Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977).
In John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977), the actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) accepts an invitation from the playwright Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell) to settle a professional conflict over drinks. The newly-middle-aged Myrtle struggles so much to connect with the leading role in Sarah’s play, an older woman who lacks agency in her married life that she can’t even read all of her lines. After identifying the disconnect between her life experience and that of her character, Myrtle begins to articulate her vision of an ideal performer. “Once you’re convincing in a part, the audience accepts you as that,” Myrtle explains, loosening her confrontational tone. “Listen, Sarah, I don’t have a husband, I don’t have a family. This is it for me. I mean, I get my kicks out of acting. If I can reach a woman sitting in the audience who thinks that nobody understands anything and my character goes through everything that she’s going through, then I feel like I’ve done a good job.”
This artistic raison d’être faces a rigorous challenge from reality after Nancy, a zealous fan of Myrtle’s, is killed by oncoming traffic while running after the actress’s car for an autograph. What follows is a posthumous contest of wills between the subject and object of what might be described as a “parasocial relationship.” In recent years, “parasociality” has become a widespread, vernacular descriptor of a tendency of fans to behave toward artists or public figures in ways that cross personal boundaries. The term originated in psychiatry. In their 1956 journal article “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction,” Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl defined the “para-social” as the “seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer” emerging from the “new mass media” of the 1950s, when radio, television, and movies became widely available to middle-class American households.1 With a media critic’s eye, the authors isolated common design elements of radio and television shows, such as serialized formats that facilitated routine watching, everyday domestic settings, and acting that mimicked the rhythms of informal conversation.
Ultimately, these presentational choices can foster a sense of “idealized” closeness in audience members, who come to believe that they “know” the performer “more intimately and profoundly than others do.” Although Horton and Wohl characterize parasociality as an inoffensive feature in the lives of most mass media consumers, they note that some people form parasocial relationships to compensate for missing social or romantic ones. They cite the example of the 1951 radio show The Lonesome Gal, which featured an anonymous single woman addressing husky-voiced sweet nothings directly at presumably love-shy listeners; the show’s popularity led its titular woman to be “inundated with thousands of letters tendering proposals of marriage.”
Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977).
As audiences and artists became more aware of the impact of mass media, filmmakers began to probe the bounds of the spectator-performer relationship. While films like The King of Comedy (1980) and Misery (1990) locate horror and dark comedy at the extremities of parasocial connection, Opening Night stands out for its nuanced empathy and complexity, which may seem outlandish given normative, condemnatory attitudes toward parasociality. Even before the death that drives its narrative, Opening Night has already invited investment from both its real-world and in-universe audiences by way of its very structure and setting. Opening Night is composed of veristic informal conversations between Myrtle and others in her quasi-familial theater troupe. While the realism of 1950s shows was designed to seamlessly invite mass audiences into fiction, the realism of Opening Night flows out of a combination of the improvisatory approach preferred by Cassavetes and the personal nature of the film for his circle of collaborators, particularly Rowlands, with whom he had a stormy creative and matrimonial partnership. Cassavetes, himself an actor who often fought for control of his roles, designed Myrtle partly as an autobiographical reflection of Rowlands, and read her lines with her tones and gestures while writing the script. Rowlands’s performance drew on her own well-publicized anxieties about aging and her experiences of being mobbed by “female admirers” who related to the beleaguered housewife she plays in Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974).2 Even to a viewer unacquainted with this circle, the ways in which Myrtle and her collaborators behave toward one another feel so continuous with the dynamics of the relationships between the actors playing them. A parallel continuity naturally suggests itself between the in-universe and real-world audiences of Opening Night. Myrtle’s declaration to Sarah is simultaneously a moment of characterization and a way of beckoning the audience into a unique, specific relationship with the film.
