"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
A Film in Which I Play Everyone, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf, 2023)
To assign the female subject the role of spectacular object is, well, not so spectacular. Nor is it terribly new. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” concludes John Berger in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing. “Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Rejecting essentialism to consider the “social presence” of men and women, Berger’s inquiries into the gendered power asymmetries inherent to looking have since been taken as a priori dogma when it comes to the omnipotence of the “male gaze” in visual culture, cinema its chief medium in the twentieth century. A Film in Which I Play Everyone, Mary Jo Bang’s ninth book of poems, unleashes said dogma to trot it through a “densely forested park” of wonder and woe. Across a whimsical, often surrealist reel of images, we meet, among others, a “dog walking along beside Anna Freud,” “a mistreated dog … eyed / by an indifferent crowd,” and “a toy dog left on a rowboat adrift in the midst.”
But this is, of course, not a book about dogs, though dogs are, like women, creatures both beheld and beholden. The gaze in A Film in Which I Play Everyone is unwaveringly feminine, and the speakers are keenly alert to what about themselves warrants watching. While scholar Laura Mulvey never makes a cameo in these poems, the influence of feminist film theory is ever present, if scrubbed of its reductive pontificating on who sees whom, and how. That is, Bang intercepts her own eyes—and lustrous imagination—for that of the imagined male auteur. The female subjects who express themselves are not just looked at by a man, or men, but by a wild array of retinas that blur gender binaries. Perhaps even more relevantly, these same female subjects present themselves as active flaneuses in their own right. A feminine love of looking becomes a kind of feminist scopophilia, upending conventions of pleasure and desire, while obscuring the line between subject and object. “You have to be a seer to see,” asserts the speaker of “Some Identical Sister, One Step Ahead,” leading to the admission: “What you really want is to be a camera.”
Throughout the book, the speaker becomes a sort of camera, seeing herself see the small and great, the sudden and endless, while also being seen. As is the case in Bang’s oeuvre more broadly, the minute doesn’t court the epic; they are betrothed from the start. Their inevitable marriage makes up the tangible, empirical realm as well as the vast interiority of her subjects. Memory and observation hoist the other up to the window of knowledge. Windows themselves play a crucial role: In the opening sections of the book, we find “plate glass / corner windows” (“Our Evening Is Over Us”), “fireworks in windows” (“Four Boxes of Everything”), and “the dawn window / grows into the maggot day” (“This Morning”).
The film screen serves as yet another window, one designed to transport, soothe, and seduce. Bang’s speakers do not distract themselves by scrolling the screens of today but rather stroll through the rich, disjunctive image-scape of motion picture history, a history that celebrated women as larger-than-life goddesses while subjugating them to narratives that, in most cases, denied them autonomy and healthy desire. “The walls of time dissolve whenever / the lights are turned off,” says the speaker in “How will it feel months from now.” And isn’t cinema the one space where humans continue to congregate in the dark as a matter of course?
The book is divided into five sections, each designated with the crosshaired numeral of a film leader, the strip attached to the head or tail of a film to assist in threading a projector. 5-4-3-2-1 becomes 1-2-3-4-5, reversing the traditional countdown onscreen before a movie’s start—and fitting for a collection of verse in which time, and timelessness, is of central concern. “The year is still the perpetual now,” starts the first line of the first poem, “From Another Approach.” “The inevitable present” (“The Actual Occurrences”) is also a bottomless lake of past and future.
But how does the clock tick in a world where “moonlit details go on and on” and “the personified day / has effaced herself from the calendar”? The question posed in “Some Identical Twin Sister …”—“Can time keep capturing an animal / even after it’s turned itself in?”—is answered by a list merging the temporal with the carceral, the medical with the mythic: “Cellblock of an instant, / mug shot of an afternoon faun, a disappearance / at the border of the forest, a bed of narrow-gauge needles.” In the lush lyric mise-en-scėne conjured in this book, “cellblock” may as well be “cel-block,” since celluloid both imprisons the female subject and liberates her from human death.
Which is to say, when dwelling in a suspended present feels preferable to the alternative, film offers a temporary escape into the illusion of immortality—“that surrealist train,” summoned in “The Theory of Personality,” that is “continually leaving the station while staying right where it is.” People and cities and parks long gone flicker to life again. Death is less a discrete event than a constant foil for the flourish of a film reel. “We are all dying but some more than most,” says the speaker of “Here We All Are with Daphne,” “so says my interiority.”
