2-News

12 — Wednesday, October 21, 2020
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

THE B-SIDE: PARADOX
Paychecks & paintbrushes

School 
of 
Music, 
Theatre 

and 
Dance 
alum 
Maya 

Ballester 
started 
her 
career 

at the University in the vocal 
performance program, but soon 
realized her heart lay closer to 
musical theatre. Through the 
Bachelor of Musical Arts track, 
she customized her degree to add 
acting and dance classes and then 
started work as a photographer as 
well. 

“It’s hard for me to tie down 

one thing that I want to do at a 
time,” Ballester said recently in 
an interview with The Daily over 
the phone from her native Kansas. 
She graduated last May, at the 
height of COVID-19’s first wave. 
Now, she joins the ranks of an arts 
industry endangered by and dying 
from the country’s mishandling 
of this pandemic. But those 
stressors aside, Ballester faces 
even deeper conundrums when it 
comes to personal income. 

“There’s this kind of switch 

that goes off in my head that when 
I am doing something for income, 
and to survive, it automatically 
becomes less fun, and becomes 
less expressive,” Ballester said. 
Her art comes from a place that 
she aches to keep separate from 
money — but without a paycheck, 
will she have the resources to 
make more art? 

Stamps and Music, Theatre 

& Dance senior Rhett Shepherd 
currently navigates a similar 
paradoxical 
question. 
Their 

senior 
thesis 
involves 
the 

development of a videogame that 
uses characters from diverse 
working-class 
communities, 

a group rarely represented by 
the white, straight and wealthy 
communities of online gaming. 
The project aims to fill a gap in 
representation, but Shepherd’s 
thesis must also reckon with 
the fact that videogames remain 
luxury products that are out 
of reach for many low income 
families. How can their art 
make the difference it intends to 
without access to the group that 
it’s made for? 

These questions leave both 

Shepherd and Ballester running 
in circles: Art and money compete 

for attention but also never seem 
to find a compromise. 

Stamps 
professor 
Rebekah 

Modrak is quite familiar with this 
paradox. As an artist, she makes 
work dedicated to the resistance 
of consumer culture — her “Re 
Made Co.” installment replaced 
Best Made Co.’s $350 artisanal 
designer axe with a $350 toilet 
plunger. The piece offered cutting 
humorous commentary on the 
absurd consumption of glorified 
tools and Modrak eventually 
received a cease and desist 
document from the company’s 
lawyers.

“Resistance 
to 
consumer 

culture 
was 
part 
of 
my 

upbringing,” Modrak recently 
wrote in an email to The Michigan 
Daily. Her parents started by 
teaching her to ask “why we pay 
companies money to advertise for 
them.” 

Now, as a professor, Modrak 

teaches the Stamps Interventions 
in 
Commerce 
class. 
This 

evolved from an older class on 
Shopdropping, a project in which 
students made false products 
to leave in a store — a reverse 
shoplift. The idea started in 2004, 
guided by Modrak’s question: 
“How can we take opportunities 
to encounter audiences outside 
of a gallery system, to introduce 
messages 
(critical, 
poetic, 

personal) contrary to the narrow 
conceptual 
boundaries 
of 

branding?” 

For Shepherd’s videogame, this 

separation starts by reimagining 
the power of ordinary objects, 
an 
idea 
that 
started 
while 

mopping the floor at a summer 
housekeeping job. 

“I look at this mop,” Shepherd 

said, “and I think to myself, 
‘this mop could be a really great 
weapon!’” The realization sent 
them into a world of imagined 
Expo marker jousts and cleaning 
pole lances, the result of which 
will 
become 
fully 
fledged 

working-class 
video 
game 

characters, aptly titled “The 
Working Clash.” 

Shepherd sees power in a choice 

like this, lifting the mundane 
into the creative, moving from 
mandatory to leisurely. The game 
will hopefully make space for 
products and professions often 

considered boring or less-than 
to take on new meaning beyond 
their measurable contributions to 
the economy. 

Finding 
space 
outside 

consumption 
is 
also 
quite 

important for Ballester. At home 
in 
quarantine, 
she 
watched 

the country’s economy melt, 
leaving millions to live on small 
unemployment checks. As the 
weeks turned to months, Ballester 
grew resentful of the system at 
large, maddened by America’s 
workaholic tendencies.