Ostensibly the object of Nancy’s parasocial interest, Myrtle, too, displays a misplaced presumption of familiarity toward Nancy. After Nancy’s death, Myrtle visits the girl’s grieving Jewish family as they sit shiva, a well-meaning gesture that is galling to her family: “I have this dead girl,” Myrtle later tells Sarah as some way of explanation, staking her claim to the memory of the late teen. A sense of what Myrtle might be projecting onto Nancy emerges in a series of dramatic encounters between them. The first begins with Nancy noting that she used to put on the same music playing in Myrtle’s room in her own bedroom when she was younger. “I was always alone,” Nancy wistfully recalls, “waiting for time to pass. Waiting for night to come. The movies don’t start till 6:00. I’d dream with the music… until dinner. Go to a movie… or a concert.” Once Nancy autonomously voices her motivations, she secures her place as the avatar of Myrtle’s younger self, paralleling the older woman of Sarah’s play who embodies Myrtle’s anxieties about her future self. If Nancy’s verbal economy conjures an adolescence of staving off isolation through engaging with art, then Myrtle must have finished what Nancy had started: using music and the movies as a conduit to forging her own adult life.
Between both characters, a single narrative emerges of a teenager deriving substitute companionship from actors, growing up, and becoming an actress herself out of a desire to pass an artistic kindness forward onto her audience. This subversion of the sacred, hierarchical performer-spectator relationship pits Myrtle’s desire to perform authentically and vulnerably against the practical realities of her career. This conflict is decisively resolved in Myrtle’s mind after two violent altercations with Nancy, who violates the actress’s boundaries by aggressively demanding her physical touch with a suggestion of sexual forwardness. Although Cassavetes presides over Myrtle’s sacrifice of her artistic mandate, he also brings the surrounding film’s performer and audience into such close contact, both spatially and narratively. Such a gesture foregrounds the inseparability of the parasocial bond from the social and creative environment in which it was forged.
Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997).
Not long after mass media defined the terms of audience-performer relations, the boundaries were redrawn at the end of the 20th century, when widespread Internet access allowed fans to form dispersed digital communities and directly communicate with performers.3 Coincident with this period of increased access was the increased public awareness of celebrity stalking, a sensational manifestation of parasociality familiar even to those who have never heard the term. This social-artistic milieu is the subject of Perfect Blue, the 1997 directorial debut of Japanese animator and manga artist Satoshi Kon. Perfect Blue follows the pop idol Mima as she leaves a commercially successful girl group in search of greater creative control as an actress. Throughout Perfect Blue, Kon cuts between groups of fans who express their disappointment at Mima’s decision and concern for her future, sampling a cross-section of mass media consumers to form a tragic chorus. Yet their parasocial designs on Mima do not register in her life given the extent to which it has already been commodified: as memorabilia to be bought on the street, a portable voice to be played back on subway commutes, and a public image of wholesome, chaste femininity to be maintained. When one of Mima’s fans observes that she is being underutilized by executives at her new studio, he alights on a setback acutely felt by Mima herself, producing a fleeting moment of humanity in a world starved for human connection.
Mima is eventually disturbed by a fansite, claiming to be her diary, that records minute details of her everyday routine. Called Mima’s Room, the site is run by Me-Mania, a rabid fan whose appearance suits the normative mental image of a stalker—a physically ugly, creepy, antisocial man. Throughout Perfect Blue, Me-Mania lurks in the background, recording Mima with a camcorder. Unlike parasocialites such as Nancy who feel personally spoken to by their artist, Me-Mania’s devotion to Mima manifests as a twisted, violent impulse to protect her from disillusioned fans, studio executives, and other threats to her interests. In doing so, Me-Mania acts as an archetypal super-fan defending an idol, behavior that is actively incentivized in a mass-consumer-based artistic ecosystem financially fueled by publicity and sensationalism. Me-Mania’s singular focus on Mima renders him vulnerable to manipulation by the main antagonist of the film, Mima’s own manager Rumi, herself a former idol. Although her relationship with Mima is personal, Rumi’s bitterness toward the actress for desecrating the infantile purity of the idol image indicates a degree of disillusionment toward her own life and career that she directly projects onto Mima, creating a dynamic that is more pathological than the fan attention directed at Mima. Perfect Blue therefore shows both parasociality and interpersonal pathology to be independently embedded elements of an increasingly corporatized media landscape.
