In his 1956 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, sociologist Erving Goffman theorizes a “dramaturgical model of social life,” in which all social interactions are likened to theatrical performances, after which one retreats “backstage” and relaxes into one’s true identity.[1] The theater metaphor remains central to how the balance between performance and authenticity is conceived, especially in a time when digital technologies are said to be bringing the “frontstage” into intimate spaces and ostensibly threatening to banish the “backstage” entirely.[2] In taking up the subject of amateur acting, Nick Drnaso’s new graphic novel Acting Class engages a premise that speaks to both contemporary preoccupations with privacy and exposure, and much older preoccupations with the theater as an experimental and microcosmic space, a petri-dish for the wider human experience. Drnaso, however, is less concerned with the distinction between a character’s inner truths and their external presentations, and more with how we come to follow scripts we believe we have written ourselves. Accepting the premise that the self is always relational and therein unpredictable, Acting Class charts the process by which a group of people are made to believe they are pursuing new levels of self-knowledge, while what they are really doing is creating a social system from scratch—one that their teacher, with just a few small interventions, is able to shape into something self-perpetuating and inescapable.
The class in Acting Class is a small group, mostly strangers to one another, who have come across flyers for a workshop (initially free, eventually paid) run by a mysterious instructor named “John Smith.” Even within the minimalism of Drnaso’s illustration, John, as they call him, is a deeply unsettling presence: ice-blue eyes, a vacant stare, missing teeth, a name that sounds invented. He is aware that everyone has come to his class from a place of near-desperation: “The people that pick up flyers and show up to free classes tend to be restless searchers,” he explains (38). There’s Beth, a troubled young woman struggling under the oppressive concern of her grandmother and primary carer, Gloria. There’s Rosie, who works at a company that creates personalized dolls, and her husband Dennis, who is in denial about their failing marriage. There’s Lou, of whom we know next to nothing except that he lives under the stairs and his colleagues are afraid to eat the cookies he bakes. And others, all in positions of equal precarity: Thomas, Rayanne, Danielle, Angel, Neil.
John is a bad acting teacher—he seems to ad-lib his classes—but he’s an effective guru, identifying students’ weaknesses, fears, and desires and pushing them into a collective performance that is for some a fantasy and for others a nightmare. The carrot he dangles is reconnecting with a lost inner self: “[T]he only thing I’ve consistently observed,” he notes at the start of the classes, “is that every person has something unique to them which is impossible to recreate, without exception. So that’s all we’re going to focus on” (20). Nonetheless, around a third of the way through the novel, John instructs the class to participate in a “simple warmup” that entails manipulating their facial expressions to convey an emotion he whispers to each of them, the goal being for the audience to recognize the emotion instantly. This exercise “can be enormously useful in performing and in life,” he informs them (86).
For the reader, the scene is absurd. Despite each receiving a full-frame close-up, the characters’ faces resist immediate legibility: we only know the success or failure of the performances by the reactions of the class. Faces are drawn so blankly that they are sometimes barely recognizable: in some frames, Rosie is almost identical to her husband Dennis (surely an intentional decision, given Dennis’s characterization as a man so dependent on his role as a husband that he stifles the romance out of the marriage). Meanwhile, Rosie’s colleague Angel is distinguishable from another character, Beth, only by her wire-rimmed glasses—a resemblance that is more intriguing because it makes so little narrative sense. If comic books and graphic novels have been traditionally marked by exaggerated emotion (manga, for example, possesses an entire visual shorthand for connoting anger, lust, depression, surprise, and longing), then Acting Class, like Drnaso’s other graphic novels Sabrina and Beverly, moves in the opposite direction, opting for a stylistic approach that is intentionally distancing.
Yet at the same time, the glimpses Drnaso does give us into his characters’ lives are intensely private. We see directly into the minds of each character, the story shifting into their imagined scenarios as they lie on the floor and free-associate. These insights are sudden and often uncontextualizable. We are violently reminded that we’ll never know the characters completely. The revelation that Neil molested a child in his early twenties comes almost out of nowhere, after we have spent a considerable amount of time inside his head. Did we miss the signs? There had been one moment some pages earlier when Neil’s anger at a minor affront had tipped over into something more malevolent. What else might we be missing?
The tension between intimacy and alienation is what makes Drnaso’s work evocative. Devoid of shading, his illustration is so clean that it feels as if it’s about to slide off the page, even as the darkest reaches of the self are garishly exposed. Toward the end of the novel, during a psychedelic sequence involving Angel and Dennis, we get an inexplicable glimpse of someone’s bodily organs: intestines, liver, lungs, spleen squished neatly into the frame as though in a glass display cabinet. Much like Sianne Ngai’s concept of “visceral abstractions,” these characters are caught between the intensity of their experiences and the insipid non-sensuousness of the smiley face or emoji, the “averaged-out, dedifferentiated face of a generic anyone.”[3] The visual economy of Drnaso’s work reflects the conditions within which his characters are attempting to survive. Toward the beginning of Acting Class, Lou adopts the role of a dog and has an elaborate fantasy in which he’s turned into a can of processed meat and eaten by his owner. Following Marx’s definition of a commodity as “congealed labour time,” the labor of Lou’s performance as an attentive animal companion has quite literally been liquified and congealed into an abstraction.
