The term "main character energy" has fascinated me for a while - seems to speak to a theatricalization of life, but also people's desire to be heroic - the hero of their own narrative. And to be seen as heroic, or just seen.
Here's an Atlantic commentary by John Hendrickson on this very notion, sparking off this week's chaos in the House of Representatives: "When 'Main Characters' Commandeer Congress"
Most of us grew up with the phrase main character as a synonym for a story’s protagonist—the person we root for. In recent years, this concept has been inverted. Main-character syndrome, the defining personality trait of our time, is not a compliment.... In 2023, a main character is often clueless and narcissistic, someone who views the world around them as a backdrop while they waltz through life. Politics has long been full of these kinds of main characters, but the Trump era brought them into the mainstream. Representative Lauren Boebert recently flouting theater norms (understatement of the year) during a Beetlejuice performance? Main character. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene doing well, anything? Main character. Main-character syndrome (also referred to as “main-character energy”) has spilled over into scores of congressional proceedings. Florida Representative Matt Gaetz is clearly the main character this week. Gaetz’s successful demolition of Speaker Kevin McCarthy was part of his larger demolition of the House of Representatives, which itself was part of … what, exactly? Why did this whole mess actually happen? Gaetz appeared to be seeking the spotlight—though, notably, not setting himself up to take McCarthy’s job....
Chaos ensued. Gaetz, Capitol Hill’s definitive new main character, got the headlines he craved.
Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC - "The house converts itself into a place to hold performance hearings, a bunch of lawmakers who cannot make any laws"
David Frum, in the The Atlantic -
"For seven years, Republicans have protected and enabled Trump, the most corrupt and lawless president in American history. They crave to believe that Biden is as bad or worse, and they won’t be denied that craving by pesky details such as its crazy untruth. The next ringmaster will have to deliver a more exciting act to the most frenzied fans in the circus seats.
For the rest of the country, all of this threatens more crisis, more drama, more misgovernment, until one of two things happens. Either Republicans will overcome their taboo against reality and find some way to strike deals with their opponents, or voters in November 2024 will replace this dysfunctional majority that lives by lies with a functional majority that can work with facts."
More recent theatrical tropism unrelated to the eviction of HoR Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
"Leader Hakeem Jeffries comes out swinging in his press conference now, saying the GOP impeachment inquiry against President Biden is, "an illegitimate inquiry, that is a kangaroo court, fishing expedition, & conspiracy theater, rolled into one." (source unknown)
Ron Filipkowski: "The clear, coordinated, forceful messaging from Democrats on a government shutdown should be the simple truth - it is happening because the House GOP is dysfunctional, can’t get along with each other, can’t govern, and are simply irresponsible performance artists."
Steve Schmidt: "Whatever transpired at the Reagan Library wasn’t a presidential debate. It was a reality show for a niche audience of people in America who can’t stop watching political theater no matter how dishonest, banal and stupid it is."
Tweeter Unknown - The reason why the crowds at Trump rallies listen to him telling all those crazy made up stories is because he's doing something fundamentally different than what normal politicians do at rallies. He's not outlining a policy agenda or conveying information about the real issues; he's doing a show. I know we say all the time that it's like he's doing a clown show but that's a bit wide of the mark; it's more like a type of fascist stand up comedy.
Unexpected use of these tropes outside the centre-left, as used by one of the worst histriones in American politics:
Lauren Boebert: “I’m done wasting time. I have 4 boys at home, I have a grandson at home. I would love to spend more time with them. I have put my life on hold to come here and provide results. I’m not here for the political show, the political theater.”
"As Kyiv’s counter-offensive grinds to a bloody halt against Russian defensive lines in Ukraine, observers and strategists are taking stock, evaluating what went right, what went wrong, and what comes next. Did the Ukrainians have the right kind of firepower, deployed in the right way? Did they apply the right doctrine? Did Nato planners misdirect the Ukrainians’ efforts? "In truth, such questions are beside the point. The hard but irrefutable conclusion is that while many Ukrainians have died, the counter-offensive did not take place. Parsing a staged media spectacle as if it was a meaningful military operation not only further confounds the truth but makes all the bloodshed even less meaningful than it already was. "Ukraine has become an intellectual battlefield as much as anything else. It’s a theatre in which that branch of political science known as realism has sought to defend its credibility against the liberals and neoconservatives who portray the battle in Ukraine as a battle for freedom and civilisation against tyranny and barbarism."
