Image Control

by Patrick Nathan

  I was never supposed to write a book like this. Fiction was my landscape for imagining how to reconcile being a person; essays were for thinking. My nonfiction work was never supposed to be personal, in any sense of the word, and I was under no circumstances to use my sexuality as some kind of talking point. Neither was I supposed to refer, in interviews, to myself as a gay or queer writer. That part of me wasn’t supposed to matter. I’d convinced myself that to be taken seriously as a writer I could be only an un-adjectived writer. But these two images were working to erase me, not help me. They were images the industry had chosen. My imagination had been what Sarah Schulman calls gentrified, a mentality “rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.” Just as, long ago, my assigned image of masculinity no longer fit (it’s a hard suit to wear with a dick in your mouth), I came to see this image of the “neutral writer” as a straitjacket.

  Yet there is no blank or neutral, not as a writer and not as a man. To aspire toward neutrality is to participate in your own oppression or diminution. For my part, growing up, I could at least look like Ryan (though I was shorter and, frankly, more handsome), but what does it mean for the American boys—trans, Black, femme, and so on—who can’t even pretend to play the part? What they see on this magazine cover is pure exclusion: This is the kind of boy who matters, and boys like you do not. At the same time, the boys who do fit the mold—white, straight, and uninterested in the lives of others—are reminded that America loves them and will protect them at all costs, even if the price, for those other boys, is their lives.

  What Esquire did was not “engage in debate,” as Fielden claimed, but instead loudly shun concerns that queers, women, and people of color have raised for centuries—concerns especially pressing under the Trump administration. Editorially, it closed its eyes to reactionary whiteness and chauvinistic masculinity, regurgitating unchallenged narratives that pretend these harmful ideologies are neutral. By refusing to connect the dots between ignorance and systemic violence, Esquire actively policed who matters and who does not. It’s the same wound pundits ripped open after the 2016 election, elevating and valorizing the suffering of white people rather than focusing on the deadlier, more widespread pain of marginalized persons. What Esquire upheld was the gentrification of American suffering, reiterating to its audience that pain and poverty and terror are irrelevant until they affect the white, the male, the straight, the Christian.

  Only a few days before Esquire told us about the boy we already knew, a video of two very different boys had gone viral. A Black teenager is waiting outside a school. He’s holding flowers and balloons. Another boy emerges from the building and rushes toward him. Other students cheer as they embrace, then kiss. It is a beautiful moment. Two boys are in love and their classmates celebrate it. It is also terribly sad: that was never me, and couldn’t have been. There was no image I saw as a boy that convinced me it was possible.

  A common lament is this country’s obsession with “identity politics”—so phrased to make it seem as if the identities of marginalized persons are what’s corroding our political discourse. For me, though, identity isn’t about how I choose to approach politics; it’s about how politics has approached me—or confined me, even attacked me. My sexuality isn’t something I choose to think about every day; it is an identity assigned to me by an ignorance that threatens my life. This is an unsolicited politics. In return, it is ethical to demand that white people think of their own whiteness, that men see their masculinity as imposed from without. What we must demand—not only of editors but anyone who holds institutional or visible power—is to be aware of this ethics. The stories you choose, the words you leave on the page, and the images you frame are not games; the devil already has enough advocates. These choices—about magazine covers, about representation, about the images we come into contact with every moment of every day—are decisions that contribute to how livable my life in this country can be, not to mention the lives of millions I’ve never met. These are decisions that get people killed.

  All of this is propaganda that can no longer be invisible. It’s telling that totalitarianism, in America, is “unnatural.” That fascism is unnatural. These are regimes, it is imagined, that restrict or deny freedom—to speak, to gather, to pray, even to think. We ground stories in these regimes because they fascinate us; we want to understand how human beings would allow such total control, not only over their lives but their imaginations. We want to imagine the circumstances under which people like me or like you, who might otherwise enjoy freedom, would accept such a narrow vision not only of what comprises a life, but of what is possible in a life.

  It can’t be said enough: Americans have no right to not understand those who allow themselves to be dominated by totalitarian rule. This nation—where freedom is merely a brand, an ideological export—is the most submissive, beaten, and terrified country on earth. This is a terror that’s mounted for years, as Masha Gessen outlined in their essay “The Reichstag Fire Next Time.” From Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act of 1918—which criminalized “speech perceived as critical of or detrimental to the American war effort”—to Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans to McCarthyism to the “secrecy, deceit, and paranoia of the Vietnam War years, which culminated in a president who had his opponents prosecuted and wire-tapped,” the so-called “state of exception” of executive emergency powers throughout the twentieth century “came close to being the rule.” What has changed since the September 11 terrorist attacks, which Gessen compares to the 1933 Reichstag fire in Berlin, is that “the enemy is not a nation or an army but a tactic, one that has existed for millennia. This war cannot be won, because a tactic cannot be eradicated. A war that cannot be won cannot end, and so it has not. Nor have the liberties surrendered by Americans in response to 9/11 been restored.”

