Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Maria
Fine Draft
Winter Project Proposal

This winter I would like to do two smaller projects. The first is to write a screenplay for a short film that will be 20 to 25 minutes long, and the second is to help Blythe and Mellissa as an assistant on their production of Genet’s The Maids. I have wanted to write and produce a film for a long time but don’t have much experience. Although film and theatre are different mediums and certainly have their own particular characteristics and challenges I think helping out with rehearsals, set building, and other technical aspects of the play will be helpful when it comes to directing and producing my own film.
The movie I want to write is going to be a comedy about free will. It involves two main characters, Cynthia and Evan, identified as a boy and a girl who are stuck in their lives and daily routines until a mystical experience happens and suddenly transforms the both of them into “extreme” (completely uninhibited and impulsive) versions of themselves.
The two biggest influences behind the idea for this film are the essay Theory of the Derive by Guy Debord in the Situationist International and the 1928 Film The Crowd by King Vidor. The spirit of the Derive and living life according to your inspiration in the moment is something which is embraced and exaggerated in the film in a hopefully funny and also hopefully interesting way, and it will explore what might happen if we were to fully live out the idea and how doing so might enrich or fulfill our lives and also how it could damage them. The movie The Crowd is an influence because of it’s themes of mechanization (and determinism) and especially because of how this was portrayed through the cinematography of the film. I would like to incorporate some aspects of the style of the film when I get to the process of storyboarding. Also I want to reference two particular ideas from the movie. The first is a scene where the main character first gets to the city and goes into an elevator and faces the wrong direction and gets corrected, and the second is a scene with a street performer and the hopelessness that this figure conveys and also it’s implications in terms of social class.
As far as my involvement with the play The Maids I am going to be attending rehearsals twice a week and acting as an assistant. My role will be flexible according to what is needed so it’s hard to sketch out here exactly what I will be doing from week to week but Blythe and Mellissa have said that they will want someone to discuss concepts in the script with, help with line notes, and to help out with set building and costuming and make-up. I’m almost viewing my time with them as sort of an internship to gain experience working with these things and observing, so I think it will be really useful and fun.
Some central themes in The Maids are performance, power, and gender (we are deciding to cast male identified actors to play the roles of two of the female characters in the play). I think the themes of power and performance especially relate to what I want to say about free-will in my screenplay as well. An essential element in becoming free in making your own decisions is discovering that you have options or other modes of being. I think the emphasis Genet places on performance and the trouble in pinning down the real self underneath the levels of artifice can be liberating in that it doesn’t leave you bound by any fixed mode of being. I think that the emphasis on power is also relevant because I do believe that power is relational, as Foucault stated in History of Sexuality. It’s interesting to consider how playing different moves and creating different experiences affects the game. In the majority of The Maids Claire and Solange are role playing the murder of their employer (Madame) while she is away. They are stepping outside of their identities and their reality in order to imagine or practice for something different. The actions of the characters in my screenplay are for the most part going to be somewhat less drastic than murder (although I haven’t completely ruled it out), but you will see a lot of things over the course of the movie and they are all acted out in real life. It will be interesting to reflect upon these two subjects together.
