Why isn't there a 'Best Extra' category at tonight's Oscars?

The award I want to see at tonight's Oscars is "Best Extra." Which noname figure grabbed the attention of the academy with his or her understated nothingness or perhaps a flash of personality in screen time amounting to no more than a handful of seconds? Which extra caught the eye of the judges when they grew bored with The Help? There could even be separate categories of Extra Oscars: Best Supporting-supporting-supporting-supporting actor and actress (a support at twelve removes from the actor he or she supports); Best Animated Extra, for that cartoon figure composed of nothing more than a few brush strokes and hidden in the deep background of Rango; Least Visible Extra, for the one who works most creatively with his or her obscurity; Best Impossible Extra, for that background actor who somehow makes her way onto films where the leading actor is alone for most of the film (Castaway comes to mind); Best Dressed Extra (how far away can someone be and still look good?).

What would these awards reveal? First, it would show us that the academy actually cared about film, the literal surface of the film. Nominating a handful of people who get no more than a few seconds of fame would tell us that the academy judges had studied every entry as if they were the FBI studying the Zapruder film, slowing the movie down to its image basis in search of that decisive background clue, the acting equivalent of the second gunman. This award would pay tribute not to the docility of the consuming stare but to the momentary and subtle power of the glimpse.

I envision the Oscar award as a regular Oscar, but with a smaller figure standing behind it. The announcement of the winner would result in an astonishingly precious moment never seen on Oscar night: the extra would approach the stage and stand uncomforably in front of the presenter. This situation of the bodies would be the first outrageous inversion of the way things are on the Hollywood screen. It would initiate a sense of extraordinary celebration. The winning extra would accept the trophy, approach the microphone, and say, "Hi, Mom."

The Man over MLK's Shoulder has a Name

Some internet detective work on the MLK "I have a dream" speech turned up a story about the people standing behind him. In 2010 USA Today ran a story about the background figures from the televised image, including the man who is strikingly visible over MLK's right shoulder and whom I discuss in the previous post.

Why did it take so long to to dissolve the anonymity of the people behind MLK? The newspaper article connects us to their private lives the way they were known to their families, a private history.

He turns out to be a cop, Charlie Jenkins, one of a handful of black police officers picked to guard MLK that day.

(Photo altered by USA Today)

How does this photo, with altered grayscale for Charlie Jenkins' face, change his background status? I think it transforms the extra into the star and moves our historical focus away from this monumental event and toward a man the Jenkins family remembers.

Now that this "extra" has been identified, he is given a private history and is no longer an appendage to this speech, more and less than a historical marker.

Extras on the Historical Stage

Martin Luther King delivers his "I have a dream...." speech in August, 1963 in Washington, D. C. For me the historical moment is entwined with the insistent presence of an man who looms silently on the left side of this image (taken from a televised recording of the event). Absent in the audio recordings and print versions of the speech, this figure enters the picture and transforms it. Throughout the talk he seems to respond alternatively to the crowd in attendance, the event going on around him, and the words that penetrate his distracted state. He represents what MLK would do if he didn't have to talk on the stage. But he also represents the recipient of the speech. The way he responds prompts us to think about the effects of this moment, in the moment. His changing facial expressions are a kind of seismograph registering the impact of King's rhetoric. The trio of lines formed by his eyebrows and moustache provide an expressive mechanism that processes MLK's words. At one point his features suggest meditation or a passing mood of consternation:

At other moments he shakes his head in that precise way that denies truth to anything but the words he hears. When King speaks about having his dream, the man looks up into the sky as if he had begun to visualize it or search for it. We have all been told about the importance of Martin Luther King's speech. The face of the extra over King's right shoulder registers something more elusively human than importance: impact. Where the other figures standing behind King seem to stare untransfiguredly, as if in a blinking contest with the TV camera, the man to the left shows us how King's words go through his listeners. We see how the speech repeatedly has to pull him from his state of distraction. He demonstrates how difficult it must be to listen to King's speech while up on stage with him. He shifts back and forth between being mesmerized by his proximity to King to being addressed and moved by speech. Cleaning his ear out with his index finger one moment, he utters words under breath in response to King, the silent prayer of the extra, in the next.

The face of the extra helps us plumb the historical moment by allowing us to see what King's words do to his audience, and therefore to us. The power of King's speech owes itself in part to this extra who makes MLK's speech visible.

The television camera transforms the bystander into an extra: into someone indelibly present on the historical stage. The combined distance of the camera and effect of the zoom lens abridges the distance of Dr. King from the people behind him, generating the impression that MLK is standing among, rather than in front of or before, a crowd. A photograph of the event from a different angle indicates a much greater distance exists between MLK and the man over his right shoulder:

The photograph isolates MLK, makes him into a separate figure, bearer of the decisive gesture, and in some ways already a statue. By contrast, the televised image immerses him into his human environment and in the process elevates the adjacent and peripheral figure into celebrity. The man in the white hat stands at the same level as the civil rights leader. The televisual image fulfills the message of MLK's speech.

Here's a segment of the video:

How an Extra within a film can Overtake the DVD Extras/Supplementary Features

The bonus features on a DVD give us the "making of" the film but cleansed of all the figures that intrigue me most in a movie. These featurettes show the Ferrells, the Spielbergs, the Cruise and the Cruz, but never those microscopic actors who give amoebic life to the background of every film.

Only in Todd Phillips' Hated : GG Allin and the Murder Junkies do the extras of the film overlap with the dvd extras. In another post I have mentioned how a former neighbor of mine, Michael, appears in the film slouched on the sidewalk and drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. Michael inaugurates the film's decadence. He does more than the star, GG Allin, to give the flavor and smell of an Allin concert.

To my surprise, Michael reappears in the bonus features. The extra footage documents the sudden self-destruction of an Allin performance at a small club in New York. We see Allin half-singing as he slowly goes beyond half-nakedness and finally gettting out of his clothes, throwing the instruments around, punching spectators and bandmembers alike, and getting tossed from the club by an irate owner. As the police arrive, Allin and his crew walk surreptitiously away from the fracas. Michael appears with a boom box on his shoulder, suddenly at Allin's side and on an even level with the star of the movie. Forcibly ejected from his performance space, Allin encounters the extra to his own movie. Michael is persistent and won't stop following Allin. When Allin and his bandmates get into a cab, Michael gets in with them. And each time this happens the cab driver says "no...too many people." As the embodiment of Allin's crazed fandom, Michael is literally the multiple figure (the extra who represents more than just one person) who makes it seem like there are too many people inside the cab. As long as Michael walks beside Allin, Allin has to walk. As the featurette continues, we realize that Allin has slowly gathered a literal following, causing one person on screen to remark, "GG, you're like the Pied Piper." But Michael, the extra, is technically the only figure who brings the music, via that cassette tape boom box that would unfailingly announce his arrival at the apartment building. It's he, not the star, Allin, who leads the rats.