This Is Running for Your Life (31 page)

A few weeks ago I was heading to Long Island City, on the N line around lunchtime, when the guy joggling his forearms with his knees beside me sought reassurance that our train stopped at Queensboro Plaza. I confirmed that it did, and we relaxed a little in our seats: one more of life's problems solved. Another issue quickly presented itself, however, and he leaned forward to peer at me again, this time uttering the words that have come to fire a sort of ontological dread in my belly: “Where have I seen you before?”

Lest you surmise the knee-joggling gentleman had any sort of
design
on his seatmate, let me assure you that the ratio of women to men who hit me with this big one is almost equal and in fact skews slightly female. “Have I seen you before?” he repeated, and I said no, I didn't think so. “Yeah, you're that woman—you were in that movie.” I assured him that I'm not, I wasn't—I promise. “Are you
sure
?” he pressed, looking less suspicious than stone perplexed.

Am I sure? Too often, when I meet someone new, somewhere in the first few minutes they will get a sort of far-off, foggy look in their eyes as I'm banging on about the health care crisis or how I know the host. I have learned to recognize this look not as crashing boredom (though I can spot that too, thank you) but the prelude to my least favorite how-do-you-do. It comes in several variations:
Who do you look like? Do you
know
who you look like? Who do you remind me of? Do I
know
you? Where have I seen you before?

The following is my attempt to get a grip on these questions and why they began to annoy, sadden, and then just thoroughly wig me out.

*   *   *

Let's start with the Greeks. Them or Larry King. “Perception is reality,” the latter is fond of saying. Under that rubric, might we in fact
be
the amalgams of the different faces and performances that people impulsively map onto us? And might not that onion-skin atlas comprise our best hope of being known, if we are to be known at all?

A brief equation inspired by Mr. King's classical aphorism:

The essential unknowability of other people times the most sensational art form we have created to transcend it—the movies—equals the intense psychological and aesthetic intimacies we develop with the images and individuals we spend so much time watching more freely, closely, nakedly, than we can ever watch each other. That is to say, without being watched back.

Film in particular has become so much a part of how we absorb and organize the world, I would argue, that the mapping/comparative impulse is not a matter of art imitating life or vice versa, but art
mutating
into life, then setting off a series of elaborate and ultimately inextricable countermutations.

It was like a movie, a movie was like it—who can tell anymore? I wonder, if one were to empty out a brain and divvy up its critical, alpha-chip signifiers—this is a woman, this is a man; this is a man from nowhere, this is the kind of woman who can ruin his life just by walking into the room; this is repulsion, this is beauty; this is how a kiss goes, this is how you die; this is running for your life, this is rolling down a city street all exhilarated and shit—how many of them would come straight from the movies, how many from lived experience, and how many from some unholy genome splicing of the two, which becomes less an image or a visual phrase than a funny feeling in the old tummy.

I imagine most of us would prefer the second pile to be the biggest, but that's just not the world/perception/reality we live in; the moving image changed so much more than the way we spend our rainy Sundays. Sometimes I worry that I'm actually most alive at the movies, and that their primeval overtures to our most private selves are the reason we can't help but see them like lovers—which is to say everywhere we go, and in everyone we meet.

In the very French director Michel Gondry's 2008 film
Be Kind Rewind
, Jack Black plays a paranoid technophobe who accidentally destroys a New Jersey video-rental store's inventory, then attempts to restock it with homemade VHS versions of Cineplex classics like
Rush Hour 2
and
Ghostbusters
. Black and the video store's presiding clerk, played by Mos Def, tell customers these new films cost more and look kind of hectic because they come from Sweden. Privately, Mos Def worries that the customers will know the “sweded” films are fake—they won't be fooled—but Black doesn't see why: “Maybe I
am
in Ghostbusters,” he says.

Maybe we all are, Gondry suggests. Maybe the act of watching a film not only completes but
activates
it, triggering a sort of psycho-sentient osmosis, opening a channel that allows a part of us to join the film and a part of the film to join us. Watching
Before Sunrise
a decade after I first saw it, I was struck by the feeling of having left a part of my former self somewhere within it; I could almost make her out between the bullet trains, down the cobblestone alleys, in the fresh faces of the actors themselves. Maybe I
am
in
Before Sunrise
.

When someone else does the recognizing, it gets trickier, by virtue of both engaging a foreign set of multimapped, memory-banked viewing experiences, and raising one of the most critical questions one human being can ask another:
What is it you see when you look at me?

Consider the overlap between the way we normals and actual famous people field that question and its psychic fallout. Porn superstar Sasha Grey describes watching herself have sex on-screen as
surreal
. “I don't feel like it's me,” she says. “It's just a weird feeling that's hard to describe.” Early on in
Don't Look Back
, a young Bob Dylan laughs uneasily over a newspaper's claim that he smokes eighty cigarettes a day. “God,” he mutters. “I'm glad I'm not me.”

Forty years later, in a 2004 interview, Dylan described the kind of confrontation that keeps him from going out in public: “People will, they'll say,
Are you who I think you are?
And you'll say,
Ahh, I don't know.
And they'll say,
You—you're him.
And you'll say,
Okay, you know … yes?
And then the next thing they'll say,
Well no, like, are you
really
him? You're not him.
And, uh, you know, that can go on and on.”

Lee Strasberg's daughter, Susan, used to tell a story about walking around New York with an incognito-in-plain-sight Marilyn Monroe. “Do you want to see me be
her
?” Monroe would say. Strasberg described the star dialing up an internal dimmer switch, slowly filling herself and the space around her with light. Within moments the people who had been passing by were stopping cold and scrambling for pen and paper.

