Mirror World
Reflections after a decade of demoralization
Tbh, this time around, I didn’t really feel anything.
I was stunned, I guess- but it had a different quality than last time. It’s more like I was stunned that I felt instantly validated, that my impulse to say Harris will not win that began in August was absolutely right.
The night of his first victory, in 2016, I was in upstate New York, working on a female led indie film about a Christian gay conversion camp set in the 1980’s. It was only a week or so into shooting, but since much of our crew had been working together for the better part of the year, we were already a little family. We stayed up late the night of the election, had a small party with balloons and wine, then watched the numbers roll in with utter confusion and, one by one, left the party late at night to consider our own private revelations in our rooms with our roommates. My roommate, Kim, and I woke up at the same time in the pre-dawn hours to confirm the results we suspected were coming for us. We whimpered each others’ names in the darkness, as if to make sure we were actually awake- not just having a mutual nightmare.
At our morning meeting the next day with all those hopeful impressive women & dudes, our female Persian director gave a speech about how we will never stop telling our stories and I sat down on the stairs and ugly cried until my face went numb. We spent the day moving slowly in the rain, chain-smoking cigarettes.
Eight years later, I feel nothing like the grief and shock I felt that day in 2016. My life has changed: I am married now, with a three year old; I rarely work on set anymore. But the day after this election, 2024, I found myself sitting on a set in the heart of Manhattan, just blocks away from Trump tower- at a global asset management company that was spending about the equivalent of a week of shooting an indie feature on an internal holiday video featuring its executives delivering cheesy jokes about year-end reports and saying Happy Holidays over and over again. As I barreled into the office 15 minutes late to do the job I don’t really do anymore and get paid an outrageous amount of money for it- I muttered something about the election and our middle-aged white dude director shrugged and said he just hoped the economy gets better. I looked around at our clean cut white boy operators who looked like Boy Scouts to me and couldn’t stop noticing how the 1st AD kept calling our one female AC Jen when her name was actually something else, and then, suddenly, felt uncomfortably restless and wild and hidden in my body- my increasingly middle aged, mom-body- trying to be young, cool and invisible around a bunch of, honestly, kids. I was fifteen when some of them were born. I started reading a new book and reminded myself I was simply riding the day out for the paycheck. Nothing revolutionary here. No need for a panic attack. Bloomberg news played on the many screens throughout the high-end office space, the overall mood was not in any way somber: stocks were skyrocketing, what could possibly be wrong?
If you want to understand where the light comes from, you have to examine the shadows.
I think this every time I want to figure out how an image is made. Until now I was looking at literal shadows- the direction of light from a window or a strobe. These days I am thinking more about underbellies and hidden doors. I am thinking about access and privilege. I am thinking about all the ways the messages that have meaning can get lost in the limitless hustle towards profits, profits, profits!
2020 was an anomaly. It was, maybe, the apex of anomalies on which my seemingly precarious professional life had been built.
That fall, I was tangentially on the campaign trail for Biden, doing a commercial and an art project at once called Barns for Biden. We, a bunch of artsy lady Bernie supporters and a single dude named Tim, would roll into a town in rural America and paint a large mural that read BIDEN 2020 on the side of a barn. My job was to film the project, and I did, obtaining all the camera equipment through a private rental as supplied by a friend, managing all the footage myself and sending it out to the production company’s headquarters on hard drives once a week. We were on the road for three weeks: a week spent in rural Michigan with an incredible woman named Deb and her horse and dog, and then two weeks in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where we worked on a family’s barn on a main road on the way into town. We were spit at and called names; we were even harassed by a man in a pickup truck covered in conspiracy stickers who came back the next day with a megaphone to better shout at us about his lord and savior, Donald J. Trump. But once or twice a regular car stopped, parents with their children inside- and they shouted thank you, and told us they had been very scared, and that we were making them feel less scared, and that made us feel some type of way. And we kept working.
It was the first time I was shooting a project myself and of course it was an unhinged art project during a pandemic with no production support, an invisible boss from way up high, a sort of vague day rate that was vacillating as the weeks waned on, and a job role that required I not only free-roam and set up all my own shots and be my own camera department but I was also booking hotels and airbnbs and grocery shopping and making meal plans with a bunch of women who had known each other closely since their days at Wesleyan together. I did like them, but it didn’t make up for my newness to the group. There were dinners that felt like I was impeding on some kind of reunion, and I’d slink off to bed, feeling sullen and apologetic.
By the end of the three weeks, I was more or less at the end of my rope and had a tense conversation with the manager of the project, who didn’t want to do all this “producing” stuff, where I said it was wild “they”(the production bosses from way on high) were trying to bring our rates down to some kind of flat project fee when they had more money than god and were probably also taking cuts of the rates they were, themselves, charging the campaign. I brought up the fact that we were a bunch of women (and that one guy, who provided his own vehicle and left on his own at some point) traipsing around during a pandemic and the fact that our rate wasn’t even higher was because they knew we, specifically, would never ask for it.
I wasn’t yelling at anyone in particular, mind you.
