On Thursday night, the new Guy Maddin film played at our local four-screen indie theater in Montgomery County, New Jersey. By Friday morning, it was gone, replaced by a drama about relationships and difficult truths and the shape of Andrew Garfield’s face.
Exactly which specific Thursday and Friday in human history this swap-out occurred on is inconsequential. Like the images up on the screen, what really matters is the motion itself. Every day, something leaves our life for the last time. And so: every day, something new enters. In this way, film distribution. In this way, mortality.
Art makes a study of our entrances and exits. It translates them into a set of actionable items and formal terms like “in frame” or “onstage.” A singer notates the beloved’s presence by the timbre of their cords. “Insert here, a sentiment re: our golden years,” Father John Misty sings on the most romantic song this side of the millennium changeover. “All ‘cause I went to the store one day: ‘Seen you around, what’s your name?’” A novel’s page turns, the ballerina skips from the wing’s darkness into the stage light, the white space between a stanza break collapses into printed text—these moments roll by as if to say, Here is the body you’ve been waiting for. And there it goes.
After the visceral feeling of losing and finding fades, we hem and haw. Maybe we expected that disappearance, felt jolted by that resurgence. At least we got to see the shape of the motion, and with it, feel an accompanying closure, a break. Art gives us the end. Rudimentary and reductive, maybe, to write it out in plain letters, as if it were a shopping list, a work email, a prom inquest, but isn’t what we make all about who moves with us towards our end?
Living is trickier. How to tell when someone is entering into or leaving your life at any given moment? We go to stores so frequently! Watching the movie, seeing the play, we sit upright and make a study of noticing. In life, though, we space and amble, blink and blink and blink. I was going to see that movie! But it’s gone. I was going to see you! I blinked. Time passed.
The magic of the frame is how it charts these motions. It lets us hang our lives off it, even if only theoretically, apocryphally, as shades or avatars or myths. And so I wonder if you can ever totally know a person until you put them into frame at some point—between the four walls of the theater, for instance, or inside the four lines that make up the cinema’s cell and ratio. Watch them enter, watch them leave. And there you are, between them and the world, watching for when you’re not there anymore.
Is there a better way to evoke the plot of Janet Planet (2023), the first feature film written and directed by Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker? Over the course of one western Massachusetts summer, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) watches her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), who watches the entrances and exits of people in her own life. Janet watches Lacy, too, who lives her 11-year-old life: she goes to piano lessons, arranges a mishmosh of figurines in theatrical tea party tableaus, zaps blintzes by the microwave’s plastic-gold glow. But you get the sense that if the film were left to Lacy’s own devices, it might unspool forever in mosquito noise curlicue rather than a line; such is the narrative urgency in a child’s day. Baker’s trick is that while Janet Planet is Lacy’s story (hers is the age that the film, as it were, comes of), the object of Lacy’s orbit is her mother, Janet. And so, the film’s gravity and structure follow suit. The long-shortness of a mid-childhood summer’s mini-epochs are split up by intertitles that announce both the during and after periods of three fellow travelers in Janet’s life: Wayne (Will Patton), Regina (Sophie Okenedo), and Avi (Elias Koteas). As in: “WAYNE,” which appears once Lacy is home for the summer, a surprise early exit from sleepaway camp. As in: “END WAYNE,” once the mercurial boyfriend’s moves prove a touch too volatile for Janet. As in: stage directions.
In the theater, the stage direction is the terrain of body-shepherding. “And with that, Avery leaves” Baker writes on the last page of her play The Flick. The “that” references a specific preceding line, a specific action Avery has just performed. But in the possibility-making language of stage direction—more suggestions than mandatory actions—Baker’s “that” also refers to everything that comes before Avery’s departure, which is to say, the life before the end of Avery. Like many of our best modern playwrights, Annie Baker doesn’t take stage directions for granted. A tradition that used to merely be a production’s first blocking notes, hurriedly copied into the publishing fodder by a sub-stub stage manager becomes, in Baker’s (and Caryl Churchill’s and Tracy Letts’s) hands, a crucial part of defining theater’s “is/isn’t” tension. It’s what Brecht tried to wield, a welding of reality and something more real: the body is always the actor and the character, the space is always the set and the setting, the time is always human and manipulated. To read a page of dramatic action isn’t that far from reading a poem—try Anne Carson.
Baker’s plays communicate constant, low-lying magical ir-realism. In The Antipodes—a play about people sitting at a table writing a story for a form that’s never specified, ambushed by writer’s block and an unseen, perhaps apocalyptic storm—this mode is achieved by embracing speculative volatility. Accounts of ritual and ceremony (in other words, the writing process) are littered with “maybe”s and “or”s, little snake-ladder chutes of uncertainty, none more uncertain than Brian’s late-in-the-play chant and mysterious regurgitations: “He dry heaves some more and then spits something out into his palm,” she writes. “It’s a small jellyfish or a seahorse or anemone, covered in blood.” In Circle Mirror Transformation, a play about drama classes in a community center somewhere in Vermont, the playwright explicitly warns against the players’ potential desire to treat unreal moments unreal-ly: “Please heed the pauses and silences in this play,” Baker writes in her opening note. “Without its silences, this play is a satire, and with its silences it is, hopefully, a strange little naturalistic meditation on theater and life and death and the passing of time.”
