Performance & Records: Seasons 2 & 1
Pulling this from my tags and messages with @doublel27 and onto main cuz it’s making me feel insane. Season 1 of Only Friends was obsessed with recordings, as doublel pointed out in her post here. They secretly recorded each other but also bonded over recordings of others—novels, albums, etc. Throughout the season, the emphasis lay in the authenticity of the recordings to capture, document, and reveal the truth—authentic behaviors and emotions—to peak behind the fictions and lies, into the realities of queer life.
Jojo Tichakorn, who many of us perceived as the lead director and writer on the first season (although he was credited as co-director and one member of a team of writers) has reason to view recording as a method for objectivity. He studied anthropology in school and moved from that into film. Anthropology depends on the ability to document people and culture, and film has a distinct history in offering viewers something closer to reality than any other medium. Susan Sontag On Photography:
“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates…In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.”
For the characters in the first season, they were being constantly disarmed and disrobed by recordings, emperors without clothes. They were confronted by Jojo’s cinéma vérité—their talking head interviews are documentarian, the cameras and mics pointed at their love-making are voyeuristic and pornographic, and a record’s reveal is an exposing truth bomb, for better and more often for worse.
In episode 3 of OFDO, we see an attempt by Raffy to use the same strategies. He leaks a video of Dean, but it has the opposite effect it might have had in the first season of Only Friends (although we’ll wait to see what happens if the vid slips beyond the faculty group chat…). We hardly even see the content of the clip—a decided difference from how recordings were treated last season. Ninew Pinya, the director and writer of Dream On, did not come to film first like Jojo, his close friend and co-director on the first season of the show. Like the characters in the series, Ninew is trained in theater with a specific focus on performance. This season is proving to be much less trusting of film’s veracity and much more comfortable and even interested with the creation of fiction and performance to compel others.
Some examples. Look at the way Dean creates a sob scene for the front desk at Jack’s apartment just to get in. Totally fake. Except, of course, that what he describes turns out to be not far from the truth even if Dean doesn’t know it. The auditions of Dean and Raffy had a distinctly Lynchian style in their visuals and the surreal merging of them together, reminding me of the Mulholland Drive lip synching scene. What’s real and what’s fake, and does it matter? Or think about Dean’s turn to the camera at the end of episode 1. He seems quite aware he’s in a story and being viewed. Rather than fear the truth coming out, he stakes a claim on constructing the story.
The talking head interviews are taking on a very different dimension than the first season, too. People aren’t trying to reveal their truth here, they are trying to wrest control of the narrative. Thanks to @fadelgender for noticing the way Dean uses this tool, among others, early on. But episode 3 really brought it home for me when Boston got in on it. “I am back.” He knows his place in the story now.
Of course, that’s also pretty close to a quote from The Terminator, and Tua for his part is coaching his (possibly gay4pay?) lead actor on how to use that reference to field questions about his name as he enters into the acting field. He’s also getting him to practice his gay kisses with him and offering him money to get involved with all this gay theater kid shit. Because the need for money here is part and parcel of the desire to perform.
That fact is why Raffy’s recording really didn’t hit the way he intended. Although he seems well on his way to understanding how you put on an act to get an audience’s reaction, he doesn’t yet understand what the rest of these theater trainees seem to know—it’s all for show. We didn’t need to see the full clip of Dean because he was just acting as a host anyways, putting on a character for the patrons. To quote the great philosopher Fergie, “All that shit is fictitious.” That’s not unusual to this crowd or something to be ashamed of, although they are aware of how those unversed in performance will perceive it.
Recordings don’t capture the truth in OFDO. They capture make-believe meant to manipulate, influence, and inspire. It’s all imaginary play, the stuff of audience’s dreams, and the creatives are the dream weavers—and because it’s Only Friends, that’s for better and for worse. They’re fighting in the wings about what image they want to put on stage, which way the story will go, who’s the hero, who’s the villain. None is so daft to believe it captures the breadth of reality, nor, though, are they so daft to think that their fictions lack deeper purpose and meaning. “The best of this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them,” Theseus comforts his wife while watching the mechanicals play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The BL drama, the love, the scandals, its all story and performance, which are not quite the opposite of reality but not beholden to the skepticism of objectivity. These characters are putting on a show for us and each other and that’s not seen as some profound issue of deception to be stripped away from them. They are making subjective truths, constructed narratives, meant to move and entertain us and themselves, “no more yielding but a dream.”