I think the greatest challenge for my writing will be to write a script which is actually funny and thought provoking at the same time. I definitely want to make some sudden jumps from funny to serious, and I’m scared if I write it poorly the philosophical ideas will either come off as boring and wordy, or as cheesy. I was really impressed how in “The Good Person of Schezwan” Brecht’s play addressed such serious subject matter but also managed to be entertaining. Although they are intended to be acted realistically I think a lot of the actions that the two main characters do will be so strange that they will be alienating enough to make the viewer be critical about what is going on in the situation.
The play is in dialogue with Orgel. Genet himself was attracted to men and in the introduction Sartre says that this play was not really written about woman but men. It is noted that the Maids do interact in a sexual way and although the characters do have a same sex relationship it is speculated that the fact that they are women is a mask for Genet to write about a sexual relationship between two males. This could be related to some of Orgel’s ideas about the fears and also the allowances of homosexual desire in Renaissance theatre. It is arguably different in a lot of ways, not the least of which is that men playing women in today’s theatre is not the norm. But I do think that these as well as other ideas about the sexually charged theatre and also about clothing somehow making the man or woman, is absolutely related to what we will be doing.
In Sartre’s introduction to the play he talks about how Genet said if he were to stage the play he would use male actors for all three parts and hang placards to the right and left of the stage stating that the actors were in fact men. I feel like this gesture might have made Brecht smile, since it was very much in line with his ideas about the epic theatre and the need for distance or alienation between the audience and the theatrical work. I feel like Brecht and Genet are interesting to compare since both were concerned with the artificiality of performance. However, in the play after the artifice of the actors is revealed and the theatre itself is acknowledged to be fake, the level of artificiality continues to spiral as the actors role play within the work and switch places as Claire pretends to be Madame and Solange pretends to be Claire. Then you see the artificiality of the characters themselves within their jobs as servants and their struggle the distance themselves from it, which is achieved by dreaming up different imaginary roles for themselves to play apart from the reality of their work. At this point is hard to place any sort of neat divide between performance and the real, because the real is continuously deconstructed. In some ways it’s as though the play was written as epic theatre with the subject offered up for criticism being reality itself. The circular nature of it which Sartre alludes to in his introduction is really the brilliant thing about it though, as one real is deconstructed as false and always seen through against another “real” which has already been previously been seen through as false.
My screenplay is in dialogue with Brecht also. I think mainly for the reason mentioned above about entertainment and content. Also I think that its method will be similar to how Brecht describes epic theatre and also its audience and its aims.
My Screenplay is also in dialogue with Guy Deboard and Situationists since they are the primary inspiration for the work.
My imagined audience for my movie is the general public. Basically anyone I can get to agree to sit down and watch it is an acceptable audience for me when I finish it. However, I agree with the Brechtian notion that we have to give the general public the credit of being smart. I don’t want to make my screenplay or the resulting film watered down or easy, but at the same time I want it to be entertaining.
The imagined audience for “The Maids” is probably going to be primarily Evergreen students since we are trying to book a space for it in the Communications Building. However there is a chance that we will try to find another venue downtown (possibly the Midnight Sun) and we have even talked a little bit about how the possibility of trying to show it in Seattle or Portland (Blythe’s mom is involved in theater in Portland) but we also realize that performing this far away might be hard to organize and may not be practical.
I think both of these pieces intend to raise lots of questions for the audience. I think one of the goals is the Brechtian idea to urge people to reexamine everyday occurrences. The working life and treatment of the maids in the play was very typical of their time. My screenplay is going to be more current but it is also going to deal with everyday issues that are sometimes overlooked.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary texts

