“Hey boss. Remember me? Jack Newton. Got a question for you. Why did you make so many suckers? You say, ‘love never endeth?’ Well, I say, love never starts! You say, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.’ And, I say, the only thing the meek can count on is getting the short end of the stick! You say, ‘Is there one among you who is pure of heart?’ And, I say, not one!” – Leap of Faith (1992)
“Is this real or a legend?…Oh, it’s a real legend!” – Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Cave of Two Lovers (2006)
“I don’t believe in miracles.” – Ben Hur (1959)
In the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic, a group of people are chained inside of a cave, staring at a blank wall in front of them. Behind the people is a fire and behind the fire there are others lifting shapes and dancing to make shadows on the wall in front of the chained group. Those making the shadows give names to the people and their perceptions. Yet while the shadows are not reality, it is all the people in the cave know. Others who had been freed from said cave eventually come back and try to convince the cave-dwellers to escape, but the cave-dwellers see that when they come back they are distraught by the darkness and cannot see where they are going. Furthermore, they do not believe the strangers when they say that the world outside the cave is better. Socrates adds that, if they were able, those chained to the cave would kill the former cave-dwellers who came back. Which would you rather be? The person watching the shadows, the person making the shadows, or the person who knows “the truth.” Yet it is not the truth to those chained in the cave because they have not experienced life beyond the cave. It is nonetheless the responsibility of those who have been outside the cave to describe the sun.
Sounds Like Titanic is a book I wandered across while shelving. It has a striking cover that features a notable painting of a woman looking off into the left-hand corner with a violin in her left hand and a bow poised in the other. In bright-orange lettering across the front, it reads, “Sounds Like Titanic.” (The current trend of a painting being covered by neon words for a cover is one of my favorites and so I was intrigued.) It is the story of a woman, Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, and her time performing with an orchestra, except they don’t play music. The music they’re meant to be performing is actually played on a CD over speakers to the audience as they play softly along- so softly no one can hear. She took the gig to pay for her expensive education at Columbia University studying Middle Eastern Studies, with hopes of becoming a war correspondent – ironic that she wanted to cover and uncover the truth when she herself was fooling constantly with her job. The memoir gets its title from all the supposedly-original pieces of “The Composer” which ring a little familiar:
“The audience hears the soaring sound of a pennywhistle – a recorder-like flute that produces the high-pitched wail made famous by Celine Dion’s ballad ‘My Heart Will Go On’ from the film Titanic. The audience also hears the sounds of the violins and piano. But no one except the three musicians can see The Composer press the Play button on a portable Sony CD player…” (Pg. 13)
Regrettably, this memoir rubbed me the wrong way. I thought it was strange that despite her love for music and her time in Egypt as an international student, we never get to hear about any of the musical myths of the lands she was hoping to be in. I also find exhaustion reading about living in a female body. It has stopped being interesting to me how my female body moves in the world. It is already an obsession we try to combat. These sections of such books strike me as something that needs to be explained to men, and not to women. We live it every day. How many more mirrors do other women need to hold up before, in a scene reminiscent of a Hitchcock woman gone mad, we smash every single one? But even this did not bother me as much as I thought it would; there was something else. In the descriptions of the work, the addiction, the exhaustion, the music, and the landscape of post-9/11 America, I found something unsatisfying. Quotes like the following abound in the text:
“You have never been so close to killing yourself, not with drugs, which are merely a symptom, but with overwork – your real disease. It’s a disease you were born with, fertilized with mountain fog – the desire to flee small-town Appalachia, the guilt of doing so, the suspicion that you are, at your core, a fraud. The only cure is to work more. Work harder than anyone.” (Pg. 125-126)
The concluding section of the book concerns itself with a conversation between Hindman and The Composer, the man leading the orchestra and the one who composes music which, “sounds like Titanic,” yet we do not get to hear the conversation! Instead, we are merely told that Hindman sees that all his deceptions and cunning behaviors were simply masking a desire to be loved, praised, and accepted:
“Perhaps The Composer can sense, on this cold morning in January 2006, that this will be the last time I’ll ever work for him, the last time I’ll ever see him… Whatever reason, he begins to tell me about his life. During the hour-long ride to New Jersey he tells me more about himself than he has in the past four years, more than he ever revealed during the fifty-four-city tour around America, a six-city tour of China. And it is only because he lets me in, finally to see his real self, with his real flaws and vulnerabilities, that I will not repeat here what he told me… What I can say is this: The most ridiculous of tics and habits…are based in the deepest, most sincere feelings: the desire to be loved and praised.” (Pg. 243-244)
Frankly, I immediately called balderdash and poppycock. I found the book unsatisfying in a way that was hard to articulate for the first few days after. Yet not only for withholding the conversation between the Composer and herself, but because of something deeper still. It was hard to put my finger on it, but I finally did: the handling of miracles.
