Note 15 - Page 30 - the Ramones and Kierkegaard
“The Ramones give Needles & Pins the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true. Søren Kierkegaard called this ‘the Third Remove’. In his book The Crisis In The Life Of an Actress, he claims no actress can play 14-year-old Juliette until she’s at least 32. Because acting’s art, and art involves reaching through some distance.”
- pg. 30
Since I’d spent a great deal of time reading literature, history, philosophy, “my subjectivity” included all of those things, but only as channeled through my own body. Before making films, I’d studied performance for several years with the visionary theater artists of Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group, and The Performance Group. And as I wrote, I found myself deploying many of the conceits I’d learned in acting and film—the use of montage, speaking through masks or personas, a very high slapstick routine of shifting identities. If I was going to be accused of stalking said “Dick,” well then, I’d play the part of the stalker. One of the most important things I learned in studying theater is to seize the impulses that arise during performance, and then move with them. A gesture turns into a mask. So I turned myself into a lab rat. I was very naive. I thought I was doing a high giddy job of performing philosophy. Naturally this writing was very physical, and I was terribly shocked when it was widely perceived at face value, as a cheap confession. Because in the book I talked over and over again about operating at a Third Remove, using a Kierkegaardian sense of irony when dealing with the banal facts that comprise straight female life: the Crush, when will he call me?
Q+A: CHRIS KRAUS