when she said images are more real than anyone imagined. Reality itself now requires the gatekeeper, something to protect it from light-starved stagnation. Because a world mastered by images makes a conduit of human experience; we exist to serve the image, not the other way around. Anyone who has seen a camera’s screen bobbing superfluously in a crowd, or realized that a subject’s enigmatic smile was not directed at someone behind the lens because there was no one behind the lens, or imagined our millions of satellites and surveillance cameras carrying on long after we’ve all been evaporated, by the asteroid or the dino virus or some combination of the two, knows it would appear images can already take themselves. We take them in as automatically, ever turning to the next one and the one after that, scanning and scavenging, as though gripped by a hunger we don’t understand.

  More than our faces, our follies, or our plates of gourmet fries, the images reflect that famishment, seeming to tear through each other; it’s a food chain in chaos, at the point of consuming itself. And so I wonder, Susan, and how I wish for your reply: If images have begun to eat their own, what might they do to us?

  Do I Know You?

  And Other Impossible Questions

  A friend was grieving and had been gone. On the evening he returned to town I appeared at his door with a six-pack, some sweets, and a recently pilfered movie screener. It would be my second time watching Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance, having enjoyed it the first time with that particular zealousness that compels one to bypass recommendation and go straight to recruitment, chaperoned viewings staged as a most intimate gift. This was at least a place to begin, and the screening was a success: We laughed, we cringed, we were quietly moved. Most important, some time passed, and painlessly.

  When it was over, my friend turned to me with a funny look. “That guy, the main character,” he said. “Do you know who he reminded me of?” I did, but I didn’t. It had bothered me all the way through the first time, this free-ranging recognition, so when my friend named its elusive source—a mutual acquaintance—the satisfaction was sonar deep. I’d only met this person once; there were no logical grounds for how fully I felt the justice of the comparison, which was physical, but not only. It just jived, it was yar—you knew it. It was also as if, simply by virtue of making the match, my friend and I had become the proprietors of a secret about this person, and a wicked one at that.

  Turnabout, let’s call it. Secret for secret, anyway. I seem to have one of those faces, see. Perhaps you do too, and you know what I’m talking about. The kind of face people think they know, or have seen before, or can easily conflate with those they have studied more intimately in two dimensions than we can ever hope to in three. Perhaps this isn’t uncommon at all. In fact, in considering the phenomenon, I have imagined most of you reading these words and thinking, Yeah, I get that all the time. Indeed, the majority of participants in a recent, random polling
on the matter affirmed that, yeah, they get that all the time. The possibility soon presented itself that on some level and to some degree we all somehow suspect we’ve encountered one another before.

  So I—like you, apparently—get this a lot. Only occasionally do people suggest that we went to summer camp together, or that I played on their volleyball team; too rarely have I come to them in a dream. Most often it turns out I am someone, or remind them of someone, they have seen on the big screen, someone whose image or affect or ineffable essence, having refracted and settled into a murky, primordial quadrant of their memory, I have stirred and called to the fore. With strangers the conviction that attends the culmination of this process is especially tough to overturn.

  A few weeks ago I was heading to Long Island City, on the N line around lunchtime, when the guy joggling his forearms with his knees beside me sought reassurance that our train stopped at Queensboro Plaza. I confirmed that it did, and we relaxed a little in our seats: one more of life’s problems solved. Another issue quickly presented itself, however, and he leaned forward to peer at me again, this time uttering the words that have come to fire a sort of ontological dread in my belly: “Where have I seen you before?”

  Lest you surmise the knee-joggling gentleman had any sort of design on his seatmate, let me assure you that the ratio of women to men who hit me with this big one is almost equal and in fact skews slightly female. “Have I seen you before?” he repeated, and I said no, I didn’t think so. “Yeah, you’re that woman—you were in that movie.” I assured him that I’m not, I wasn’t—I promise. “Are you sure?” he pressed, looking less suspicious than stone perplexed.

  Am I sure? Too often, when I meet someone new, somewhere in the first few minutes they will get a sort of far-off, foggy look in their eyes as I’m banging on about the health care crisis or how I know the host. I have learned to recognize this look not as crashing boredom (though I can spot that too, thank you) but the prelude to my least favorite how-do-you-do. It comes in several variations: Who do you look like? Do you know who you look like? Who do you remind me of? Do I know you? Where have I seen you before?

  The following is my attempt to get a grip on these questions and why they began to annoy, sadden, and then just thoroughly wig me out.

  * * *

  Let’s start with the Greeks. Them or Larry King. “Perception is reality,” the latter is fond of saying. Under that rubric, might we in fact be the amalgams of the different faces and performances that people impulsively map onto us? And might not that onion-skin atlas comprise our best hope of being known, if we are to be known at all?

  A brief equation inspired by Mr. King’s classical aphorism:

  The essential unknowability of other people times the most sensational art form we have created to transcend it—the movies—equals the intense psychological and aesthetic intimacies we develop with the images and individuals we spend so much time watching more freely, closely, nakedly, than we can ever watch each other. That is to say, without being watched back.

  Film in particular has become so much a part of how we absorb and organize the world, I would argue, that the mapping/comparative impulse is not a matter of art imitating life or vice versa, but art mutating into life, then setting off a series of elaborate and ultimately inextricable countermutations.

