Carry On... #Look at Me

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

-Overused philosophical canard

"You don't understand the humiliation of it - to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable - that somebody is watching..."

-Tom Stoppard; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

"Enough about me, what did you think of my performance?"

-Old Broadway joke

About two years ago, my wife re-established contact with a childhood friend. They had been out of touch for about thirty years and (needless to say) had a lot of catching up to do. But the most complicated part of their new-found contact turned out to be explaining to her friend's 12-year-old daughter why they had been out of touch for so long.

Being a child of the internet age, the girl assumed that there must have been some apocalypse-level falling-out for their friendship to have gone dark for three decades. Her mother had to explain that nothing sinister had happened between them; they simply found themselves living in different countries at a time when mobile phones did not exist, and long-distance calls over landlines (or telephones, as we used to call them) were prohibitively expensive. And in the absence of such modern institutions as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or even email (this was in the early 1990s) the only practical avenue of communication open to them was letter-writing, which was slow and laborious. 

So, they gradually lost touch, and their lives quietly and peacefully advanced in different directions, until the technology of the future allowed them to re-connect via Skype or Zoom or WhatsApp or whatever it is that two generations of Westerners now take for granted.

There is no question that social media has transformed our lives in permanent and fundamental ways; so much so that an intelligent 12-year-old girl can find it difficult to conceptualise life without such things. But as I said at the very beginning of this film series: the inventor imagines the car, the futurist imagines the motorway, and the writer imagines the traffic jam.

Although social media has made it possible for humanity to connect with itself in completely novel ways, it has also had a number of, shall we say, side effects. Apart from everything else, social media has turned everyone who uses it into a performer.

As Tom Stoppard's Player King puts it in Rosenkranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, "We're actors - we're the opposite of people!"

Popular "YouTuber" Elle Mills articulated this aspect of social media very eloquently a few months ago when she announced her departure from the world of "performance blogging" with a very well-written article in the New York Times:

My [YouTube] channel was as raw and honest as I would have been in my diary. That’s part of the culture. Being known as you are — and praised for it — lures in those of us with a deep desire to be seen.
But another part of the culture is to make yourself into a product and figure out how to sell that product. Success is measured in views and subscriber counts, visible to all. The numbers feel like an adrenaline shot to your self-esteem. The validation is an addicting high, but its lows hit just as hard.

Elle Mills is clearly an intelligent young woman who is preceptive enough to understand the long-term impact of living her life as a performance. She goes on to say

It had begun to feel as if I was playing a version of myself I’d outgrown. I was entering adulthood and trying to live my childhood dream, but now, to be “authentic,” I had to be the product I had long been posting online, as opposed to the person I was growing up to be.

By the standards of social media blogging, Elle Mills is a runaway success story. 1.7 million people are subscribed to her YouTube channel, and some of her individual videos have been viewed over 5 million times (for comparison, the first season of Game of Thrones had an audience of 2.5 million).

And yet, for all that success, it is very difficult to pin down what, exactly, she is famous for. Like so many bloggers, she simply exists, but in a very public forum - where millions of people look at her and recognise her not for any particular accomplishment, but because she allows herself to be seen.

Our next film is one that anticipates this particular aspect of social media fame by over sixty years.

It Should Happen to You tells the story of Gladys Glover, a young woman living in New York who (like so many others) dreams of fame and success. More than anything else, she wants to "make a name for herself" although it is very unclear (at least at the beginning of the story) just what, exactly, she expects to do to earn herself that name.

The solution she finds is one that was ripe for absurdist comedy in 1954, but watching this film in 2023 will strike many chords with anyone who has inhabited the world of social media, however casually.

Gladys is played with a great deal of style and vigour by the one and only Judy Holliday, fresh from her success in Born Yesterday (which we screened last year as part of the Ordinary Ladies series).

It Should Happen to You is also notable as the film debut of Jack Lemmon, who went on to become one of the most recognisable and respected actors in Hollywood (and who, unlike Gladys Glover, became famous for a very good reason).

In the modern world, social media has allowed millions of ordinary people to "perform" themselves in front of an audience. In It Should Happen to You, Gladys Glover discovered a way of doing that before the advent of YouTube, Facebook or the internet itself.

We will screen It Should Happen to You at 7.30 on Thursday, the 12th of October at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.