Pretty things, so what if I like pretty things?
Pretty lies, so what if I like pretty lies?
— Rufus Wainwright, “Pretty Things”
W hen I have eleven dollars to spend on a Friday night, I go to the IFC
Center and see an independent film. In general, I prefer indies to major studio productions because of their honesty. Without the pressure of a massive budget or an omnipotent Hollywood producer to limit its options, an indie is free to take chances that more mainstream films cannot take. The freedoms of an independent production—to challenge the viewer’s preconceptions and to force them to see things they’d rather not see—are what make the indie my entertainment medium of choice.
The greatest indie scares the hell out of you. It makes you weep like a child. It makes you laugh until you cry. It embarrasses you. It makes you question everything you’ve ever taken for granted. If it’s truly wonderful, it changes you. It acts as a sort of mirror, reflecting parts of you that you thought were invisible before you entered the theater. If you don’t know whether to hate or love yourself when the screen goes black, if you leave the theater and step into a world you didn’t know existed two hours earlier, that’s the mark of greatness.
When I take my seat at an indie and let the darkness surround me, I’m able to admit the facts of my existence that I have tried to deny. Enveloped in a darkness that allows me to become anonymous in a room full of strangers, consumed by the unapologetic honesty of the film, I am able to admit that there is a part of me that is undeniably ugly. There is a safety in darkness that makes honesty less frightening than it would be in the light of day.
When I leave the IFC Center late on Friday nights, Sixth Avenue is always there to greet me. After I have drowned in the strange beauty of a great independent film, the world is transformed for me. The threatening darkness, the harsh life-noise of passing cabs and pedestrians, the inexplica-
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bly grotesque odor—the ugliness of Sixth Avenue—always become attractive to me. I find that I love everyone who passes me on the street. I love their ugliness. I love their anger. I love the stench of dried urine that hovers in the air as I pass homeless men huddled in doorways. I love everything about city life that people have warned me against. I love it for the same reason I love an independent film: it’s honest. I love it too because it forces me to look at a reflection of myself that is often hard to recognize. I love it because I fear it.
Sylvia Plath, in her poem “Mirror,” wrestles with the conflict that springs from a simultaneous love and fear of honesty. Written from the perspective of a mirror, Plath’s poem recognizes the honesty and impersonality of its narrator: “I am silver and exact. / I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. / I am not cruel, only truthful—” (1-4). She suggests here, at the opening of her poem, that the mirror is reliable, free of the limitations of human perception; it does not care who or what you are. Merciless in its reflections, it returns an image of whatever it sees without discrimination or personal connection. The graphic personification of the mirror implies an intimate relationship between it and the reflected figure, an aging woman. There is a sense that the mirror is at once a constant in the woman’s life and a reminder of the inevitability of physical change. She looks to her reflection for a glimpse of
“what she really is,” responding to the likeness the mirror creates by crying and wringing her hands (11). She is frightened by the changes it reflects but continues to love it for its reliability. It forces her, in its honesty, to acknowledge the terrible fact that the slow fade of youthful beauty is inevitable. Plath illustrates, with cinematic imagery, this horrifying fact of impending ugliness with the image of a “terrible fish” that rises steadily in the lake of the mirror
(18). The grotesquerie of the fish is too honest for the woman’s fearful eyes.
She looks away, choosing the deceptive darkness of candles and moonlight,
“liars,” over the mirror’s harsh and honest reflection (12). She needs that darkness, however brief, to survive in the face of the mirror’s horrific reflection. She is slowly drowning in the mirror’s painful truth, but her hope for a miracle of eternal beauty continues to pull her to the surface. There, she will inevitably meet with the terrible fish of ugliness that awaits her.
Life in New York is frightening. The city is a sort of fun-house mirror; it shows us the darkest truth of our existence, magnifies it to the point that it cannot be avoided and throws it in our faces at every turn. But we have chosen to live here, in a city full of darkness and pain, because we have somehow found the beauty in the distorted reflection of ourselves that it offers. Every day, we pass people on the street who embody magnified versions of what we
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hide about ourselves, what we fear becoming, whose existence we are terrified by. When I walk down Sixth Avenue in the light of day, I have to look away from the suffering eyes of a man, stinking of squalor and huddled in a doorway. If he can exist in the same city that I move through with selfish indulgence, what does that say about the city? What does it say about me? The questions are too difficult to attack, their answers too painful to acknowledge.
I inevitably avert my eyes, imagine his invisibility, the invisibility of his paper cup that begs the clatter of dropped pennies. He is, in a way, a terrible fish rising in the mirror whose reflection I have come to love. In order to maintain my love for the image I rely on, I need to look away from the honesty it threatens me with. I pretend to study the pavement beneath my designer shoes, trying to convince myself that he doesn’t exist. Even a three-second glance at the cracked and stained sidewalk can be enough to save us from a haunting vision of human suffering. In those three seconds, we can lie to ourselves, pretend the gruesome truth is not really there and avoid the reflection of the fun-house mirror. In our search to know ourselves, to know the world we inhabit, we encounter images, distorted or entirely clear, that are difficult to stomach. What happens when we hide from those images? What are the consequences of denial?