Music is a miracle of sorts. Despite being bought an electric piano and being surrounded by musical theater, music is a mystery to me in a way that other art isn’t. I am not a fantastic painter, but I know that if pressed I could paint a tree. I could not sing an opera though and I could not create a melody. My brain is not wired to create such things. As with many other human beings, things out of my grasp have a mysticism to them. There’s a veneer of majesty. Therefore, I tend to associate music with the divine. Music also happens to be central to most kinds of worship. Musical theater is one of the few places I can access the goosebumps and transcendence of my childhood in churches. Music is obtainable divinity. Music is also one of those arts that is difficult to fake. Either the notes are being hit or they aren’t. Either the person knows the piece or they don’t. Either this is a moment of divinity or not. Except in Sounds Like Titanic, the mystery is taken from us. The miracle is manufactured. It is finding out the crying Madonna statue had a battery pack and a fountain-rig. It’s finding out the boy from Heaven is for Real (2010) made it all up. Rather than making our world clearer, it makes it murkier. We require the true mysteries of life. We do not need to be manufacturing them. Hindman seems to think that the orchestra was providing a necessary service to those in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, who were needing something to believe in. Why not them?
I seem to recall a couple of examples of grand fraudulence in other pieces of art: Princess Caraboo (1994) and Leap of Faith (1992). Leap of Faith is a movie starring Steve Martin who plays a conman pretending to be a preacher on the road who accidentally performs a miracle, with all the spiritual implications thereof. Princess Caraboo takes place in Regency England wherein a young woman is discovered wandering the streets, speaking a foreign language, and is pretending to be a princess of indiscriminate, “Eastern” origin.
Films of fraud usually take on a certain act structure:
Act 1: Suspicion – People are first suspicious of whatever it is they’re meant to be convinced. The town of Rustwater is suspicious of Steve Martin’s Jonas Nightingale and a butler, Frixos, is suspicious in Princess Caraboo. Then come the subtle signs of doubt as people’s trust is challenged. Hesitance also begins on the parts of those experiencing the fraud as certain signs emerge telegraphing that perhaps the conman is not who they say they are. Jonas Nightingale seems to know information about those in the prayer tent, though he really had plants in the audience relay the ailments of certain congregants through listening devices. Princess Caraboo gets up at sunrise and mimics morning prayers, appearing to have a tribal tattoo, and carrying herself like royalty.
Act 2: Disruption – Something inevitably occurs in the conman’s narrative that disrupts the strategy. In Princess Caraboo, it is the reporter who is meant to catch the imposter-Princess who falls in love with her. In Leap of Faith, a young man, Boyd, who initially was walking with crutches after a car accident becomes inexplicably healed at one of the prayer revivals. In both instances, an anomaly unaccounted for, an “X-factor” changes everything.
Act 3: Concession – Buying-in is part of the narrative, whether that is the conman (Leap of Faith) or the people around them (Princess Caraboo). In Leap of Faith, it is the townspeople and eventually Nightingale himself who considers, ironically, that the thing which ends up being true is the miracle with Boyd. It changes everything and Nightingale is turned from a con artist into a believer after a long drought that the town was praying for finally ends with a downpour of rain at the film’s closing. By the end of the movie Princess Caraboo, the secret is found out as she runs away with her lover to America, having left the entire town charmed into enjoying her antics. By the end of Leap of Faith, the lie becomes true in the only way a miracle can. Even if the townspeople had been told the truth, miracles still came after anyhow, meaning that someone or something did make them happen, even if it wasn’t Nightingale. How is this any different from the audience members in Hindman’s memoir? The answer: information and consent. Hindman’s conclusion that the Composer was someone who initially wanted to do good and therefore should not be revealed is hollow. She presents it much like a magic show. But in a way, magic shows are the opposite of a straight fraud; you’re told you’re going to be tricked and you already know it’s an illusion, yet you are delighted anyways. You may not know how it is being done, but you know it is not magic. Pretending that a magic show is a true miracle would be insidious for it cheapens the efforts of the performer who spent hours upon hours practicing their illusions and perfecting their craft. Every American stereotype dictates that we want the quick and easy thing, that we do not want to work hard, and that we are ignorant enough that we cannot even tell when someone is playing a CD instead of an instrument right in front of us.
“The only major difference between The Composer’s customers in rural America and his customers in Manhattan – the epi-center of elite musical culture – is the amount of money they can spend on CDs, and the speed at which they part with their cash.” (Pg. 106)
It is something that erodes trust in the arts as people’s faith in its ability to lift us to heights of compassion and understanding is already dwindling. She is now one of the keepers of secrets. She is an insider into the truth and she refuses to set people free. Even if people are resistant to the truth you must still tell them of the world outside, even if they will mistake a magic trick for a miracle.
So, who would you rather be, those looking at the shadows or those making the shadows? Or would you rather be the person who knows about the shadows, keeps quiet, and then looks all around you and cannot believe that no one will leave the cave. To be fair, she authored a book about the experience, but shame has no expiration date and I wonder about any of those people who paid for her concerts and wondered how they could have been so stupid. In hindsight, they think a magic trick is nothing like a miracle, if only someone had told them that there was a life outside the cave.
ALEXANDRA AVILA 