Recreating An Experience: On Musicals, Annihilation, and Mason & Dixon
Today is my day off. Almost exactly a year ago I spent my day off writing about my experience traveling from Brooklyn to The Bronx and back for a musical theater gig. The letter that resulted from that day of writing was one of my better pieces of the year. I’d like to spend my day off this year recreating that exercise, whether or not I recreate the success. A repeating gig deserves a repeating feature.
Rehearsal is all about repetition. The band repeat the same material for a week so that their performance becomes replicable. Practice sucks the ambiguity out of the music on the page. Even the most precise written instructions are open to subtle differentiation depending on the person carrying them out. One of many phrases that I heard from multiple teachers in college is that practicing solo is for learning your part and practicing with a band is for learning everyone else’s parts. It goes deeper than that. Practice creates a shared understanding of time, a constructed reality sturdy enough to withstand the chaos of live theater.
The more you repeat something, the more details you find to replicate. With last year’s week of The Warrior’s Commute under my belt, I’d learned how to shave crucial seconds off of my trip. Gradually I internalized the exact pace I had to walk to stroll smoothly out of the 1 train and on to the A train, only breaking my stride to stand on an elevator. Between these regimented transfers and the books I carried with me no moment of my commute went unaccounted for.
Last year I used the long train rides to burn through most of Moby Dick. This time my attention was divided. First I read Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, mostly in a single round trip. Then I made it halfway through Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, my first time returning to the famous recluse since my manic inhalation of his novels during lockdown. If you squint, you can see Moby Dick refracted into both of these selections. Annihilation is an expedition to conquer the sublime terror of nature, doomed by the its leader’s ulterior motives. Mason & Dixon is an episodic marathon of bromantic misadventure, dedicated to the old-timey particulars of its period’s diction.
The shared reality of the musical relies as much on active eyes as it does sharp ears. I watch for the director’s cues. I watch hands or head nods count out time so that I can accelerate and decelerate in time with the musicians on the other side of the pit. Mimicking the movements of another musician’s body gets me one step closer to mimicking the count in their mind. Moving in sync makes our brains just a little more like someone else’s, and there’s ours.
As a lark on the ride home one night early in the week, I surreptitiously mirrored another passenger. They sat just within my peripheral vision. When they uncrossed their legs and pulled out their phone I did the same, all without moving my eyes. I felt both satisfied with my timing and mildly disgusted, like I had done something invasive. This split second decision may have put a karmic target on my back. For the rest of the week I spotted other commuters shifting in their seats in time with me. Small gestures, performed with identical tempo and pace. It never happened more than once a day, but even at that rate it started to creep me out before long. But again, I brought this on myself.
Even before this reckless application of my beat matching skills, I began the week with an act of mimicry. I started reading Annihilation because my roommate was reading it around the house. Not only for that reason of course. If you’ve followed this newsletter since the tinyletter days you might remember that I have a fascination with Alex Garland’s film adaptation of the book disproportionate to the interest of the general public. I love Annihilation, the movie, despite and because of its flaws. I liked Annihilation the book just fine, although to be fair the two aren’t really comparable. Garland treats Vandermeer’s book as a prompt, rearranging and recombining different elements to tell his own story.
One element that Garland hones in on is mirroring. In both versions of Annihilation a team of scientists travel to the heart of an abandoned chunk of American wilderness where previous expeditions have mysterious vanished without a trace. Things get drastically weirder from there. In both tellings some of the scientists come face to face with their doppelgänger. These encounters take place on the margins of the plot in the book, but they take center stage in the finale of the film. Questioned about her clone’s behavior by her mysterious superiors, Lena (Natalie Portman) speculates that the creature “didn’t want anything” and only copied her out of its alien version of instinct.
The movie, otherwise happy to have characters speak frankly about its themes, offers little more in the way of explanation. Lena confronts the entity at the heart of “The Shimmer” in a wordless dance. First she tries to fight it, then she tries to flee. Neither plan works. Finally, as the creature assumes her form, she calmly hands “herself” a grenade, pulls the pin and leaves the alien to immolate as she bolts out the door at the last minute. This is a mighty anti-climatic ending if you read the scene as Lena tricking the alien into killing itself. If the alien was a puzzle, this solution seems arbitrary. Luckily there exists another reading. Along with copying human behavior and human form, the alien may have copied some of human psychology, namely an inclination for self-destruction.
