Backstage

December 28th, 2007 Posted in Critique, Mystery

Hidden is not necessarily secret. Those not in the know might not need to know and might not want the bother of learning and remembering. Those making a presentation–whether actors, film-makers, teachers or whoever–are usually willing to share the social organization used in constructing their particular public event.

The experience of the hidden is available in visits and tours backstage at the play, the artist’s atelier, the restaurant’s kitchen, the factory floor, the barn at the farm and the like. It is a pleasant diversion on both sides unless it is overdone and interferes in the productive work.

The inside narrative is also offered in memoirs and writings even though these venues can also be used to cover-up, deny, and fictionalize the actual. Many outsiders are avid to know and they can’t get enough of such stories and visits.

We all participate in the magician/observer nexus and revolve through the two sides of this social experience. Whatever our activity there is always a difference between public and private, and we in turn can be visited by the inquisitive other. Some activities might have a higher prestige, might reach a larger audience, might have a greater consequential impact, but the distinction of front and back, shown and hidden is the same.

So there is a constructed event and the fact that it requires planning, gathering, rehearsing, costuming and so on is known and accepted. There are also mainly biological necessities that we hide in plain sight since we all engage in them just by being alive.

This doing and hiding is constant for all of us. Selecting a wardrobe, dressing to go out, personal hygiene, manners all contribute to a building and maintaining of a public self and a sequestering of the means and the necessities. We grant the hidden to each other in a conspiratorial mutuality. We pretend to ignore our nakedness beneath our clothes and most of the time we actually succeed.

Where the hidden becomes secret, that is either denied or if admitted presented as something else, the experience shifts. The criminal gives minimal access to both his story and his shadow. The exposure of his real act is extremely limited. He strikes and then retreats to his false front. Unless one is the victim the front experienced is actually a cover, and below that is a true backstage that is denied. And sometimes even the victim doesn’t know until later if ever–the surreptitious pickpocket, the run-away spouse or partner, the public official with his bag man, all long gone with the boodle before the marks wise up or just wander off to their own upcoming destiny.

So the two models: (1) the ordinary straight up action with a front and back, where you see and you do not see but could see if you wished or could surmise in the ordinary way, and (2) the con-scam convolution where a series of illusions, misrepresentations, tricks mimic the ordinary while setting up a secret pattern that is only available to insiders and their associates. This is the class of fraudulent actions.

Social life can be seen as a series of constructed illusions most of us understand and participate within. Yet parading inside this social swirl are illusions that mimic the others but are actually something else.

The secret way is culturally well known: beside the confidence man (person) there is the spy, the embezzler, the politician, the propagandist, the terrorist, the assassin, the philandering spouse/partner, the cult and so on.

Under the British and U.S. trial systems the expectation of fraud, lies and false fronts approaches the universal. Courts of law encourage the idea of different sets of facts and interpretations among which a panel of ordinary citizens can supposedly discern an approximation of the real.

There are specialists in unmasking. The detective in actual practice as well as idealized in fiction; and more generally the critic, the investigative journalist. The sociologist in his search for the how and why of things might on occasion penetrate and unearth a fraud.

As we have been suggesting in these notes there is no universally accepted test of fact–for some people faith trumps science. The basis for a critique might be contested. On top, deconstruction practitioners could contrive a clean sweep like a horde of invading horsemen from the east. Nothing left, not even desolation. Is it necessary to burn down the house to prove it flammable?

In the other direction, the taboo is an ingenious and powerful combination of social recognition and denial. We find its reflection in the ultimate threat of the circles of hell.

The secret is associated with the nefarious but it could simply establish a temporary advantage. It is a form of power and profit of one over the other. The false reality within which the not-knowing-other acts deforms the limits he encounters, sometimes to the point of seeming to offer no options.

Uncover and suppress. There is possible darkness in the attack upon the secret. The counterspy sees a traitor under each bed; the inquisitor can not imagine a broom without a witch; “everyone is under arrest,” shouts the timid comic to the world.

There is the war among the shadows. The police informant, his true identity well hidden–if he weren’t wearing a transmitting wire his cover would be perfect–joins the conspiratorial revolutionary cell whose members pretend an interest in botanical gardens.

Another twist. The critic can become the target. The detective is turned into the fugitive–and even the members of the circle around him, the supposed audience for the critique, become suspects. We are all familiar with this spiral into violence. The list of the disappeared expands.

Uncovering a fraud can be very like disarming a ticking bomb. Sociology, and those following its logic and directives, can become entangled in a desperate enterprise. The risk of seeing is sometimes a risk of the choice among the previously unappreciated options. It is a form of freedom. Give up timidity and dependence. Look!

Movies do the con game very well. An older example: “Nobody Lives Forever” (1946) directed by Jean Negulesco, starring John Garfield and Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Bingo and best wishes.