An Actor Prepares

VARIOUS SOUNDS AND IMAGES REMIND US THAT WE ARE WATCHING A FILM ON CELLULOID [1]

BASED ON REAL GOSSIP AND VIOLENCE. [2]

Before the screening, The Actor sat alone playing an emulator of Tomb Raider on his computer. This first Lara Croft game came out in 1996, making it so archaic that the system it was designed for was already outmoded by the time he was born. The Actor took pleasure in controlling Lara, often ignoring the assigned quests to instead throw her block-y, pixelated body around jungles and caverns. There was morbid joy in being able to experience her cool deaths, where the avatar died, but he lived on to watch. He thinks “I am the soul which lives on, severed from a body.”

Knowing only that Garden Reflexxx is two people — André Shannon and Jen Atherton — The Actor looks them up online while in the Uber to their movie. “Our works focus on queerness sans role models, featuring characters discovering themselves through motions of joyful/generative self-destruction.” [3] To him, this is about as helpful as their description of the film, which is confoundingly titled Grape Steak. “A debut, a sequel, a Special Feature, a resourceful movie about gay bashing today, slow cinema for club kids, a comedy for a come-down. This is a feature length work: warning. A wishfully ambient portal.” [4]Regardless of this poetic wash, The Actor’s friends who know say this is the cool event of the week in Sydney, and being spotted might provide him some clout. He’s told that being at the screening will make him seem cooler than the current credentials he has: a key supporting role on a Netflix show and appearing as a non-speaking extra in a Marvel movie. The potential of being one of the more recognisable names at the screening, and then maybe being chased to star in the next Garden Reflexxx movie (if tonight goes well), could be a good move in the long run. 

He arrives appropriately late, having to take a spot on a wooden bench beside the shoddy seating bank where most attendees sit. There’s only one spot left, which leaves him shoulder-to-shoulder with a strikingly gorgeous, tall woman who holds a small, fluffy dog for the duration of the screening. The Actor and the tall woman never make eye contact. There’s a benefit to coming late, forced to sit in a position where nearly everyone in the crowd can see him. His radiantly moisturised skin reflects the glow of the projection. Showing up the second the movie starts means The Actor’s face shows Grape Steak’s opening image of pure pink. It becomes a rich gradient that fades to blue, with bold letters appearing on top: “based on real violence and gossip.”

Grape Steak is obsessed with identity. Switching between different cameras and people, the movie is fractured by slides which appear of total blue with different characters’ names written on top. The Actor imagines if he was in the film that he would have a scene where he turns to the camera, stares deep into it and says “yeah, it’s a movie and we’re acting.” He guesses this must be what Garden Reflexxx meant when they said that their characters discover themselves “through motions of joyful/generative self-destruction.”

Another key moment of identity-making comes in a scene near the centre of the film — one of many with characters stating who they are — where two people sit watching a meteor shower in bushland. They reintroduce themselves, even though they’ve already spent most of the movie together. It’s weird because the credits detail that the character Gloria is played by a person named Gloria, yet the character Bart is played by André. The whole thing is shot in night vision, capturing their bodies as the only visible things on screen. The effect makes their eyes laser-like. The Actor can’t help but think of Lara Croft at this moment.

W watches The Actor from above, like his face has become the screen which shows the film, and to be fair, the mirror-like quality of his face does kinda do that. The Actor can feel himself being watched, but doesn’t look back. Being an actor makes you very good at this. Being watched meant The Actor detached from the narrative mostly and performed watching it instead, transforming Grape Steak into more of a wash of images than it already was. The only moment that stood out to him, upon the realisation of being stared at, was barely legible, almost accidental. A character named Elmo stops speaking mid-sentence, shrugging off their line and laughing. The camera shakes, trying to readjust as they shudder beyond the blocking. The other actors in the film look confused, trying to improvise around the energy, but Elmo just walks away. Someone else looks towards the operator behind the camera. Elmo never reappears in the film.

W practically jumps a few feet off the edge of the seating bank once the lights come up, the applause still not finished, to introduce themself to The Actor. The talk is meaningless and small, W a puppy pawing at The Actor, who hands out the perfect amount of little doggy treats in the form of attention. W asks what The Actor thought of Grape Steak, and he says he thought it was weird but okay. W asks The Actor’s favourite thing about it, and he said that he liked that everyone talked about who they were in a, like, performative way that was cool. W says that Grape Steak took 5 years to make, so of course peoples identities feel fluffy, amorphous, tangible, touchable, present, real, fun, performed. “Cool.” The Actor asks W what they thought of the moment where Elmo walks off screen, and W says they don’t really remember anything like that. The Actor is confused.

Then W brings The Actor home, something unspeakable sandwiched between the two like they’ve brought a part of the film home with them. Potentially, this could’ve been something reflected off The Actor’s face and trapped in an intangible realm. They perform sex lazily that contains a similar dynamic to their conversation, though definitely more thoughtful. W plays gay guy music the whole time. The Actor assumes this must be really cool to listen to in this context. It’s a soothing alternative to the denseness of the film’s score – brain-scrambling bass tones by Megan Alice Clune, so thick that the sound of the large fan which tried (and failed) to cool down the space would shudder, as if trying to break through the film, but never quite getting there.

