Narrative and Its Distrustful Audience
Where simplicity cannot work, simpleness results. Blatant simplification means bland architecture. Less is a bore.
—Robert Venturi
After the plague, my little family and I took a spring drive to visit a friend down in Philadelphia. He had just turned forty and invited a dozen or so of his nearest and dearest to share a meal in his backyard. My wife and I couldn’t remember the last time we had gathered in a group of more than four at once, and when the date arrived, we were eager to hit the road. We dusted off our social attire. We took our recyclables to the curb. We loaded up the midsize with coolers and extra kids’ clothes.
The simplicity of such actions would usually inspire a small measure of confidence. But the New Jersey Turnpike turned out to be a hurtling nightmare of storm and steel, and we barely knew where we were before the mainline shot us into a tight curve hugging the Schuylkill River and the University. A passage for history’s foreign merchants and the shoreline institution that came in their wake—an especially mirthless arbiter of human value. Turning our backs on them both, we drifted onto our exit a few miles north. We sank back into the car upholstery. We exhaled for what felt like the first time in hours. We found the house on a gentle hill, under a sleepy line of maple trees.
My close acquaintances tend to have other close acquaintances that are not acquainted with one another whatsoever, and such was the case among us who found ourselves gathered in the afternoon quiet of my friend’s postage stamp garden. None could decide who to greet as a known associate or to whom to introduce ourselves for the first time. But once we were each positioned around the yard, now habituated to stand at a courteous distance to reduce global figures of contagion, carefully cupping our waxed plates of veal meatballs, penne vodka, and romaine salad, we settled into the soft enthusiasm of people gathered.
My friend and I were seated on the patio, watching the kids play among the planters and trying our best to eat daintily, when a look of concern came across his face.
“Maybe I should have thought to record this,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
But I knew what he meant. The scene of laughing children, small strangers who know instinctively when they are among their own, was easy to imagine immortalized on tape. When we replayed the tape later, it would have the timestamp laid over the footage just like home movies did when our parents were the ones behind the camera. We would observe the children laughing, their clothing a fluttering extension of their joy, and their choice of clothing stylistically consistent with the year blinking on the seven-segment display in the corner of the picture.
My friend and I had no video camera on hand, but the more time that passed, the more the view from the patio seemed on the verge of tinging sepia. Maybe we were at risk of slipping into a reverie of the Old World. The concept is easily romanticized in monochrome—an idyll through small kitchens packed with large families, the recipes on the butcher block still curled from when they were first rolled up, secreted into the hollow handlebars of a bicycle, and smuggled across borderlands—when in truth that history is a much more complicated story of conflict, migration, and hardship. It only feels safe or sad because it is gone.
If this sounds like distrust, it probably is. The impulse to distrust movies, especially ones dealing in nostalgia, has much precedent.
In 1961, Susan Sontag cautioned in the pages of the Columbia Spectator that “the camera is an absolute dictator. It shows us a face when we are to see a face, and nothing else; a pair of clenched hands, a landscape, a speeding train, the façade of a building in the middle of a tete-a-tete, when and only when it wants us to see these things.”
Nine years later, at the close of America’s most examined decade, a prominent book editor named Toni Morrison published her debut novel, The Bluest Eye. Her protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, is “a little black girl [who] yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl.” The supremacy of these features has been transmitted to her directly from the leading ladies of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But we soon learn it is Pecola’s mother, Pauline, who has passed a weakness for cinema down to her daughter. Relocated, as a young wife, to an Ohio mill town during the Great Migration, Pauline escapes the loneliness of keeping house by going to the movies. “There in the dark […] along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” Here Pauline is not speaking lightly of destruction. The idea of romantic love has brought her a husband that will come to violate all that is good in her, and physical beauty will for her daughter become a devastating obsession.