Vandermeer’s version of events is much more concerned with those mysterious superiors. The novel is a mess of schemes and counter schemes. The scientists examining “Area X” do so under false pretenses, uncertain of who they are gathering information for, or even what data they are there to gather in the first place. Mason & Dixon, as rendered by Thomas Pynchon in Mason & Dixon, might be able to relate. The duo, an astronomer and surveyor respectively, are tasked first with observing the Transit of Venus and then with establishing the boarder between Pennsylvania and Maryland famously named after the two. The fictional Mason & Dixon take on these assignments out of a mix of scientific curiosity and personal baggage, but their work serves the ulterior motives of forces political, religious, and, most ominously, corporate. No matter how well-intentioned, Pynchon argues, the act of carving the world into measurable units serves the interests of some of history’s worst actors from the East India Company of Mason & Dixon to the military intelligence-big business axis lurking behind every corner of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Most of Pynchon’s novels take place in a world already thus divided, but Mason & Dixon is set in a world where these scars on the map are still fresh. At one point a character interrupts another, better educated, character’s anachronistic monologue about “southern Philadelphia ballad singers”1 to decry that even music has fallen under the scalpel of scientific measurement. God forbid this fictional 18th century Philadelphian from glancing at the sheet music that sat in front of me for most of the week. Music, for all of the talk regarding its possibilities for free expression, is subject to all manner of measurement and division. Songs divided into form, time divided by tempo into measures, measures into beats, beats into collections of smaller beats.
Musicians don't make these incisions into the material just for the fun of it of course. These markings are guideposts designed to keep ensembles on schedule so that they arrive at the right destinations at the right time. Avoid these guideposts at your peril. This year’s musical was particularly unforgiving. The material is often quite fast with measures ending in tight syncopated patterns. Missing these patterns by, and I’m not kidding when I say this, even a quarter of a second ruins the intended effect of the music. Interpretation is only negotiable in service of the larger whole. My job is not to express myself, it is to recreate an experience and to make such recreation reliable, predictable, and repeatable. This job gets easier with time. The more you rehearse the more precise your internal demarcations become, until you find yourself agonizing over decimal points that whizz over the audience’s head, not to mention their ears. All of these details accumulate to fill in the terrifying gaps that cannot be communicated simply by mirroring another musician’s movements. No matter how fine-tuned our mimickry, some things cannot be copied intact.
What is lost in this process? Do we lose time by dividing it? The blank page filled with markings, the empty calendar with confirmed appointments. What happens once is an event, what happens twice is an obligation. The math that allows to know exactly when a train arrives in the opposite track still comes up short when measuring what makes each passenger tick. Who are you in there? Who am I?
The joke here is that the character is predicting the rise of rock and roll and, specifically, the Philly Soul sound. As far as Pynchonian anachronisms go, this one is pretty toothless. Ol’ Tommy P uses the same technique toward more disturbing/effective ends in Gravity’s Rainbow and Inherent Vice, which populate their period piece settings with bits and pieces of modern culture as a way of drawing a through line from “then” to “now”. That both of these novels end on the same strip of Californian highway only heightens the chronological vertigo
As far as imitating other in public, my impression is that it's something actors do all the time. I don't know for sure, but I did it a great deal when i was a younger person. Imitating the gait of someone in front of me, trying to find the expression someone was holding in their face in my own facial features and muscles. Maybe partially an unconscious drive of overly strong mirror neurons I did this stuff a lot. Sometimes if i heard something i liked in someone's voice i would repeat the phrase under my breath. If i liked the phrase enough i would say it out loud walking around by myself. I think its worth keeping in mind that a good deal of non-verbal communication, such as copying stance, hand movement or gestures is largely unconscious for most people who don't or aren't currently examining them. If you are looking for something you will likely find it, but for me its not something i am much bothered by, even when i do notice it. With some people who are highly social, but are not very self-aware, you can push this to comical limits. If you are conversing with someone in a social setting. Put your hand n your hip, see if the other person mirrors. The work ur hand up to hook and rest on your shoulder or opposite shoulder. Then after a bit stretch that arm up and over your head. I have gotten people to imitate all these motions seemingly without them realizing it! Keep in mind there is often a delay. Anyhow. Great read!