The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  Focus Features, who distributed Coraline, are looking after me. The previous night they had a small reception at the Chateau Marmont for their two Oscar nominees, Coraline and A Serious Man. The partygoers were a strange mash-up of Minneapolis Jews and animators. Even more oddly, I was one of the Minneapolis Jews (or almost. I wound up comparing notes with one of the other partygoers on the St. Paul paper’s pulse-pounding exposé that I actually live an hour away from Minneapolis).

  The best thing about the Oscars, I realized when the nominees were announced, is that Coraline won’t win. In the year that Up is nominated for Best Picture, which obviously, it won’t win, nothing but Up can win Best Animated Picture.

  A limo picks me up at three p.m. and we drive to the Oscars. It’s a slow drive: streets are closed off. The last civilians we see are standing on a street corner holding placards telling me that God Hates Fags, that the recent Earthquakes are God’s Special Way of Hating Fags, and that the Jews Stole something, but I can’t see what, as another placard is in the way.

  A block before we reach the Kodak Theatre the car is searched, and then we’re there and I’m tipped out onto the Red Carpet. Someone pushes a ticket into my hand, to get the car back later that night.

  It’s controlled chaos.

  I am standing blankly, realizing I have no idea what to do now, but the women look like butterflies, and there are people in the bleachers who shout as each limo draws up. Someone says, “Neil?”

  It’s Deette, from Focus. “I just came back from walking Henry through. What a nice coincidence. Would you like me to take you through?”

  I would like that very much. She asks if I would like to walk past the cameras, and I say that I would, because my fiancée is in Australia and my daughters are watching on TV, and Kambriel will be happy to see her jacket on television.

  We head down into the throng, behind someone in a beautiful dress. It looks like a watercolor of a dream. I have no idea who anyone is, except for Steve Carell, because he looks just like Steve Carell on television, except a tiny bit less orange.

  We are scrunched together tightly as we go through metal detectors, and the beautiful watercolor dress is trodden on, and the lady wearing it is very gracious about this.

  I ask Deette who’s inside the dress, and she tells me it’s Rachel McAdams. I want to say hello—Rachel’s said nice things about me in interviews—but she’s working right now. I’m not. No one wants to take my photo, or, Deette discovers, to interview me. I’m invisible.

  At the bend in the red carpet we pause. I look down at Rachel McAdams’s watercolor dress and wonder if I can see a footprint. Cameras flash, but not at me.

  And we’re into the Kodak Theatre. Someone else introduces me to the editor of Variety. I realize my facial recognition skills do not work when people are in tuxedos. (Except for James Cameron, whom I have now only ever seen in a tuxedo and would not recognize wearing anything else.) I tell this to the editor of Variety. He points to a man with a tan and a huge grin, tells me it’s the mayor of Los Angeles. “He comes to all these things,” he says. “Why isn’t he behind his desk, working?”

  “Er. Because this is the biggest day in Hollywood’s year?” I venture. “And it’s Sunday?”

  “Well. Yes. But he still comes out for the opening of a drinks cabinet.”

  I went to the Golden Globes six weeks earlier and discovered that the commercial breaks in award shows are spent in a strange form of en masse Hollywood speed-dating as people shuttle around the room trying to find friends or make deals, and assume that tonight will be much the same.

  The Kodak Theater has a ground floor and, above that, three mezzanines. My ticket is for the first mezzanine. I head, sheeplike, up the stairs. There is a crush to get in, as a disembodied voice tells us urgently that the Academy Awards will start in five minutes. I stare at the woman in front of me. She has blond hair and a face that’s strangely fishlike, a scary-sweet plastic surgery face. She has old hands and a small, wrinkled husband who looks much older than her. I wonder if they started out the same age.

  And we’re in, with no time to spare. The lights go down and Neil Patrick Harris sings a special Oscars song. It does not seem to have a tune. Several people on Twitter who aren’t sure which Neil is which congratulate me on it.

