i was directed towards this scene from David Lynch’s 2001 film ‘Mulholland Drive’ by a commenter underneath the Father John Misty performance. the point of interest starts from about 1 minute in:
i have not seen Mulholland Drive, but that fact did nothing to stop me from being undeniably perturbed by the performances at the ‘Club Silencio’. the audience in attendance are sparse and silent, so moving on from my last few blog post, i am instead focusing on the absence of performers, as suggested by the name of the venue. the host of the event in this scene repeats in a number of languages that everything we are watching is pre-recorded, and the sounds of the orchestra are all coming from speakers, digital files. a trumpeter demonstrates this by miming along to a solo before abandoning the facade and waving his instrument melodramatically. he is followed by a singer, who convincingly keeps up the already revealed gambit for longer, before collapsing on stage, her voice eerily surviving her presence as she is carried off by two stagehands. even though we know her performance is prerecorded, her collapse is no less shocking, and her powerful voice outlasting her is no less disconcerting. there’s not much i can really say about the scene apart from it feels wrong, and that it led me on to some other interesting ideas about the nature of performance, what we as an audience expect from performers, and the relationship between the seats and the stage.
lip-syncing or miming along to prerecorded music serves as an excellent and commonly debated baseline for the ‘absent’ performer and the ‘present’ audience. my flatmate drew my attention to the similarities between ‘Club Silencio’ and another scene in David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ (which this time i have seen, i promise), when Dean Stockwell’s immaculately dressed character, who has only just been introduced, mimes along to Roy Orbinson’s ballad ‘In Dreams’:
this is probably my favourite ever scene out of all the cinema i’ve watched (which, as you can probably tell, is not that much). its placement in the context of the film certainly heightens its effect: arriving around halfway though when the tensions between the banal and the absurd are finally released and all sense of normality and safety finally evaporate, this event acts as the pivot on which the film operates. but aside from that, we can view it independently as a layered performance, with differing and distinct audiences. Ben, stockwell’s character, is inexplicably dressed in georgian-era court dress, and is paled with the heavy make-up of the time. Already, this suggests an aura of facade, but one that he has adopted whole heartedly – as a performer he is not trying to trick the audience, just like the host of the Club Silencio, but instead adapts this fakery into the heart of his show. his microphone is a lamp, useless for amplifying his voice, but its presence gives him an air of authority, spotlighting his heavily made-up face. the tools of the performance are obviously fake, the lamp, the cassette player, the costume – but this means nothing – it is a strong performance nonetheless, one of the most affecting i’ve ever seen.
Within the film, there are two audiences: Frank (dennis hopper’s character), and the rest of the club house. There is a clear divide between the two, as made clear by the camera angles, with Frank placed next to Ben, often in the same shot, framed by the parted curtains – and the others, with the reverse of that shot. In the context of a theatre, Frank is on stage, and the others are in the stalls. This is reflected in their actions: Frank attentively watches Ben, firmly placing himself firmly within the audience, yet he identifies with the performer by standing on ‘stage’ and expressively lip-syncing along to the song, before becoming visibly repulsed by something and switching off the tape. Whereas the others are comfortable in their roles as spectators, subtly dancing or looking admirably towards Ben, Frank cannot assign himself to either position, tries to be both, and finally ends the show. He is missing Ben’s microphone (despite it’s being a lamp), costume, and captivating, unselfconscious air, yet he does have the power to turn it all off, which he does. This is the power of the participatory audience, a blunt demonstration of the pact between audience and performer, and what happens when you break it. when Ben briefly addresses his gaze and his ‘voice’ towards Frank, he is incorporated into the performance, but his presence in the audience is a necessity for the show – a dichotomy he apparently cannot bear.
but ! as previously stated, repeatedly, its all fake ! no one is ‘performing’ ! so how come both the Club Silencio and ‘In Dreams’ are so disarming? so powerful? so confusing? what does it even mean to perform? and what does it mean to watch a performance? and where is the boundary between the two? especially when the performer is merely an active audience member responding to a prerecorded performance by someone else? the power of the microphone can never be understated, even if it is never even plugged in.
all of this reminded me of a disconcertingly large world which i know almost nothing about: vocaloid. On a basic level, vocaloid is a software/digital synthesiser that accurately recreates the sound of a human voice. users of vocaloid can make electronic voices sing any tune, with any lyrics, in any context. the software comes in 2 different parts: the editor, in which voices are arranged and controlled, and the voices themselves. there are hundreds of different voices, mainly singing in japanese, with some chinese and less english, each with unique identities, names, costumes, personalities, backstories. vocaloid is just a software, like ableton or premier pro, but it’s users and fans have created an entire, populous and evolving narrative universe based on its sounds, as if each effect in premier pro was its own character. this dichotomy between product individuality/personality/independence, and complete user control is a little weird to me, but hasn’t stopped me from downloading the software and beginning to create tunes with the only free english voice i could find: ‘eleanor forte’. on its own, using vocaloid is a strange experience, and feels a little bit like playing god: i am at once both the audience and the performer, hearing my constructions sung back to me by an entity i control. but this dynamic is one that has proved to be extremely popular across the world.
