What he said sounded strange to me. At first, it even greatly perturbed me. During my nocturnal reconstruction, when the weight of that perturbation had lifted, his words were both light and dark. At this third instance, of writing it down, I will try to maintain a balance between the light and the darkness, and my surest guide will be the exact sequence of our exchanges.
All fine and good: he told me that he still did not see the reason for my original remark. He found nothing erroneous about the presence of my famous Rolex on the wrist of the protagonist. As to its price and its condition as a status symbol, he was perfectly aware. Perhaps I didn’t know who the actor was. He didn’t give me a chance to say that I did know who he was: nothing human is alien to me. Leaning slightly over the table and lowering his voice theatrically, he assured me that this actor had more than enough money to buy himself a Rolex, as well as six more, one for each day of the week, and, if push came to shove, the entire Swiss company that produced them.
And he wasn’t exaggerating, he added. I myself had made reference to the complexity of making a movie, a complexity that indicates the magnitude of the enterprise, on which millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars were commonly spent. Now, given the system on which Hollywood bases its audience appeal — the so-called star system — the actors occupy a place of central importance. Movies are marketed using the names of these shining figures that perform in them, and the audience pays its entrance fee to see their extremely well-known faces. That’s why they are paid so highly, for their names rather than for the actual work they do — which in the end isn’t any different than that of the lowliest electrician, who earns a pittance. This actor in particular was one of those privileged few. He had so much money that he could not possibly live long enough to count it all. True, he acknowledged, taxes take the lion’s share, but if one pays them on time, they are never more than a percentage of one’s earnings, and no wealthy person has ever become poor from paying them.
Anyway: the several-thousand-dollar watch meant nothing more to him than a cup of coffee meant to us. With this, verisimilitude had been rescued.
Even before I began to think of a reply, and while I was listening to him speak, a vague sensation came over me, the precursor to a much more vigorous one soon to come … a sensation of strangeness — tinged with a certain amount of disappointment and a remote bit of despair — upon hearing my friend speak so knowledgeably about the world of show business, the money movie stars make, such frivolous nonsense so far beneath the sphere of our interests. It was a nuanced sensation, or one with echoes, because it revealed that I possess that same knowledge. But maybe the modern world is so infused with this information, which is so much a part of even the air we breathe, that it is impossible not to know it.
But when the time came for me to respond, I had to pause. Without realizing it, we had started down a road so subtle that it would carry us from the lowest lows to the highest highs, without many stopovers. The only thing that was obvious, clear as a bell, fit into one very short and very simple sentence: “The actor is not the character.” But my intuition clamorously informed me that this generalization was not enough. We were talking about a specific, concrete case, and generalizing would only create a short circuit. I knew I should go back to the beginning, to the Rolex, the goatherd, the mountains, lest I risk tracing a vicious circle of reasoning that would generate still other circles and provide no way out that would allow our conversation to move forward.
Even with these precautions in mind, I had no choice but to begin with a generalization, for otherwise not even I would have understood myself; but I took care to say it in a tone of voice that made clear that I was using it only as a point of departure. The actor, I said, was not the character.
What are you talking about?!
Well, yes. . In a way, he was. The actor continued being the actor while he was playing the character; one could even say that he was more himself than ever, for he was practicing his profession and justifying his existence beyond the good life he led in Beverly Hills, with his divorces and adulteries and consumption of drugs. But a fundamental difference persisted, or better said, emerged. Though fundamental, it was impalpable, perhaps taken for granted with excessive levity. It was “impalpable” (a metaphor I apologized for using and that I would try to improve upon) because it could be perceived only in the stories and not in the beings that enact them — in the movement of the story itself, not in any one of its moments. Perhaps it should be understood in the same way as the Uncertainty Principle, even if on a different level than that of subatomic particles.
An approving nod from my friend greeted my utterance of the words “different level,” which he would repeat shortly. I continued:
A successful Hollywood heartthrob, I said, had enough money to buy himself an expensive Swiss watch, just as a woman in the second half of the twentieth century wore dresses with zippers. Those were their stories, or lack of stories. The imperative that prevented a primitive goatherd in the remote mountains of Ukraine from wearing a Rolex was almost as powerful as that which prevented an Egyptian queen of the first century from wearing a dress with a zipper. So, a Hollywood heartthrob and a Ukrainian goatherd on the one hand, and a modern woman and the Queen of the Nile on the other: were they the same person? Apparently, they could not be, at least not on the same level. “Level” of course is also a metaphor, and also in this instance I intended to distance myself from it, and to do so right away, because the other level was that of fiction, which was not a metaphor but rather, in a way, the real — perfectly real — lifeblood of all metaphors. Fiction created a second and simultaneous world. .
Here I interrupted myself twice over. I did so in the conversation, because I could see that I was getting nowhere, and I did so when I was remembering the scene of the conversation, because I saw that I was reaching my goal too quickly. The impetus to speak and to remember what was spoken, though the same, were charged with distinct and incompatible energies.
We had the actor, the beautiful and famous blond in his mansion in Southern California, with his numerous bank accounts, his expensive watches, his swimming pool, his Ferrari, his top-model girlfriends. His agent called him and told him that a big studio was offering him the starring role in a new movie by a prestigious director, and that they had agreed without a murmur to his multi-million dollar fee. There was no reason to say no a priori. What was it about? What would be his role? It was an adventure movie that took place in the mountainous desert region of Ukraine, and its plot dealt with aspects of the sudden advent of capitalism in the republics of the former Soviet Union. He would play the role of a primitive goatherd, far removed from modern civilization, a kind of noble savage, who suddenly sees himself involved in a sinister plot. . Anyway, something more or less predictable, with just enough originality to justify making the movie, but not too much to scare off the audience. And it behooved him to take the role because it would give him opportunities to shine, as well as a temporary reprieve from the string of urban, yuppie, fashion-
police roles that he’d been playing for the last few years. In short: a renewal of his image, replete with the shaggy beard he would let grow, long hair, troglodyte garb; and his agent didn’t need to tell him, because he knew it all too well, that he would look fabulous in all of it, that his shaggy beard would be groomed by a hairdresser to the stars, and his rawhide garments would be fashioned by the best designer available.