...and performing

 

A smoke break: for many, the only respite

The thoughts I outlined about different forms of performance yesterday were on my my mind as I watched The Last Showgirl. It really is as good as everyone is saying, but the thing that struck me the most about it is a kind of performance which is by no means restricted to professional entertainers. 

The titular protagonist of Gia Coppola's film, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is struggling to come to terms with the fact that the Las Vegas revue she's been part of for thirty years is approaching the end of its run, and, in the process, having to reassess her place in the landscape of contemporary employment and gender politics. You realise, as the film goes on, that for Shelly the casino stage is more than just her workplace, it's her safe space, her refuge from a changing world she understands less and less as she gets older. In this respect Shelly reminded me a lot of Mickey Rourke's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson in The Wrestler, and like that character, another major strand of Shelly's story is her attempt to reconcile herself with her estranged daughter Hannah (played by Billie Lourd). 

Shelly has a habit of saying things about her show which sound like PR lines from a press release she long ago internalised, which are routinely shot down by the younger members of the cast: 

    Shelly: We were ambassadors for style and grace...The costumes. I mean it makes you feel like                         you're stepping out of the pages of Vogue magazine. I think that's why women like to come                     to the show. The glamour is undeniable.

    Mary-Anne: The glamour is undeniable. I think I could deny the glamour. 

The most brutal of these takedowns comes from Hannah, in a scene where she confronts Shelly for leaving her 'in the casino parking lot with a Gameboy while you did two shows a night': 

    Shelly: I mean if you can do what you love for thirty years, you know, and be passionate about your                  career...

    Hannah: What kind of career is this? You're in the goddam back of 80 topless dancers! This was                            worth missing bedtime for most of my childhood? Was it? 

You're in the goddam back. This line sums up the cognitive dissonance Shelly spends the film struggling with. It may be her on the show's poster but it's her from thirty years ago, when she was young. Shelly isn't the star of the show now - she's in the back, just another body on the stage, sewing up her own torn wing-cape so the cost of having it repaired can't be docked from her pay, even as she tells others (and herself) that her job gives her freedom, that she's doing what she loves, and that it's something she is 'passionate' about.

Ah yes, 'passion'. That word began showing up in advertisements for jobs around two decades ago regardless of - indeed, almost in inverse proportion to - the degree to which the job would seem to give workers something to be passionate about. One wonders how many people, by now, have had to pretend to be passionate about ready meals or tennis shoes or ISAs in order to convince a middle manager or a recruitment consultant who surely knows that they're lying that there's no lie they won't tell to get a job. Or, worse, no lie they'll eventually convince themselves to believe.

This popular motivational slogan started life as the title of a searing exposé of the Amway pyramid scheme. These days it's used unironically. It's meritocracy all over again.

I read today that due to a crisis in the broadcasting industry, senior TV producers are having to take jobs stacking shelves in supermarkets. I imagine these producers having to perform 'passion' for the supermarket experience to some retail manager in order to land those jobs. I imagine them sitting in the breakroom, looking at posters exhorting them to perform some version of positivity trademarked by their company's internal advertising department, no doubt with a cutesy acronym devised by somebody who can use the word 'learn' as a noun without feeling an urge to throw up.

They've seen the prices going up. They've seen more and more young men and women with sunken cheekbones trying to sneak food out past security. They've seen more and more goods get security tagged. Meat, when they started, then cheese. And then butter. 

The manager, who sat there during the interview and made notes on a piece of branded paper while they tried to demonstrate their passion for hooking people up with skimmed milk or tinned fish, won't hear a word of sympathy spoken for the shoplifters. 'It's organised,' he says. 'They're gangs. They sell it on. I saw a programme on the telly.' 

And the producer thinks about explaining that she knows exactly how programmes like that are put together, how press releases and video packages get laundered into a vague simulacrum of fact, but she decides against it because she has a mortgage, she has kids. She needs the shifts. So she just blankly says 'yeah' and makes herself smile once again as she wheels a trolley of white sliced bread to the shelves which face the in-store bakery. 

We may not have our tits out; we may not wear sequins and crowns: but, under neoliberalism, we are all the last showgirl.