Torch in the Darkness: A Cultural Study of The Flick
How can a story of movie happen off the screen? Well, welcome to Annie Baker’s play The Flick, where the most heroic character is a guy who bursts onto the scene every time by kicking open the back door of a movie theater, holding a push broom and dustpan, and sweeping up spilled popcorn on the floor. However, the play is far from a plain depiction of the ordinary, humble lives of movie theater workers. What makes waves is the silence embedded in their everyday conversation, through which The Flick ultimately reveals the debated underlying logic — the complex technological advances — under the mask of disease metaphor, and opens the door to an intricate and deep discussion on temporality, humanity, and future.
Described by Charles Isherwood as “a work of art so strange and fresh that it definitely freaks people out”, The Flick clinched the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, not for the usual Hollywood glitz, but for its raw and intricate exploration of everyday life. Unlike typical blockbusters, The Flick doesn’t serve up murders, explosions, or the flashy theatrics we’ve come to expect from traditional plays and movies. Instead, it thrusts into the spotlight characters we’d easily miss — a trio of cinema workers — Avery, Sam, and Rose — who do the humdrum and tedious labor day after day in the backstage of a narrow, run-down small-town theater. This kind of naturalistic narration perfectly matches Raymond Williams’ statement in “Culture is Ordinary” that “culture and education are ordinary; that there are no masses to save, to capture, or to direct, but rather this crowded people in the course of an extraordinarily rapid and confusing expansion of their lives” (18). Challenging the extravagant theatrics and cinematic spectacle, The Flick offers a fresh take on dramaturgy by examining the intricacies of relationships and cultural dynamics among three ordinary cinema workers, and ultimately look forward to a poetic redemption of modern humanity.
A notable feature highlighting the ordinariness of The Flick is the deliberate incorporation of pauses and silences throughout the play, even down to exact seconds in the stage direction. When Avery comes to work in the theater for the first time, he has an awkward conversation with the old staff Sam, his coworker. Sam also finds himself hard to welcome and communicate with Avery:
The inability to achieve a successful and coherent connection doesn’t only arise from the unfamiliar relationship but continues through the process of getting to know each other. Sam and Rose have known each other for a long time, but when Sam tries to introduce Rose to Avery, they still cannot achieve a complete, nice conversation:
Same thing when Avery and Rose sit down together for a movie when they have co-worked for a while:
Though not that intolerable when approached in the literary format, these pauses and silence are indeed unbearable in live performances where the audience has been accustomed to coherent, well-designed plotlines. However, pauses and silence are extremely common in our everyday lives where absolutely coherent dialogues are impossible. By incorporating numerous pauses and silences in between lines to slow down the pace of dialogues, Annie Baker articulates her naturalistic philosophical reflections on the conception of time. Reminiscent of modern and postmodern playwrights such as Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, and Bertolt Brecht, Annie Baker’s theatrical characteristics of quasi-absurd representation of temporality showcases the crisis in historicity proposed by Fredric Jameson in “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The failures of communication shown in the play reflect that people have lost their ability to actively project and retrospectively connect across the temporal spectrum, let alone shape the past and future into a cohesive experience. As a result, “it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but ‘heaps of fragments’ and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory” (25). Thus, the discontinuous conversation and the sense of fragmentation produced by the characters in The Flick are the answer to, in Jameson’s words, “the return to the question of temporal organization in general in the postmodern force field” (25).
Interestingly, as Jameson further illustrates this “suggestive aesthetic model” (26) of fragmentation in the psychological context of Lacan’s “linguistic malfunction and the psyche of the schizophrenic” (26), the textuality of breaking down temporality in The Flick is also discussed in the context of physical and psychological diseases. The immediate cause of the failed communication in The Flick is that each character has a certain disease, breaking down “the signifying chain, which is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers that constitutes an utterance or a meaning” (26). Avery has obvious symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, which is mainly characterized by hyperactivity, inattention, narrow interests, strong mechanical memory, special talents in certain fields, and severe language communication barriers.
An example is Avery’s response when Rose wants to break the silence with him:
Whether it is Avery meditating alone or having an endless conversation with Rose, it seems that they are not communicating meaningfully, but rather uttering pointless sentences, according to the cooperative principle of verbal communication. In this sense, the speech here becomes another kind of silence — the contextual silence. Moreover, Avery not only tends to have thoughts that are difficult for ordinary people to understand but even has a morbid suicidal tendency:
It’s apparent that Avery is an incredibly anxious character. He usually contemplates his identity and existence philosophically and suffers from permanent loneliness deep within his heart. On the contrary, Rose holds an opposite view to Avery by saying “I don’t get suicide” (66). However, Rose also has her psychological problems of being a nymphomaniac, as she introduces herself that “I’m like this like crazy nymphomaniac. All I want do is like have sex all the time” (65). She debuts herself in the play by drawing a cartoon penis with a heart in the fog on the window of the projection booth (21). After she teases Avery with her fingers, she confesses “I’m an idiot…Honestly, I don’t know why I even like did that. I wasn’t planning on doing that. I swear to god…There’s something wrong with me” (63).
