When we Don't Know we are Extras

SO...I have the creeping suspicion that I won't make any appearance mouthing words in a simulated conversation in Adam Sandler's movie,  I Hate You, Dad. I didn't get the call. While the shoot took place in Boston, Massachusetts, I was working on a book in Jefferson, Wisconsin. That's quite a distance. How far in the background of an image can someone be before being disqualified as film extra? This is the inverse of the question: how prominent do you have to be on screen in order to have your name in the credits?

There are of course endless films in which we are extras, films which we will never see, films that in fact really don't exist. In how many photo albums around the world do we lurk as incidental figures? How many times have we walked unwittingly between some public monument and a family diligently attempting to document themselves in front of it? Our anonymous status in these photographs is similar to the role of the extra film: we are the not-family, in the same way the film extra is the not-star. Our incidentality within this vast archive of tourist photos should not be confused with our dispensibility: imagine how peculiar, how irreal, it would be if the family recorded themselves before a vast monument around which was nobody but themselves. It would have the same uncanny look as do the streets of New York, empty and purged of all extras, when Tom Cruise wakes up one morning in Vanilla Sky. Without our blur, that family photo would look like a fake.

Not knowing the film we are in occured to me the other day while I was watching a documentary, Hated. The film focuses on G.G. Allin, a controversial fringe figure of punk rock who exponentially raised the transgression factor of the movement. Allin was infamous for physically attacking his audience, defecating on stage and dispersing it liberally among his followers, performing in the buff. At the very beginning of this film the director gives us the quintessential image of one of Allin's disciples: a guy, face abundantly pierced with metal, slouched on a sidewalk waiting to get into an Allin show, drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. He takes a swig, screws back on the cap, and rests the container next to him. I instantly recognized this guy: he lived in the apartment building for which I was a superintendent when I was a graduate student in New Haven. Michael was one of those guys who had sentences tatooed up and down his neck. But he never made me feel comfortable enough to ask what they said, or to have him move his shirt over to make them more legible. The piercings through every visible piece of cartiledge or membrane of his face and his haircut, shaped like the top of a Roman Centurion's headpiece, endowed him a strange stegasaurian threat. It made complete sense that this guy is the emblematic extra, the one image that embodies, in shorthand, all the pain, ritual scarification, and brown bagged thirst of the typical Allin fan. He was filmed at a telling distance, through a zoom lens, like an animal at a zoo. It made me wonder if he knew if he was an extra in this film. Would he want to know? If he did know, was it an appearance of which he could be duly proud? Would he tell his mother?

I was driving up through New Haven from New York a few weeks ago and dropped by my old apartment building. Michael's mom still lived there, but Michael had moved to another city to study psychology. In my broken Spanish, I tried to explain to his mother that I had seen Michael in a film. In broken English, she asked me, "What kind of film?" And I paused, but not because of my broken Spanish.