This chap whose name I can't be bothered to dredge up is using a Baudrillard-move - except he still believes in realists / realism / reality (whereas JB saw it all as merest vapour)
Finally, at the Atlantic, James Parker on the wrestling world and its relation to Trumpism, in a piece titled A Gory Amalgam of Truth and Spectacle
With the news last month that the Ultimate Fighting Championship (brand: authentic, highly skilled violence) has merged, in a deal worth billions upon billions, with World Wrestling Entertainment (brand: fabulously stylized, highly skilled violence), it appears to be time to reset the reality levels....
Trumpism has expressed and explored itself through both of these entities. And as they coalesce, and as Trumpism itself further coalesces, we are surely heading into—as the great New Hampshire metal band Scissorfight once put it—the “high tide of the big grotesque.” For a primer on the UFC side of things, you won’t do better than Michael Thomsen’s new book, Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions & Hustlers Transformed the UFC Into a $10 Billion Industry.... .... pro wrestling is deep. Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, by Abraham Josephine Riesman, published earlier this year, will help you get your mind around it. And you need help. Pro wrestling is a thunderdome of images, the human comedy at near-celestial scale. Its lingo, its carny slang, expresses some kind of hierarchy of awareness, but where wrestling begins and where it ends, no one can say. If you’re a “mark,” you’re way down there: You’re taken in by the “kayfabe,” the fakery, and you think it’s all real. If you’re a “smart,” you’re higher up the great chain: You know what’s going on, you can tell a “work” (something prefabricated) from a “shoot” (an improvisation), and you can take an ironist’s or an aesthete’s pleasure in the pageantry and the bombast and the medieval moral drama. But is anybody really a mark? And is anybody really a smart? “When you start to think about it,” Riesman muses, “the existence of marks in great numbers starts to seem unlikely. It’s possible that the majority of wrestling fans may have always been smarts. It’s possible that the illusion at the heart of wrestling was not that fans believed wrestling was real, but that wrestlers believed that fans believed it.” (This is an irresistible idea: the puffed and strutting wrestlers, maintained in their dreamworld by the gallantry of the fans.).... Over both of these books, and both of these organizations, looms—I was going to write “the shadow of Trump,” but Trump has no shadow. No secret darkness, no buried awareness: Every inch of him is lit up. Better perhaps to say that the Trumpiness of all this is baked in. The story of the world as told by the UFC and WWE—it’s not exactly a liberal’s vision. Booming characters preen and dominate; nuance is banished. This is heavy-metal America.... High theater, high narrative, has merged with what Kipling called “the undoctored incident.” The kayfabe has merged with the fist in the face. Is some kind of grotesque UFC-WWE blend in the cards?
The next argumentative leap from this, I think would be to look at Jan. 6 - and whatever future organised violent chaos lies ahead of us - as theatre and fascism bleeding into each other. As WWE merged with UFC.
It was a cos-play coup and an actual "see if this works, why not, what we got to lose" Hail-Mary-pass attempted coup. Some of the participants imagined they were the good guys, the calvary; some knew they were the bad guys but didn't care, believed it was ride-or-die time, BAMN. Probably still others did really think of it as a spontaneous lark, sight-seeing combined with mass trespass.
It was largely all for show... except someone got shot dead, many others got badly injured (and a few died later) and quite possibly actual politicians might have been slaughtered, if things had gone a little differently with the timings and maneuverings.
A gory amalgam of truth and spectacle, indeed.
In real-time it made for gripping TV (like any horrific unfolding catastrophe news report - 9/11, Katrina) and retrospectively ditto, with the well-structured and dramatically narrativized Sorkin-esque pageant that was the 9/11 hearings in Congress.
The Speng did a very amusing overview of late-Roman politics, in which the popularity of Senators was tied into their ability to theatrically over-emote, so eventually every speech in the Senate was prefaced by open weeping. This was because Rome's problems were basically unsolvable, so what mattered was that you were the politician who visibly cared the most, not whether you could actually do anything useful.
ReplyDeleteYes it's not the case that was ever a form of politics that didn't have its theatrical element. Anything involving a speech and a podium is theatre to some extent.
DeleteThat idea that Rome's problems were basically unsolvable so the pols just act out grief rather than formulate policy... it's funny... it reminded me of reports on the Tory conference in Manchester, how the speeches are railing against the terrible state of the country... the country they've been running for 13 years! And not proposing any solutions, just railing against it, as if they were the opposition party. So not theatricalized weeping, but theatricalized complaining, blaming, scapegoating.