Meanwhile, a young Angeleno was writing about having watched the Watts rebellion from “a penthouse in the Chateau Marmont with this ex-philosophy major from Stanford whose family owned all the more oily pieces of land in Arizona, Mexico and California.” The author surrogate that Eve Babitz spent her 1960s crafting did not have blue eyes. She did not, at least not always, have blonde hair. The protagonist of the novel that would become Eve’s Hollywood may enjoy a front-row perspective on power and privilege in Los Angeles, but she is seated on the outside aisle, a culture away from the starlets whose portrayals have poisoned the minds of Morrison’s characters. From Eve’s social remove, she is able to perch close enough to the posing and posturing of the industry to adorn herself in it—or cast it off as freely as fine fabric.
One day, Eve drives a friend from Chicago to the apartment where he has arranged to crash, only to discover his directions have led them to Gower and Sunset: “Gower Gulch, the very home of Day of the Locust.” Babitz’s happenstantial humor is twofold here. The nickname “Gower Gulch” comes from the 1930s Western extras who were fabled to hang around that intersection, an area, in Frank Capra’s estimation, “infested by shacks and dinky stages where ferrety-eyed producers made ‘fillums’ that cost, and sold for, peanuts.” The Nathanael West novel The Day of the Locust deals in the same type of dispiriting creative life. By simply proximity, the desperation of unemployed actors could become her friend’s desperation. Even worse, it could become Eve’s.
The author then pivots deftly to poetics: “We have just had extraordinary rains and it is spring, so the bougainvilleas are rampant and the poinsettias which don’t match are almost arching to meet each other in front of her old stucco, falling-apart house, the house of a girl I don’t know.” If the industry is one animated by ruin, Babitz seems to be saying, then, like flowers, its decay comes with the bitterest of sweetness.
Back in Philadelphia, consciously tracking my vital signs and marveling at the post-Pandemic air filling my lungs, I told my friend none of this. Instead, I intoned, quasi-mystically:
“Moving pictures.”
He laughed at a perceived pun. What could be more moving than footage of children at play?
But I am more interested in the allure of the technology itself. A sequence of photographs passing before the eyes of an aesthete, a laureate, or a critic—at a speed of twenty-four frames per second, just fast enough to perceive them as if the subjects themselves really are in motion.
On the small screen, the stakes remain the same. Faces, hands, and speeding trains spliced together in hopes that the finished product will someday capture an audience with its dangerous wonder. Just offscreen there is the crew, its petty tyrants and tense technicians milling around and betraying glimpses of fellow feeling just like any other workplace. The rudiments of the processes are known to even the most casual viewer. The processes have been so thoroughly discussed in magazine spreads and on-camera interviews that I think of the stagecraft all the while I watch the finished episodes.
Did he really behave that way towards her between takes? How did they think to write that?
An opening sequence from one particular subscription streaming service comes to mind. Onscreen, I see an ominous and meandering piano score introduce the shadow of a male jawline. The frame widens. We see that the man lies atop a newly made bed, on his back, dressed in a fresh dress shirt and slacks. Though his skin is pale with fatigue, he has already knotted his tie smartly for a coming workday. The camera cuts to the same man sizing up a blue recycling bin, the ground beneath him dusted with snow. His movements appear slightly mechanical. The high angle shot captures his confusion dispassionately. Only when we detect the smooth iterations of gray that his shadow casts do we recognize the scene as a sequence of three-dimensional animation.
At this point, we have slipped into what roboticist Masahiro Mori first named the uncanny valley. The onscreen man resembles the show’s lead, admired actor Adam Scott. But he is not Adam Scott. Like an artificially intelligent robot, his eeriness only increases as he becomes more lifelike. As if to underscore this point, not-Scott passes another version of himself, one dressed in red pajamas and grasping at a bouquet of suited arms and legs whipping over his head like balloons in the wind. As not-Scott continues his presumed commute to work, his doubles quickly proliferate. They limp through parallel elevator doors, simultaneously. They type laboriously at countless cubicle pods, falling into lounge chairs that crumple beneath them like clay. The army of indistinguishable suited men is, in short, grotesque.