  Any visit to an airport will illustrate just how thoroughly this nation is governed by fear—and not only from without but from within. As Arendt observes, “A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.” Primarily, Arendt is analyzing the rise and fall of the Reich and Stalin’s rule in Soviet Russia, but reading her thoughts today offers an eerie, sickening, unsettling recognition: Americans have become the exhausted Germans, desperate for an easy way out of economic frustration; we have become the cowed Russians, too concerned with making it from here to there to protest our unconstitutional mistreatment. Remembering the immediate response to 9/11, Gessen notes that “Fear has a way of catapulting citizens into the inside of a lie . . . Within hours of the September 11 attacks, 150 members of Congress gathered on the Capitol steps and sang ‘God Bless America.’ Some of them held hands. The strongest country on the planet was making a spectacle of fear and resolve.” We have become the terrified Americans, so convinced by the sensibilities of entertainment—the terror and ecstasy of seeing a disaster we’d never seen before—that we behave as if something almost statistically impossible could happen to us at any moment, and therefore we must safeguard ourselves against it at all times, by any means. We became, as Gessen writes, mobilized:

  A key characteristic of the most frightening regimes of the past hundred years is mobilization. This is what distinguishes the merely authoritarian regimes from the totalitarian ones. Authoritarians prefer their subjects passive, tending to their private lives while the authoritarian and his cronies amass wealth and power. The totalitarian wants people out in the square; he craves their adulation and devotion, their willingness to fight and die for him . . . A nation can be mobilized only if it knows its enemy and believes in its own peril.

  This echoes Arendt’s own observation of “the perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them
in motion . . . If there is such a thing as a totalitarian personality or mentality, this extraordinary adaptability and absence of continuity are no doubt its outstanding characteristics.”

  Uncoincidentally, the fundamental, irreducible quality of capitalism—particularly America’s brand of imperial capitalism—is motion: an aggressive, constant pursuit of novelty, innovation, and profit margins. Yet in the United States, capitalism is as natural as fascism is unnatural. Even if it is capitalism itself, as Russell indicates in his History, that has laid the groundwork for the fascist expression of totalitarianism:

  Though many still sincerely believe in human equality and theoretical democracy, the imagination of modern people is deeply affected by the pattern of social organization suggested by the organization of industry in the nineteenth century, which is essentially undemocratic. On the one hand there are the captains of industry, and on the other the mass of workers. This disruption of democracy from within is not yet acknowledged by ordinary citizens in democratic countries, but it has been a preoccupation of most philosophers from Hegel onwards, and the sharp opposition which they discovered between the interests of the many and those of the few has found practical expression in Fascism.

  This “imagination of modern people”—today, seventy years more modern than what Russell described—is visible even in the language we use in our day-to-day lives. Americans measure productivity not only at work but at home—whether we’ve done enough dishes or laundry, sent enough emails, texted enough friends, made enough plans. We talk about time management in our personal lives. We apologize for claiming sick time, for taking vacations. Instead of hobbies, we have side hustles, second-incomes, gigs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, article after article circulated advising us on how we could maximize our time in isolation. In place of the thought police Orwell imagined, Americans have created thought managers.

  When she covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel in 1961, Arendt was repulsed by this war criminal’s tendency toward total banality:

  Officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché . . . The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

  Eichmann’s envelopment in the vocabulary of his ideology, his subservience to it even at the level of language, illustrates the totalness of totalitarianism, that it is indeed within the power of a regime to limit what constitutes a life, as well as limit what one imagines is possible. Just suggest to a random American that we reduce the military, disarm or defund the police, pay people to stay home during a pandemic, and institute nationalized healthcare and free education to join the ranks of nearly all other Western nations. You will hear, most likely, how this is “not possible.” Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise in a society where, to return to Arendt’s words, there is “a way and philosophy of life so insistently and exclusively centered on the individual’s success or failure in ruthless competition that a citizen’s duties and responsibilities could only be felt to be a needless drain on his limited time and energy.” We are too busy being productive, too involved in managing our time, to participate as citizens in our own democracy.

  Accustomed as we are to entertainment, it’s tempting to look for a mastermind giving the orders and signing the death warrants. Yet with most totalitarian structures, the movement outpaces its creators. As concerns the capitalist species of totalitarianism, the metaphor of evolution, or “natural selection,” is more helpful. In nature, a species doesn’t decide to evolve; it reacts, over time, to its environment. So too do individuals and systems respond to capitalist pressures, often involving competition, and change their behavior or rules or laws accordingly. Rather than subjects of some capitalist mastermind, we are evolving into totalitarian subjects via Capital Selection.

  Rooted in an ideology predicated on expansion, acquisition, and unlimited growth at the expense of the entire world; establishing murderous regimes overseas in exchange for profit and national security; depriving other nations of their autonomy, wealth, and resources; branding itself as synonymous with freedom and liberty in the common imagination and warping our day-to-day language in the process; and of course having established itself upon two concurrent genocides, the United States of America’s project of imperial capitalism is the most successful, longest lasting, most deeply entrenched, and—given the catastrophic threat of climate change—the deadliest of all totalitarian movements in world history; and it is not only still moving, but still accelerating.

