Feel Free

by Zadie Smith

  The following extended love scene is of such a delicacy and beauty that it reduced the audience to nervous giggles, as if embarrassed to be intruding upon such intimacy between puppets. But before anybody takes off their clothes, Michael, besotted by Lisa’s voice, asks her to sing one of her beloved Cyndi Lauper songs, and Lisa, fearful she is being ridiculed, closes her eyes and cautiously begins. This song should rightly, thematically, be “True Colors” and so there is something unexpectedly amusing about Lisa opening her miraculous mouth and singing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

  We get the whole song, in all its lyrical banality,* and it acts as a prelude to sex that proves equally pared down, simple, human, and from which all the usual cinematic fantasy has been stripped. The two sit on the edge of the bed, undressing to reveal our own lumpy bodies. When he gives her head, she is a little shy, as we can be, and he, in his turn, silent and workman-like, as often happens. When they shuffle up to the headboard, they move as we move—laboriously, without elegance—and then lie with each other as we all have, moving back and forth slightly, and finishing about a minute later. What strikes us above all is the gentle compassion these two bodies show each other. Elsewhere in this film, in many chilling glimpses, we see people treating each other without any compassion at all, or with brutality, pushing past one another, yelling at strangers, or standing by the icemaker in the hotel hallway repeatedly telling each other to fuck off. Everywhere you look, the world is pain:

  The life of the individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but an actual struggle against other people. He discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand.

  Still, amid Schopenhauer’s pessimism there is this shred of light: compassion. Even if the idea that we have separate bodies at all is a form of illusion (enabled only by the supporting illusions of space, time and causality), these bodies of ours still feel pain, still suffer when they are subjugated, oppressed, exploited or simply laughed at. For Michael (and Kaufman) certain women are both a vital source of this compassion and the unique recipients of it.* Lisa, for Michael, is an anomaly. An Anomalisa. And this compassion, this choosing of each other, is objectified in their miraculous voices: David Thewlis’s Northern English mix of reticence, pragmatism and despair, and Leigh’s cloud-free all-American innocence.

  Noonan, Leigh and Thewlis were in the original cast of Anomalisa, in its previous incarnation as a radio play, and their sublime performances lend the film a rare aural self-sufficiency: you could close your eyes and still enjoy it. And yet, in the 2016 Oscars, this witty and profound script has received no nods, nor is the film nominated for its acting or direction.* A reminder that alongside its noted myopia toward distinct genres, races and subcultures, the Academy has also proved reliably blind to a more general category: genius. (Which category, so problematic for us, is, for Schopenhauer, easily defined: “The gift of genius is nothing but . . . the ability . . . to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world.”)

  That same night of the compassionate hook-up, Michael—self-confessed “sloppy sleeper”—thrashes in his bed. He’s having a nightmare, though as it’s happening we think it is real. In this dream, the central problem of the film is restated—everybody is one person—but with an added, paranoid twist: they’re out to destroy Lisa-and-Michael! For one of the features of the compassion Michael now feels for Lisa is that he is able to make, in Schopenhauer’s words, “less of a distinction than do the rest” between him and another person; he recognizes, in some sense, that Michael and Lisa are one—and now it’s them against the world. As he runs from that world, down the hotel corridor, one of his face plates falls off entirely—we see the gray, gaping cavity beneath—and when Michael wakes up he finds he has hit his new love in the face with an elbow. But what if this nightmare (that Michael, too, is nobody) is not a dream at all but a glimpse of a deeper truth?

  Life can be regarded as a dream and death as the awakening from it: but it must be remembered that the personality, the individual, belongs to the dreaming and not to the awakened consciousness, which is why death appears to the individual as annihilation.

  That we believe ourselves to be separate from each other, and separate from the apparent objects of our desire, was, for Schopenhauer, the root of our suffering. A better consciousness was possible, one that recognized our essence as “will” (expressed in us as will-to-live, and objectified, with varying degrees of consciousness, in our urges, desires and actions), and that this essence was not individual but rather shared with all people (not just Lisa), all animals, all plants, all the phenomena of the world. What we can know intimately through our bodies has, for Schopenhauer, its equivalent in the keenness of the iron to fly to the magnet, in the determination of water to flow downwards, in the force of gravity itself, and though such knowledge is not a synonym for “force” or “energy,” it contains both those terms. The will lies behind all, contains all, is the “thing-in-itself . . . the innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole,” a somewhat loopy metaphysics that real academic philosophers, like my friend Tamsin, must take with a large pinch of salt, though it has captivated artists for generations. Is it possible that the problem in Anomalisa is not that Michael thinks everybody is the same but that Michael thinks he is Michael?

  Your individuality is not your essential and ultimate being, only a manifestation of it . . . Your being in itself . . . knows neither time nor beginning nor end . . . It exists in everyone everywhere.

