We Are All Theater People

  

All About Eve is the only film in Oscar history to receive four female acting nominations (Bette Davis and Anne Baxter as Best Actress, Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter as Best Supporting Actress). The film stars Davis as Margo Channing, a highly regarded but aging Broadway star. Baxter plays Eve Harrington, an ambitious young fan who maneuvers herself into Channing's life, ultimately threatening Channing's career and her personal relationships. The film also co-stars George Sanders. Notably for the subject of the movie, Marilyn Monroe appears in one of her earliest roles.

The last post I made brings up an important point. We have been trapped in the process of Historical Narratology, by which we collectively consume the News and decide what the narrative of history will be from it, as we are a giant collective group of screenwriters in one room, yelling out our ideas to each of how the story must proceed.

We do this because we are prisoners of the Dramaturgical, especially those of us born after 1965. The Dramaturgical subsumed the culture of the West in the Twentieth Century because of the advent of Postmodernity via movies, recorded music, radio broadcast, television broadcasts, etc.

Over time we learned to become actors in a worldwide drama. We are characters. We know what that concept means in regard to having multiple personas that we adopt in different situations. We are comfortable knowing there are levels of character reality in ourselves.. People in the past aspired to have character.  Actors were seen as abnormal people. Now we all of us are required to have the psyche of theatrical performers. 

Some of our cultural heroes are people who realized this early on, decades before the rest of us. The famous ones were Hollywood actors who realized that they had to be in character even even when off camera but in the public eye. All actors today realize this, as does the public. 

One of my favorite Hollywood movies illustrates the concept of the take over of our lives by the Dramaturgical during Twentieth Century very clearly---All About Eve, released in 1950, exactly halfway through the century.. This is one of those movies I could write a dissertation about.

The movie is about Theater people in New York, including actors, actresses, producers, directors, and critics. We get to see how horrible they are to each other. It points directly to the destruction of the concept of Honor in the second half of the century in film and in our culture, and the rise of the Antihero over the Hero . 

It is also very explicitly about the rise of the Toxic Feminine, which has also subsumed our culture, This is feminine character inflamed with the desire for raw Attention that could only have been imagined by women in the era of Postmodernity. The last shot of the movie is a gut punch in describing what the entire coming generations of young women would be like, growing ever more absorbed in the collective Attention-seeking disease on larger stages.

It is a brilliant movie and feels ahead of its time. The essential message I get from it is that Postmodernity is turning all of us into the Theater people. The culture of Theater was becoming, via Pop Culture, the culture of America.

We interact with each other with the knowledge we are interacting with personas. Our culture is a giant backstage from which there is no escape. 

Actors went from being freaks to being our greatest heroes, because they are the most highly talented in the essential skill of the Dramaturgical era.

We know nothing is truly ever what it seems. We are suspicious of all reality because we know it to be stagecraft. We believe that we can design history the way screenwriters tell a story.  The News is a Reality Show that obeys the canons of story-crafting and character. Skilled news producers are skilled at narrative.

What was true in an allegorical sense in Shakespeare's time, "all the world is a stage," is now true in a literal sense.  Postmodernity brings about this awareness and acceptance of its own Dramaturgical condition  Thus we think of this situation as normal now. I think it was one of those things that separates us from people of the past in a huge way. Hardly anyone is left alive who is now Dramaturgical in their core.

God bless the legitimate Theater people. I've know a few in my life, and I have liked most of them, even the crazy ones. I saw in some of them a struggle to come to grips with the very things I just wrote, even if they wouldn't have expressed it as I just did. 

We have been looking for the elusive catharsis, putting together in our Postmodern way the shards of methodologies through experiment, hoping to recreate and re-invent that release that drama once provided, but which now only seems to deepen our affliction.