  Just as there’s no unseeing the “toxic” aspects of masculinity or the horrific dynamics of whiteness once you’ve dragged them from their darknesses, so too is the capitalist imposition of identity vulnerable to light. Another of masculinity’s epithets is “fragile”—an ideal way to describe the reactionary violence of men whose idea of masculinity is so easily threatened. It connotes a guarded notion of masculinity as immutable, as eternal. As, in other words, a relic. Frankly, a masculinity that can be called fragile is a masculinity that should be shattered; and so too should we imagine a fragile capitalism—something to shatter through identitarian experimentation, representation, and a plurality of contradictory, multifaceted images grounded in context. What we need is to resist the authority of unsolicited images.

  Men are not monsters, but they do monstrous things wearing the masks of their culture’s imposed masculinity. The average consumer—buying cheap products and bad art that undercut labor, skill, and creativity for the profit of a wealthy, corporate elite—does great harm to our culture and our planet indulging in interests they’ve been assigned or manipulated into cultivating. They, too, are not monsters. As with all repressive ideologies, it is the responsibility of the privileged to dismantle these systems—perhaps to great and disruptive pressure from those who are not privileged. A pretended neutrality is instead a complicity in imposing suffering on all individuals simply to protect a power structure. Believing or tolerating that “men are men” makes you nothing but a pawn. Believing or tolerating that what we see is what we’ve chosen—that a government whose primary concern is the protection and longevity of corporate wealth at the expense of the entire planet is the only electable option outside of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany—makes you a pawn. Totalitarian systems rely on these pawns to destroy the minorities whose lives are inconsistent with the reductive myths they overlay onto reality, not to mention any imagined ideas that might alleviate or reverse this irresponsible, genocidal movement accelerating toward extinction.

  There is no neutrality in visibility. There is no natural or eternal in how we, as modified creatures of technology and culture, live or die; and there are no ideologies or mythologies we can allow, any longer, to go on hiding in the dark.

  II

  WE HAVE ALWAYS WRITTEN WITH LIGHT

  In one of Francesca Woodman’s photographs, she’s folded herself into a large curio cabinet but left the door ajar. Within the frame, we can see four of the cabinet’s compartments. Woodman is in the lower right, her head leaning off the shelf, her hair draping onto the floor. Her feet are tucked into a corner, just behind the glass. In the compartment above her, also on the right, there are three plump waterfowl and a fox frozen in hunter’s form, its teeth bared as it stares into a corner. All are dead, of course. To their left, a pair of some other kind of bird—limpkins, maybe, or egrets—stand delicately among sticks and feathers and dead leaves. Below them, directly left of Woodman herself, a taxidermy raccoon seems to have just stepped out of the darkness, its jaws open, its eyes locked on the nape of Woodman’s neck. The photograph’s locale—the floorboards, the dead things—indicate it was taken sometime in 1976, during her Space2 series, in whic
h she exhibits her blurred flesh in or nearby a large glass display case, sometimes with other models, sometimes with an unidentified skull.

  Woodman’s striking use of her body could align neatly with two contemporaries, Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose Untitled Film Stills and raw Polaroids of the 1970s were the famous beginnings of famously self-regarding careers. Yet in Woodman’s work, her body is more object than subject. In fact, in many photographs, Woodman’s skin appears to literally blur and blend into the wallpaper or the floorboards. Her use of bodies—her own and her models’, whether displayed in a cabinet or hanging in a doorway—is surrealist: they could be furniture, décor, structural materials, toys, objets d’art, dead and stuffed creatures, sculptures, zoological specimens, or even living persons. In the surrealist imagination, there is no hierarchy of importance; everything is capable of registering the same interest or dismissal. The objects in Woodman’s photographs, human and not, get spilled on by light; a rectangle from a window stretches across the floor, bisecting warped and wrinkled leaves of wallpaper that have curled onto the floorboards. A little pane of glass intensifies the light upon Woodman’s fingers, visually slicing them at the knuckle. These objects, bodies included, remind us just how dramatically light can change a thing, how it bestows another side, another use, even another meaning. All objects are treated the same, given the same importance; all are worthy of, or deprived of, the gift of light. These are photographs “about” photography; they decrypt themselves.

  In his journals, Hervé Guibert writes that the “most photographic” moment is often “but an event of light, without a subject.” His own photographs, full of smoke and shrouds, filmy panes of glass, and overexposed nudes, are rich with these events, though not as surreal or claustrophobic as Woodman’s tend to be. I’ve since realized that a lot of my favorite photographers—Woodman and Guibert included, but also Saul Leiter, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Carrie Mae Weems, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, Trent Parke, and many others—seem to see the world in layers and tones of light rather than observable events, places, or persons (or, like André Kertész and Graciela Iturbide, in layers of shadow).