The Performance of Heartbreak: An Epilogue

The Performance of Heartbreak: An Epilogue begins in familiar territory for Scott Caan: a writer, Jimmy (Daniel Irmas), struggles with relationship issues and turns to his best friend Giovanni (the always delightful Joe Pease) for help. Caan’s writers are often tortured and tormented men, but in Heartbreak, a finger is finally put on the pulse of that despair: capitalism.  

The play opens with Jimmy flipping a coin, a decision weighing on his mind. Giovanni patiently waits his friend out as he rambles about trips to Paris, babies and the aggravation of his live-in girlfriend taking over “his” space. 

            Jimmy: Having a woman move in with you is like the worst deal in the history of

                         bad deals. Think about it. She gets a new house, new furniture, new place to put 

                         all  her shit, and what do you get in return? Love? Support? Occasional affection. 

                         But what the fuck? She’s still getting all that shit too. Nothing’s changed, except 

                         mine becomes ours, and I just became we. For what? I mean, I was just having 

                         sex with you, regularly, for free, and now I’m paying for it.”

            Giovanni: Someone has to be the Masculine and someone has to be the

                             Feminine. I mean, everyone plays a part. You move in, she moves in. 

                             Someone wears pants…Generally the one wearing those very pants wakes up 

                             every morning and puts money in them.”

The very language Jimmy and Giovanni use to seek an understanding of cohabiting with a romantic partner is infused with patriarchal capitalist constructs.  The negotiation of two human beings merging their individual lives is overshadowed by fiduciary concerns. Someone wears the pants in the family, someone has financial responsibility, and that someone is male. The man provides (Masculine = active) and the woman takes (Feminine = passive).  And thus it becomes clear how desperately patriarchy relies on capitalism to maintain its power.

What’s fascinating to note is that while Caan never mentions marriage, which in its historical tradition outright treated women as property, even the act of cohabitation between Jimmy and his girlfriend replicates that patriarchal structure. And an equal relationship turns into an unequal one.  By moving from her house to Jimmy’s, where everything has been bought and paid for by him, she no longer carries the burden of financial need, but that doesn’t mean she stops “owing.” She pays her debt with her body. And sex that was once “free” becomes a business transaction, turning her into the very definition of a prostitute. (That a wife “owed” her husband sex was in large part why spousal rape wasn’t considered a crime until the mid 1970’s and didn’t become law in all 50 states until 1993.).  What does she get in return for all this? Status with her female friends, Giovanni guesses. Talk about a bad deal…

It might be easy to dismiss both Jimmy and Giovanni as unrepentant Neanderthals at this point, but it would also be a mistake. We are all born into a cultural history, born into traditions and values that lurk beneath the surface in our psyches even when we no longer believe they’re the truth. Masculinity, we are taught, has more value than femininity. And while femininity can gain value when infused with masculinity, masculinity is devalued when infused with femininity. It’s the patriarchal playbook. And though Caan’s work doesn’t touch on race, capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy go hand in hand. 

Ultimately, though Jimmy and Giovanni maintain the binary construct of Masculine and Feminine throughout their discussion, they also boil people’s behavior down to individual choice, and women can choose the “masculine” behavior just as men can choose the “feminine.” Essentially it comes down to what feels right to each individual person, no judgment. It’s progress, and as come to find out, Jimmy’s churlishness about sharing his things doesn’t so much stem from selfishness as it does from that very pressure to be the “provider.” To make enough money to provide all the things and the trips to Paris and babies…because Jimmy wants to quit his soul-sucking job, writing for a popular television show.

            Jimmy: “These people. This machine. They don’t have hearts. There’s no pulse. 

                          They don’t give a shit about feelings…It’s actually a prerequisite. I know this 

                          sounds crazy, but I’m pretty sure, in order to be an executive at one of these 

                          big television networks, you have to take a class on how to ignore compassion.”

No matter whether your business is producing television or selling coffee pots, when profit is given a higher value than people, people simply become things, cogs in a machine that have no value as human beings.  And when art is reduced to a profit making business, it’s only imperative is to make what sells. And it has a vested interest in selling the values of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy, in upholding the system that made it profitable to begin with.

And here is the crux of Jimmy’s despair. He has become one of those cogs. Even worse, he’s become complicit. 

            Jimmy: “It’s all our problems now because we signed up. We said ‘okay, I’ll play along, 

                          but just for a bit. I’ll feel it out.’ We didn’t know that once you settle in, it’s hard 

                          to come back… Money. We move for it. We break for it. We sell our original 

                          dreams for it. We take the blueprints we set up, and turn ‘em into something else 

                          to fit the way. We trade our heroes for homes and speedboats that don’t work 

                          anyway and we teach our kids that creativity and passion’s for someone else. Or 

                          that it just plain ain’t. Period. That’s the performance. That’s the heartbreak. Life."                           

