"The Art of the Artistic Process" by Brittany K. Allen
When the ball dropped this New Year’s, I was watching Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 on my couch, delighting in Marcello Mastroianni’s easy smirk. I was listing resolutions in a notebook, stroking the cat, and thinking: George Clooney could never. I’m late to Fellini. I’m late almost everywhere. But I’m a diehard fan of Bob Fosse’s 1979 film All That Jazz, which owes a lot to this masterpiece.
Both films use playful spectacle to depict a creative’s “process,” following him from block to brainstorm to—in both senses of the word—execution. Both plots hinge on the simple question, will he make the thing in time? But the main similarity is in the protagonist. All That Jazz’s Joe Gideon (a choreographer/director, after Fosse himself) and 8 1/2’s Guido Anselmi (a film director, after Fellini himself) are both charismatic creatives. In a recent lecture on this character in fiction, the novelist Charles Baxter argues that the charismatic figure can be categorized thus: instead of love, he has obsessions. His “grandiosity precludes friendships.” And he “often stage manages his first appearance from above.” Baxter also noted a friend’s definition of the archetype, saying, “He can summon angels and make them appear,” which feels particularly true of both these men. Gideon and Anselmi regularly invite the viewer into daydream fantasias where they break the rules of reality. They both know they are cads, but also know you will forgive them, because they’ve this ability to delight.
What especially delights me about these men is their love of The Work. How they worship not the content but the form, not the story but the structure; they worship the work for its own sake. The almost incidental quality of the projects they must finish (what is Joe Gideon’s musical about, exactly? A sexy…airline?) underlines the meta-agenda of both films, which are—respectively—an ode to the processes of film and theatre-making. The otherwise chaotic All That Jazz is anchored only by Gideon’s ritual: Splash some water on the face, two tabs Dexedrine, then—“It’s Showtime Folks!” (Never mind the show.)
It seemed so poignant to me, as the ball dropped us into what is sure to be another difficult and uninspiring spin around the sun, that an artist could have nothing to impart but the most obvious lessons—like, death comes for us all!—yet still move and dazzle. I am galvanized by proof that even when you’ve nothing new to say, if you find a fresh way to show the how of creativity, you might be deified, and forgiven. You will have done your work.
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There are plenty of films, books, and television shows about artists making art. Ours is an epoch lousy with love letters to the process. (Or, more often, some glittery, glancing version of the process, in which all the writing is feverishly expelled in a final montage, and everyone looks very cool at their typewriters.) But to spend a second in Obviousland, the charismatic creative character is harder to find outside the milieu of the straight, white, very horny dude.
When I attempted a rude taxonomy of other meta depictions of the process, I noticed that femme and queer entries into this canon tended to spotlight a young creative, still on the cusp of self-definition. Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, for instance, introduces a film student (a close avatar of Hogg herself) via the formative trauma that will become the subject of her first film. Other recent autofiction-ish explorations of the creator creating by Greta Gerwig, or Desiree Akhavan, are as much about coming of age—or, the work of self-making—as they are about the work of art.
And even when the femme creative is a confident sort, she’s often made to apologize for her unruly ambition. One recent exception to this rule can be found in Radha Blank’s 2020 film, The Forty-Year-Old Version, in which a struggling playwright swims against structural currents to get her play produced off-Broadway. Blank’s doppelganger protagonist (she wrote, directed, and stars in the film) is pleasingly unruly, and—like a Gideon—full of lust and naked ambition. I enjoyed her bravado. I also enjoyed Blank’s withering depiction of the white gatekeepers who mold her work to suit their own racist notions of “authenticity.” But I wrestled with her choice to frame the obstacles to “Rad’s” creative expression as almost entirely external. Blank’s film doesn’t show us how this woman wrote a play so much as it makes a case for this woman’s right to write for a wide audience. (As in 8 1/2, the “what” is cheekily incidental here—the play-within-the-film is mainly described as being “about gentrification” and seems to consist of only two scenes.)
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There is another, ultra-dazzling depiction of process to be found in Michael R. Jackson’s tour de force Broadway-bound musical, A Strange Loop. It depicts the inner life of Usher—a Black, queer, musical theatre writer (after Jackson himself) who’s both stymied and constituted by an inner chorus of negging thoughts who lacerate and dissect his every move.
When Usher is impelled to write a “gospel play,” for Tyler Perry’s production company—framed by his own “Agent Fairweather” as a career-making move—the musical becomes about a moral dilemma. Usher believes Perry’s work is tantamount to minstrelsy, but he needs the money and wants the attention, so agrees to take a pass at the compromised task. Our hero winds up writing a wicked satire of a Perry-style family drama, taking careful aim at a god-fearing, homophobic set of trope-y characters. It’s titillating and hilarious to watch Usher eviscerate a toxic depiction of Blackness in this “gospel play,” but as the meta-project wears on, the viewer begins to experience Usher’s bone-deep frustration alongside him. We’re reminded at every turn that this artist isn’t at liberty to make the work he wants to make, thanks to the voice of a dominant culture that’s so insistent it’s embedded in his own psyche. It’s a brilliant, honest, but exhausting experience, to sit in the loops of Usher’s mind for ninety minutes. And that’s the point.
