Joseph Richards

On the urging of one of the readers of my book Capitalist Realism, I started to investigate the work of David Smail. Smail – a therapist, but one who makes the question of power central to his practice – confirmed the hypotheses about depression that I had stumbled towards. In his crucial book The Origins of Unhappiness, Smail describes how the marks of class are designed to be indelible. For those who from birth are taught to think of themselves as lesser, the acquisition of qualifications or wealth will seldom be sufficient to erase – either in their own minds or in the minds of others – the primordial sense of worthlessness that marks them so early in life. Someone who moves out of the social sphere they are ‘supposed’ to occupy is always in danger of being overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror: “…isolated, cut off, surrounded by hostile space, you are suddenly without connections, without stability, with nothing to hold you upright or in place; a dizzying, sickening unreality takes possession of you; you are threatened by a complete loss of identity, a sense of utter fraudulence; you have no right to be here, now, inhabiting this body, dressed in this way; you are a nothing, and ‘nothing’ is quite literally what you feel you are about to become.”

“My fear was casting someone that would be familiar to the audience, which didn’t feel credible for the story,” Glazer says. “So in wrestling with that, we came to the idea of her in disguise, and then the disguise led us to shooting the world as it is. The narrative and the method became the same thing.” Even Johansson’s sessions with a dialogue coach, in which she learns to speak in clipped, frosty R.P., were recorded for the film’s prologue, in which we see her extraterrestrial temptress ‘getting into character’.

In fact it is striking that the successive is not the past but the present which is passing. The past appears, in contrast, as the coexistence of circles which are more or less dilated or contracted, each one of which contains everything at the same time and the present of which is the extreme limit (the smallest circuit that contains all the past). Between the past as pre-existence in general and the present as infinitely contracted past there are, therefore, all the circles of the past constituting so many stretched or shrunk regions, strata and sheets; each region with its own characteristics, its 'tones', its 'aspects', its 'singularities', its 'shining points', and its 'dominant' themes. Depending on the nature of the recollection that we are looking for, we have to jump into a particular circle. It is true that these regions (my childhood, my adolescence, my adult life, etc.) appear to succeed each other. But they succeed each other only from the point of view of former presents which marked the limit of each of them. They coexist, in contrast, from the point of view of the actual present which each time represents their common limit or the most contracted of them.