Indeed. And not just in the UK, of course. What you could broadly call the "culture wars" in the US have become such an obsession because politicians on all sides have generally decided they can't or won't fix the real issues that people face in terms of healthcare, education, inequality, transport, crime, etc, etc....
DeleteWell one of the right-wing tropes at the moment is "The Blob", the idea that there is a liberal-left establishment that is inherently resistant/obstructive to any policy it doesn't like. I don't think that's true, but I do think that as advanced technocratic states evolve, power inevitably gets diffused due to the sheer complexity of institutions and the legal frameworks that they work within.
DeleteI think that the rise of populists is largely a response to this impasse, but they are obviously not the solution. I do think however that the institutional basis of the state will start to break down due to sheer inertia and consequent lack of legitimacy, and I suppose the populists are part of the demolition process.
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ReplyDeleteMain character energy is one of the oldest impulses in human culture. There's a great discussion here between Natalie Haynes and Emily Wilson, the translator of an interesting-looking new version of the Iliad, talking about how Homer's characters have an "elemental" hunger for fame: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20231004-the-iliad-the-ultimate-story-about-war
ReplyDeleteYes I think the ache for glory and renown goes back a long way - it does feel like more people think that is their birthright nowadays, some kind of extraordinary fate. Judging by surveys of what young people admire and aspire to. A smaller and smaller group of the population are content to be cogs in the social machine, playing their small part in keeping the whole thing ticking along. Celebrity as a life goal seems to be more and more widespread.
DeleteI saw something about this book elsewhere, does sounds interesting
My predilection for woo-woo means that I spend quite a bit of time watching the New Age scene, and they attribute all this individualism to the Age of Aquarius, which according to the mythos should see the eclipse of top-down Patriarchal hierarchy in favour of bottom-up individualism. So the increasingly apparent impotence of our rulers ties into this.
DeleteI don't completely buy this, but it is fun gauging the extent to which actual events correlate with it.
I've said this before, but I think World War 2 is becoming the modern equivalent of the Iliad. It's quite clear for example that Hitler has already become a mythical figure, and D-Day a mythical event. A lot of columnists think it is quite clever to disparage the "nostalgia" and "refusal to move on" of WW2 commemorations and movies, but really nostalgia is not what is going on - it is the creation of a thousand year myth-cycle.
ReplyDeleteTrue! That identifies something I have found increasingly unsettling about the UK: that the cult of WW2 is not receding into the past, but actually growing in prominence. I was driving through the English countryside over the summer and happened to stumble across a village in a full-on WW2 recreation festival. Men in khaki fatigues and women in tea dresses. A Spitfire parked on the village green. It was like something out of Dr Who. And it was absolutely packed. It's not nostalgia: almost no-one who was there could actually remember the war. But some kind of quasi-religious ritual.
DeleteAnd then the other day a family member who's a teacher had an 11 year-old kid try to disrupt a class by drawing a picture of Hitler on the whiteboard. Where does that come from?
You know where else has an overwhelming obsession with victory in WW2? Putin's Russia.
The Homer / WW2 connection in print: https://hackettpublishing.com/iliad
DeleteWell, WW2 relates to this desire to be heroic - but not necessarily individually heroic, someone winning medals for courage, astounding feats of bravery etc, it is also the collective heroism of playing your small part in a righteous struggle. And, myth-mongering aside, and all the false equivalences of Churchill done bad things didn't he, British imperialism, that disgusting Human Smoke book by Nicolson Baker which tried to make out that Churchill and Roosevelt were war mongers just like Hitler, et al - it is a clearcut case of Good versus Unfathomable Evil. Unlike many other wars in the past century or so, where you could says its just tribal antagonism, or jockeying for power / territory / economic domination, or different but equally pernicious ideological systems competing by proxy .... here it's Good versus Evil. So you can see why people would be attracted to that - it's an 'actually happened in living memory' struggle of the sort you get in a saga like Lord of the Rings. Plus all the myths (except not myths) of plucky Britain standing alone, everyone pulling together and playing their part...
ReplyDeleteIt does help when one side wears skulls on their hats.
ReplyDeleteBut also WW2 is a good narrative - lots of twists and turns, exotic locations, perilous episodes, iconic characters. Like Star Wars, which I think in many ways was/is the Sci-Fi version of WW2.