The Mummified Extra

Last week I was travelling through Mexico. One of my destinations was the small city of Guanajuato, located between San Miguel and the even tinier Calderones. In Guanajuato I came across a museum that held scores of curious and somewhat frightening mummies:

As I walked around the museum I had the strong impression that I was in an exhibit of extras. Instead of a star on Hollywood Boulevard, this display seemed to be an hyperbolic example of being presesrved by chance. Not having your name eternalized but rather your entire, nameless, body. The idea that they are film extras is not too far from the truth, however. I first encountered these mummies in Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. In the opening credits to the film, Herzog lets his camera linger over the twisted hulks of the deceased. Here is a still from that film:

                                            Film still from Nosferatu, Werner Herzog, 1979.

When Herzog made the film they were still in their original catacomb. When I entered the museum, I had a flashback to Herzog's film. There was a bizarre moment of recognition as I looked into the glass cases, and a question I have never heard asked: "Where have I seen this mummy before?" With stars, this question comes loaded with less doubt, even if we cannot remember the name of the film. Yet I greeted the return of these inanimate film extras into my midst with a strange double-take. The mummies were more than just relics: they were posthumous celebrities (posthumous not to life but to Herzog's film). I had never expected to meet these figures from Herzog's film in person. For me the museum was a kind of exhibit of extras. Their everydayness has been immortalized. One wall of the exhibit even looks like a group of wanna-be's waiting for an audition, their post-mortem poses easily mistaken for signs of boredeom or impatience, the slouch of the man or woman who dreams of getting into pictures:

How did these corpses turn into mummies, into representations? At the turn of the century, bodies in graves on which the families had lapsed in their payments were disinterred and the plots were sold to another interested (and decesased) party. The minerals in the earth around Guanajuato are such that buried corpses do not decompose. So the first mummies were the unclaimed, those abandoned by both the love and the funds of their family. They were still stacked in a catacomb when Herzog filmed them. Since these strange mixtures of semi-preserved flesh, hair, and skeleton have been moved into the museum. These mummies are preserved in a state of peculiar expression, something more than a yawn and short of a scream.

The mummies wear the clothes in which they were buried. This gives their appearance a strange and sudden relevance to our eyes, one that I imagine that overwhelms the grave robber. Chemical chance, rather than mortuary science, has intervened here. The mummies in ancient Egypt were the stars of their culture: Kings, Queens, their retinue. The figures in Guanajuato have been preserved, like people in the background in films from the 20's, by their literal environment, something no less bizarre than the light-senitive silver emulsion on early film stock.

The exhibit is very different from the dignfied preservation of Tutankhamen. The royal prince of Egypt was wrapped as diligently as a birthday gift. The mummies here by contrast seem like stragglers:

 

Like anthropological specimens such as "Lucy" these figures entered unwittingly into a bogus eternity as the cast for a museum. It's a fitting monument to the people who are subordinate to the opening credits of Herzog's film, but who give that film a documentary level of ghastliness. The mummy museum in Guanajuato is the official Tomb of the Unknown Extra.

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.

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.

Why are there no Extras in Adult Films?

Will you do nudity?_____ Semi?_____ Full?_____
This was one of the questions on the information card I filled out during the casting call for extras for the upcoming Adam Sandler movie, I Hate You, Daddy.
         Have I just not been paying close enough attention to notice all those nude extras in the background of Adam Sandler films? That one man or woman obscurely getting out of a bath in his remake of The Longest Yard? Or that full body wax going on behind the drama unfolding in Mr. Deeds?
         Under what circumstances could the nude figure be consigned the place of an extra? Bizarrely, only during massacres, holocausts, in asylums (see Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies), those black spots in history when dissidents are rounded up in the football stadium.
         Could Sandler be cutting into new terrain for I Hate You, Daddy?
         The question on the casting call card made me realize: there are no extras in porn films. There are no neutral bystanders in an orgy. Such negligible characters as the pizza deliverer cannot slink off scott free as they do in our everyday world. In the adult film, these figures are compelled to participate. The extras in an adult film cross this line easily because there's not much dialogue happening anyway. The extra in Ass Bandits, if he or she exists, just grunts more discreetly.
         Porn films provide us with our operative model for celebrity. Here the mucus membranes are ready for their close up: anatomy stars and the residual body of the actor becomes, in an odd twist, just extra. The adult film provides us with the perfect embodiment of the Hollywood star sytem: a cinematic world without anyone on the sidelines, without the reality quotient provided by the non professional actor. In short, a spectacle so consuming that it destroys our peripheral vision.