  It was like a movie, a movie was like it—who can tell anymore? I wonder, if one were to empty out a brain and divvy up its critical, alpha-chip signifiers—this is a woman, this is a man; this is a man from nowhere, this is the kind of woman who can ruin his life just by walking into the room; this is repulsion, this is beauty; this is how a kiss goes, this is how you die; this is running for your life, this is rolling down a city street all exhilarated and shit—how many of them would come straight from the movies, how many from lived experience, and how many from some unholy genome splicing of the two, which becomes less an image or a visual phrase than a funny feeling in the old tummy.

  I imagine most of us would prefer the second pile to be the biggest, but that’s just not the world/perception/reality we live in; the moving image changed so much more than the way we spend our rainy Sundays. Sometimes I worry that I’m actually most alive at the movies, and that their primeval overtures to our most private selves are the reason we can’t help but see them like lovers—which is to say everywhere we go, and in everyone we meet.

  In the very French director Michel Gondry’s 2008 film Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black plays a paranoid technophobe who accidentally destroys a New Jersey video-rental store’s inventory, then attempts to restock it with homemade VHS versions of Cineplex classics like Rush Hour 2 and Ghostbusters. Black and the video store’s presiding clerk, played by Mos Def, tell customers these new films cost more and look kind of hectic because they come from Sweden. Privately, Mos Def worries that the customers will know the “sweded” films are fake—they won’t be fooled—but Black doesn’t see why: “Maybe I am in Ghostbusters,” he says.

  Maybe we all are, Gondry suggests. Maybe the act of watching a film not only completes but activates it, triggering a sort of psycho-sentient osmosis, opening a channel that allows a part of us to join the film and a part of the film to join us. Watching Before Sunrise a decade after I first saw it, I was struck by the feeling of having left a part of my former self somewhere within it; I could almost make her out between the bullet trains, down the cobblestone alleys, in the fresh faces of the actors themselves. Maybe I am in Before Sunrise.

  When someone else does the recognizing, it gets trickier, by virtue of both engaging a foreign set of multimapped, memory-banked viewing experiences, and raising one of the most critical questions one human being can ask another: What is it you see when you look at me?

  Consider the overlap between the way we normals and actual famous people field that question and its psychic fallout. Porn superstar Sasha Grey describes watching herself have sex on-screen as surreal. “I don’t feel like it’s me,” she says. “It’s just a weird feeling that’s hard to describe.” Early on in Don’t Look Back, a young Bob Dylan laughs uneasily over a newspaper’s claim that he smokes eighty cigarettes a day. “God,” he mutters. “I’m glad I’m not me.”

  Forty years later, in a 2004 interview, Dylan described the kind of confrontation that keeps him from going out in public: “People will, they’ll say, Are you who I think you are? And you’ll say, Ahh, I don’t know. And they’ll say, You—you’re him. And you’ll say, Okay, you know … yes? And then the next thing they’ll say, Well no, like, are you really him? You’re not him. And, uh, you know, that can go on and on.”

  Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, used to tell a story about walking around New York with an incognito-in-plain-sight Marilyn Monroe. “Do you want to see me be her?” Monroe would say. Strasberg described the star dialing up an internal dimmer switch, slowly filling herself and the space around her with light. Within moments the people who had been passing by were stopping cold and scrambling for pen and paper.

  Of course creating distance between person and persona is common among people whose faces and bodies and voices become commodities, if sometimes confusing for the public picking up the tab. (Apparently it’s confusing for the celebrities as well, several of whom—most recently oblong national nightmare Kim Kardashian—have sued companies for using alleged doppelgängers in their commercials and trading on a look, the celebrities say, that belongs to them. As if to close the perfectly silly circle, Kardashian’s ex-boyfriend, an NFL running back, began dating the model in question.) And of course normal people have personas too, themselves often in part constructed from the personas they have watched and admired on-screen, although we all want to be recognized, especially at parties where boys are present, as sovereign creations. No one wants to be unoriginal, or a type, or a screen of such accommodating blankness that pretty much anyone from Tallulah Bankhead to an animated lake trout can be projected onto it. But also, who needs their benign social interactions to segue without warning into not just an
inappropriately intense eyeballing but a weirdly potent subversion of their individuality?

  * * *

  There was a point, two years ago, when I lost my patience. It happened as I was speaking with two gentlemen at an exceptionally civilized housewarming thrown by a lovely couple who happened to be my sole acquaintances in the room. As we talked about the space (grand) and the hosts’ Florentine wedding (grandissimo), one of the gentlemen, a money guy, got the foggy look in his eyes. Something scrolled up behind my ribs in anticipation of what came next: Wait, who do you remind me of? She reminds me of someone—who is it?

  I told him I hated this game and that it never ended well, but soon three others were pointing their noses in close to mine and shouting celebrity names like Pictionary clues. I followed what I’m pretty sure is the advised strategy in a bear attack: keep still, don’t make eye contact, and wait for it to be over. But this guy was half-lit and wholly tenacious. Eventually he left the room to seek out a computer and google his mind to rest. He gathered his team around the monitor in the study, where they deliberated over the actress he had in mind. No one noticed when I pulled my coat from the closet behind them and walked out the door.