I was just yelling into a void- a nameless production manager, at a nameless production company, who was answering for a national campaign for a candidate I didn’t even care about. And we were all just trying to get paid.
Everyone sat in a sort of stunned silence in the rented mini van and we all agreed we would keep the day rate and the per-diem going.
That weekend, Adam also had a whole two days off and we calculated the distance from Brooklyn to Lancaster. It was closer than we’d realized and within a few hours we were reunited in the parking lot of the weird hotel where I’d been living for too long.
On Sunday, I went home. The rest of the ladies barreled on to another podunk town in the middle of fucking nowhere, their minivan breaking down before they were even out of Lancaster.
Less than two weeks after returning home, I saw my work embedded in an ad that played as the opening banner on YouTube for a week. Two weeks after that, I received a check for $12,000.
The story beneath the story was the normalization of the disassociation between words from reality, which could only usher in the era of irony and flat detachment, because those seemed like the only self-respecting postures to adopt in a world in which everyone was lying all the time. Naomi Klein, Doppelgänger
I tell that story because I want it to sound like some kind of victory - even if the victory is only that I did a job that had some kind of national clout and got a fat check at the end, which felt like a triumph but you must consider the fact that I also only made money until March of that year, the rest of my life was functioning on savings, Covid payments and unemployment insurance. And while it sounds like an impressive lump sum- it barely netted out to a respectable day rate, all things considered.
That story is not, in reality, any kind of victory for anyone- except maybe Aurora, who was born more or less nine months after I got home. While that project thrived off a wild network of hardworking art ladies running all over the country in minivans and virtually consulting the people in touch with the people in the campaign, four years later I didn’t hear of any of these lean lady-led projects. It is not currently a time of national crisis- (or isn’t it?)- so why operate in any way but business as usual? Why does it seem that it must be some kind of war time for women to receive large contracts?
But one of the Boy Scouts on the financial job I worked on Election Day 2024 did do all the steadicam for the Harris campaign and I’m sure he raked in a whole lot more cash than I did in three weeks’ time.
I am beginning to understand that the first time around, 2016, I was still young and coming up in my career during a time of unfounded optimism, performative progressiveness and the distracting charade of girl-bossiness that characterized the 2010’s in a big, blustery way. I thought I was at the helm of some kind of sea change, but I was really just peering through the slightest rip in the fabric of misogyny that typically characterizes our media landscape. And- though I was constantly working- I was still being exploited and being told to be grateful for it and chasing that carrot of imaginary futures: thinking of each job as a doorway when really it was a kind of steam roller, flattening me into ever-smaller and weirder versions of myself that functioned as part of an ever expanding camera machine on larger jobs (the ones with the money) continually helmed by homogenous looking Boy Scouts who reminded the older Boy Scouts of younger versions of themselves.
I don’t know that I remind anyone of a younger version of themselves.
After this election- any of the memes or graphics espousing a continued commitment to girl power has felt like gaslighting to me.
The problem, as usual, is me: wanting to believe that positive change occurs naturally, without too much effort or sacrifice or violence.
Reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger has been the only salve for me during what appears to be increasingly disparate, confounding and infuriating times. But while Klein’s Mirror World is made up of conspiracy theorists and right-wing media conglomerates, my Mirror World is the space between what is real and what is captured through refracted lights and electric sensors and delivered to you, after a series of compressions, on a screen that has gotten ever-smaller, until you could hold it in your hands. The ways these stories reach you are in themselves made up of minuscule tragedies and triumphs, heroes and villains you’ve never even heard of, maybe have never even considered.
Without establishing a relationship to a larger, more complicated vision of truths- it’s possible for everyone’s individual life to devolve into self-pity, doubt, dread; it’s simple enough to take everything I’ve experienced as empirical evidence of a cynical world. I realize one of my deepest fears about writing is that the need to unbox a personal narrative seems inevitably narcissistic, an egotistical project- until I realized my projects are not about communicating some special knowledge I’ve gained through my efforts, but to reveal the burning questions I’ve dug up in places where I thought there would be neat conclusions.
***
Anyway if you made it this far, you’re a good friend to me, lol. Or you’re trapped on the subway and luckily downloaded my email at the last stop.
I do realize things are about to become wild again- and I would be more scared if I wasn’t so confident in the community we’ve built together, yes, that lean, lady-led world of creatives who have been surviving without proper labor practices or good bosses or fair rates for as long as we’ve been working. I’ve been thinking about community building in a stronger, more tangible way and the first step I plan on taking is a book club about Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger- more info on that to come.
I’ll also be participating in a reading from one of my essays at the MM LeFleur on the Upper West Side on January 15th if anyone is interested in a free class with Theresa Lin about personal essays and the great Vivian Gornick.
I didn’t write as much as I intended to this year. I hope 2025 is full of more time for the projects none of us have been able to get to just yet. I hope you enjoy your time together and feel more connected than ever before and know that the internet is just a telephone line disguised as a get rich quick scheme and the best thing you can do for the next four years is take care of yourselves and call your friends. And your mom.
xx
Exactly how we all feel