“I’ve grown very irritated with 

capitalism in general,” she said, 
“and how that has led to people 
defining who they are by their 
career, defining their worth by 
their career.” At the same time, 
this conclusion doesn’t solve her 
conflict — “I’m still struggling to 
form a healthy relationship with 
making money and also getting 
to do what I want to do,” she said. 

Shepherd echoed Ballester’s 

sentiment: “You can talk in circles 
about it for a long time,” they said, 
“I don’t really have a good answer 
for it.” 

For Modrak, the answer lies 

in actively disentangling oneself 
from consumer culture. “I used 
to exhibit [my work] in gallery 
spaces,” she wrote, but now 
it’s 
“intentionally 
net-based,” 

meaning it can reach any browser 
of a consumer space. The result 
gives 
Modrak 
independence 

and control over her own ideas 
and, according to her, is far more 
liberating. 

This 
idea 
holds 
special 

importance for Modrak now 
that we live in an age of “self-
promotional culture.” The growth 
of 
influencers 
and 
freelance 

artists pushes individuals to 
think of themselves as brands and 
thus “define success according to 
the narrow rationale of corporate 
culture,” she wrote. 

Ballester’s 
work 
in 
acting 

and 
photography 
are 
both 

heavily operated by such models 
of 
self-promotion 
— 
“you 

are your business,” she said. 
There are drawbacks to both, 
but 
performance 
work 
feels 

especially vulnerable to her. 

ZOE PHILLIPS
Senior Arts Editor

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

DESIGN BY YASSMINE EL-REWINI

THE B-SIDE: PARADOX
Love is a mess of paradoxes in ‘Eternal Sunshine’

“Oh, my darling, Clementine. 

You were lost and gone forever. 
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.” 

So croons Joel’s (Jim Carrey, 

“Dumb and Dumber”) mother 
as she bathes him in his distant 
memory of infancy in “Eternal 
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” 
It’s strange to think how you 
could know someone’s name 
from a song before you ever 
meet them. 

Of 
course, 
this 
is 
not 

not 
actually 
a 
coincidence; 

screenwriter Charlie Kaufman 
(“I’m 
Thinking 
of 
Ending 

Things”) chose this lullaby 
specifically to fit the narrative 
of his movie, but it’s not that 
far-fetched. 
We 
sometimes 

make up parallels in our lives 
with our loved ones even if they 
don’t make sense. Like Phoebe 
Bridgers 
wrote, 
“I 
didn’t 

know you then / And I’ll never 
understand why / It feels like I 
did.” 

“Eternal Sunshine” begins 

with Joel meeting Clementine 
(Kate 
Winslet, 
“Titanic”) 

on an impulsive day trip to 
Montauk. Joel is enamoured 
by Clementine’s boldness — 
the way that she invites him, a 
stranger, into the intimacy of 
her life and apartment. After 
spending a night together, the 
film abruptly cuts to what we’ll 
eventually realize is a flashback 
to when Clementine and Joel 
broke up, shortly before the 
opening of the film. Clementine 
went to a special medical clinic 
to have her memory of Joel 
erased from her brain, and, 
upon discovering this, Joel 
does the same to his memory 
of Clementine. The film follows 
Joel as he regrets trying to erase 
her, and they both eventually 

realize that even with all of 
their baggage, they’re willing 
to give their relationship one 
more shot. 

Even 
the 
mind-bending 

science-fiction angle of the film 
feels like something grounded 
in reality — who hasn’t ever 
wished they could, like Joel 

and Clementine, be strapped to 
an examination table and have 
your 
heartbreak 
surgically 

removed? 

The most painful moment 

for Joel wasn’t just the sight 
of Clementine walking out his 
door, but the moment when she 
acts like she has never (because, 
in her current consciousness, 
she hasn’t) met him before. 
It’s a science-fiction version 
of the universal fear that you 
can spend so much time in love 

with someone only to end up as 
strangers. That’s the paradox 
that really matters, not the non-
linear storytelling that begins 
the day after Joel has already 
had his memory erased. With 
no 
memory 
of 
Clementine, 

he meets his ex-girlfriend as 
if they are strangers, leaving 
a disconnect between their 
bodies and minds. After two 
years of love, they erase each 
other through a procedure that 
takes about as long as it might 
take you to finally block your 
ex’s number.