  The erroneous belief that one is an individual at all—what Schopenhauer called the principium individuationis—may be the deeper truth hiding behind Michael’s face plates. (It would also help explain his fondness for Lakmé, an opera set among the transcendental Brahmin, for whom ultimate reality is likewise “All-One” and individual existence merely an emanation, made possible by the illusory veil of Maya.)* In the dream we are separate beings. In reality we are one. If only there were a way to reach out to the hinges of your individual face plate and tear away all that stops you from knowing that! But Michael never reaches this awakened consciousness: like so many of us he remains stuck between those twin poles of want and boredom.

  With Lisa the change comes far sooner than with Bella. That same morning over breakfast, Michael begins to realize that Lisa’s unique voice is disappearing and Tom Noonan’s already starting to overlay it. “Who would’ve thunk it?” asks Lisa, and Tom Noonan. “It’s just so beautiful. Life can be. Things can work out. That’s the lesson.” But the next time she speaks there will be no Lisa, there will be only Noonan. Michael hangs his head in preemptive despair. “Sometimes there’s no lesson,” he replies. “That’s a lesson in itself.”

  When Michael finally gives his speech on customer service, at the conference podium, it starts pretty well (“And always remember, the customer is an individual. Just like you . . . Each person you speak to has had a childhood. Each has a body. Each body has aches”) but soon turns strangely philosophical (“What is it to be human? What is it to ache? What is it to be alive? I don’t know. What is it to ache? I don’t know . . . Our time here is limited. We forget that. Death comes, that’s it. Soon it’s as if we never existed. So remember to smile . . .”) until it veers off its track altogether and becomes a pessimistic Schopenhauerean rant (“This is not working. The world is falling apart. The president is a war criminal. America is going down the tubes and you’re talking about goddamn intelligent design!”).

  The horrors of the will are historical as much as personal and seem to have no end in view. “History shows us the life of nations,” writes Schopenhauer, “and finds nothing to narrate but wars and tumults; the peaceful years appear only as occasional brief pauses and interludes.” What we might find bleakly funny in all this is that Schopenhauer’s proposed and partial remedy to this situation—comp
assion—sounds not very different from Michael’s customer-service bromides:

  So remember to smile. Remember there is someone out there for everyone. Someone to love. Remember every person you speak to needs love. Remember to—

  Conference over, Lisa abandoned, Michael returns home to find his wife Donna throwing him a surprise party. The surprise is he knows nobody and they’re all the same person. His son grabs his present, the Japanese sex toy. It starts singing. A liquid oozes from it. Donna asks Michael if it’s semen. But Michael does not find that an important line of inquiry. Instead he turns to his wife: “Who are you, Donna? Who are you really?” (“If only,” whispered Tamsin-the-Nietzschean in my ear, “there was a way to stop asking that question!”) Our final vision of Michael is of a man stuck in the middle of a party of nobodies—all with the same face—who is choosing to focus on a singing doll leaking semen, in which substance Schopenhauer saw a clear manifestation of the will, seeking only its own replication and continuance, without regard for what we, as individuals, may “want.”

  What Donna “really” is, in Schopenhauer’s view, is the same thing semen is, really: will. Reality is the will, expressed in everything that we do and are and see, independent of belief; we are both the prisoners and perpetrators of the will, it never lets us go, not even in late middle age, although, every now and then, there will come along an object or experience of sufficient beauty—an aria, say, or an antique Japanese sex doll, or a really good film—that offers itself up to us as an object of aesthetic contemplation, by means of which we might be able, for a moment, to will-lessly contemplate the will. Oh, and also? Be kinder to Donna. Compassion helps. You might not sleep the deep, unruffled sleep of Hero Boy, but in Kaufman’s reality (and Schopenhauer’s) that’s about as good as it’s going to get.

  DANCE LESSONS FOR WRITERS

  The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it’s a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected—compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose—maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do. One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers—you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham’s memoir. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes:

  There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

  What can an art of words take from the art that needs none? Yet I often think I’ve learned as much from watching dancers as I have from reading. Dance lessons for writers: lessons of position, attitude, rhythm and style, some of them obvious, some indirect. What follows are a few notes toward that idea.

  Fred Astaire/Gene Kelly

  “Fred Astaire represents the aristocracy when he dances,” claimed Gene Kelly, in old age, “and I represent the proletariat.” The distinction is immediately satisfying, though it’s a little harder to say why. Tall, thin and elegant, versus muscular and athletic—is that it? There’s the obvious matter of top hat and tails versus T-shirt and slacks. But Fred sometimes wore T-shirts and slacks, and was not actually that tall, he only stood as if he were, and when moving always appeared elevated, to be skimming across whichever surface: the floor, the ceiling, an ice-rink, a bandstand. Gene’s center of gravity was far lower: he bends his knees, he hunkers down. Kelly is grounded, firmly planted, where Astaire is untethered, free-floating. Likewise, the aristocrat and the proletariat have different relations to the ground beneath their feet, the first moving fluidly across the surface of the world, the second specifically tethered to a certain spot: a city block, a village, a factory, a stretch of fields. Cyd Charisse claimed her husband always knew which of these dancers she’d been working with by looking at her body at the end of the day: bruised everywhere if it was Kelly, not a blemish if it was Astaire. Not only aloof when it came to the ground, Astaire was aloof around other people’s bodies. Through fifteen years and ten movies it’s hard to detect one moment of real sexual tension between Fred and his Ginger. They have great harmony but little heat. Now think of Kelly with Cyd Charisse in the fantasy sequence of Singin’ in the Rain! And maybe this is one of the advantages of earthiness—sex.