We're All Going to the World's Fair (Jane Schoenbrun, 2021).
The capture and homogenization of popular art by commercial interests is now so nearly complete as to sometimes necessitate venturing far to find alternative expressions. Online communities formed on Internet forums, imageboards, and microblogging sites such as Tumblr have become vital hubs for those with niche artistic tastes. On these platforms, these shared interests can spill across age, socioeconomic status, and other demographic lines, which can’t easily be transcended in in-person social groups. Even as they realize the democratizing potential of the Internet, these communities still raise questions of appropriate boundaries when they facilitate contact across vulnerable divides, particularly between minors and adults.
One such parasocial relationship develops between two non-celebrities in Jane Schoenbrun’s 2021 independent horror film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. The teenager Casey and the adult man JLB, both using pseudonyms to construct their respective public online personas, take part in the “World’s Fair Challenge,” a collaborative storytelling activity whose participants reenact the circumstances of an urban legend and record video logs of subsequent unusual experiences. Just as Perfect Blue cuts between the reality of the film and recorded television scenes paralleling the narrative, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair moves between traditional film scenes and screen recordings of YouTube videos and video calls, formally evoking the blending of online and offline life. Casey’s videos are noticed by JLB, who initiates regular Skype calls with her to provide guidance. JLB’s concern for Casey grows in urgency as her videos become more disturbing and violent. “I can feel the forces of the fair pulling you in closer with each new video you upload. And I don’t really know you, but I feel like I do,” JLB confesses in a video addressed to Casey. In admissions like this, he essentially reveals that he has mistaken her immersion in the game for a genuine breakdown arising from her private life, into which he feels he has privileged insight. When JLB reveals that one of her videos made him consider calling the police, Casey is disgusted with this violation of her boundaries and, calling him a pedophile, breaks contact completely.
To many people who grew up on the Internet, JLB’s relationship with Casey recalls a familiar online dynamic of adults forming “intimate relationship[s]” with teenagers as pretext for “grooming.” Although the film refuses to exonerate JLB’s obliviousness of the power imbalance between himself and the much younger Casey, Schoenbrun situates his behavior within the layers of atomization that drive people to seek virtual company. The sorts of intergenerational contacts that queer people have historically relied upon for community are now often transacted online, and, as Schoenbrun observed in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine,4 they are just as often demonized as predatory. Casey’s violent behavior parallels certain expressions of gender dysphoria, for which transgender teenagers routinely seek resources online. With his soft-spoken voice and well-groomed appearance, JLB is also coded as a gay man. Schoenbrun further mitigates the insidiousness of the relationship with a series of environmental shots of the icy woods and empty streets surrounding Casey’s house and interior shots of the cavernous mansion in which JLB lives alone. In sum, all of these textural details communicate an atmosphere of psychogeographical isolation that shapes both of their lives, pulling them online toward a fragmentary simulacrum of offline social interaction.
Opening Night, Perfect Blue, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair make a compassionate case for a more expansive conception of parasociality. Instead of suggesting that this behavior is the result of individual shortcomings, these films connect it to the conditions of global capitalism: it has atomized individuals across and within strata, inculcated religious devotion to mass media, and created prescribed forms of contact that ultimately imperil the marginalized. In this landscape, art is continuous with its audience, each sustaining the other, supplying a singular nourishment to a starved world.
NOTES:
1. Donald Horton & R. Richard Wohl (1956). Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction, Psychiatry, 19:3, 215-229, DOI: 10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049
2. Carney, Raymond. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. Faber, 2001.
3. Gayle S. Stever (2009). Fan/Celebrity symbiotic social relationships: A participant-observer ethnography of fan clubs. International Communications Association: Theme: Keywords in Communication, Chicago, IL, May 22-26, 2009.
4. Schoenbrun, Jane. “Portal to Portal: Jane Schoenbrun on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Interview by Sam Bodrojan, 14 Apr. 2022, https://filmmakermagazine.com/114086-interview-jane-schoenbrun-were-all-going-to-the-worlds-fair/.