In the essay “Late Victorians,” Richard Rodriguez explores these consequences, as experienced by the increasingly superficial gay men of San
Francisco’s Castro district. He illustrates them with a number of images, including a mirror inherited from an AIDS victim. We fill our lives with mirrors, speculates Rodriguez, to perpetuate the idea that they somehow contain memories of our youthful beauty. But how can we expect a mirror to immortalize us? As soon as we leave its narrow field of vision, we are no longer present within its frame; our relationship to the mirror is fleeting. The image in the mirror does not always leave a lasting impression on the person who sees it. So as Rodriguez’s mirror is handed down from one gay man to another,
AIDS—death—being the factor that forces it to change hands, there is no permanent remnant of the man who owned it last. Only the glass and the ornate frame that surrounds it remain. Rodriguez’s fear of this lack of remembrance is paralyzing. Still, he hangs the mirror over his bed and chooses to deny its honesty. The beauty of its frame detracts from the honest reflection it offers. Like the seduction of youthful beauty, it has a hypnotic quality that lies in the intricate artistry of its construction. Complex and beautiful, it diverts attention from the simple honesty that it contains. It is, in a way, the darkness, the lie, that lets us deny the honesty of a negative reflection.
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If we deny what is not beautiful, we will inevitably lose touch with the truth of our existence, because the truth lies in what is ugly. Rodriguez explores in “Late Victorians” the creation of, and resulting obsession with, an ideal of physical perfection that came to define the homosexual community of San Francisco. The heterosexual masses harbored preconceptions of what a gay man should be; content to settle for a reduction of the gay personality, they created a fun-house mirror that reflected only the beauty on the surface.
Its distorted image hid the flaws and highlighted the virtues of a shallow life, so much that the reductive mirror of the masses managed to morph into another sort of distorted mirror, one that valued superficiality and a carefree lifestyle. As the Yuppie culture placed homosexual men on a social pedestal, their every aesthetic choice emulated and studied with a resentful eye, the distortion increased. The gay men of San Francisco accepted it in exchange for their own social needs.
The last time I went to the IFC Center, I saw an award-winning indie,
Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know . It was a film about nothing.
It had no real plot or significant conflict to propel it from one scene to the next. It looked like an indie, with its weird shots and offbeat actors, but it was different from the other indies I’d seen. I wasn’t afraid of it. I loved every character: the masturbating pedophile, the needy performance artist, the selfmutilating shoe salesman, his seven year old son with a sexual fetish most adults would cringe at. They weren’t frightening, though they should have been. The director had glossed over the ugliness of the characters with a superficial beauty that drew the audience in. Everyone found a happy ending; everyone said “I love you” to someone without worrying about whether or not they’d hear it back. But needy performance artists don’t find love. Men who burn themselves strictly for effect don’t get to see their children, even after the wounds heal. Pedophiles aren’t charming. And little boys who meet their cybersex partners on park benches don’t come home in one piece. The film was a sparkling Hollywood lie disguised as a gritty and honest indie. But it wasn’t entirely committed to the superficiality it had submitted to either.
This faux-indie seemed ashamed of its lies, unlike a big studio production.
Hollywood blockbusters don’t hide the fact that they are dishonest with their audience; their ticket sales rely on the American obsession with the beautiful lie of a happy ending. But the film I saw seemed trapped between the ideals of two cinematic worlds: desperate for the integrity associated with a great indie and hopeful that it would receive a sparkling statue at each movie festival. A real independent film, not an award-winning liar, forces us to acknowl-
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edge the truths that we hide from, and those truths cannot be revealed in a sugarcoated happy ending.
If an external force never compels a person to acknowledge the horrific truth he denies, it is likely that he never will on his own initiative. In “Late
Victorians,” that change came when AIDS swept through the gay population of San Francisco, tearing away its façade of beauty. Using the stereotype of aesthetic perfection to differentiate themselves from the straight world, gay men had become consumed by the superficiality of their own self-definitions.
And as they suddenly and tragically met AIDS, a disease that does not distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, it became obvious that physical perfection is fleeting. As the disease ate away at their bodies, as they watched their once beautiful friends die ugly and disgusting deaths, the flaws in their lifestyle became apparent. But they were unable to detach themselves from the social preconceptions that had defined them, however falsely. They couldn’t tear their eyes from the reflection the fun-house mirror offered, even as the image came to reflect a new reality.
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
—Virginia Woolf
When Rodriguez describes a memorial held for his friend César, a victim of AIDS, there is an emphasis on the superficiality of the event. He observes that, following his death, César is nothing more than a conditional memory:
“César’s memorial [was] the kind of party he would have enjoyed, everyone said” (502). Rodriguez gives the impression throughout the scene that César’s obsession with aesthetic perfection in life has resulted in an empty death.