Nymphomania can function as a cultural disease in Western countries, highlighting the serious crisis of faith faced by contemporary people. They generally lead unrestrained, topsy-turvy lives, where carnival is the embodiment of loneliness. A case in point is Rose’s problem of drinking alcohol:
The other person in the conversation above, Sam, has a family history of mental disability and is extremely allergic to odor. In Scene 7, Act 1, Sam gets Pityriasis Rosea after he touches and smells “a nasty nasty old New Balance shoe” (28), getting his neck itchy in Scene 4, Act 1.
Though skin disease, compared with Asperger’s syndrome and nymphomania, is just an external bodily ailment that may not lead to immediate fatality, it does possess contagious attributes. From a medical perspective, skin disease falls under autoimmune disorders, causing physical discomfort and mental inadequacy. From a societal perspective, skin disease is intertwined with contemporary society and consumer culture. How can one’s body maintain order in such a disordered living environment where food debris is scattered, sneakers are discarded, and feces are sprayed? The low-wage workers in a run-down movie theater in The Flick who spend most of their days in such underproof working environments reflect the social problem of implicit relationship between low-wage service work and disease. The conditions of the movie theater and the spiritual states of its audience in The Flick also reveal the contagious physical and mental illness in contemporary society.
The underlying logic for these disease metaphors and their resulting silence is the complex technological advances, as the title and the theme of The Flick suggest. By telling a story of movies off the screen, The Flick not only focuses on the lives of the humble movie theater workers but uniquely chooses to tell the story of movies in the format of drama. In this sense, the first contrast in the play’s discussion of technological innovation is between drama and film. It’s interesting to see the special setting of The Flick in that the auditorium of the movie theater becomes the front stage in the drama theater. The audience of the play The Flick occupies the position that traditionally belongs to the big screen in cinema. This face-off between the drama-theater audience and the movie-theater audience becomes one of the highlights in the play.
Furthermore, Skylar, the new employee who takes over Avery’s job, touches the movie screen to bring this issue into the audience’s full focus:
The touch here can be viewed as a paradoxical and confronting way of breaking down the fourth wall in both movie and drama theater to present their attempts to communicate with either side. It is a challenge that Baker gives both to the advanced technology and the people engaged in the industry, questioning “Are you real?” It visually represents the confrontation between the original and the technological reproduction that Walter Benjamin discusses in “The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of The Work of Art”: “The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity” (21), and the technological reproductions “certainly devalue the here and now of the artwork” (22). When three-dimensional real-time theatrical performance has been flattened into a dynamic picture on a two-dimensional screen, Baker’s intention to tell the story of movies by means of drama becomes thought-provoking for the audience.
Apart from the format of the play, the content of The Flick shows that the second contrast in the play’s discussion of technological innovation is between traditional celluloid and digital movies.
Baker once illustrated in an interview that her motive for writing The Flick was her interest in the changeover of the medium from film to digital movies at the beginning of the 2010s: “I wrote the play in 2011 and then we staged it for the first time in 2012, which was a big year. 2012 and 2013 were the years that 75 percent of all movie theaters in the United States converted to digital” (NPR para.16). In the play, the most representative expression of the struggle with this technological innovation in the film industry is the letter written by Avery when he notices that the movie theater, which has the last 35-millimeter Century film projector in Worcester County, is going to be acquired by a new company and transformed into a digital cinema:
In this letter, Avery, as a fanatic and guardian of traditional film who questions and rejects digital film, uses a simile to compare digital movie to the postcard of the Mona Lisa, and traditional film to the Mona Lisa. This can be directly related to Benjamin’s issue of “aura” in that “Uniqueness and permanence are as closely entwined in the latter as are transitoriness and repeatability in the former” (23). Although traditional celluloid is also a reproduction of natural live performances through the machine, most of its productive processes are still inseparable from the subjective experience in which people feel the charm of light, the trait of the lens, and the texture of the film. The celluloid symbolizes the slow life in the pre-digital era; however, digital movies contribute to the reification of everything in the world, such as scenery, climate, and actors, in order to pursue precision and efficiency. Digital movies store the actor’s image, voice, and movements as digital information for reproduction without his personal involvement. The aura becomes artificial, too, as it can be rearranged by the computer program. All artificial flaws and roughness are erased, and art becomes completely flat.