The system breaks for no one. And this is why I see this as one of Caan’s darkest plays, because despite Jimmy’s romanticizing of the starving artist, the hard reality is, no money, no food, no roof over your head, no survival. The purpose of life has been reduced to making enough money to live. And the truth of the matter is, the poorer you are, the harder you work.  Throw in centuries of sexual and racial oppression that barred women and people of color from educational systems and equal opportunities and fair pay. Throw in the historical truth that this country’s economy was built upon the backs of African slaves.  And now toss in the all too common eagerness to blame immigrants, women, black people, brown people, Irish people, and on and on and on for your own despair. And the system keeps rolling, its power undiminished.

We are all trapped in this machine. It’s why civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King began to see that their fight, our fight, wasn’t just with the system of white supremacy, or patriarchy, it was with capitalism itself, which gave white supremacist and patriarchal oppression a place to flourish. 

And yet, in art there is still hope. Art not bound to financial gain. Art written with the express purpose of pushing against the darkness in search of a way out.  Art that gives representation to women, to people of color, and to alternative forms of masculinity that aren’t toxic to everything around them. 

Jimmy and Giovanni see the theater as the stage for that hope. But theater is also a business, and even if one isn’t interested in making a huge profit, one has to at least make enough to keep the lights on. So unless the theater is privately funded, productions that made money would need to be given some kind of priority to keep the seats filled.

But that would be quite the dream, wouldn’t it? A theater as a philanthropic project dedicated to producing work that is resistant, representative, and revolutionary. Someone, make it happen, please. 

I can’t help but think that in addition to art, Caan offers us one other glimmer of hope. That Jimmy was on to something when he finally realized that what his girlfriend gives him (in exchange for a couch) is patience. Because isn’t patience one of the most important things we can give each other, and ourselves? Compassion is intrinsic in patience, as is connection. Patience gives us the breath we need to keep listening, to try again, to not give up on other people, on ourselves, and even on change. Most of us live with some form of privilege, most of us, at some point, are going to screw up as we wend our way through issues of sexism, racism, sexual orientations and gender identities, and class. When we do, we can only hope there’s someone in our lives patient enough to take the time to explain it to us.  In this sense patience is an act of resistance. It’s not passively waiting for something to happen. Rather, it’s the deliberate act of giving another person a chance to grow. And that finally might lead to a little progress, instead of perpetually spinning around in circles.

All The World’s A Stage: Scott Caan’s “The Trouble We Come From”

Gender relations and identity have been recurring themes in much of Scott Caan’s work, and they’ve never been more evident than in his most recent play, “The Trouble We Come From.” The play’s structure is a departure from Caan’s typical approach, but without missing a beat, he deftly weaves flashbacks, scenes within scenes and a play within a play to not only take the audience on a journey through his main character’s psyche but through our own as well.

When we first meet Charlie (played with an endearing befuddlement and sweet earnestness by Michael Weston), he is frantic, fearfully peering through the windows of (what we assume) is his own house. He enters it cautiously and proceeds to have multiple heart attacks as he stumbles upon burning candles, incense, a glass of wine, a vandalized photo of him and his girlfriend, and finally a pair of red lace panties strewn across the back of his couch. Within seconds it’s apparent he’s having one of the worst nights of his life.

Completely in a tizzy, Charlie scrambles up the stairs to his bedroom, and after finally ascertaining that his unwelcome intruder Samantha is no longer in the house, he calls his best friend, Vince (Scott Caan).

Caan is superb as Charlie/Weston’s foil. Released from playing the angst of existential crisis, Caan plays Vince with impish abandon. The result is a performance that is pure joy.

As Charlie begins to explain to Vince what has sent him over the edge, we discover that after finding out his girlfriend Shelly is pregnant, and having a poor enough reaction to send her running off to Detroit, he has had several unexpected encounters with girlfriends from his past that have left him questioning his future.

These past girlfriends (plus one additional character) are all played by the same actress, Teri Reeves. In a remarkable Tatiana Maslany-esque feat, Reeves seamlessly creates four completely separate and believable personas: Joanna, Samantha, Kelly, and “the Blonde.”

