From the Magpie (Real)

Derek Jarman’s eighties disco footage; Laurie Anderson’s dog.

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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Derek Jarman shot footage of patrons in an East London disco in 1984 that was recently edited into Will You Dance With Me?, an hour and eighteen minutes that can’t exactly be called a documentary, because the patrons were invited specifically to be filmed. But they aren’t acting, either, except insofar as they are acting like themselves. They look straight at the VHS camcorder, and presumably Jarman, quite a lot: the young, handsome guys standing at the bar; the two tall queens in pearls and Lady Di-blonde, Flock of Seagulls hair-stylings; the older gent in white shoes, white pants, and a white muscle tee who never stops dancing or smiling; a young man with a spectacular swoop of blond hair who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Donald Trump, but almost certainly isn’t, and writes fiercely in a notebook; the one, then two, then three men doing chained pop and lock, like a collective Shiva with undulating arms and backwards baseball caps. Everyone is smoking. No one in the film is a particularly good dancer, but they’re all great dancers. How one might feel about this very rough and tender footage may depend on one’s feelings about early eighties disco. There are those of us who can’t, actually, hear “Let the Music Play” too many times. (Is that clanging sound a cowbell? electrified sleigh bells?) Ditto Jocelyn Brown’s “Somebody Else’s Guy,” with its classic line—“You are the one who makes me feel so real”—that slides up just before the beat kicks in and kicks your ass onto the dance floor.

You are the one who makes me feel so real.

“But I felt: you are an I / you are an Elizabeth,” writes Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “In the Waiting Room. “Why should I be my aunt / or me, or anyone?” Why, indeed? Why not be something else, say, a dog? The other morning at the gym, I heard a woman say, “So I got the tickets and I was just so proud of myself, my tail went up.” She said it so matter-of-factly I looked to see if she actually had a tail. With the same matter of factness, Laurie Anderson says, “This is my dream body,” in her film Heart of a Dog, which is a documentary only in the sense that a dream body might make a documentary. It’s a sonic and visual collage concerning the deaths of her beloved rat terrier Lolabelle, her mother, and her husband, Lou Reed. Actually, it’s a cartoon image of Laurie Anderson that says the line above; she’s already dreaming, dreamed. Lolabelle seems more real in the film than Anderson, who is a disembodied voice mulling over fragments of her past and an assemblage of astonishingly beautiful images of blurry family snapshots, what seems to be a sea of old gold, random surveillance footage, clouds, and sky. Whereas Lolabelle, furry and doggy, sometimes played by an actor rat terrier—a kind of canine reenactor—is, in the still images where she’s dying, belly bloated and rheumy blind eyes, entirely and inescapably herself.

There are many close-ups of Lolabelle, as there are many close-ups of one clean-cut young man in Will You Dance With Me?, a man whom Jarman eventually asks to dance. You are the one who makes me feel so real, and the lover moves the camera close close close to the beloved, over and over. It’s a comedy and a tragedy at the same time, trying to get so close with a camera over your face. A friend in New York told me that he saw a disheveled man in his twenties sitting inside a banana box on the sidewalk close to one of the ubiquitous nine-and-a-half-foot tall LinkNYC kiosks/monoliths that deliver free wifi to the citizenry. The man in the box was watching a Beyoncé video on the screen, chair (box)-dancing, and delivering a running stream of commentary, advice, and suggestions. Did he think he was talking directly to Beyoncé? Could he get close enough? Did she make him feel so real, or was he the one making her real by addressing her as if she could hear him?

Orpheus is everyday. We keep talking to people who aren’t there, cajoling, seducing, dancing with ghosts. “What are nights for?” asks Anderson, and answers, “To fall through time into another world.” In her film, she seeks, finds, and loses again Lolabelle, her mother, her husband, her own memories, past selves. Jarman died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1994; the club footage was found by director Ron Peck, who had asked Jarman to shoot it as a test for another project. The film of that night in 1984 ends, or seems to be torn off, on a still image of the clean-cut young man looking into the camera, very much like the famous still image of the boy on the beach looking directly into the camera at the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Perhaps Jarman, who made eleven features and thirty-seven short films between 1971 and 1994, had that in mind, perhaps not, and who knows where that young man is now? He seems as real and present as this morning, while Jarman persists only as a perspective, an exquisite noticer of light and movement and the faces of others.

The thing about Will You Dance With Me? is that it feels like it’s occurring in real time. It isn’t; the jump cuts in the music mark missing time—minutes, hours. But when you watch it, you’re there, you’re right back there, and it feels so real. There’s that person who looks like Mrs. Doubtfire. There’s the round woman in the round glasses line-twirling with the skinny guys. (Line-twirling was apparently very big that year.) Now it’s fun. Now it’s boring. Now they’re playing “Relax don’t do it” for at least the second time. You are the one who makes me feel so real. When the lights came up in the theater, it was just the Magpie and a stranger in a hat. The other two people in the audience had left in the middle. The hat and I sat there a minute, smiling. You know the refrain.