Edward Albee's Existential Vertigo

“Well, first of all, anybody who doesn't carry a certain amount of existential angst with them throughout their lives is either a dumb brute or, by choice, insensitive …. If you think of yourself and the world around you, you have to participate in that. You have to have these anxieties and these fears, especially if you come to the conclusion that you're going to go through it only once.”

                                                                          – Edward Albee

A subject which inevitably comes up when doing (or reading or seeing) A Delicate Balance is 'fear' – or 'anxiety' or 'dread' or, as I prefer because we are really dealing with a philosophical term of art, angst. Anyone attempting a concise definition of this much explicated and exploited notion could do worse than consult Søren Kierkegaard, the idiosyncratic and indispensable philosopher who both figuratively and literally wrote the book on subject (The Concept of Anxiety, 1844). Kierkegaard compares angst to the dizziness, the anxiety, many experience when looking over the ledge of a high building, a sensation that is not the ordinary fear we feel when confronted by a threat (such as the possibility we might fall) but a response to something quite different: the recognition that there is nothing preventing us from leaping into the void. Angst is “the dizziness of freedom” we feel when we stand on the (metaphorical) ledge overlooking our life and consider all the distinct possibilities of what we could be and become if we would dare to choose one and make the leap.

The disabling vertigo, the need to maintain balance, is understandable: every choice we make has consequences (including the loss of other choices) for which we are fully and solely responsible. But not choosing has consequences, too. And our freedom is not infinite, not least because it is (in the jargon of our age) “time sensitive” – in time our freedom, our being, all our possibilities, will end. There is a tradition, of which it is safe to say that Edward Albee is a part, that considers the 'problem' of angst not the sensation itself but our compulsion to evade it, to deny freedom and instead seek refuge in withdrawal, estrangement, distraction, fantasy, self-delusion, self-medication, servitude, resignation, routine, naïveté, compromise, etc. etc. Ultimately, however, we face the question: “What did you decide?”

Hall of Mirrors: Jodie Foster plays “Jodie Foster” in a short play written and directed by Jodie Foster(?)

The histriologist has parsed many a complex text in his barren time but few as tangled as Jodie Foster's much bruited Golden Globe's speech (“performance piece”? “character monologue”? “comic skit”?) in which the convolutions, and interlocking convolutions, of the concept, writing, and performance produce myriad and redundant layers of irony (and/or masks) that are no more or less obscure for being redundant.

This is the scenario: in accepting an award, a veteran actor (and director) makes – reading from a teleprompter – a speech notable for its forced garrulousness, faux bonhomie, lame (or poorly delivered) gags, and, most of all, arch explanation of why the honoree is not directly addressing an issue she [IMO quite reasonably] feels is not really the public's concern.

But, but, but ...the circumlocutionary avoidance is so ostentatious and so teasingly near-explicit that it draws far, far more attention to what is (just barely) unsaid than could possibly have been achieved had the actor simply noted, “And I want to most of all thank my partner, the love-of-my-life, ____.”

To reduce the complexities to their most simplistic, the question for the viewer is: was the forced-ness and faux-ness qualities of the performance – i.e. of the “real” Jodie Foster being under-rehearsed and/or nervous and reading a clumsy and/or convoluted script? Or are the forced-ness and faux-ness deliberate and intended elements essential to the high-concept of the piece and character -- “Jodi Foster” -- performed by the real actor/author, Jodi Foster?

Because the real Jodi Foster is not only a hugely gifted and experienced performer perfectly able to smoothly deliver a speech but also an educated and pretty sophisticated mind,  it is not so far-fetched that what we saw was a meticulously conceived, rehearsed, and delivered performance-piece meant to provoke exactly the debate, discussion, and questions that it has in fact produced, and produced to a degree that a more direct declaration might not have achieved -- because, really, acknowledging her sexual preference would not (for a number of reasons) in itself be today as charged or, in social or career terms, as consequential an act as it might have been five or ten years ago.

I will never know the lady's true intentions nor need to; she is by all accounts happy and I'm enough of an admirer to be happy for her. The Histriologist is not interested in the psychology of the celebrity but in understanding the work and whether there are in the work details which help the reader/detective untangle the mystery.

“Well played at the NAACP, Candidate Romney, exactly the strategy I would have recommended, were I so morally debased (or financially blessed) as to be advising you. The 'boos' were especially propitious, so much so that I suspect they were voiced by stooges you hired for the occasion ….” After all, the NAACP was not Romney's audience; they are not going to vote for him no matter what he says. No, Romney was playing to the Reagan 'moderates,' the self-styled 'independents' and 'centrists' with their quiet forty-year-plus resentment towards agitating minorities, displaying himself as the 'reasonable' and 'gracious' statesman while making the mau-mauing Obamanistas appear as angry radicals stuck in the 60's. Clever. Ugly, but clever.