Tear Me Down: Some Extra Inches with John Cameron Mitchell
I recently interviewed John Cameron Mitchell via phone call for his The Origins of Love concert in Miami (which is also hitting a number of other locations). The piece went up on Miami New Times, but as with most conversations, things get cut. Here’s a few Q&As that didn’t make the cut, mostly centered around Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Anthem, but I really loved.
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You note that the marginalized come together in a unique manner. There’s something fascinating about how Anthem centers a world around a person who wants to “help their tumor go viral” and breaks it down into these deeply felt pains and traumas while being kind of camp — how do you balance those things and do you think they inherently go together?
They really do! I mean today is, lord knows, a strange time. In some ways the world is better off than it’s ever been. But we have this, we have climate change hovering over as the one thing that is different. Visual culture is also different, which doesn’t change the things that are happening but it changes the way they are talked about. And the 24 hour news cycle and ADD has numbed people to a litany of events and also it’s amplified and exaggerated them perhaps more than they are as problems because there’s a lot of screaming going on and people not looking at each other’s faces and cyber debates and that is different and it has caused a polarization and a kind of consolidation of behind what it means to be conservative or liberal. It’s been decided what you’re supposed to believe.
It’s all very reactionary.
Yeah, and it’s all very capitalistic. If you’re conservative you have to believe that global warming is a hoax and that abortion is wrong, and a lot of these things that don’t have a lot in common but Fox News managed to corral everybody into this box-ticking membership. And of course liberal people are doing the same now as a reaction and for the ease of selling to that group. Once you corral them, then you can sell them, which is the capitalization of politics. And everything else can be capitalized too. I’m not a marxist to be honest but I also think trying to sell something has warped us, even sex has been capitalized. And porn has been inserted as the masturbation aid for 95% of males and it’s kind of even crushed a certain imagination about how you have sex and a lot of young people aren’t having sex because of porn and the internal pressure — life is messy, but the internet is more controllable, so you have a lot of young people who are naturally sex obsessed refraining from it because it’s too scary. Which is weird. And it all comes from people trying to sell something online.
There’s a line from Anthem, which is “if all news is fake, then all stories are true” which means if we can’t agree on facts, we can and do agree on metaphor. Because that is interpretable. And a lot of stories are being told and you have to be careful which one you’re listening to or telling, but in some ways as people turn off the news they’re listening to more stories, they’re watching more TV series, they’re listening to more podcasts. Something like Hedwig might have more importance because it’s a metaphor that might be useful. So storytellers have a larger responsibility today than they did in the past now that journalism has been discredited in a way.
You don’t have to tell me
Yeah, it sucks. First they came for the journalists and then we don’t know happened after that.
And I find that Hedwig and Anthem and the other things that are important to me, I get people saying “this has been very useful to think about how to negotiate life” and that is the best compliment and is also a little bit sad that stories have to be the thing that does that, but then again, religion is a story too. Money is a story as well, it’s a story that we agreed to.
A lot of people think about sex or religious influenced stories the same way — it has to be “the abortion movie” in theaters everywhere. Anthem is so interesting because it takes both sex and faith and treat them as revelatory and stifling experiences; things can have layers and it reminds me of watching Ken Russell except via audio.
Yeah, that’s right. All of these things are tightly bound. And I think of Anthem as a faith based piece. The faith is not the one tied up in the pretty package that we’re given as kids. It’s a dirty changeable living breathing sweating faith-based journey. And that’s called life. Life is a faith-based journey. You have faith that is worth something, that is meaningful. Some people don’t want to be forgotten, but other people want to be of use. And it’s very sad when you realize you’re not of use. At first you don’t think you really need to, when you’re a kid, but then later you realize it’s the main thing. To be of use to yourself, your neighbors, your family, your friends, and maybe to a larger group if you’re lucky.
A lot of existential crisis comes from “what kind of mark am I leaving on those around me”
Yeah, and I’ve always found people who try to help other people to be very sexy as well.
