[T]he sacrificial victim must send up long-drawn-out, mournful, pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the unutterable loneliness of existence. Thereupon my joy of life, blazing up from some secret place deep within me, would finally give its own shout of exultation, answering the victim cry for cry. Was this not exactly similar to the joy ancient man found in the hunt?
— Yukio Mishima, CONFESSIONS OF A MASK
Invigorated by the adrenaline of a new semester, this past February I plunged into a deep dive of the bibliography of writer, playwright, model, and nationalist Yukio Mishima and, by happenstance, discovered a new favorite book of mine: Confessions of a Mask. The novel is narrated by a deeply closeted and sexually repressed adolescent who finds himself fascinated with images and drawings of the mortally wounded and bloodied bodies of strong young men. Particularly fond of depictions of Saint Sebastian, the narrator finds that these scenes of dying young men speak to something burrowed deep within him. I include this passage here because it conveys the nature of the relationship between the performer and the spectator, the one who does and the one to whom it is done. Sometimes while watching a film, I hear a cry inside of me but it is base and small and too humiliating to give credence to; I smother the cry until it becomes unbearable or until I hear it mimicked in some way in the world around me as Mishima’s narrator does, a loneliness that reverberates and is responded to until it becomes something more. When the cry becomes unbearable, when the struggle of life grates too harshly against the soul, there becomes a need that is like an itch; a need to create and mirror and reflect the unreflectable. Anxious turnings of the stomach, deep hollows in the chest that strike harder than sadness, the tinges of fire along the strip of the neck, become dramatic soliloquies, dance moves, splashes in a pool, words even.
In the middle of her collection of iridescent written fragments, her mini-meditations that explore the multiplicities of the color blue, poet Maggie Nelson cites Leonardo da Vinci: “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing.” And it is love, I think, that impels us to perform. A longing, a signified sigh, a certain kind of grasping toward bodies and the consciences they veil within them. The always-failed endeavor to get within, be within. We don’t have to be too special or too talented to be performers. Performance: dance, sport, writing, speech—all containers designed to transport a message from the performer to the one being performed to, containers that hold questions and answers. Is not every rehearsal of a performance simply a love letter, scratched out, torn, and then crumpled?
Scratched. Torn. Crumpled. I think of these actions and I think of the sounds they produce; intentionally fervent, a near-melodramatic display of frustration left to fester too long. We can think of Toni’s footsteps as scratches, tearings, and crumplings upon the paper of her own body. The sound of sneakers on wet cement. Thumping and rhythmic, pulsing and spastic. We see Toni run up the steps of the overpass, but we might as well be seeing anyone for any discernible attributes of hers have vanished in the baggy gray sweatsuit she adorns. She is enveloped by the chain-link fencing typical of pedestrian overpasses and it evokes to us the sense of a narrow cage. Her rehearsal begins as a disintegration of sorts: jumping jacks wither away into beating steps upon the cue of the disembodied sound of bodies—hands or maybe feet—pounding against something seemingly solid and sturdy. We cannot be sure, but we tether this sound to earlier sequences in Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits (2015). Meandering sequences of the girls dancing during rehearsal at the gym, music blaring, bodies moving in tandem. Unsynchronized with Toni’s abrasive steps, we understand intuitively that the bodies we hear are nondiegetic, that these bodies are not Toni’s, that Toni is alone, disconnected, on an overpass. And yet, there is something about the insistence of her movements, the intensity perhaps, that calls to us the potential that the step-clapping sounds are indeed diegetic, for they reverberate within her conscience. She rehearses with the intention of perfecting her steps so that they might soon be good enough to present, like a gift, to them, the other older better dancing girls. See, see my body move. Toni pounds away, trying and trying to get it right, body moving for them and almost with them but always a step too late.