Apple TV+ subscribers will recognize from this description the title sequence of 2022’s critically acclaimed sci-fi thriller series Severance. In it, actor Britt Lower plays Helly R, costar to Scott’s character, Mark S. The two are office colleagues at a shadowy organization called Lumon Industries, where conflicts between their two personalities drive much of the dark script’s welcome humor. And in a way that an industry long dominated by men has rarely allowed until recent years, Lower explores depths of Helly R’s character that have nothing to do with how male characters like Mark S might think about her as a romantic interest.
Helly R feels refreshingly contemporary, but one of the chief pleasures of Severance is how certain choices of its set design evoke the postmodern workplace of the nineteen sixties and seventies: IBM clocks, avocado carpeting, monochrome computer monitors. To hammer home this aesthetic—evoking among other things the Digital Revolution in its infancy—establishing shots of Lumon Industries use the old Bell Labs campus in New Jersey as a stand-in for that of the fictional tech corporation. The onscreen talent follows suit. Breakout star Tramell Tillman’s character, Mr. Milchick, sports natural hair trimmed short to match his well-groomed mustache and ramrod straight posture, which under the short sleeves of his starched white button-down makes him appear ready to single-handedly battle the Viet Cong armed only with a Rolodex. By contrast, Mark S wears the overlong professional cut and unassuming gray suit of yesteryear’s faceless worker bee. Inscrutable and hesitant, he is often underlit to appear very tired.
What message does this subtle imagery, with its many referential details, seek to convey? Literary theorist Frederic Jameson, himself thoughtful about the limits of onscreen nostalgia, might attribute the gloom of Severance’s environs to the stylistic pastiche common to a lot of postmodern art, which in his words largely limits postmodernism to “blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs.” From this perspective, the proliferating details are what leave us cold. Mr. Milchick’s intensity and attention to detail are mere parody of a buttoned-down stereotype: the Vietnam veteran readapting to civilian work. Mark S is mere parody of the veteran’s wan and untested counterpart. Such characters point at but do not fully represent any archetypal figures from real life. The more characters and details that add to the pastiche that is a fully realized story, the more emptied of authentic meaning they become.
And period pieces, specifically, cow us with detail. Teletype. Bloodletting. Fabulous hats. Deliberate conversation around the breakfast table regarding significant historical events. Political portraits seen looming over corridors. Extinct weaponry. Whalebone shapewear. Cartoons flickering from another room. Cigarettes sucked so breathlessly as to imply irony or hindsight about something to do with preventative healthcare. Flywheels. These carefully placed props often not only fail to represent the past; they fail even to comment meaningfully on the present.
Still, Jameson has not convinced me that referential details do not hold narrative power. On television, the moving image allows a showrunner to include so many of them. Take The Crown, another kind of workplace drama. The saga of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, thanks in part to the deep well of British actors showcased on the program, captivates not as a public exposé of a private monarch but as a cautionary tale of work-life balance. From Emma Corrin to Helena Bonham Carter, we see the varied ways one might tell the story of royals as flawed individuals suffering the burden of their station—every waking moment. They embody the institution of the Crown, and all of the blood spilled over the very concept of monarchy, but they also are simple human beings who drink too much, have too many affairs, and correspondingly age and die.
So The Crown has a sturdy premise that can be grafted onto any one of its characters, but for viewers like me sometimes it is really all about the costumes. Like Mad Men before it, every outfit in the show has been carefully modeled on a historical referent. Every worsted stitch and processional pleat appears by design. In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the designers in question are quick to emphasize their creative license. “Often,” comments head buyer Sidonie Roberts, “people think we just replicate a load of stuff and obviously we don’t. Amy [Roberts] and me, since season three, have always been led by the scripts and we break down every single character and first think about their storyline individually and then how that kind of merges as one—how they relate to each other—and we’ll map it out from there.”
Roberts’ is an illuminating distinction. To replicate the real-life ensembles of the royals exactly would literalize representation to a degree that risks derailing the coherence of the moving image. A fastidious gas station attendant on screen has superbly tailored pants. They match his character as he exists within the architecture of the story. Even though his real-life counterpart may wear his pants off the rack and two inches too big at the waistband, the actor who plays him cannot wear baggy pants. The audience would likely revolt. Instead, he has a white garrison cap and shiny wingtips—because they evoke his time and temperament.