Such superficiality has managed to take precedence in the memories of mourners over any of César’s internal beauty.
The scene at the memorial is less about the tragedy of César’s death and more about the effect it has on Rodriguez: there is a tone of regret in the passage that makes it seem as if he wishes he could not only change the way
César had led his life but also his own choices. César had come to terms with the finality of life before AIDS had destroyed him, responding to an administrative scheme to prevent drunk driving at a junior prom by saying, “You cannot forbid tragedy” (495). But Rodriguez, unlike his friend, clings to a fear of the end of beauty. He becomes aware, through his reflection on his friend’s death, that in focusing on the terrible fish that will one day rise in the lake of his mirror—the end of beauty—he has sacrificed life. He has outlived his
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friends by avoiding the path that will lead him to AIDS and eventually death, but has he really survived them? As he stood before the mirror, wringing his hands and dreading the moment the fish would appear, his friends turned to the liars of darkness. They were able to live beautiful and enjoyable lives, envied by the masses. But Rodriguez, paralyzed by a fear of the loss of youthful beauty and consequent death, is unwilling to embrace life. He describes in the final scene of “Late Victorians” an old man who personifies his fear: “He is not the sort of man any gay man would have chosen to become in the
1970s. He is probably not what he himself expected to become. . . . Certainly he is what I fear becoming” (503). The description implies that the man is unforgivably flawed; he has no chance for redemption. But in the scene, it is the ugly old man who is respected and placed on a pedestal. Rodriguez has survived his friends and avoided the fate of AIDS but has found himself alone and unfulfilled as a result. He cannot bring himself to sacrifice beauty for the sake of a complete life yet cannot completely devote himself to the lifestyle that he blames for the death of his friends. In refusing to accept the terrible fish that rises in the mirror, he faces both the end of life and of beauty; he has sacrificed life altogether.
There is a denial sprung from fear that often results in a paradoxical existence. We fear a condition or fate so deeply that we are at once consumed by our fear and a devotion to its reciprocal idea. In his essay “Life with
Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant,” Gerald Early explores this contradictory mindset of a vast majority of African-Americans. Unable to choose between a hatred of the white definition of beauty and a submission to the social pressures that it exerts, blacks are left clinging to “opposing notions,” defined by Early as a “great hope (but secret fear) of an African-
American future . . . that blacks will always remain black” and its reciprocal:
“the great fear (but secret hope) of an African-American future . . . that blacks will not always remain black but evolve into something else” (228). Some
African-Americans, concludes Early, are simultaneously terrified of their blackness and the eventual loss of that which makes them black. In response to a “white dementia” that equates blackness to nothingness, blacks cling to their racial identity, believing that “blackness is everything” (228). But the dementia that Early references is too powerful to be completely resisted; it infiltrates African-American minds and convinces them, on some level, that the only real beauty is white beauty. It is not until the black community as a whole can decide what sort of existence will satisfy their social needs that they can be racially proud, both differentiated and a part of the whole.
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In the song “Both Sides Now,” Joni Mitchell sings about perspective, articulating a feeling of confusion at all that she has seen: “I’ve looked at life from both sides now / from up and down / and still somehow / it’s life’s illusions I recall / I really don’t know life at all.” If we are to agree with Mitchell, then no amount of knowledge could ever hope to clarify the deceptive qualities of life. Even when we are trying to be completely honest with ourselves, examining our surroundings and ourselves from every possible angle, we are still left without a clear sense of what we have actually seen. Perhaps, then, the truth we seek in a mirror’s reflection is just as deceptive as the denial we rely on to escape its frightening honesty. As long as we are afraid of the truth of that terrible and inescapable fish that rises toward us in the mirror, we will never begin to understand that which we seek to comprehend. Such comprehension is elusive not because the truth is unclear, but because we do not want to acknowledge the honesty that lies in ugliness. It is easy to turn to a beautiful illusion, to believe in happy endings, to convince ourselves that it is better to live a long, though empty, life than to die young, to imagine in selfish dishonesty the invisibility of suffering, all in hopes that the lie we love so purely will one day come true. But it never will, and we can never expect it to because a mirror image is fixed. We will always tend to cling to the hypnotic beauty of a lie simply because the light of truth can be frighteningly blinding.
WORKS CITED
Early, Gerald. “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant.”
Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry.
2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 225-238.
The Hours.
Dir. Stephen Daldry. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and
Julianne Moore. Miramax. 2005.
Me and You and Everyone We Know.
Dir. Miranda July. Perf. Miranda July and John Hawkes. MGM, 2005.
Mitchell, Joni. “Both Sides Now.” Hits.
Reprise/Wea, 1996.
Plath, Sylvia. “Mirror.” The Collected Poems.
New York: Harper, 1992. 173-
174.
Rodriguez, Richard. “Late Victorians.” Encounters: Essays for Exploration and
Inquiry.
2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2000. 493-505.
Wainwright, Rufus. “Pretty Things.” Want One.
Dreamworks, 2003.
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