When I write I am performing. I care deeply about my writing and I care deeply about the way my writing is read; about the way certain words written out on the page can seem to fit together to create a phrase that motions toward understanding, less like the logical understanding of two jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting into each other and more like entwined limbs with skin and blood coursing beneath that skin, the galvanization of still and cold body into life. I am grasping outward—always, always for you, reader. And this is performance: something that is ultimately birthed from the need to be seen, to be known, to be recognized, to be validated. I am here now. And my body moves for your eyes. See, see my body move. Are these unspoken projections not the cries that stem from lovers, those who so desperately want to love and want to be loved?
Perhaps that is what is so alluring about Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies (2007); Marie, desperately wanting to be loved by Floriane, gazes at Floriane and her team’s rehearsal which is arguably the ultimate expression of love. Similar to Toni, we see a kind of performance—a work in progress, a rehearsal just like Toni’s but one that possesses a more discernible strength in unification, in synchronization. The sense of struggle here, that insistence and intensity, lies not within sound but rather in sight. Awash in the unfathomable blue of chlorine pool water, Marie watches Floriane’s team from underneath after having been beckoned in by Floriane. Submerged in the water, the lens of Marie allows us to see what the pristine and meticulously choreographed bodies above the surface never betray: a wild and near-desperate thrashing. A symphony of legs, contorted and bent and always, always moving. Like Toni, the legs of the synchronized swimmers seem to move—to thrash—out of something that closer resembles necessity rather than want. The ethereal and inherently mystifying sounds of the below-the-surface submersion convey the notion that we have entered another realm. We have entered a realm in which we are allowed to bear witness to the attempt, the trying, the struggle of girls and the bodies they inhabit. Their bodies heave, trembling under the exertion of their labor, and our understanding of their movement as an offering swells and spills over until our understanding collapses into awe and reverence. As the girls plunge their heads and torsos in and jut their legs out from under the surface, as we see them wind their arms back and forth against the nothingness of the water, striking it, beating it, the reverence and the awe we feel solidify back to a resounding whisper of truth that reveals the intimacy of rehearsal. Limbs fight against the defenseless—air and water—and we know that these limbs are merely fighting against themselves. Love contorts into a thrashing, kicking leg; a type of work exerted, a type of labor in which the labor itself becomes both the medium and the crumpled and crossed-out message of love.
And my body moves for your eyes.
Pondering the potential for a film like Wes Anderson’s Rushmore to affect us in the wake of grief, Kristi McKim asks “[W]hat is it like to feel such pain, and how does this film—or any film—really help you? How might film offer a form by which to structure inchoate feeling?” What if we were to take these questions and expand McKim’s focus on film to all mediums? What does Toni think, what does she feel when she sees the older girls hitting their perfectly choreographed steps? Does she perceive that writhing human struggle so ingrained within herself expressed outward back to her like a mirror? Back on the overpass, Toni soundlessly punches, pounds, and wails on the air, both rehearsing her steps for dance and for boxing. In her fervor, in her desperation to both “get it just right” as well as to adequately express her emotions, we cannot discern whether or not she is dancing or fighting for her life, if she is struggling or if she has complete control over the movements of her body, if this performance is beautiful or grotesque. It is in this difficulty to discern, this witnessing of the raw, bleary, and multiplicitous extraction of the self, that lies the intricate meaning of rehearsal. We are afforded a glance at a performance before it has the chance to skim upon perfection, before the ugly things—the struggling, the thrashing, the attempting, the misstepping, the thumping, the contorting—are obscured or cut out. But what all those ugly things signify is rather quite beautiful: an offering to the audience made with pain and grit and sweat. I hear a cry inside of me but it is base and small and too humiliating to give credence to; I smother the cry until it becomes unbearable or until I hear it mimicked in some way in the world around me as Mishima’s narrator does, a loneliness that reverberates and is responded to until it becomes something more. The full expression of the shaky cry that grows and dies in the back of all of our throats; loneliness meeting loneliness. A wordless affirmation that resounds loud and furious but lands tenderly. I am here now. See, see, see. I ask again, is this not some letter of love?
Author Biography
Andrenae Jones is an English and Film and Media Studies major at Amherst College in her junior year. She is intrigued by any and all critical and academic analysis of pop culture and its effect on contemporary society.