hatsune miku was one of the first voices created for vocaloid, and has become something of a pop-star in her (?) own right, performing actual concerts (via hologram) across the globe to packed out audiences. in essence, miku is a vessel through which others, anyone really, can animate their own songs without relying on a voice, peskily attached to a real life human, with their own creative impulses and inflections. this hasn’t stopped her from becoming a personality in fans eyes, many of whom travel for hours to see her ‘perform’ (i don’t mean those quotation marks deridingly, i just mean to question what it really means to ‘perform’). like Ben, like the singer in Club Silencio, Hatsune Miku is obviously, unavoidably, openly fake – but the people still come, the performance is still affecting, the audience is still here. unlike other hologram performances, like tupac’s famous appearance at Coachella 15 years after his death, or, amusingly, a concert involving a real audience and a virtual Roy Orbison, the ‘In Dreams’ singer Ben channels in ‘Blue Velvet’, whose poster i recently saw in glasgow, miku’s concert goers are always aware of the ‘singer’s’ non-existence. she is not a reminiscence, or a recreation created to ease mourning or nostalgic tastes, she is what she is – a digital projection, a personality who doesn’t extend beyond the screen. her fans are also her creators, her audience her performers, she is a medium and an icon.
clearly, despite conventional notions, the presence of a performer is not always necessary. just as we have seen the audience be replaced (successfully or not) by prerecorded sound banks and robotic seat-fillers, the performer can be replaced by an image, real or digital, you decide. in an admittedly jarring jump, i’d like finally to look at one of this first instances of the phenomenon of the absent performer: Paul Robeson’s performance at the 1957 Porthcawl Miner’s eisteddfod. in what was probably one of the worlds first ‘live-streams’, and an event i’ve been fascinated with for a while now, Robeson performed over the phone from a studio in New York specifically for a packed hall of miners in Wales. he had a deep relationship with the Welsh miners union dating back years before the performance, and they had invited him to perform at their annual Eisteddfod, an offer which he gratefully accepted despite his relative stardom. There was one major problem – Robeson, after years of tension, had recently been blacklisted by the FBI for ‘communist activities’ and had had his passport taken away and his right to travel revoked. the miner’s union and Robeson came up with the ingenious idea of having him perform at the festival over the telephone: a crackly, virtual robeson performing through a rigged up speaker to a real crowd, eager just to hear his voice.
the crowd at the Eisteddfod
the result is beautiful. both Will Painter, the union leader, and Robeson’s addresses to the crowd are profound and clear, and robeson’s performance is powerful and strong despite his absence (you can listen to it all here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4BoVrfabM7E7Tj4THcTdcl?si=8M1TONfSQ9OCcOmpuZVgzw). however the defining moment for me is when robeson is joined by the Treorchy Male Voice Choir for a rendition of ‘We’ll Keep A Welcome In The Hillside’, a song perfectly suited to the situation. as they sing, one disembodied voice over a telephone line united with a visible and physically present choral group, the crowd begin to join in – erasing all boundaries between performer and audience, an exercise in vocal solidarity resonating, literally, across continents.
the Porthcawl Eisteddfod differs vitally from the Club Silencio, ‘In Dreams’, and Hatsune Miku in that the image on stage is not what the focus is on. Robeson does ‘perform’ in a more traditional sense, and the effect is one of sincerity and genuine connection, rather than one of artifice and facade. but what unites the concerts of robeson and hatsune miku (a bizarre sentiment) is the audiences desire for a collective experience, no matter form the image on stage takes. as long as the performer stands for something which the crowd are invested in, the event always has the potential to be fulfilling for the audience and the performer. although everybody travels to ‘watch’ the act, the real sense of experience often comes from the feeling of being in a crowd, of watching a show with thousands of others, whose reactions, whether they mirror yours or not, are real and apparent even if the visuals are not. at the Eisteddfod, there is no tension between audience and performer, as in ‘Blue Velvet’, and as the boundaries are blurred, each individual associates themselves both with the spectator and the singer, and what emerges is an experience of heartfelt connection and grace. there may be no orchestra, as the host of the club silencio claims, but the power is still there.
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