The costume designer’s work, at heart, is to source and compose the most elegant of references.
At any time, I may turn on my television, gaze into the captivating face of actor Matt Smith pretending to be Prince Philip, and wonder how I myself am both an individual and an institution. In my own personal body, I can cut a path through town, appraising the skies and inspecting the architecture as I go. I can visit the local theater, buy a ticket, and appeal to the screen through laughter and tears. I can and will retreat into the solipsism of the private mind. But as a degree holder with a digital footprint, a native English speaker and Westerner living in a purported democracy, I have my own duties of state. I am responsible for what I publish and for what I speak or otherwise convey to my friends and colleagues over coffee. I am responsible not just for how my conduct affects other individuals but for how my conduct impacts society as a whole.
It sounds like an old-fashioned civics lesson, but that duality, of the private self and the public record, did not exist before modernity and the rise of the novel. The feature film and the prestige television series owe the novel at least that. For a very long time artists looked like Hans Holbein the Younger, who painted Henry III as an icon. Then, it seems almost suddenly, artists started looking like Hilary Mantel, who wrote fictions of Thomas Cromwell as but a man. Dostoevsky fan Mikhail Bakhtin can be credited as one of the chief thinkers to articulate this shift, with all the fun and inventive terminology of a philosopher, in his 1941 essay “Epic and Novel.”
I am not reading philosophy, however. I am instead standing beside a pond in New Canaan, looking up a rocky pitch to a rectangular house whose four exterior walls are made entirely of glass. This is the former home of Philip Johnson, the architect who, after visiting the Bauhaus in 1928, brought back to New York the outrageous idea that architecture could be part of an American art museum. You could say that Johnson’s thinking is by and large the reason architectural exhibitions feature so prominently in places like the Museum of Modern Art, whose opening included one of his first shows.
Today, Johnson’s building designs dot the skylines of New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Houston. The architect was spiritually, if not physically, in the room when Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously adopted the phrase “less is more” to describe his approach to minimalist design. But the glass house, an on-site docent has just reminded me, is Johnson’s crowning achievement. In person, I can see that the house is a streamlined wonder, the embodiment of mathematical elegance. Every line without meets, at a fixed degree, every other within. Shadow, curve, and reflection converge on an exponential complexity that challenges any greater knowledge than calculus. Picking across the granite earth, I appreciate how the glass house breathes new life into common metaphors: a delicate cage, its prisoner exposed to public observation; an impractical shelter, very pretty but also very difficult to heat in winter or cool in summer; a glass tomb, when also and at last its owner died within its walls.
I do not at the time of my tour know that in the 1930s Johnson was a Nazi sympathizer and aspiring leader of the US’s short-lived Young Nationalist party. The museum staff has not offered up this information, nor have they included any discreet exhibits about its subject’s one-time flirtation with fascism. I will not learn of these details about the personality that the site celebrates until I hear about a group of contemporary architects that has signed a letter to MoMA asking that Johnson’s name be removed from “every leadership title, public space, and honorific of any form.”
In the months that follow, there will be much discussion of the petition in the architectural press. Both MoMA and the trust that operates the Johnson house will issue statements denouncing racism, antisemitism, and fascism. They will vow to continue fostering dialogue geared towards greater equity and inclusion. Reading them, I will be reminded of Johnson’s own attempt to rehabilitate his image a full eighty years earlier. At the outbreak of war in Europe, he returned to academia and began regaling younger architecture students with innocuous-sounding tales of ill-informed associations with pro-Nazi agitators like Father Coughlin and Lawrence Dennis. He tried, without luck, to join William Donovan’s Office of Facts and Figures, the wartime precursor to the CIA. He enlisted in the Army, where his past and advanced age of thirty-seven barred him from serving as anything more than a barracks orderly at Fort Belvoir.