Genet, Jean (author) and Jean-Paul Sartre (preface). 7-32, 33-100, 101-164. The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays. New York: Grove Press, 1982. This book contains the play itself and also a second play, Deathwatch which Sartre argues in the introduction is the same story as The Maids. Of course we will constantly be referring to The Maids itself, and I think it will also be interesting to read Deathwatch to see how it is similar.

The Crowd. Dir. King Vidor. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). 1928.

This film tells the story of a foolishly idealistic young man trying to become successful and in New York City. Despite his best efforts to “make something of himself” and rise above the crowd he becomes swallowed up in the work machine, at first living a painstakingly ordinary life and eventually ending up in poverty. The simplicity of the plot in this movie leaves something to be desired for me, but I love the style of the imagery. The inevitability of the dreariness of life that the movie portrays is a theme that the characters in my screenplay are rubbing against and trying their hardest to disregard.

Murderous Maids. Dir. Jean-Pierre Denis. ARP Selection. 2000.

This film is about the lives of the Papin sisters who are the subject of Genet’s play The Maids. Blythe saw this movie and recommended it to all of us to watch. She felt that this movie was more disturbing and more authentically showed the brutality of the murder than some of the other films made about Christine and Lea Papin. She also felt it spoke to the power relations inherent in the profession of being a maid in France during the time period.

Secondary texts

Foucault, Michel. Madness and civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Random House, 1965.

One of the characters in my screenplay starts off as a self conscious and socially awkward office worker who is secretly obsessed with a TV therapist (modeled after Dr. Phil). After undergoing his “extreme” transformation and getting in trouble for acting out he is ordered to see a psychologist before returning to work. He is secretly thrilled to be undergoing treatment and to have the opportunity to confess and be “fixed” by the psychologist. It’s in this space that I think I’m going to write in a lot of the talk-y philosophical ideas I want to address through the work. I want to read Foucault’s critique of mental institutions and mental illness because I think it will be relevant to these interactions. I think it will also clarify for me what exactly it does to the power relation when the patient is absolutely thrilled to be there and plays within his role as patient. Also the question “what does it mean to be mad?” is relevant to what I’m writing. Hopefully in my screenplay I write I’ll show both some advantages and disadvantages of deciding to go against society’s expectations and be a little crazy.

Appignanesi, Richard. Freud for Beginners. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

I want to read this book because I read Foucault for Beginners at the beginning of the quarter and thought it was an easy, non intimidating read that helped me to get a good start on understanding some of Foucault’s concepts. I don’t want to study Freud in too much depth but I do want to learn enough to be able to kind of poke fun at the institution of psychology in the scenes where Evan is in the clinic. Psychoanalysis seems like an easy target for this. Electra complexes, anal retentive and expulsive personalities, incest, it all sounds like comedy gold to me. I want to contrast some of the absurdity of these theories with the grave seriousness in the demeanor of these old white men.



Freud was very serious.

The writing part of my project won’t require any technical proficiency. I do want to work on my writing so I’m planning on getting feedback from my peers, and discussing my work a lot. I am basically doing the play to acquire skills and my group knows I’m going into this with not much experience but they are thankful for the help. We will need to have space for the rehearsals and performances. We will also need access to materials for building sets, props and we will need costumes. My best friend is in media works and knows the costume shop and prop supplies at Evergreen by heart so she would be a good person to ask for help if we have any trouble figuring out resources at Evergreen. We also collaborate on art projects a lot together so I know she’d probably love to lend a hand here and there.
PERSONAL SYLLABUS

Week 1

Sketch out rough draft of screen play and the scenes you want to write
Go on a Derive (alone)
Initial meeting with cast (read through)
2nd meeting (rehearsal)
Re-read Sartre’s introduction to The Maids

Week 2

Watch Murderous Maids
Re-Read The Maids
Rehearsal
Rehearsal
Write
Go on a Derive (with a friend)

Week 3

Watch The Crowd
Go on a Derive
Read Deathwatch
Rehearsal
Rehearsal
Give your writing so far to a friend to read and set up a coffee date to talk about your work
Continue writing

Week 4

Coffee date about your writing
Go on a Derive
Read Begin Madness and Civilization
Rehearsal
Rehearsal
Give your writing to another friend and set up another coffee date
Continue writing

Week 5

Coffee date about your writing
Go on a derive
Rehearsal
Rehearsal
Finish Madness and Civilization
Continue Writing

Week 6

Derive
Rehearsal
Rehearsal
Read Freud for Beginners
Finish your rough draft of your story
Send it out to friends and set up coffee dates about your writing

Week 7

Selected Situationist readings
Try and go on 2 coffee dates to talk about your writing
Derive
Rehearsal
Rehearsal
Go to the Writing Center on Campus and have them edit your work

Week 8

Derive
Put your finishing touches on your writing and finish your final copy
Rehearsal
Rehearsal

Week 9

Dry tech rehearsal
Wet tech rehearsal
Final Dress rehearsal
Performances

Week 10

Performances