  And now our hosts: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. They come out, they make jokes. From the first mezzanine, the timing is off, the jokes are awkward, the delivery is wooden. But it doesn’t feel as if they’re playing to us. I wonder if it works on television, and send the question out on Twitter. A few hundred people tell me it’s just as bad on TV, twenty tell me they’re enjoying it. I decide this is what Twitter is for: keeping you company when you’re all alone on the mezzanine.

  Best Animated Movie is the second category of the night. My fifteen seconds of Coraline talking to the camera go by fast. There, I think. The largest audience that my words will ever have.

  Up wins.

  The Oscars continue. In the audience, we cannot see what they are seeing on television at home. Somewhere below me George Clooney is grimacing at the camera, but I do not know.

  Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. present the Best Screenplay award, and are funny. I wonder if they wrote their own bit.

  During the commercials the lights go down and they play music to mingle by. Roxanne does not have to put on the red light.

  I head for the first mezzanine bar. I’m hungry and want to kill some time. I drink whisky. I order a chocolate brownie which turns out to be about as big as my head and the sweetest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I share it.

  People are wandering up and down the stairs.

  Whisky and sugar careening through my system, I defy the orders on my ticket not to photograph anything, and I Twitter a picture of the bar menu. My fiancée is sending me messages on Twitter urging me to photograph the inside of the women’s toilet, something she did during the Golden Globes, but even in my sugar-addled state this seems a potentially disastrous idea. Still, I think, I should head downstairs and, in the next commercial break, say hello to Henry Selick. I walk over to the stairs. A nice young man in a suit asks me for my ticket. I show it to him. He explains that, as a resident of the first mezzanine, I am not permitted to walk downstairs and potentially bother the A-List.

  I am outraged.

  I am not actually outraged, but I am a bit bored and have friends downstairs.

  I decide that I will persuade the inhabitants of the mezzanines to rise up as one and to storm the stairs, like in Titanic. They might shoot a few of us, I decide, but they cannot stop us all. We can be free; we can drink in the downstairs bar; we can mingle with Harvey Weinstein.

  Someone tells me on Twitter that nobody’s checking the elevators. I suspect that this might be a trap, and head back to my seat.

  I have missed the tribute to horror movies.

  Rachel McAdams presents an award in her beautiful, oh-so-tread-on-able dress.

  For the Best Actor and Actress awards, a tableau of people who have worked with the nominees tell us how wonderful they are. I wonder if this works on television. On the stage in front of us it is painfully clumsy.

  People below us are milling and chatting and schmoozing more with every commercial break. There is an edge of panic to the disembodied announcer’s voice as she orders them back to their seats.

  The man in the bar who reminded me of Sean Penn turns out to have been Sean Penn. Jeff Bridges’s standing ovation reaches all the way to the top mezzanine. Sandra Bullock’s standing ovation only reaches the front rows of our level and stops there. Kathryn Bigelow’s standing ovation covers the entire hall except, for some reason, the top right of the first mezzanine, where I am sitting, where we remain sitting and clap politely.

  It all seems to be building up to a crescendo, and then Tom Hanks walks out onto the stage and tells us, with no buildup (if you exclude months of For Your Consideration campaigning) that oh, by the way, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture and good nigh
t. And we’re out.

  Up two escalators to the Governors Ball. I sit and chat to Michael Sheen, who brought his eleven-year-old daughter Lily, about the sushi dinner we had two days before, interrupted and ended by a police raid. We still have no idea why. (Next morning it will be a front-page story on the New York Times. They were serving illicit whalemeat.)

  I see Henry Selick. He seems relieved that Awards Season is over, and that he can get on with his life.

  I feel as if I’ve sleepwalked invisibly through one of the most melancholy days of my life. There are glamorous parties that evening, but I don’t go to any of them, preferring to sit in a hotel lobby with good friends. We talk about the Oscars.

  The next morning the back page of the LA Times Oscar supplement is a huge panoramic photograph of the people on the red carpet. Somewhat to my surprise, I see myself standing front and center, staring down at Rachel McAdams’s beautiful watercolor dress, inspecting it for footprints.