Capitalist abstraction is felt viscerally, argues Ngai, which is maybe why Drnaso’s flattened worlds are able to elicit such strong reactions. The uncanny intimacy of Acting Class feels true to the cycles of self-exposure and self-commodification that characterize many people’s experiences of life on the internet. In some ways, reading Drnaso is similar to reading a transcript of text messages, his illustrations giving away none of the bodily information that might otherwise guide us toward a particular interpretation. The paradox of his work is a familiar one: it goes without saying that reading somebody’s texts over their shoulder on the bus is more intrusive than eavesdropping on their conversation; at the same time, few people would argue that texting somebody is a more intimate act than calling them face-to-face, or that a love-react tells us more than a facial expression. In Drnaso as on the internet, extreme forms of disclosure coexist with extreme forms of withholding.
In Sabrina, digital technologies are everywhere—entire scenes unfold on YouTube and internet forums. In Acting Class, the internet is both nowhere and everywhere. Its conspicuous absence invites us to read the whole book as an analogy for the internet: each of the characters escapes into avatars of their own design, and each of them admits that doing so has made them feel worse, or at least not better, even as they somehow fail to pull themselves away. The class works up to a synchronized, improvisational performance of perfect, instantaneous transmission: “You will be able to look into someone’s eyes and intuitively understand your relationship with them,” John Smith promises. “It will come together without explanation” (179). Sure enough, the last third of the book takes place in what could be described as a kind of virtual reality, a collective hallucination signaled by the disappearance of the community center and the reappearance of a new fictional town populated by side characters (a young boy, an old man) who are all played by John. There is a subtle tilt here away from realism and toward allegory, perhaps even toward the supernatural. A few of the characters begin to notice the subtle manipulations of their teacher, as he—in the guise of unassuming side characters—dictates how the story will unfold. Suddenly the question we are asking exceeds the scope of the novel: not who but what is John Smith? Is he the “invisible hand” of a free-market economy, arranging the characters into a system of mutual interdependence? Is he the algorithmic hand shaping the collective performance of the online?
John’s ambiguity speaks to an increasing awareness of the ways our lives are governed by forces too abstract and dispersed to pinpoint. Similarly, the gap between his promises and the world he conjures for his characters is a familiar betrayal, reminiscent of our protracted coming-to-terms with failed experiments of “connectivity” amid increased social atomization. It makes sense, then, that we are seeing more iterations of an oddly specific premise –the quest for a perfect sociality, attainable through theatrical methods, directed by morally dubious figures. Acting Class is one example; Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show The Rehearsal is another.[4] By creating sets and hiring actors to replicate real scenarios, Fielder enables his “clients” to rehearse endless variations of a difficult encounter in advance, in order to ensure that the “real” version generates the best possible outcome. As in Acting Class, we can never be sure what we’re watching is the real thing. Mid-conversation, footage of an interlocutor is cut with a clip from the actor playing the interlocutor. More than once, Fielder breaks character to comment on the meta-structure of the show, throwing his actors off-balance. When a fatherless child actor playing Fielder’s fake son becomes unexpectedly attached to Fielder, he must explain to the kid that their bond was only an act. “Daddy,” says the kid. “Nathan,” Fielder corrects him, “not Daddy.”[5] The child is trapped in the act, in the same way that many members of John Smith’s class are by the end of Drnaso’s novel. “I’m not going to give up this opportunity,” Dennis says to Rosie at the end of Acting Class, and it’s not clear whether he’s referring to the class itself or to the high-level corporate status that his character has achieved within it (261).
Fielder’s role in The Rehearsal has many parallels with John Smith, although Fielder is undoubtedly the main character of his own show, while the fictional John fades suspiciously into the peripheries. In a way, both characters are reflections on the role of the artist, in whose hands people become characters to be scripted. In one scene, John Smith summons his class to watch the “performance” of the janitor mopping the floor of the community center one floor below. “I like to imagine this person’s life. Or an idea of what his life might be,” says John, who goes on to greet the janitor familiarly by name (37). Even the janitor’s anonymity was a performance, we discover, in a flourish that recalls a similar revelation in episode one of The Rehearsal: Fielder, seemingly encountering his client in his home for the first time, has been practicing this encounter for weeks in advance within a life-size replica of the man’s house. For Alexandra Tanner—a critic who also written on the parallels between these two works—part of the eerie correspondence between Fielder and Drnaso comes from the fact that both creators, hiding behind fictional puppet masters of their own design, render it impossible to grasp the intentions behind the work or to know with any certainty that we, too, are not being manipulated. But where Fielder’s apparent revelation is that he cannot remake the world in his own image, Drnaso’s is that he is doomed to do so. Acting Class was written in the pandemic, and it is shot through with a feeling of mental claustrophobia, the mind’s tendency to create traps for itself, even or especially when confronted with apparent freedom of the imagination.