If the sentimentality doesn’t 

get you, the cinematography 
will. There are great visual 
paradoxes when Clementine 
walks down a street only to 
appear to return right where she 
began, like an urban Penrose 
staircase, or the Eldritchian 
version of Patrick (Elijah Wood, 
“Wilfred”), 
the 
man 
using 

knowledge of Joel’s memories 
to seduce Clementine, in a 
comatose nightmare sequence 
where, no matter how many 
times Joel turns him around, 
he never sees his face. 

But Kaufman’s portrayal of 

these inherent contradictions 
of the human condition isn’t just 
about the body horror of these 
faceless 
creatures 
in 
Joel’s 

dreams — it’s the way that Joel 
and Clementine are cosmically 
magnetized 
to 
each 
other. 

Though they’ve forgotten about 
each other, they remain drawn 
to each other. Their bodies 
could not forget. Perhaps this 
is 
because 
Mark 
Ruffalo’s 

(“Spotlight”) character fucked 
up the science, or maybe it 
means that we can’t ever really 
forget people as much as we 
want to, no matter how much 
we shill out for an experimental 
psychological study. 

Kaufman has something to 

say about the repressed feelings 

we hold in our bodies, too. Sex 
is probably the most intimate 
thing you can do with someone 
second only to, I don’t know, 
dying in their arms. But, in 
Kaufman’s 
film, 
Clementine 

uses it as a conversation starter 
— not to express any meaningful 
or established feelings. The 
implication in Joel’s vitriolic 
“I assume you fucked someone 
tonight. Isn’t that how you get 
people to like you?” is that she 
doesn’t have any depth to her 
personality, that she uses her 
body to get to know people. 

Avoiding the possibility of an 

argument about sex positivity, 
Kaufman uses this sequence 
to point out how weird it is 
that the bodies we’re in feel 
so separate from who we are 
inside our heads. Nearly the 
whole film is spent in Joel’s out-
of-body experience during the 
procedure. Maybe Joel thinks 
(while 
Clementine 
denies 

that she’s at all promiscuous) 

that Clementine sees physical 
nakedness as less incriminating 
than emotional vulnerability, 
or maybe she sees her body and 
her mind connected in a way 
that Joel can’t. When her mind 
tells her body that she wants to 
eat off of Joel’s plate the first 
time they meet, she does. 

“It was so intimate,” Joel 

recalls 
about 
the 
bizarre 

moment. “Like we were already 
lovers.”

There’s a scene where Joel 

and Clementine venture out 
onto a frozen lake to lie down 
and stargaze. The frozen lake is 
revisited multiple times, even if 
the characters don’t realize it.

“What if it breaks?” Joel 

asks.

“‘What if?’ Do you really care 

right now?” Clementine says.

Is the ice going to crack? Is 

the view of the stars worth the 
risk of hypothermia? Is the love 
worth the heartbreak? It’s the 
paradox of loneliness when you 

know how much it hurts to be 
with someone who hurt you, 
but you still want it anyway; 
of knowing no one can force 
feelings of love but still hurting 
when they don’t love you back; 
of Valentine’s Day intending to 
be all about love, but ending 
up being about heartbreak; of 
everyone having the shared 
experience of childhood but 
somehow forgetting how lonely 
it is to be a kid when you finally 
grow up.

All we’re supposed to want 

is survival. We’re supposed to 
shave off anyone who might 
hold us back. But instead we 
go against all our instincts 
to protect ourselves when we 
choose to love someone, even 
with all their weaknesses laid 
out on the surgical table. Maybe 
love is the ultimate paradox.

Daily 
Arts 
Writer 
Mary 

Elizabeth 
Johnson 
can 
be 

reached at maryelzz@umich.edu

MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON

Daily Arts Writer

It’s a science-
fiction version 
of the universal 

fear that you 
can spend so 
much time 
in love with 
someone only 
to end up as 
strangers.

THE B-SIDE: PARADOX
The true tragedy of snob

NINA MOLINA
Daily Arts Writer

In 
his 
1988 
poem 

“Introduction 
to 
Poetry,” 

Billy Collins laments the way 
his students have been taught 
to read poetry. Rather than 
“hold it up to the light like a 
color slide,” or “press an ear 
against its hive,” he writes 
that 
the 
students 
torture 

a confession — in this case 
meaning or significance — out 
of the poem. Once they have 
found its meaning, analyzed 
its metaphors and discussed 
its themes, they leave. 

