eyes for an audience
^ Jamie Neumann in de passie: restaging lyrical nitrate. 2024. a.r. havel and a. hennen payne
When making the recreation of the Dutch nitrate film “de passie” on Super 8mm, I asked actress Jamie Neumann to make direct eye contact with the lens as an explicit allusion to Sally Potter’s Orlando. That film has endured as one of my favorite lavish queer-feminist visions, wherein Tilda Swinton’s character addresses the audience like second person literary references throughout. I imagine that in the dark theater of 1992, this kind of address was still slightly jolting: audiences were not yet accustomed to a celluloid character returning the gaze. And still, it is rare for a narrative film to “break the fourth wall,” though now, it often revels in a kind of pastiche mockumentary style, as in 2018’s I, Tonya. I repeated this gesture when making “queers in the bramble” a couple months later on Super 8mm as well; this time, the affect is more as a P.O.V. of another cruiser in the park.
One could write a whole cultural history of this act: what it means to be actively engaged by a performer, to understand oneself as an active audience, and furthermore about the construction of performances, reality, and/or reality as performance. Perhaps it would include Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, or harken back even further to a Masque-plays of the Medici’s. Oh, right: it begins at the allegory of the cave, and reaches an academic crescendo with Richard Schechner. But, what interests me now, in this contemporary moment, is the way we have ingested this gesture into concepts of ourselves, whether we understand ourselves as performing for an audience or not. Because we—Western technologically centered people with smartphones—are now constantly engaged in performing for the camera: in video calls; in social media posts like selfies and staged portraits with friends, family, or lovers; and in its epitomical manifestation, erotic performances on Twitter and OnlyFans.
In the latter cases, performing becomes a hyper-conscious display for a semi-anonymous audience; and, its cultural antecedent may not actually be filmic, but reside in the architectural designs of live peep-shows, with their anonymous individual viewing stalls. A particularly seedy construction of this appears in Ken Russel’s 1984 film Crimes of Passion; and a less absurdist rendering was more recently presented in the FX series Pose. But neither displays a design motif of the peep-show that was prevalent: the darkened glass or one-way mirror wherein performers could not see their ogling audience.
^ Clin and Whit in queers in the bramble. 2024. a.r. havel and a. hennen payne
In 2014, Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree in response to his perceived unattractiveness and his inability to garner attention from young women; his action initiated an online community of “incels,” men who felt betrayed by society, blaming their perceived social isolation and victimhood of beauty standards not on marketing schemes, but on the people who exemplified the success of beauty privilege. Rodger was an angry virgin, and he made his ideas known in self-recorded manifestos. In all of them, he sits in the driver's seat of a new sedan or a convertible—yes, this California boy epitomized the progeny of his Hollywood connected parents and ideology. In one particular video, he silently flirts with his phone’s camera, raising his eyebrows while some cool smooth jazz plays on the car stereo. We were all suddenly made to imagine what an Elliot Rodger seduction might look like, the hollow gestures meant to form a coherent sexuality. I remember watching this, in 2014, convinced that this act, this utterly desperate performance for the camera, was an indication of Rodger’s pathology. But, now, over a decade later, I’m more than accustomed to all kinds of people performing for some omniscient audience, especially as it constructs a sexual self.
^ still from YouTube video where Elliot Rodger flirts with the camera.
On the pornotopia of Twitterlandia (now fittingly called X), I can spend hours scrolling through profiles of chiseled models who make direct address to the camera—to everyone and no-one simultaneously—attempting to convince me to spend $10 a month to see more of their amateur erotic performances for the camera. And it's telling that the more “successful” these models become, the less they make this gesture, and the more they mold their content on the narrative-style filmmaking of studio pornography.
The vertically framed videos of guys jacking off or teasing their nudity are clearly a contemporary consequence of the phone screen template as the dominant mode of consuming media. Studio-made pornography is still mostly made in the 16:9 aspect ratio, made for watching on high definition televisions or laptops; in these scenes, few actors are looking directly into the camera unless it is either a POV of another performer, or a post-cum shot talk back.
^ screenshot of Twitter profile with thirst traps and eye contact to entice activity with the post and pay-for-view content on OnlyFans.