I want to divert a moment to talk about Shelly (Claire Van Der Boom), who even in her absence throughout much of the play is remarkably present. Not only do we see her through Charlie’s eyes, but we see her through Vince’s as well, not to mention her influence on the physicality of her and Charlie’s living space. Thanks to Shelly, the refrigerator is chock full of unexpired goodness and, in what will become a running gag throughout the play, is also equipped with a foghorn like alarm that goes off when the door is left open for too long.

Far from being written as a controlling leash-wielding fun-stealing bitch who is a threat to Charlie and Vince’s friendship, Shelly is spoken of only in fondness by both Charlie and Vince.  The rigged refrigerator leads to Vince questioning what is going on with Charlie that would require it (when Charlie was seven he left the refrigerator door open and ruined everything inside. His mother “lost her mind, slapped him around and took off for a couple days.”) Not once does Vince offer a condemnation of Shelly for installing it. Word that Shelly is pregnant doesn’t spell the depressing end of the world for life as Charlie and Vince have known it. Instead, Vince is thrilled. “We’re having a baby,” Vince crows with glee, and thus inserts himself happily into Charlie and Shelly’s growing home.

As Vince begins trying to talk Charlie down off the ledge, we begin to discover what has put him there. It is here that we are treated to our first “flashback,” or scene within a scene. Vince doesn’t simply fade into the background though. Far from it, he is as active an observer as we are, and Caan’s facial expressions as he watches these exchanges are priceless. 

First up is Latina Femme Fatale Joanna. The Temptress, the snake in the garden, the overpowering Id, and pure fantasy. Charlie says she’s “without question the greatest sex I’ve ever had.” In fact, Joanna is a powerful, and very recognizable, cultural trope. In the face of her, what man could be expected to resist? Who could blame him? It’s her fault, not his, for seducing him. This is our expectation anyway. And if it’s not clear enough where we’ve seen “Joanna’s” before in past dramatic representations, Caan makes sure we get it by calling up images of “Fatal Attraction” through a reference to bunnies boiling in pots.

Reeves is an absolute delight as she teases and torments an increasingly flustered Charlie, who is barely able to stand his ground against her. She completely disregards his attempts to say no, even going so far as to physically accost him, pursing his lips with her own fingers to force him tell her what she is demanding to hear. In fact Joanna is the main reason Charlie has begged Vince to come to his house, as protection against Joanna’s sexual wiles and aggression.

Next we meet Samantha, one of Charlie’s two past loves. She’s the girl Charlie couldn’t get out of his system. Done was never done, and breakup after breakup only led to Charlie chasing after her again until she finally got back together with him. Then one day he stopped chasing her and she was left alone. For that reason, Charlie is convinced he ruined Samantha’s life and her appearance now is tied to her need for revenge.

Reeve’s Samantha is petulant and demanding. In a classic ex-girlfriend goes psychotic Lifetime movie move, she makes herself at home in Shelly and Charlie’s house, taking a lighter to Shelly’s face in the picture on the table and draping her panties on the back of the couch. Like with Joanna, we see the dark side of women’s sexual “empowerment,” one that strikes fear in the men involved.

In the middle of Charlie’s struggle to convince Samantha to leave his house, he runs into “the Blonde” outside the theater. Reeves’ imbues the character with a coy innocence and as the music swells, we see an instant connection between the two. She invites Charlie for a drink. Once again Charlie is faced with temptation, and it’s all he can do to say no, going so far as falling down on his knees in agony as she walks away.

Samantha only agrees to leave Shelly and Charlie’s house when Charlie promises to meet her later at her own. The first act breaks with, much to Vince’s chagrin, Charlie leaving to fulfill said promise and Vince waiting for Joanna.  

If there is a running theme throughout Act One, it seems to be a deep anxiety about male helplessness in the face of a female seductress. And Caan wastes no time in knocking it down. Vince’s thoughts on accountability are made quite clear early in the act when he scolds Charlie for trying to excuse his actions by saying he knows they’re stupid.

Vince says: “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this, you do it a lot. Saying something is stupid, admitting to it before you say it, does not in any way exonerate the stupid thing you’re about to say. It’s still stupid. It doesn’t make it any less so if you cop to it before hand.”

In other words, admitting you’re a stupid asshole doesn’t excuse you from accountability for being a stupid asshole. Biological urges do not excuse bad behavior. No matter what Joanna, Samantha, or even the Blonde do, the only person to blame for Charlie’s actions is Charlie. 

It’s a refreshing slap in the face at a seemingly cultural imperative to lay the blame for men’s actions at the feet of women. Her dress was too short, her shirt too low what’s a man to do it’s out of his control. Vince, and Caan, call bullshit.