The Flick marries these feelings of volatile possibility and turbulent silence. Nominally the story of three people working at a dingy, single-screen movie theater in Worcester County, Massachusetts in the summer of 2012, the play is nothing less than a mediation—and blessedly, not a meditation—of and on time’s passage in front of eyes. Which is to say, cinema on stage. Whole scenes are composed of two characters sweeping the movie theater house, intermittently chattering. Drama crops up: work crushes go requited and unrequited, existence and stasis begin to irk and anxietize the players, all while a sale of the dilapidated and time-less theater to a digital-minded optimizer looms. But this narrative conflict emerges from the durational terrain of life on the clock, rather than rising above it. When the Flick (the name of the play, the name of the theater) finally does go digital, an entirely wordless scene accounts for the disassembly/assembly in terms that wouldn’t be out of place in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968):
Then we watch Sam and Rose slowly and methodically disassemble the film projector. They remove the reels and then, piece by piece, they remove the film projector from the window and put it on the floor of the protection booth. This might take a little while. Then we watch them install the new digital projector. It doesn’t take very long. They turn it on for a second to try it out. It emits a glowing square of white light and then begins to project images. It is on for a while, projecting images we can’t see. Sam and Rose leave the booth. Then the projector goes to green, then white, then darkness.
The cumulative effect of directing a stage in this way is to suggest a certain wobbliness over exactly what is happening. That wobbliness is, of course, how theater lives and breathes. We feel time pass in real-time, are confronted by bodies who literally share our air and yet seem to move through it differently. This distancing effect is doubly felt at the cinema, where time and space don’t unfold in our literal atmosphere but from the insides of a can, a collusion of digital particles unwinding through dust and light. When Wayne performs his Tai chi perambulation, when Regina disappears from behind the ice cream counter in the space of a cut, when Janet and Lacy mynah-bird Avi’s New Age yogaisms back with prostrations of their own, actions that could be read as “less real” become matters of possible fact.
Rather than feeling limited by the ways it threads itself back to Baker’s stage conceptions, Janet Planet effectively articulates a theory of film directing completely in stage directions. What does life look like in italics? A design for living—our meaning or thesis, our purpose or point—emerges from underneath our text, out of the mouths of 11-year-olds or the claws of imagined creatures too easily relegated to the junk drawer of “unrealistic” by the grown-up march of time. In the opening staging notes of The Flick, Baker writes, tellingly and hopefully: “We, the theater audience, are the movie screen.” It’s just a stage direction. What if it’s true?
And so what if I say that the best dramatic precedent for Janet Planet is Labyrinth (1986)? Another girl’s coming-of-age film full of dead ends and loops, condemned in some circles for being plotless. Possessed and animated by an imagination devoted to wording the world as simultaneously descriptive and mysterious. Life stages imagined as the world falls down, which is to say, as time adds age. The dioramas actually affect the movement of the flesh and blood; the puppetry is actually the animal it resembles; the illness is a virus. It’s not a virus. Thin air eats men who only exist because they were written to be there. And at the end of the long summer? The fall. By inserting lives into imagined roles, we render life.
I wonder if you can ever totally know a person until you put them into frame at some point. This speculation maybe makes art seem overly utilitarian. Movies aren’t made to be psychoanalytic transactions. Janet Planet is not Annie Baker’s confessional memoir, despite Lacy staging her figurines like a playwright might her characters. Just because I recognize in Lacy a pastoral-stretched eccentricity that also led me to speak made-up languages in malls doesn’t mean the movie explains me, to me or to others. Our people are in the pieces we make and love, but in the action, just below the story said aloud. There are people in this essay, too, absences and presences that percolate like hands and faces in a movie set maze. I’m sorry. I miss you. I love you. Just some things I say to them sometimes.
Art’s stage direction—its suggestion for how we speak to it—is merely “This is what it is.” Everything else in the air is life, which we bring with us, which we carry away. And art asks that we enter into a relationship with forgiveness. It renders this relationship in the language of belief. Isn’t that all? Forgive the fact that this isn’t actually happening. Forgive the fact that that is an actor; that this small green frog is attached to a man’s hand; that the dancer who is a swan has human digits, a smile, small flecks where the lip’s texture pokes through the lipstick. Forgive the fact that in life, unlike in art, sometimes we miss how we mean—like Janet, like the lost soul ghosts of The Flick. Forgive ourselves that life, unlike art, doesn’t give us lines to measure by, just a sequence of summers and silences. “A poor player that struts and frets,” someone once said. And signifying nothing? What if that doesn’t sound so bad? What if it’s a matter of framing?
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