KAREN BLACK'S VIRTUAL AND SURPRISINGLY VIRTUOUS REALITY

Cass McCombs is a popular and prize-winning song writer who lives a nomadic life.  He’s in his thirties.  This linked article in Pitchfork is about him and his friendship with Karen Black, which led to a song called “Brighter!” which is about her and partly sung by her on a video montage of her just being at home and also, through clips, being a range of characters.  The second link, to Vimeo, is to the actual video.  You can open them in whatever order suits you.  

http://pitchfork.com/news/53553-video-cass-mccombs-and-karen-black-brighter/

http://vimeo.com/83970135

Black, Eckelberry (Black’s producer husband) and McCombs are all part of the ancient tradition of actors, troubadors, entertainers, and impresarios that have always intrigued humans everywhere.  I name these real people to stand for the whole class of floating, shape-shifting, morphing people in the arts that humans have always loved, hated, suspected of supernatural powers or maybe subtle evils.  My entitlement is simply that I was in the theatre department of Northwestern University at the same time Karen was.  She was so open to life that it made difficulties.  I was so guarded against life that it made difficulties.

Karen’s face was not her only fortune, but it contributed.  Eyes like a Siamese cat and a body and mouth voluptuous as a siren gave her a quality of dangerous seduction -- sometimes.  Other times she seemed a child, a little bewildered but concerned about anything hurting and wanting to heal, to make pretty and clean.  

Jennifer Garner, star of “Alias,” is a vanilla version of some of these same aspects.  Karen always suggested something eerie, scary, fascinating and possibly evil.  She could have been a vampire, a witch, an alien queen from another planet, someone from the lowest classes, maybe a hippie or even a whore, a possessed child.  She came a little too close to us.  At some point she was shunted over from the mainstream movies to the "downscale" horror and thriller genre.  There was always a malicious impulse to displace her from legitimacy, even in college, and to punish her vulnerability.  My guess is out of fear.

But then, being out on the edge is the story of actors and writers from the beginning and is one of the things that always drew me to Karen in that brief bit of time just before the Sixties.  If a person is a process of shifting brain patterns, always taking in and always sorting for storage, then a stage actor is a person who does that on several levels at once:  the real-life occupation of showing up on time, eating and sleeping, and all the other ways of staying functional; the intricate memory of technical skills of blocking, projection, timing and so on; deep understanding of the creator’s goals for the performance; and the immediate goals of the present productor/director -- all mixed with the memory-stores of the actor in order to summon up a convincing simulation.  That’s stage acting.

The kind of acting Karen Black was extraordinarily adept at doing was supplying an incredible range of emotions on her face and in her body, going a little out of control, a bit over the top, extravagantly offering the camera herself the way a child goes all out in play.  It’s a cousin of stage acting; also a cousin of dreams, hypnotism, psychoanalysis, and writing; a dangerous edge towards loss of control that can register as lunacy.  It is also a source for pornography.  

Some actors, especially those BBC classically trained people, are rather colorless in person -- faces unremarkable, voices trained, good posture: canvas rather than paint.  Alec Guinness talked about it.   Unremarkable until they slip on the guise of a role.  Movie actors are different; they are instruments in a different way.  They aren’t even ON the canvas until the editing room.  They are the palette, squeezes of cadmium and alizarin waiting to be applied.  In late private life they are more likely to seem like the twisted, dried and cracked paint tubes -- exhausted, used up.  A little goofy.

This particular vid, "Brighter!" is intriguing partly because of all that, but also because it demonstrates the strange affinity between a young male pop artist and a film actress in her seventies who is dying of cancer.  There have been movies about it: the maladjusted kid who is searching for the meaning of life and the sadder-but-wiser woman with nothing left to lose, getting one last hit off the potential of the young.  A meeting of hearts and minds.  A double look at human life from both ends.

McCombs’ lyrics aren’t edgy.  Just pleasant and singable.  But in the context of this video they are both horror and innocence.  At this calendar moment the Hollywood world is focused on awards and, as always, the value is skewed to the extreme, but to realistic suffering in the world rather than campy nightmares derived from sensational headlines and captured with low production values.

So this is how it goes

Well I, I would have never known

And if it ends today

Well I'll still say that you shine brighter than anyone

Now I think we're taking this too far

Don't you know that it's not this hard?

Well it's not this hard

But if you take what's yours and I take mine

Must we go there?

Please not this time. No, not this time.

Well this is not your fault

But if I'm without you

Then I will feel so small

And if you have to go

Well always know that you shine brighter than anyone does.

Now I think we're taking this too far

Don't you know that it's not this hard?

Well it's not this hard

But if you take what's yours and I take mine

Must we go there?

Please not this time. No, not this time.

If you run away now,

Will you come back around?

And if you ran away,

I'd still wave goodbye

Watching you shine bright.

Now I think we're taking this too far

Don't you know that it's not this hard?

Well it's not this hard

But if you take what's yours and I take mine

Must we go there?

Please not this time. No, not this time.

I'll wave goodbye (You shine bright)

Watching you shine bright (You shine bright)

I'll wave goodbye tonight (You shine bright)

What Karen captured both in life and on screen was the doubleness that comes from representation.  On the one hand theatre and -- even more than that -- film present a sensorium that is a simulation so convincing that you “suspend disbelief.”  At the same time it assures you that this is not real, that you can step away from it, that you can hold it outside yourself to think about.  Human brains can manage several virtual realities at once and, in the best of circumstances, can keep a grip on which one is the “real” reality (though it is also an edited version) through the continuing stream of information from the sensorium.

Artists of many kinds do this, using the technology and assumptions of their times.  The newest technology is CGI, “computer generated images,” which can alter sight and sound in convincing ways.  Karen’s movies, so far as I know, didn’t use CGI much.  It was enough to exploit empathy with her to vividly draw us into a virtual world.  Yet there was always something in her performance that said, “I wouldn’t really hurt you.” 

This isn’t always true.  War, drugs, abuse, disease, can force a virtual reality onto humans that is a continuing inescapable horror movie.  We’ve always known this.  The artists are the ones who learn to manage it.  It is the ambiguity of brains that they can organize reality into a suite of virtual worlds, summoned and dismissed at will.  For Karen it was both a skill and a dimension of herself.  She was not afraid of the "reality" of human life but she loved the gorgeous, risky astonishment of good times as much as the end.