Of course creating distance between person and persona is common among people whose faces and bodies and voices become commodities, if sometimes confusing for the public picking up the tab. (Apparently it's confusing for the celebrities as well, several of whom—most recently oblong national nightmare Kim Kardashian—have sued companies for using alleged doppelgängers in their commercials and trading on a look, the celebrities say, that belongs to them. As if to close the perfectly silly circle, Kardashian's ex-boyfriend, an NFL running back, began dating the model in question.) And of course normal people have personas too, themselves often in part constructed from the personas they have watched and admired on-screen, although we all want to be recognized, especially at parties where boys are present, as sovereign creations. No one wants to be unoriginal, or a type, or a screen of such accommodating blankness that pretty much anyone from Tallulah Bankhead to an animated lake trout can be projected onto it. But also, who needs their benign social interactions to segue without warning into not just an inappropriately intense eyeballing but a weirdly potent subversion of their individuality?

*   *   *

There was a point, two years ago, when I lost my patience. It happened as I was speaking with two gentlemen at an exceptionally civilized housewarming thrown by a lovely couple who happened to be my sole acquaintances in the room. As we talked about the space (grand) and the hosts' Florentine wedding (
grandissimo
), one of the gentlemen, a money guy, got the foggy look in his eyes. Something scrolled up behind my ribs in anticipation of what came next:
Wait, who do you remind me of? She reminds me of someone—who is it?

I told him I hated this game and that it never ended well, but soon three others were pointing their noses in close to mine and shouting celebrity names like Pictionary clues. I followed what I'm pretty sure is the advised strategy in a bear attack: keep still, don't make eye contact, and wait for it to be over. But this guy was half-lit and wholly tenacious. Eventually he left the room to seek out a computer and google his mind to rest. He gathered his team around the monitor in the study, where they deliberated over the actress he had in mind. No one noticed when I pulled my coat from the closet behind them and walked out the door.

This bothered me for a long time. I complained bitterly about it to my dad, who seems to have one of those faces as well. All while growing up, I was advised of my father's resemblances—variations on the dark-and-handsome theme—by friends and strangers alike. He just looked like my dad to me. But then it happened: I was around thirteen when I saw
The Philadelphia Story
, my first Jimmy Stewart movie. “Dad!” I said. “That's
you
!” He smiled and said I was batty—a pretty Jimmy Stewart response, when you think about it—but I was adamant. It became important for him to recognize what I saw plainly for myself. How could he not? Hadn't people told him?

I have a better understanding of his befuddlement now, though I'll be damned if I'm wrong about Jimmy Stewart—especially in profile. It still happens: Last year my dad and I were piling up an A&P's conveyor belt with Christmas booty when he caught the checkout lady's eye. “You know, you look like someone,” she observed from behind the register. “You look like that actor…”

“Abe Vigoda?” I offered, stacking fruitcake like firewood. She looked at me as though I'd just jammed a stick into a ten-speed's whirling front wheel, like that was my idea of fun.

My dad told me not to take the party incident so hard, that people sometimes fumble when they're trying to make frivolous social contact. I can understand that—
I am that
—and this was not that. It's not a misplaced generosity but a misunderstanding to write off the shift from cocktail banter to a ruthless round of Celebrity Whatsit as a clumsy attempt at connection. Generosity might involve a recognition of the impulse we earthlings have, when confronted with something perfectly ordinary and frankly terrifying—a new human being—to “solve” them, contain them in some satisfying way, avoid looking further into yet another wild abyss. In other words it's the avoidance of connection. Which I believe, dear Internet warrior, you might know well.

I suppose there's another option. I suppose there is the idea that we are meant to take comparisons to random and sometimes only faintly familiar celebrities as some kind of compliment. Though an ex-boyfriend of mine, who is often and straight-facedly told that he's a dead ringer for John C. Reilly, might disagree. Then again, this same ex-boyfriend practically levitated in a Las Vegas restaurant when our waiter, pausing between water-glass refills, told him that he looked like that guy—oh, that
guy. You know
, the one in that movie. Plays a vampire?
The Lost Boys!

Um
, we said, bracing for the worst. But the waiter was talking about Jason Patric, who was the best-looking man on the planet for about twenty-seven minutes in 1991. And yet it wasn't necessarily flattery—the waiter just wanted to get it right. In such cases the assumption seems to be that it's better to resemble someone famous than to drift along without a public antecedent, your bastard features displaced in a larger puzzle. A connection is indeed being made, it's just between you and a vast and agile ecology of celebrity DNA.

Computer science is working to mimic this kind of thing in cyberspace. Google and YouTube have partnered to create facial-recognition software that will map and organize the massive video hub's famous faces on its own. “The Internet is in a constant state of flux,” Google's announcement of the project read, “and new ‘celebrities' are constantly added to the popular culture even as the celebrities of the past fade. This ability to learn autonomously to constantly add to the existing gallery of celebrities is therefore a major design principle of our work.”

From this angle what I call the
Compare and Conquer
looks more like a compulsive reflex than a deflective one. Certainly it's less personal. Which is not to say it can't be all of those things. The information-gorged brain resorts to pattern recognition, after all. We consume images, our primary cultural language, at a turbine-busting velocity, and all of those faces wind up forming a sort of alpha database that gets scanned like police software when someone like me comes into view. I'm not sure if the impersonality of the reflex will make those displeased with either the quality or quantity of the comparisons they receive feel any better, but it seems obvious that the only constant in subjective pattern recognition is the subject's inconstancy. Who can say whether that Las Vegas waiter had a brother who wore his hair in a feathery, Jason Patric mullet circa 1987, earning him a comparison that caught on despite the wiry glasses and dimpled chin that he happens to share with a certain restaurant patron, which patron then called up the original resemblance in his waiter's eye by a kind of pinball proxy? And who was I to bite my tongue?