  * * *

  This was originally published in the March 25, 2010, issue of the Guardian under the title of “A Nobody’s Guide to the Oscars.” I’ve restored the original title here. It wasn’t about being a nobody, it was about being out on the days when you would best be at home, and melancholy.

  * * *

  A Wilderness of Mirrors

  Who am I?

  It’s a fine and legitimate question, one that haunted me when I was a boy. I would stare into the bathroom mirror and do my best to answer it, teasing information from my reflection, hoping for a clue. My face would be framed by the mirror: a glass shelf with toothbrushes on it beneath my face, tiled wall and frosted glass window behind me. I had too-short dark hair, one ear that stuck out from the side of my head and one ear that didn’t, hazel eyes, red lips, a sprinkling of freckles across my nose.

  I would stare and stare, puzzling over who I was, and what the relationship was between who I thought I was and who I really was and the face that was staring back at me. I knew I wasn’t my face. If something terrible happened to me, like a fireworks accident, if I lost my face and spent my life bound in bandages like a mummy in a scary film, I’d still be me, wouldn’t I? I never found an answer, not one that satisfied me. But I kept asking. I suppose I still am.

  That was the first question. The second was even harder to answer. It was this: Who are we?

  And to answer it, I would open the family photo album. The photographs, black and white at the front, color in later volumes, had been carefully stuck into the family album with photo-mounts on the corners, and handwritten notes beneath each photograph identified the subjects, and where and when the photograph had been taken. Glassine, semitransparent paper covered each page. There was something extremely formal about the photo albums. We were never permitted to play with them unsupervised, or to remove photographs. They were, when the time was right, produced by adults from high shelves or dark cupboards, only to be put away again once we had looked at them. They were not to be played with.

  This is who we are, the albums said to us, and this is the story we are telling ourselves.

  There were the dead, grave people in uncomfortable clothes, posed in black and white. There were the living, when they were so much younger as to be different people: the old people were young people then, in ill-fitting clothes and in places we could scarcely imagine. Here assembled, formal and stiff, are grandparents and great-grandparents, uncles and aunts, weddings and engagements, silver and sepia, gray and black, and then, as time moves forward, the people and the poses drift into color and informality, the snapshots and the holiday shots and look! you can recognize the wallpaper and you realize that the proud grandparents are holding a baby that was you, once upon a time. And now you are here again, in context, pondering your infancy, and the people who surrounded you, and the world from which you have come. Then you put down the photo album and go back to your life, reassured, given a frame and a place. The images of our forebears and our loved ones give us context, they tell us who we are.

  For years, I believed I had visited the National Portrait Gallery, because I had been to the National Gallery. After all, there were portraits on the walls, were there not? It was not until I was a grown man that I finally wandered the corridors and spaces of the National Portrait Gallery and realized that I had never been there before. The embarrassment in my mistake was rapidly replaced by delight. I was glad I hadn’t visited the Gallery as a boy: I would not have known who these people were, save for a handful of kings, and perhaps Shakespeare and Dickens. Now, it was like being handed an album of a family I knew too well.

  Initially, I walked the galleries looking for the people I was familiar with—the ones whose stories I knew, the ones I wondered about, the ones I would have loved to have met. And then I moved wider, using the Gallery as a way of learning about people. Wondering, as I walked and as I stared, about the faces I passed: how they fit into the history of the country, why each person was there, and not someone else in their place. The faces became a dialogue, the paintings became a conversation.

  The National Portrait Gallery is the nation’s family album, I realized. It gives us context. It is our way of describing ourselves and our past to ourselves, our way of interrogating and explaining and exploring who we are, inspecting our roots in a way that is more than just looking at the places from which we come. There is landscape, and there is portrait, after all, and they are ways of explaining the orientation of a sheet of paper, and they are the ways we understand who we are: the places we came from, the people we were.

  For years I had loved Constable’s landscapes: the clouds, which seemed so much more cloudlike than any clouds I had ever seen, and which forced me to stare at clouds and wonder if they were art, and the trees, and the way the sense of place gave continuity: the Suffolk landscape, which could have been my own Sussex lanes and skies. Now, for the first time, I saw John Constable: I did not expect him to be handsome, or so pensive. And there was something odd about his eyes: they seemed to be focused on different places. I wondered if he had a lazy eye, as my daughter did when she was young, or if it was simply the way that Ramsay Reinagle had presented him to us. I imagined what it must have been like to live inside that head, to see the world, and its clouds and skies and trees, through John Constable’s strange eyes.