  When I write I feel there’s usually a choice to be made between the grounded and the floating. The ground I am thinking of in this case is language as we meet it in its “commonsense” mode. The language of the television, of the supermarket, of the advert, the newspaper, the government, the daily “public” conversation. Some writers like to walk this ground, re-create it, break bits of it off and use it to their advantage, whereas others barely recognize its existence. Nabokov—a literal aristocrat as well as an aesthetic one—barely ever put a toe upon it. His language is “literary,” far from what we think of as our shared linguistic home. One argument in defense of such literary language might be the way it admits its own artificiality. Commonsense language meanwhile claims to be plain and natural, “conversational,” but is often as constructed as asphalt, dreamed up in ad agencies or in the heart of government—sometimes both at the same time. Simultaneously sentimental and coercive (“the People’s Princess,” “the Big Society,” “Make America Great Again”), commonsense language claims to take its lead from the way people naturally speak, but any writer who truly attends to the way people speak will soon find himself categorized as a distinctive stylist or satirist or experimentalist. Beckett was like this, and the American writer George Saunders is a good contemporary example. (In dance, the example that comes to my mind is Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, whose thing was tapping up and down the stairs. What could be more normal, more folksy, more grounded and everyday than tapping up and down some stairs? But his signature stage routine involved a staircase pressed right up against another staircase—a stairway to itself—and so up and down he would tap, up and down, down and up, entirely surreal, like an Escher print come to life.) Astaire is clearly not an experimental dancer like Tharp or Bausch but he is surreal in the sense of surpassing the real. He is transcendent. When he dances a question proposes itself: what if a body moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical question, for no bodies move like Astaire, no, we only move like him in our dreams. By contrast, I have seen French boys run up the steps of the High Line in New York to take a photo of the view, their backsides working just like Gene Kelly’s in On the Town, and I have seen black kids on the A train swing round the pole on their way out of the sliding doors—Kelly again, hanging from that eternal lamp post. Kelly quoted the commonplace when he danced, and he reminds us in turn of the grace we do sometimes possess ourselves. He is the incarnation of our bodies in their youth, at their most fluid and powerful, or whenever our natural talents combine ideally with our hard-earned skills. He is a demonstration of how the prosaic can turn poetic, if we work hard enough. But Astaire, when he dances, has nothing to do with hard work (although we know, from biographies, that he worked very hard, behind the scenes). He is “poetry in motion.” His movements are so removed from ours that he sets a limit on our own ambitions. Nobody hopes or expects to dance like Astaire, just as nobody really expects to write like Nabokov.

  Harold Nicholas/Fayard Nicholas

  Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. “For ten and sixpence,” advises Virginia Woolf, “one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare.” The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is you
r own body. Some of the greatest dancers have come from the lowliest backgrounds. With many black dancers this has come with the complication of “representing your race.” You are on a stage, in front of your people and other people. What face will you show them? Will you be your self? Your “best self”? A representation? A symbol? The Nicholas Brothers were not street kids—they were the children of college-educated musicians—but they were never formally trained in dance. They learned by watching their parents and their parents’ colleagues performing on the “Chitlin” circuit, as black vaudeville was then called. Later, when they entered the movies, their performances were usually filmed in such a way as to be non-essential to the story, so that when these films played in the south their spectacular sequences could be snipped out without doing any harm to the integrity of the plot. Genius contained, genius ring-fenced. But also genius undeniable. “My talent was the weapon,” argued Sammy Davis Jr., “the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man’s thinking.” Davis was another Chitlin hoofer, originally, and from straitened circumstances. His logic here is very familiar: it is something of an article of faith within the kind of families who have few other assets. A mother tells her children to be “twice as good,” she tells them to be “undeniable.” My mother used to say something like it to me. And when I watch the Nicholas Brothers I think of that stressful instruction: be twice as good. The Nicholas Brothers were many, many magnitudes better than anybody else. They were better than anyone has a right or need to be. Fred Astaire called their routine in Stormy Weather the greatest example of cinematic dance he ever saw. They are progressing down a giant staircase doing the splits as if the splits is the commonsense way to get somewhere. They are impeccably dressed. They are more than representing—they are excelling. But I always think I spot a little difference between Harold and Fayard, and it interests me, I take it as a kind of lesson. Fayard seems to me more concerned with this responsibility of representation when he dances: he looks the part, he is the part, his propriety unassailable. He is formal, contained, technically undeniable: a credit to the race. But Harold gives himself over to joy. His hair is his tell: as he dances it loosens itself from the slather of Brylcreem he always put on it, the irrepressible Afro curl springs out, he doesn’t even try to brush it back. Between propriety and joy choose joy.