11. How to Be a Person: Outside the Butcher’s
The Newsletter for Monday February 26, 2024
Once I had a friend named Ben. He was really nice. I value friendship over most everything else and I wanted to be a man that makes friends easily. But Ben was boring. So boring. I felt terrible for leading him on. But not as terrible as I did hanging out with him. I ghosted him but he wouldn’t take a hint. Then he caught me in front of the butcher shop and confronted me. It was an amazing time, two middle-aged men having a hurt-feelings spat on the street like we were in high school again.
I love a youthful experience. For fifteen minutes all civility and age-won appropriateness was gone. It was two children breaking up with one another. It felt exhilarating and awkward and pitiful. I was alive. Present. Loved. Thrilled to be the victor, the perpetrator, the one in charge. I felt guilty for hurting him. I probably could have done that better. And then ashamed. But then defiant and righteous. Fuck him if he can’t read a room. People have broken up with me. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea all the time. When someone distances themself from me I know the best chance I have of being with them again is if I give them space. Play it cool. It’s not something I’m historically good at. But it pays off. The world isn’t looking for needy. The world isn’t looking for provocation either.
Unless it’s the world of performance.
Have you watched Phantom Thread? It’s Daniel Day Lewis and other people. He’s an uptight fashion designer who is cruel to his muses. The way he does it without showing us he is doing it. The way it’s always about what the audience is feeling and not about what he’s feeling. This is great acting. The famously-method actor must have been a real peach to work with. Which I would love to experience. To be affected by a fellow actor so much you wonder if something is wrong. Did I say something, you think? You go up to them at the end of the day and say “Is everything alright?”
“Yes, darling. I was acting.”
And they put the emphasis on the last syllable so it tings across the room like an olive pit launched from the toothy mouth of a Bertie Wooster: -ting!
But it’s an other, a jobbing actor that really impresses in the film. Harriet Sansom Harris as a proxy for the real-life Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. Drunk, fragile, unendingly rich, Harris plays victim and perpetrator all in the space of two minutes. Smiling through unbearable sadness, laughing, coquettish, stopping herself from crying, ending with quiet menace.
Harriet Samson Harris
That’s what you want in performance. Provocation. It’s not what you want in real life. Life is hard enough without buttheads breaking up with you in front of the butcher’s.
Still, a scrape is followed by a bandaid and a treat. And then it turns into a story.
And a story is always better than being boring, isn’t it?