Both A Strange Loop and The Forty-Year-Old Version are highly successful on their own—very different—terms. They show the work of art-making for two distinct creatives who are and have been thwarted by misogyny, racism, fatphobia, homophobia, and ageism, both external and internalized. The questions I’m forming are about the powers entailed to a certain kind of character. Can the truly charismatic creative, with his confidence, his carefree monstrosity, his ability not just to summon angels but make them appear, even exist in a marginalized body? Are we capable of that kind of ease?
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You may say: of course not! Hollywood tells us again and again that it’s not ready for a certain type of somebody to be fully human, and many of us internalize the message. The dominant culture can barely imagine a femme artist, let alone a Black queer artist, as capable of being both egomaniacal and charismatic—and also the sky is blue and water is wet. Only white auteurs get to splash around in their own imaginations, turning up fanciful explorations of process that cost somebody millions of dollars (see: Guido’s 80 million lire spaceship, in 8 1/2). While the “othered” are still obliged to make work flexing against the system that allows this to be so. And yes, it’s the worst. We’re all tired. That’s why we’re spending New Year’s on the couch.
Many days, this concession is quick to surface. Every day, it feels reason enough to sit down. But then I’m reminded that some work entirely refuses the terms of our existing frames. Take Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 film, The Watermelon Woman, which I recently discovered c/o the Criterion Channel.
The Watermelon Woman is a meta-portrait of a young black lesbian woman filmmaker, who from her first moments is categorized by both her self-doubt and her quest for a meaningful subject. “Hi, I’m Cheryl,” she tells the camera, “and I’m a filmmaker…um, I’m not really a filmmaker, but I have a videotaping business with my friend Tamara, and I work at a video store, so I’m working on being a filmmaker. The problem is I don’t know what I want to make a film on.” We go on to follow Cheryl’s quest into the archive, as she goes looking for evidence of a Black actress who played assorted mammy roles in 30s Hollywood (after Butterfly McQueen). Cheryl is both devout and curious about the creative process. Unlike a Gideon or an Anselmi, she is both buoyed and meaningfully provoked by her closest relationships: to her good friend, Tamara, and to Diana, a love interest.
What also differentiates Cheryl from the other artist avatars mentioned above may be that commitment to finding a worthy subject beyond herself. “I know it has to be about black women,” she tells the camera of her project, “because our stories have never been told.” This quest shows us Cheryl is young but not unformed. She may be anxious, but her project is not to be defined by negging inner or outer critics. Under our gaze, she grows confident, conducting interviews and reviewing archival footage. She learns how to film-make, as we watch. And in her way, with the Watermelon Woman, she summons an angel.
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Two years ago, just after completing the run of a play, I went out into the Portland night with my director and dear friend to get matching tattoos of bowler hats on our inner ankles. We wanted to do this because we are both obsessed with All That Jazz and we wanted to permanently commemorate an event that was, by definition, ephemeral. The hats were a nod to the late Ann Reinking. Specifically the scene in All That Jazz where her character admonishes Joe Gideon, from inside a scathing unitard: “You better change your way of living!”
One of the New Year’s resolutions I wrote sitting on my couch, shortly after Guido Anselmi killed his own critic in 8 1/2, is to blow up—or at least thoroughly addle—the rhetorical project that’s categorized much of my creative work to date. My work has had a lot to do with convincing myself, foremost, that I exist as a subject; and secondly, that I deserve to—especially on the terms entitled to the most empowered in our culture. I have yearned for the right to have nothing to say, and the confidence to say it anyway. I have wanted to be a charismatic creative: tyrannically ambitious, obliged to nothing and no one, respected chiefly for my reinvention of form, and hindered only by “my own” hang-ups. Lately, I think this might be an impossibly tall order. And anyway, there are more interesting tasks.
For some of us, the best work cannot begin until subject is disentangled from what Guido’s critic would call “the squalid catalog of your mistakes.” The razzle-dazzle is all well and good, but this January I’m lifting up the ode to process that can reckon with both the self as subject and the world beyond the self. There is, after all, so much world to see.
I’ll always love Joe Gideon. But it’s not quite as charming as it used to be, how that charismatic figure won’t change his ways. In fact, he’d rather die. (He does.)
Brittany K. Allen is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in Catapult, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Kenyon Review Online, and Longreads, among other places, and her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her stage plays have been produced and developed at The Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Portland Center Stage, and elsewhere, and she's the recipient of the 2021 Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, and the 2021 Dramatists Guild Foundation Georgia Engel Prize for Comedic Playwriting. Her writing has been supported by residencies at MacDowell and SPACE on Ryder Farm, and scholarships to both Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers Conference. The winner of Epiphany's inaugural Fresh Voices Fellowship, she is currently working on her first novel.