  Some portraits were important because of who the subjects were. Others were important because of the artist. Still others were important because of the historical moment, because they were a record of their times, which are our times. Most images gain their power from the moment of intersection: painter and subject, time and history and context, ever-changing context. All come together as we walk the corridors of the National Portrait Gallery.

  We look at a portrait and we begin to judge, because human beings are creatures of judgment. We judge the person being painted (a bad king? a good woman?) in the same way that we judge the artist, and occasionally we find ourselves judging them both, particularly when the subject is also the painter: Dame Laura Knight’s self-portrait, a symphony in crimson and vermilion, shows the painter in perfect profile, flanked by the naked flanks of both a model and of the painting of the model. As a woman she was forbidden to attend life-drawing classes, and here she tells us that she is a woman, and she is a master at drawing from life. The technique is remarkable, the statement powerful.

  Examine the Chevalier d’Eon. I mentioned him once in a story I wrote, having vaguely meant to put him into a tale: a cross-dressing spy, caught up in intrigue, royal proclamations and court cases. Legally pronounced female, apparently against his will. I knew all this, but I did not know how kind he looked. I know that if ever I write about him, this portrait, painted by Thomas Stewart after an original by Jean-Laurent Mosnier, who knew d’Eon, will change the way I tell his story.

  As a writer, I find myself drawn to the writers: the Gallery’s troubled portrait of the Brontë sisters is like something from a mystery novel. On the left side of the painting, Anne and Emily, jaws set and defia
nt, on the right side the third sister, Charlotte, her face gentler, a half-smile at the edges of her lips. The three women of glorious gothic romanticism, describers of ex-wives in attics and runaways on moors; three women who wrote of haunted figures in just-as-haunted landscapes, in a portrait painted by their mysterious and dissolute brother, who was, we realize as we stare, once himself a character in the painting, the central figure around whom the three women cluster, but who is now painted out, replaced by a pillar. Still, a ghostly shape confronts us, like an after-image, or a reflection. The painter’s lack of skill somehow adds to the power of the picture: this is not a portrait by a professional. It is a story, frozen and mysterious, and there were, I have no doubt, tears and harsh words involved in Branwell’s painting himself out of the portrait. (Or did someone else paint over him? Is the pillar some kind of clue to a mystery most gothic?)

  I know that photographs tell us things about the photographer, but I do not wonder about the photographers in the same way that I wonder about the painters, even when they have composed their photographs as elegantly as any classical portrait. Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph of Alfred Tennyson, austere and windswept, taken on the Isle of Wight, is haunting. The background is a smudge, the hand holding a book reminds us of formal portraits of the religious, while the face is thoughtful and seems, to me at least, almost tragic. This is the man who would write “Crossing the Bar.”

  Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark! I think. And may there be no sadness of farewell, when I embark.

  I learned the poem as a boy, when Death was merely an abstract idea, one I suspected I would almost certainly manage to avoid as I grew up, for I was a clever child and Death seemed quite avoidable back then.

  And as we come closer to now, as we come through modern (and what a beautiful, old-fashioned word that is), the paintings erupt and divide into contemporary movements and ways of seeing and of describing. Strict portraiture is given to photography, then taken back once more, and now we are in my lifetime and in the material of my life. The Brian Duffy portrait of David Bowie is as iconic as the Aladdin Sane record cover that I contemplated when I was twelve, certain that if I understood it and its lightning-bolt imagery, then I would understand all the waiting secrets of the adult world. Bowie’s eyes are closed in the Aladdin Sane cover photo, but in this image, anisocoriac eyes stare, surprised, into the flash. Bowie seems more vulnerable. And, looking at an image that once symbolized all the mysteries of adulthood for me, I realize he looks so heartbreakingly young.