23. Wearing its Ugliness

Ugly, some will say.
The toad wears its ugliness
Like a holy robe.

—Thomas Fo


We live in a culture that encourages us to identify with those aspects of ourselves which are the most superficial, fleeting, rooted in artifice.

We have all been taught to recognize certain facets of this ugly truth. We know that “the media” influences us, sending us so-called “hidden” messages, although truthfully they are quite flagrant, telling us that to be attractive, desirable, worthwhile, we must follow certain standards and norms that are largely determined by the media and the advertisers who finance their productions. We are warned of this deception on a daily basis, more often than not by the very media that propagates it. We know that that these standards are senseless illusions, and yet we cannot stop ourselves from heeding them. We purchase new, fashionable clothing, and throw out our out-of-date clothing while it is still perfectly serviceable. We wear makeup and bathe ourselves in cancer-causing sunlight to tan our bodies. We monitor our food intake, purchasing specially-prepared “low calorie” meals that are engineered to taste like they are full of fat and sugar. We identify ourselves with our possessions—our clothing, cars, computers, cellular phones—worried that a vehicle that is supposed to take us where we need to go is “not stylish enough,” “lacks character,” “doesn’t stand out.” We know, on some level, that this way of thinking is self-involved, shallow, false, and yet we feel it is a guilty pleasure. We enjoy the vanity of our self-deception, comforted by our ostensible recognition of our own hypocrisy.

But these daily acts of self-deception represent just one tiny fragment of the grand artifice that is our culture. Just as our government exposes its small injustices so that the public will not delve into the unfathomable depths of true injustice, just so, we recognize our small acts of shallowness but not the more profound void of self-knowledge that they represent. Noticing the pleasure I take in my expensive new cell phone, I can chastise myself for my own superficiality, without ever noticing that my deeper thoughts and beliefs are just as cheaply bought as a gadget in a store.

Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? Our society gives me answers to these questions. I am a man, a young man, a hip man, a man with a good job, a man with credibility. My purpose is to work, to do my job well, to be productive, to contribute to my company, to impress my friends and coworkers with my wit and competence, to find a wife, to raise a family who will carry on my name once I am gone. And my goal is to stay alive, to live as long as I can, and to die old, and rich, and respected.

There was a time in my life when these answers were sufficient for me. These are the years I think of as “the trance,” when I was involved with the mesmerizing narrative that my culture fed to me. These were the days when, in more ways than one, I was an actor.

I became an actor at the age of fifteen. My family moved to a new town, and I didn’t have any friends at my new high school. Every day at school, I fantasized about leaving, dropping out, escaping back to my old neighborhood. But there was one shining beacon that kept me coming back to school each day: Joanna. She was in not one but two of my classes, English and art, so I got to see her more than once each day. She was beautiful, with huge eyes and long legs, but that’s not why I liked her. I liked her because she was weird and artsy, always dressed in funny, mismatched outfits that looked incredible on her. In class, I pretended not to notice her, but in reality I was a detective, scrutinizing every scrap of her conversations that I could manage to scavenge, trying to deduce how to win her heart.

One day she turned to her girlfriend sitting behind her and asked, “Are you trying out for the play?”

Thus began my acting career. I showed up at the tryouts, trying my hardest to look nonchalant, like I had no particular motive other than wanting to be in a play. I got cast in a small role. I was sure Joanna would be the star, but she got a comic role as an old lady, her beauty smothered in layers of heavy bustles and age makeup.

Alas, love was not to be between us. But from my role as “king’s steward number two,” I learned a valuable lesson: acting is not just an activity but an identity. When I saw how the drama students stuck together, how they created their own little hierarchies, how I could ascend those hierarchies merely by observing and mastering whatever behaviors and affectations were “cool” to them, I felt I had uncovered the great secret of life. Here was a discrete social ladder that I could quantify, whose perimeters I could see clearly, and all I needed to do was read the signs and move ahead. What adolescent doesn’t long to discover the path to popularity, to finally gain some feeling of agency and control over the social order that oppresses us all? Unfortunately, in most social groups, these systems are obscure, tricky, the path riddled with boulders and rickety bridges and false starts leading nowhere, all in order to prevent those at the bottom from ever reaching the heights of power held by those at the top.

But the world of acting was different. Reality for the “drama nerds” was heightened, exaggerated, a heady, enhanced, performative existence. Every gesture, every mannerism was premeditated, carefully crafted for the greatest effect. Where normal life seems often seems murky and unsystematic, the life of an actor is art, and art can be understood and mastered if only the student is attentive enough.

I pursued the study of my new identity with heroic diligence and patience of the sort most teachers can only fantasize about from their students. I learned the gestures, the facial expressions, the vocal flourishes that made me irresistible to directors and actresses, and anathema to my male rivals, who all wanted to befriend me nonetheless, in the tradition of “keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.” The calculated lifting of one sardonic eyebrow drew swoons from girls in black slippers and berets. I won the lead role in every play, or better yet, for reasons of female attention, the villain. I was the king of my small world, the biggest fish in my pond. And it was all automatic, as though I were following a script—play the part, say the right lines, and everyone will cheer and applaud.