As W falls asleep, too beyond waking to hear, The Actor says “the movie was my cavern, and I was Lara Croft.” Images from Grape Steak flow through The Actor’s mind as they fall asleep, detached from narrative. Toad, the elusive and beaten figure at the centre of the film, stumbles through the woods at night. They’re calm but drenched in tomato sauce-blood, shellshocked into an easy-going stupor. Lara Croft only splashes small amounts of blood when shot or hit. “Sometimes a killer body just isn’t enough.” Why does it all feel so sombre though? André/Bart throw themselves around in a dance in front of some European monolith, before later having weird sex with an older guy who looks like Gaspar Noé. People growl and pull funny faces. People are nice to each other. People are crazy. People get in cars and help one another. People read sarcastic iPhone poetry. People play the pokies. People investigate. People commune with other people.

They wake up, and W invites The Actor to a screening of a movie called Persona that afternoon. The Actor asks what that is. “Only like my favourite film. It’s sooooo good! Wait, okay, look at this.” W turns on a projector on a bookshelf beside their bed. It lights up the wall a blank blue. The Actor waits for a name to appear as if this were an intercut title card from Grape Steak. “ELMO”. Elmo didn’t get a title card in Grape Steak, maybe some kind of vengeance by Garden Reflexxx for leaving the shoot midway through. The Actor feels sad when the projector’s blue stops and just loads the image of W’s laptop desktop. The default macbook background makes W seem anonymous to The Actor.

W opens The Criterion Channel and puts on a video essay by Peter Cowie about the opening few minutes of Persona – “PERSONA’s Prologue: A Poem in Images”. Cowie describes how the film is a veritable arthouse classic directed by Ingmar Bergman, depicting the isolated retreat (and inevitable disintegration) of two women: Alma, a nurse caring for Elisabet, an actor who has a nervous breakdown in the middle of a play, breaking character into fits of laughter and now refuses to speak. W turns to The Actor and whispers “Her silence is obviously an act against the falseness that permeates the world.” Before falling into this hyper-cinematic chamber drama though, Persona begins with a chaotic mix of images edited together at great speed, much more about metaphorical ambiguity than anything directly in the film. It depicts everything from death, traumatic world events, horror film, pornography, cartoons, slapstick, landscapes, Christian imagery, but is always centred around the mechanics of film itself. Cowie notes that “various sounds and images remind us that we are watching a film on celluloid” [5], describing specifically that the first image seen is the projector starting up, reels of film pouring into the machine. 

W and The Actor walk to the screening of Persona before the rain starts. It’s muggy, so their hair is wet, but it’s also making everything move at this hazy pace. They climb down stairs to the small, underground room. The lights turn off and W’s face melts, which goes unseen. W excuses themselves with a small chuckle, though The Actor doesn’t particularly notice as his eyes are caressed by the boy in Persona, who famously holds his hand up towards the screen. 

W walks up the stairs, out into the day time, dripping skin and their own persona. Their face comes to reveal that of Elmo, the actor who disappeared from a scene in Grape Steak. The people do not notice W rotting away to become Elmo. The Actor doesn’t really clock that W has left, let alone transformed into someone else. At the conclusion of Persona, The Actor stumbles out of the cinema, alone. There is no sign of W, just something that looks like wet paper scattered along the pavement outside. It must have rained while the movie played.

Elmo encounters Jen and André, recounting to them how they met an actor who swears that Elmo was in Grape Steak, breaking character and disappearing mid-scene. Jen says “I think I know which actor it is you met. I love the delusion of it all. I love that though, I want that scene.” Garden Reflexxx ask where Elmo was just before, and they mentioned seeing Persona. “Honestly, fuck Persona. We did film stock better!” André chimes, then rambles something unfollowable about Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho and the song ‘Rude’ by Shygirl. Elmo understands at some base level that it’s about taking something firmly entrenched yet strange, then making it way sexier and kinda cooler.

Cowie talked about how “When Persona was made, video didn’t exist in any consumer format, and one wonders if Bergman, were he alive and remaking the picture, he’d construct the prologue any differently knowing that film buffs could freeze individual images.” [6] Grape Steak is similarly intangible and ungraspable. It played once and now only exists in minds. 

Weeks later, The Actor thinks he finally sees Elmo – or is it W? – through the crowd at a Shygirl concert at Manning Bar. The Actor desperately tries to reflect their face, but their eyes never see him. It’s as if Elmo/W’s face is a hole that he can’t catch. Shygirl, before beginning her song ‘Cleo’, claims that “This song is about being a main character… Seems like there’s a lot of main characters here tonight.” The Actor and his current companion throw their arms in the air and scream in excitement.

YOU GOT ME FEELIN’ LIKE A MOVIE STAR

ALL EYES ON ME

YOU GOT ME FEELIN’ LIKE A MOVIE STAR

I CAN BE YOUR FANTASY [7]

Cowie quotes Persona’s cinematographer, saying “I like to see reflections in the eyes” – a key motif in Persona – “which irritates some directors but is true to life… I always aim to catch the light in the eyes because I feel they are the mirror of the soul. Truth is in the actors’ eyes, and very small changes in expression can reveal more than a thousand words.” [8]

CLICK THE CAM, ROLL THE SCENE

FEED ME MY LINE, YOU TELL ME

I CAN PLAY ANYBODY, I CAN BE YOUR FANTASY [9]