It is often said that capitalism relies on a failure to imagine otherwise. When Drnaso’s characters are encouraged to lie on the floor and think up scenarios for themselves, the majority find themselves falling into familiar roles, or in other cases into roles they are desperately trying to escape. The reason their collective performance comes together “without explanation” is that it is just another version of the world they’ve been living in. It takes a long time for John’s strategy to begin ringing alarm bells for either the characters or the reader because the conditions he sets up—in which nobody knows what is real and what is performed—are already so familiar. While the threat that John Smith represents is dispersed and vague, its effects are brutally material. Over the course of the novel, at least three of the characters lose their jobs. Danielle snaps and deliberately injures one of her clients in their physiotherapy session; Thomas, plagued by new insecurities, no longer feels comfortable life-modeling in the nude; and Angel—who has been sucked entirely into a fantasy world—simply fails to show up to her normal life. Under such conditions, what is the real cost of tapping into one’s inner authentic wellsprings of emotion? For Beth, who lapses into an extended psychotic break, it’s being sectioned.
In an article on the Paranormal Activity franchise, Julia Leyda reads demonic presence as an allegory for debtor capitalism, arguing that the mechanisms by which the latter operates are so disembodied and omnipresent that they are almost ghostly.[6] Leyda’s analysis clarifies the difference between Fielder’s “Nathan Fielder” and Drnaso’s “John Smith.” The former is a lovable narcissist, a man with a physical presence who can be paparazzied on the sidewalk. The second is an abstraction, a non-character who is so effectively self-effacing that most of the characters do not notice the ways he manipulates them. Of course, the chain of exploitation does not end with John, who confesses at the end to being “just a recruiter” for an unspecified “organization” with ambiguous goals. The true terror of John’s character lies in the fact that one can never really escape whatever it is he represents. When the hoodwinked majority boards the bus to join the “larger group” at the end of the novel, thus committing themselves to the program beyond the first free sessions (and presumably to further emotional and financial exploitation), we cannot be entirely certain that those who have escaped and returned to their lives are better off. Beth is in an asylum, where her grandmother fails to visit her. Danielle doesn’t have a job. Rosie no longer has a husband and will presumably be forced to cover Angel’s shifts at the company where they both painstakingly personalize tiny ornaments by hand.
A few pages before the end of Acting Class, Rosie begs Angel and Dennis not to board the bus, attempting to shatter the illusion in which John Smith has trapped them. “This is all hollow,” she begs. “There’s nothing behind it,” reminding Dennis of their marriage, the bills she will now need to pay alone; reminding Angel of her cat (262). There’s something devastating about Rosie’s expression in this frame, though it’s so simply rendered that a child could replicate it perfectly with tracing paper. What Rosie sees—and what Dennis and Angel fail to recognize—is that although the remaining group may seem to be participating in a communal fantasy, their stories, despite intersecting, remain intensely individualized. “We are created from contact with others,” Tanner summarizes, but we can “never fully know each other.”[7] Any closeness that might have emerged within the group has been co-opted and transformed into an exploitative, self-regulating arrangement, in which everyone is locked into roles that support the uneven dispersal of power, even those who choose not to participate.
Despite everything, there are moments of real connection. Angel discovers an imaginary lover. Rayanne’s child finds peace. Lou is allowed to simply become a dog. Though overall the novel is largely as bleak as Sabrina, there are two kinds of optimism to be found in Acting Class. The first is piecemeal: the nuggets of joy and playfulness that persist in the texture of the everyday and in our relationships with one another. The second is purely speculative, haunting the story like a bright shadow: the sense that with a different teacher, this group might have been able to build a communal fantasy that worked for all of them, and that this fantasy may have eventually found a foothold in the “real world.” The questions Drnaso asks could be applied to political organizing as much as to his own craft as a storyteller. John Smith is everywhere—he’s in all our institutions, he’s in all our intimate circles, he’s in all of our heads. This makes world-building as dangerous as it is necessary.
Notes:
[1] Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1956).
[2] Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (New York: Random House, 2019).
[3] Sianne Ngai, “Visceral Abstractions,” GLQ 21, no. 1 (2015): 35.
[4] This comparison has also been made by Alexandra Tanner in a review of both works for Gawker. See Alexandra Tanner, “Fantasize in the Extreme!” Gawker, September 23, 2022. https://www.gawker.com/culture/fantasize-in-the-extreme-the-rehearsal-acting-class.
[5] “Pretend Daddy,” The Rehearsal, created by Nathan Fielder, HBO Entertainment, episode 6, 2022.
[6] Julia Leyda, “Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as recessionary post-cinematic allegory,” Jump Cut 56 (Winter 2014–2015). www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/LeydaParanormalActivity/index.html.
[7] Tanner, “Fantasize in the Extreme!”