In “Reign of Terror” and “The Crowd Closes In,” death takes the form of the guillotine, honoring Olympe de Gouges, a French aristocrat best known for the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. Other poems pay homage to those lost in recent times, such as “Elegy for Two,” “How will it feel months from now,” and “The Echo,” which is dedicated to the late American poet Lucie Brock-Broido. But amid the steady contemplations of mortality in the book—sudden or slow-in-coming—a cheeky irreverence peeks through like a child plucking flowers from a grave. “To Say Please and Yet Not Please” reads the title of one poem: defiance despite decorum, or the other way around. Syntactically and otherwise, Bang’s recurrent playfulness comes not at the expense of gravity so much as in service to a levity without which it cannot exist.
In keeping with such antinomies, for a book invested in the image-scape and production of the motion picture, the motif of waiting and stillness doesn’t seem a surprise. “This is all / the waiting you could ever want,” declares the speaker in “From Another Approach,” belying the labor—and indeed, the tedium—of onscreen, and real life, performance. After all, playing “everyone” means playing the vast majority of the cast relegated to background and extra roles, roles no less crucial, Bang seems to suggest, to creating the magic whole.
Opening with a dedication to Norma Jean (otherwise known as Marilyn Monroe), Bang’s female cast of screen stars remains predominantly anonymous and, in the diegesis of the film at least, without dialogue. “Isn’t this all for the better? You with no mouth / to speak of?” says “a man [who] turned me into a tree” (“Here We All Are with Daphne”). In “A Miniature”, “a hand (not mine) / covers my mouth.”
The book’s title comes from a statement by David Bowie, himself a gender avenger of sorts. Resistant as her work is to overtly political interpretation, Bang’s poetry is rarely categorized as feminist—arguably a mistake given how consistently her work probes gendered assumptions and exposes the erasure of female voices. As in so many of her earlier books (Louise in Love and A Doll for Throwing) in A Film in Which I Play Everyone, the feminine is recast as a mode of both oppression and resistance. But this time around the speaker’s awareness of patriarchy is more directly expressed. “Power / got concentrated in the hands of a conquering few // who swept aside freedom and invented a female avatar / for every anxious damning force,” recounts the speaker of “Far from Here.” In “The Problem of the Present,” the speaker denudes the dangerous pageantry undergirding marriage: “because who would ever // want a diamond unless they were told to. / Here, someone must have said, you want this.”
As in many of Bang’s earlier books, the image of a supine female speaker resurfaces, this time emboldened by a greater sense of feminist consciousness. In “A Set Sketched by Light and Sound,” the speaker describes “An alarm that tells // of the need to absent yourself, to lie down / and behave as if you have no agency,” whereas in “No Questions,” the enforcement of gender is made painfully clear: “You know all / there is to know about lying down / and about taking it and this is because / you are a woman and this is what / you were taught women do.”
The subjects that speak out against male oppression do so not in anger as much as clear-eyed recognition. Perhaps this is why, when presenting subjectivities seemingly from the past, Bang never seems revisionist, never endows these historic personas with ra-ra girl-boss motives. And perhaps speaking itself is overrated: “Speaking is / a way of living with the ruin we were given,” concludes “Our Evening Is Over Us,” with the phrase “over us” having the double meaning of “sick of us” or “dismissive of our human folly.”
When speaking of eros, Bang’s subjects are often shut down by others or themselves. “I love you, I wanted to say / to the girl, but silence kept sounding // its silver bell,” reads “Staying Is a Form of Haunting.” Across the book, desire for a female beloved isn’t fixed to a particular woman, or girl, but many that have touched the speaker’s heart, body, or both. This desire for another may also be read at times as a wistfulness for a former feminine self—one less world-weary and resigned. “That hat attracts me. As does the woman,” admits the speaker in the final tercet of “Think of Jane and the Regency Era,” only to follow the line with the declarative, “But not everything is possible. / You are only the heroine in your own story.”
Timeless and evanescent, bold and blinkered, Bang’s speakers resonate as heroines of their own artful invention, ever mindful of the fact that their time—on the screen, on the page—will come to a close, the curtains falling as the crowd shuffles out. “ ‘That’s all,’ she said, ‘then, it’s over,’ ” reads the first line of the book’s last poem, “Once Upon a Time,” whose last stanza starts, “The deaths past and present / in ashes, each discrete moment / a memory palace to be built.” A Film in Which I Play Everyone erects a glittering temple to the splendors of perception, one that, unlike the Alhambra or Versailles, can withstand the ravages of the material world. Under Bang’s direction, the seer and the seen need not be separated by the screen between them—nor by gendered theories of the gaze. Both film and femme are as fragile as they are indelible, forever impressed on our collective conscience.