Before I continue, lest you think I have some particular grudge against actors, it is crucial to note: acting is no more false than any of the other activities and subcultures through which we develop and define ourselves. But it happens to be a perfect microcosm of real life, since it is life aestheticized, and so it is for me both the representation and the object of representation, my view of life and my particular life circumstance.

Once I had built my identity as a thespian, there was no escape from the track I had set myself upon. I enrolled in a special university program for “dramatic studies,” and everyone told me that acting was my calling, my passion. I always felt strange when people said this to me, because frankly, I wasn’t exactly sure what passion was. I had become pretty adept at feigning passion—both onstage and off—and I had some guesses about how it might feel. It should make a person feel alive, I thought, and completely present. And that’s not how I felt at all, ever. I felt that I was always following a script, playing a role, doing what was expected, what was fitting, so much so that I had no idea of what I actually wanted, what I was meant to be doing, who I truly was.

After college, I began to get “work,” as they call it, mostly parts in commercials. I hated selling things. I had always hated sales, hated the idea of convincing people to buy things they didn’t need. I fancied myself a minimalist at the time, a posture that fit in neatly with both my poverty and my artsy persona. And yet I performed dutifully, immaculately, because that was my job. I acted my heart out in service of blue jeans, facial tissue, dishwashing detergent, fast food. Each day, I hoped against hope, brought me closer to that sitcom job that would elevate me beyond the drudgery of thirty-second spots and inane catch phrases, to the status of a respectable actor. This misery was only temporary dues-paying, I told myself; and so I paid my dues with gusto, proving my dedication by treating the absurd dialogue with dead serious professionalism.

And yet, I could not bear to watch these commercials that I poured all of my expensive dramatic training into. I was given recordings of each one to use in my portfolio. The cassette tapes lay in neat piles at the back of my closet, where I could forget their incriminating existence.

Once at a bar, I told an attractive woman that I was an actor, but when she asked me what I’d been in, my tongue stuck like glue in my mouth; I could not bring myself to tell her that my most recognizable work had been a lucky series of advertisements for “The Diamond Discount Specialists.”

When I finally realized, one fateful night at a sad, lonely party, that my entire life was an act, that I was always performing, that I couldn’t turn it off, that there was no “me” beyond that script whose lines I dutifully parroted with all the empty bravado that I used for my acting roles, I decided it was time to discover who I truly was. The first step, I knew, was to confront that most hated side of myself, the commercial actor. And the very next morning, I pulled every one of the cassette tapes from my closet, blowing off the dust that had accumulated from months and years of neglect. I placed them in a single, precarious stack on the floor of my small studio apartment. They reached from the ground to well over the top of the television set.

I sat on the floor for a long time, staring in horrified apprehension at the evidence of my shame. Would I be able to stomach this physical manifestation of the misery that comprised the last five years of my life?

My hands shook as I took the first tape off of the stack and placed it into the VCR. As it played on the television, I watched myself drinking beer with “the guys,” sitting on couches in a sitcom-style living room, the setting itself mocking my dreams of an actual weekly television show.

When it ended, I ejected the tape and inserted another. And then another. Images of my face flashed across the screen, me laughing, frowning, working hard, holding hands with my “girlfriend” (although I had not maintained anything close to a committed relationship since high school), playing tennis. Married with a small child. Comforting an elderly relative. Enjoying a delicious hamburger dripping with orange-colored sauce.

They were every bit as horrible as I had imagined. In fact, they were worse. Watching these familiar, trite little scenes, I was able for the first time in years, or possibly ever, to regard myself honestly, to see myself as others would see me. What I saw on the screen was not a great actor. Instead, this man in the commercials was...normal. A normal part of everyday society. A mascot celebrating convention, complacency, and good old-fashioned American consumerism.

If I were to die tomorrow, I told myself, this would be the sum of my achievements. This is what I would leave to posterity. My life would be judged by this. I felt sick to my stomach.

I watched one hundred and thirty-eight commercials that day. It took four hours to get through them all, switching the tapes after every thirty or sixty seconds.

When I had removed the very last tape from the VCR, I felt weak and drained. I carried all the tapes to my closet and stacked them in the back again, eager to hide them away. An hour later, I put all of the tapes into garbage bags and placed them in the apartment dumpster downstairs. Then, in the middle of the fretful, sleepless night that followed, I rose from my bed and went back downstairs in my pajamas to rescue the tapes from the dumpster. Rather than putting them back into the closet, I stacked them in a tall pile against the wall of my living area, where I could never, never forget their existence. Even as I write, the tapes stand facing me, now in my study, a reminder of the life I once lived, and of why I must never return to it.

I will never act again, I said to myself, as I stacked each ugly black tape against my blank white wall. And I was, at last, free.

Chapter 24:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/06/24.html