Beyond the humbling nature of this last post, especially for an independently wealthy Harvard graduate, there was no punitive consequence for Johnson’s hateful political bid during his lifetime. Once the war was over, Johnson was absolved, at least in the sense that he was free to invest privately in becoming one of the most well-known architects of modern times. Exploring his glass house, the final monument and legacy, I find myself thinking of what else but a movie. I probably saw it in one of the handful of American dens where I spent my childhood watching home videos. I would have been sitting cross-legged in front of a honey-oak coffee table, my friends gathered around me like disciples on the wall-to-wall carpet. With the naivete of a child, I still remember the den as a kind of paradise, a space where one personal value or cultural belief depends on, or is perceived to depend on, the diminishment of the values or beliefs of any other. The working definition of peace and harmony has been co-constructed amongst the gathered specifically. The viewers could be anybody. In such a place, any group resembles a family.
The movie in question takes place entirely in and among a collection of glass skyscrapers on the outskirts of Paris. It is a slapstick set piece of grand ambition. The local businessmen work and live so close together that the viewer cannot always tell what is an office, a furniture showroom, or a tabac. The environment is so modern that the restaurant at the center of the picture’s second half is still an active construction site when the doorman gets into position on opening night. The sequence from Jacques Tati’s Playtime that keeps replaying in my mind is one of the maître d’ gesturing for patrons to enter the dining room only to accidentally slam the back of his gestural hand against a black marble support column. The viewer soon learns that a metal panel on the selfsame column conceals a blinking mess of controls for rocket-strength air conditioning. Calamity ensues.
Is Playtime, its shifting reflections or physical comedy, distrustful? The folly of the maître d’ seems to me a dramatic argument against modern architecture. His is a workplace that does not accommodate the human body. The gesticulating body does not fit physically into the high-rise office building or apartment complex without a sense of discomfort and confinement. The camera-dictator, Sontag’s scourge, introduces this argument entirely through subterfuge. The black metal support column is a façade covering a dysfunctional technology. The maître d’ is the face of another kind of coverup, the unpreparedness of the restaurant for dinner service.
The business at hand in Severance is similarly dubious. Lumon Industries has siloed its departments to discourage interoffice communication. The hallways linking them are vast and nondescript. Dedicated viewers will come to find that employees have reason to distrust the very experience of consciousness.
What neither work does is expressly link these difficulties for its characters to anything as cumbersome as the actual history of modern architecture. While Mark Lamster, Philip Johnson’s biographer, stresses how the architect drew inspiration from the Third Reich’s state infrastructure, the extent to which Johnson’s influence on the US skyline reflects the tenacity of fascist ideas in America is up to the individual. Biography alone cannot solve such predicaments. What the novel and cinema do, distrustfully or otherwise, is much more dangerous. They ask us to collapse the distance between denotation and connotation, between the high-rise on screen and the viewer’s fear of oppressive systems at large, and thereby make the individual experience of the work a part of its evolving whole.
I don’t feel like I share that kind of collaborative power with the glass house. Its architecture doesn’t have the same fluidity as that of pure story. I am standing in Philip Johnson’s living room, but even though I am positioned inches away from the fireplace where he allegedly burned damning correspondences after the war, I cannot stamp anything out there. Plus, it is nearly dusk. I have to catch a train that will take me to a subway that will take me far away from New Canaan.
I follow the gravel path back to the property gate, where a bus waits to carry the day’s last visitors back to the gift shop in the middle of town. Stepping aboard and taking a seat, I notice the man in front of me is sporting a perfectly coiffed ducktail. His hair is so shiny that he must have used actual grease as pomade. At first, I have the urge to change seats and see if he is aggressively chewing gum or fingering a switchblade. But this man does not need my unsolicited attention. Maybe he is on his way to a Sondheim audition. Maybe some shady hair-and-makeup department has plotted this all out to elicit a preplanned emotion from me. Maybe I have finally pierced the veil and truly entered the pictures. Anything might happen after an opening scene like this one. If I can will myself to sit back in my seat and hold onto the detail a little longer, it just might take me anywhere.
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