Collins 
hates 
this; 
he 

wants the experience of art 
appreciation to be as ongoing 
as the admiration of nature in 
everyday life. 

I agree with him. As one 

learns more about a subject 
— in this instance, art — the 
less one seems to appreciate it. 
This is the paradox of the snob. 
Critics and experts’ knowledge 
about art ultimately lead to 
bitterness and disillusionment 
about the direction of that 
particular art form. Slowly, 
the initial passion for the form 
is replaced with unending 
criticism. 

We are taught to approach 

art in this paradoxical manner. 
In my creative writing classes, 
I’ve learned to employ the 
syntax 
of 
Alice 
Munro, 

Raymond Carver and Alice 
Walker; we read the words 
and then tear them apart and 
put them back together in 
carefully 
crafted 
academic 

prose of analysis. But I don’t 
want to tear the story into 
shreds 
of 
clever 
sentence 

turns, front versus backstory 
and particular verb usages.

I wonder when I’ll start 

seeing 
writing 
as 
work. 

Perhaps 
that’s 
what 
the 

best artists do — they have 
routine and practice, what 
outsiders conflate with divine 
inspiration. Walking the line 
between creating a writing 
routine while also giving in 
to the whims of inspiration is 
tricky. 

Perhaps therein lies my 

question: 
Why 
does 
art 

criticism exist if it turns us, 
the art critics and consumers, 
into 
cynical 
curmudgeons, 

ready to attack any artist, 
musician or writer? 

In 
one 
of 
my 
English 

classes, we’re learning about 
Romantic-era literature. At 
the 
peak 
of 
19th-century 

Romanticism, 
nature 
and 

emotion became art’s purpose. 
And, for the first time in 
literary history, art’s purpose 
became 
oppositional 
from 

societal, morality and value 
systems. 

We just finished reading 

Johann 
Wolfgang 
von 

Goethe’s “The Sorrows of 
Young 
Werther,” 
the 
1774 

German novel about a young 
man’s infatuation with an 
unavailable girl that leads to 
his suicide. Werther’s foray 
into the reality of unrequited 
love is painful to watch, even 
with Goethe’s beautiful prose. 
And yet, the epistolary novel 
is flooded with reasons to 
continue loving the world, 
despite the trials and pain 
that 
they 
bring. 
Though 

Werther is no exemplar on 
how 
to 
handle 
romantic 

rejection, 
his 
youthful 

intensity and sensitivity are 
highly admirable. He writes 
to his best friend, “I am proud 
of my heart alone, it is the 
sole source of everything, all 
our strength, happiness and 
misery. All the knowledge 
I possess everyone else can 
acquire, but my heart is all 
my own.” This vulnerability 
to the world is enjoyable and 
interesting to watch unfold, 
but it’s also a virtue that us art 

consumers can — and should 
— learn. 

As an English major, I live in 

constant fear of becoming this 
snob. I worry I will approach 
every piece of literature I 
pick up ready to annotate the 
margins and always keeping 
the 
essay 
prompt 
at 
the 

forefront of my mind. But, I 
agree with Collins when he 
writes that he would rather 
“walk inside the poem’s room 
and feel the walls for a light 
switch” than beat a meaning 
or significance out of a poem. 

It 
seems 
some 
art 

enthusiasts 
find 
comfort 

in that they are the few 
“chosen” followers who are 
enlightened enough to have 
better taste. I’ve encountered 
people who correct the way 
you say Van Gogh. They are 
the ones who gasp at you 
for not knowing that the 
drummer of Nirvana was the 
lead singer of the Foo Fighters 
and book-shame you for not 
having 
read 
“Fahrenheit 

451,” 
“Slaughterhouse-Five,” 

“Frankenstein” or any Oscar 
Wilde. But I have yet to find 
joy in being the “select” few. 

In some ways, this makes 

me excited to have space away 
from this kind of analysis 
after my formal education. I’m 
determined to never let go of 
that excited, playful state of 
being enraptured in a novel. 
Like Werther, I’d be sorry to 
lose the beauty of nature in 
the name of art.

Daily 
Arts 
Writer 
Nina 

Molina can be reached at 
ninamolina@umich.edu.

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