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September 19, 2010

I'm Still Here

The news that I'm Still Here was indeed an act came a day or two after I caught up with the movie. I thought then and still suspect now that Casey Affleck's picture has some basis in truth, that it is perhaps an extenuated expression of some discontent on the part of its subject. I don't think it's a particularly good movie, but it's a fascinating document by default, and still rife with unanswered questions. In particular, I'm curious as to how sustained the act was. The drugs might have been fake, the debauchery staged; the film could feasibly have been shot over the period of a few months and edited to make it appear to cover an entire year; even so, the part required a disconcerting amount of commitment. Surely Phoenix wasn't completely in character, so to speak, for the past two years, but all the same, he openly altered certain intractable aspects of his persona for that duration. He took both his body and his career and deliberately pushed them into an awkward and uncomfortable places. When Robert DeNiro gained weight for Raging Bull, it was for the sake of a film which he rightly believed to be a great one. I can't believe that Phoenix expected I'm Still Here to be great, nor is it.

A more admirable perspective: the film is anecdotal evidence to a performance of questionable duration but utmost conviction, executed for the sake of the artist and not his audience. Box office results suggest that moviegoers don't doesn't care, one way or another, and I'd like to think their indifference is reciprocated, that the public is peripheral to the work; the terms of its justification and success are entirely private. This is a species of satisfaction that fascinates me - one in which the process eclipses or even negates the work. I was reminded of the acting workshop described by Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre, which with its arbitrary strictures sounds maddeningly solipsistic until one considers it from the perspective not of the outcome but an experience. In other words, if one loves one's art wholly, one might come to relish the exaltation of it without relying on something so palpable as a DVD, a CD, a book, a 35mm print or critical and public reactions to justify the means.

This would be the motive of the Artist As Supreme Egoist - the act of creation for one's sole benefit. The lack of reciprocation is why I do not subscribe to this ideal, and yet, as I edit the film I'm currently working on and distribute the data of which it's comprised to as many places as possible for posterity's sake, the fragility of the end product has reared its head again. Many of the pictures I've made sit on hard drives that may or may not work the next time I try to plug them in. They've been made, they've been seen, and what I hold onto is not the physical media but what I've gained from making them. This includes the act of sharing them, of exploiting them, of employing them as arguments in a continuing conversation and so on and so forth. I benefit from all of this in a manner which can't be commodified. I benefit from the commodification of my work as well - I have to, and I want to - but were I to wake up one morning and find that need gone, the desire might soon follow, and a reappropriation of means would take place.

Phoenix surely arrived at this point, and he must have found other tenets of his craft similarly unstable. He set them aside in exchange for an exercise whose end must have been one of two things. It might have been I'm Still Here, in which case his aim was discouragingly limited. Or perhaps I'm Still Here was a byproduct of something we're not privy to, and which certainly isn't illuminated in the film itself. The movie illuminates nothing, which is why it fails to work in either context. It is a side effect - to what being the question that makes it worth considering. Affleck stands by his brother-in-law's work in the picture, calling it the best performance of his career. If it ends with the film, I disagree, but I have a strong suspicion that it doesn't.

Posted by David Lowery at September 19, 2010 7:17 PM