As Sam comments, “People always freak out when like you know when like art forms move forward” (Baker 33), the flattening in art also further contributes to the flattening of human beings. Jia Tolentino states in “The I in the Internet” that digital media is “utterly consumed by capitalism” (part 1), and “Now, in the twenty-first century, in what appears to be something of a final stage, commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships” (part 2). The young Americans in The Flick who suffer from loneliness, ill communication, and diseases in the age of the technological explosion of the 2010s are the best evidence. For instance, Avery once had a dream about which he talked to his therapist over the phone in Scene 6, Act 1:
It is quite ridiculous that in this dream, what decides whether people go to heaven or hell after death is the movie they have seen. What used to be a nuanced, diverse, and comprehensive understanding of someone’s image and life story has now been reduced to quick, binary labels for they promote faster and more effective recognition and understanding. Meanwhile, although the scanner identifies Avery’s movie and allows Avery to go to heaven, it is still far from understanding what kind of person Avery is and what kind of movies he truly likes. In this sense, Avery’s dream can serve as a warning of the illness of art and its impact on human beings in the contemporary technical era. For those who are used to watching TV and browsing the Web while chatting on their phones, and those who get into a vicious spiral of “rarely communicate — do not want to communicate — cannot communicate”, adding silence, pause, and slow pace in The Flick can be regarded as resistance to a world of efficiency, infatuated with speed and fear of boredom.
However, it doesn’t mean that Annie Baker and her The Flick hold a completely pessimistic attitude towards the age of technological explosion. It seems that Avery, Sam, and Rose should have been full of vitality but suffer from a bleak life: They are muddle-headed without the support of ideals as Avery says “Maybe it’s never gonna get better” (45) and Sam says “Yeah. Whatever. Who cares” (76), and they are trapped in the anxiety of self-definition when Avery says “Who’s Myself? Apparently there’s some like amazing awesome person deep down inside of me or something? I have no idea who that guy is” (68) and Rose says “Sometimes I worry that there’s something really, really wrong with me. But that I’ll never know exactly what it is” (88). However, the play still offers a hopeful blueprint for what kind of future people want in its discussion about “loyalty, faith, and who we can trust.” When Avery fights for his 35-millimeter Century film projector, he is “carrying a torch” (93) and will continue to stand for the 35-millimeter until people pry the camera out of his cold, dead hands (94). When Rose hears about Avery’s suicidal experience, she comments, “Aren’t you curious what’s gonna like happen to you? In like the future? I’m just like so curious about my future” (66). When Avery leaves Sam with the words “Don’t expect anything. Don’t expect things to turn out well in the end” (114), Sam stops him and says “I know my life might seem kind of depressing to you…But there’s some good stuff in it. Maybe I never told you about it, but there’s some really good stuff in my life” (115). The dialogues above imply imperceptible but persistent trust in the warmth of humanity.
As Avery storms out of the door at the end of the play, Sam confidently starts the game that he and Avery used to play a lot and waits patiently for Avery to come back. As expected, after a few minutes, Avery returns and finishes the game. This emphasis on mutual trust and understanding between friends shows Annie Baker’s yearning for humanity and sets a warm tone for The Flick in the end, because even though Avery leaves again, Sam “sits down in one of the seats, smiling to himself” (116). This scene also echoes an aphorism he gave to Avery before, with which I may end my article:
Sometimes the people you fall in love with fall in love with you back
(Pause.)
Sometimes they don’t. But sometimes they do. And it’s awesome. (115)
Works Cited
Baker, Annie. The Flick. Samuel French acting edition. New York: Samuel French, 2014.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of The Work of Art.” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings et al. Translated by Edmund Jephcott et al. Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.
Isherwood, Charles. “Review: In ‘The Flick,’ Moments at the Movies, but Not on Screen.” The New York Times, 18 May 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/theater/review-in-the-flick-contemplating-a-life-of-stale-popcorn.html?hpgrp=c-abar&smid=url-share.
Jameson, Fredric. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
“The Flick.” YouTube, uploaded by Kateryna Czartorysky, 5 Apr. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euBfaIGBCUg.
“THE FLICK Trailer 1.” YouTube, uploaded by Outside the March, 30 Sep. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM2A1VOBAk0.
“The Flick (full video trailer).” YouTube, uploaded by Dobama Theatre, 1 Mar. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoaEEj8XBDU&t=1s.
Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror : Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House, 2019.
NPR. “‘The Flick’ Tells The Story Of The Movies, Off The Screen.” National Public Radio, 11 June 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/06/11/413711303/the-flick-tells-the-story-of-the-movies-off-the-screen.
Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary.” Resources of Hope : Culture, Democracy, Socialism. London: Verso, 1989.
