Lost in the Cosmos

company in their midst. Not only did they make the town and even their homes available to the film crew, allowing their very lives to be disrupted, some town folk even expressed the strongest possible desire to be in the film, if only in the most insignificant roles. A quiet woman, the librarian, said that it would be the greatest event of her life.
    The actors also enjoyed their stay in the town and the attention they were getting. Even though they, the actors, were not held in the highest regard by the filmmakers—producers, directors, cinematographers, etc.—were in fact often referred to by the latter as “pieces of meat,” “talking faces,” “hollow heads” among other uncomplimentary expressions—they, the actors, found themselves playing enjoyable roles in the town. What roles? They were playing the roles of the superb human beings the town folk believed them to be. Everyone in town remarked what nice people they were. So they became nice. They became nicer than saints. One famous actress in particular, noted for her childish and difficult ways, became a very model of friendliness and graciousness, astounding even the film crew and the town folk by her small acts of kindness, such as inquiring after the health of a stagehand’s sick child, remembering the name of the A & P checkout lady.
    Question (I): Which of the two, the actors or the townspeople, are the more real, that is, perceive themselves as more nearly what they are?
    (a) The townspeople because they have no illusions about themselves, their humdrum lives and workaday selves, whereas the actors not only live in a tinsel world but are themselves forever playing roles, are always “on” even when they walk into the town drugstore.
    (b) The actors, particularly the actress who, by very reason of her finding herself in a real place among real people and removed from the fakery of Hollywood, is able for once in her life to become herself, her true best self.
    (c) Neither town folk nor actors, because both are equally displaced, equally deprived of themselves, though in different ways. The town folk are deprived because, though they live in a “real” town, through an optical illusion they perceive the actors to be more splendidly real than they themselves and perceive the actors’ lives to be both more glamorous and more of a piece (to judge from the films) than their own, which seem somewhat dim and tentative by comparison. Through a different sort of optical illusion, the actors are able for a while to take on the very reality imputed to them by the town folk, wear it like a costume and with the greatest of ease because they’ve been doing nothing else most of their lives. Thus, they cloak the nought and nakedness of their selves, which are perhaps no different in kind from anyone else’s but perhaps more acutely felt.
    Note that the felt “reality” of the actors in the town is as brief as any other performance. After six weeks on location, even the gracious actress said she “couldn’t wait to get out of the boonies.” For their part, too, the town folk might get sick and tired of the antics of, say, Mel Brooks.
    Though both actors and town folk have reached for what they perceived to be a heightened reality, it, reality itself, has somehow fallen between them, like a dropped ball.
    Question (II): Test your own index of misplacement.
    (1) Imagine meeting Robert Redford under the most ordinary circumstances: you’re a bank teller and he comes in to cash a check. He is very nice, almost preternaturally nice. You perceive that Redford’s self has, perhaps by virtue of his film image, a higher or at least a different reality from your own.
    (2) Imagine that you are a movie star finding yourself in a small town, you with all the well-known self-problems of movie stars—What if these people recognize me and hassle me, about autographs? What if they don’t recognize me?—and all the anxiety caused by three failed films, dearth of good scripts, unsympathetic directors, producers, and moneymen. Now imagine you as such a movie star watching the locals at work and play; you envy the A & P manager perched in the manager’s box keeping an eye on the checkout lines, watering the lawn of a late summer evening.
    Which of the two would you rather be, the bank teller or the movie star?
    ( CHECK ONE )

    Thought Experiment: Imagine you are walking down Madison Avenue behind Al Pacino, whom you have seen frequently in the movies but never in