New Yorkers walking down the streets of midtown Manhattan in
March were suddenly alarmed to notice the figure of a naked man
perched on various rooftops and on the 26th floor ledge of the
Empire State Building. There were 31 of these effigies, all plaster
casts rendered in fiberglass or iron of the same man, who was the
artist himself, British sculptor Antony Gormley. The nearest Mr.
Gormley could get to explaining to Janice Turner of the
Times of London what he thought he was doing was to tell
her that “to me it is going back to the basic condition, which is:
‘I am here now, I am an animal living in time, dependent on air,
food and having a place.’ For me this is the first principle.”
Not that the animal himself was the one on the rooftops. So of
course he was not here, now, as the living, breathing
being he is. Rather, he has left inert bits of himself, like giant
droppings, all over the city as a public announcement of his own
momentous existence — and nothing else. Self-discovery has always
been a part of artistic creation, but today self-discovery is
getting harder and harder to distinguish from self-publicity. The
idea that self-advertisement is some kind of human right has
wrought havoc in the art world and, more and more, the world at
large.
Over the past few months I have had several public debates with
a guy who not only regards “Who I am” — that is, who he is — as
an ontological certainty but who believes that the very existence
of this Platonic ideal of himself confers certain rights upon him
which have never before in human history been regarded as rights at
all, let alone rights so absolute and imperative that they must
override even any negative effect their exercise might have on
national security. Who he is is a homosexual seeking to “repeal”
the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on the strength of
this same belief, amounting almost to religious faith, in the
perfect and unquestioned existence of “Who I am.” This “I,” so
often identified with sexual or other self-chosen behavior, we
might call “true psychic reality,” belief in which differs from
other kinds of faith in requiring a public affirmation for its
validation.
As I sat down to write today, my eye fell upon the cover of
Parade magazine, delivered every Sunday with the
Washington Post, on which there is a photo of a heavily
made-up teenage girl with very long hair wearing very tight and
low-slung jeans. Next to her image is a quotation, in 72-point
type: “I Know Who I Am Now.” Why knowing who she is now
should be considered a remarkable feat for a 17-year-old girl or
why, even if it were, it should be a matter of any interest to the
rest of the world is apparently not a matter of any doubt or
uncertainty. Such questions are never raised in the accompanying
article, or by Miss Miley Cyrus herself who, in contrast,
entertains a certain skepticism about her Christian faith. “Yeah,”
she says with teenage sarcasm, “I’m going to go to hell because I’m
wearing a pair of really short white shorts. Suddenly I’m a slut.
That’s so old-school.”
Some might say that God Himself is rather “old-school,” but
Miley is untroubled by any suspicion that the Creator of the
Universe could be other than an indulgent parent to her. She is
equally certain about having discovered “who I am” (or, possibly,
“who I am now”) by falling in love with her co-star in her latest
movie. For her, as for the would-be gay soldiers, it is not
surprising that the question of who she is should be all bound up
with what she does or doesn’t do sexually. What is surprising is
that she and Parade magazine should regard her
announcement of same as a matter of public interest. Perhaps it’s
like saying, back in “old-school” days, that one had found Jesus —
an act of witness to a reality that, like the permanence of Miley’s
attachment to Mr. Liam Hemsworth, might otherwise seem a bit
dubious.
When in The Last Station, Michael Hoffman’s excellent
movie about the final days of Leo Tolstoy, Helen Mirren’s splendid
Countess Sofya Tolstoya cries out that her husband (Christopher
Plummer) is tearing pieces off her so that “I don’t know who I am
anymore,” we realize at once that the question of who she is is not
an existential one. That is, it is not a question about true
psychic reality but something much more down-to-earth. In fact, it
is just because she has no doubts of her own about being the wife
of her husband, the mother of her children, the mistress of the
estate of Yasnaya Polyana, that she finds it so shocking when her
husband puts his duty to mankind (as he sees it) ahead of his duty
to his family. For her, identity is not in the least mystical or
problematical, something to be discovered and announced to the
world, but, as it is for most people, something determined by their
families, their relations, the bit of land they inhabit, their
class and their country. “You are the work of my life,” she tells
Tolstoy at one point, “and I am the work of yours.”
Mr. Hoffman’s movie is all about this tension, much rarer in
Tolstoy’s day than in ours, between such traditional identifiers as
these and the revolutionary and utopian ones that so often produce
a sense of liberation from the ordinary constraints of everyday
reality but leave a man, as Tolstoy finds out to his cost, with
nothing between him and the universe save for his self-chosen
“ideals.” But the love of mankind turns out here, as it so often
does in real life, to be but a poor exchange for the love of the
flesh-and-blood people to whom we are bound by ties of what used to
be called nature. “I’ve never met ‘mankind,’ ” says Tolstoy’s
young disciple, Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), to Vladimir
Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), the most militant of the Tolstoyans, by
way of explaining his newly discovered love for someone he
has met, the lovely Masha (Kerry Condon). But as he is a
revolutionary by temperament, we may doubt whether his relationship
with her marks the formation of a new family or merely another way
of projecting onto the universe, as Miley Cyrus does, a private
affection as an existential affirmation.
I suspect that the organic ties of blood and belief and
nationality are not what they once were partly on account of the
suspicion of a lingering tincture of racism or fascism or
ethnocentrism or religious bigotry about them. But as answers to
the question of “Who I am,” they still seem to most of us to be
superior to those involving either our behavior in the bedroom or
the utopian ideals with which they so often come in conflict. This
is not so, however, in the media and movie culture that seems to
become ever more influential in our lives. That’s why Joe Winston
decided to make a movie documentary out of Thomas Frank’s book
What’s the Matter with Kansas? This movie purports to
explain “How conservatives won the heart of America,” yet it
consists of almost nothing but portraits of two families of Kansan
conservatives.
Mr. Winston has some fun with these people, and especially with
their religious beliefs — one family goes to visit the “Creation
Museum” in Kentucky — and their lost investments in a now-bankrupt
Kansas theme park, Wild West World. But these things are unlikely
to be as shocking to the vast majority of Americans who won’t see
this movie as they are to the small number of those who will. After
a while it began to appear to me that the filmmakers meant to
suggest that the ties of parental and filial love, of religion and
duty and family and community, were themselves the reason for the
disordered universe, as they see it, represented by conservative
dominance in Kansas. Mr. Frank himself appears on film to tell the
story of radicalism and populism in the Kansas of a hundred years
ago and says, in effect, “look on this picture, and on this.”
What’s wrong, he asks, with a world in which the currents of
history — lately appearing to the media in all their glory of
onward-rushing inevitability in connection with President Obama’s
health insurance “reform” — appear to run so backward? Well, maybe
the problem is with the historicist model, inherited from Marx,
that regards social and political progress according to, well,
“progressive” canons as fixed and immutable, the true psychic
reality of the race just as the self shorn of its organic ties to
family and community is the true psychic reality of the individual.
But for those who see “who we are” more in terms of obligation than
desire, both kinds of progressive aspiration are likely to appear
dangerously utopian. We’re the ones who remember that “utopia”
means “no place” in Greek.