Act Two begins with what may go down as one of my favorite sequences in the play. It’s still nighttime; Charlie returns home and grabs a bowl of cereal, leaving the refrigerator door open. The foghorn blows and Caan goes to town with physical comedy as Vince, sleeping under a blanket on the couch, yells in terror, promptly falls off and then scrambles in a blind panic across the floor, only stopping when he hits the stairs leading to the bedroom. Chest heaving, he hangs on to both the blanket and a pillow for dear life as he tries to pull himself together.

Already miffed at his rude awakening, Vince grows increasingly agitated as Charlie’s explanation of what happened with Samantha meanders around through various musings on the progression of women’s sexuality. But finally Charlie admits that nothing happened with Samantha. He ended it. For good. 

Breathing a sigh of relief, Vince is ready to claim victory for Shelly and Charlie and call it a night. Until Charlie reminds him it’s not over. They still have to deal with Kelly. Samantha wasn’t the only woman besides Shelly he ever loved.

But before Charlie talks about Kelly, he wants to know what happened with Joanna. As Vince desperately tries to change the subject, Charlie susses out that Joanna and Vince slept together. In yet another hilarious sequence, Charlie demands to know how it was, and Vince finally admits it was… okay. Charlie has a harder time accepting that Vince didn’t have the best sex of his life with Joanna than that his ex girlfriend and best friend had sex all over his house. As Vince comments later in the play, fantasy always trumps reality.

But finally Charlie tells his final story of the night and we flash back to his conversation with Kelly.

Reeves brings a sweet vulnerability to Kelly. Unlike Joanna or Samantha, Kelly bares her soul for Charlie, and us. She admits she was a shell of a person when she was with Charlie, too afraid of rejection to be true to herself. But everything in her life is wonderful now, and she’s ready to be in a relationship. She wants Charlie back. Needs him back. Because despite how great her life is, it is, in essence, empty without him in it. His final rejection breaks her heart. Unable to even look at him, she walks away in tears.

Kelly is also a woman all of us know. Whether we identify with her ourselves or just recognize her lovelorn desperation from romance novels and movies. Culturally speaking, Kelly is the girl who reminds all us other girls that our lives are not complete without a man.

But there is more to this story, and it’s Vince who tells it. Charlie treated Kelly like crap. And she let him. What did Charlie do on Kelly’s birthday? Played golf with Vince. Bros before ho’s? Not in Vince’s world. The way Charlie and Kelly interacted was wrong. Nowhere does Caan make it clearer that relationships and sex needs to be a two way street than in Kelly’s story. Vince’s biggest condemnation of Kelly and Charlie’s relationship is that Kelly never had a voice, not in bed and not anywhere else. That’s not a relationship, Vince says, that’s prostitution. Female desire is every bit as important as male desire.

Throughout the play, Charlie has noted the cosmic coincidence of running into these four women on this particular night at this particular time. He’s convinced that somehow he’s being tested. It’s teased early on that the entire thing might be a setup when both Joanna and Samantha clearly know who Shelly is and follow her on social media.  Jealousy and competition between women over men and women’s distrust of their male partner’s fidelity resonate culturally—and the motivations for all these women to play this game are certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

But Caan knocks that down too. Vince doesn’t even consider for a moment that Shelly is “twisted” enough to pull off such a thing. In fact, it’s none of these women’s fault this is happening. It’s Charlie, Vince surmises, who has in fact put all three women back into play in his life in order to test himself. And as far as The Blonde goes, desire for other women doesn’t end with commitment. That’s just the way the universe works. The point is, Vince reminds him, that Charlie said no, took responsibility for his own actions, and passed. With flying colors. 

Night turns to day and Vince tells Charlie it’s time for him to let himself off the hook and enjoy the beautiful life he is creating with Shelly and their baby. As Charlie pulls a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and promptly closes the door, it’s a physical verification of the progress Charlie has made in his life.

Now we finally get to meet Shelly in the flesh, but all our expectations for what comes next are sent spinning when she walks onto stage from the audience holding the playbill for “The Trouble We Come From” in her hand even as we hear Charlie thank the crew for their hard work and tell them he’ll see them the next day.

In that moment it’s revealed that none of what we just witnessed was “real;” it was all artifice, a play within a play.

Claire Van Der Boom brings a range of emotions to Shelly. Both self assured and vulnerable, Shelly is not afraid to speak her mind. She is appalled at the play she just witnessed, appalled that Charlie not only feels the need to put his angst up for public display but that he still has that angst at all. Shelly might want Charlie in her life, but she doesn’t need him, especially at the expense of her own dignity.

As she walks away, Charlie scrambles to explain himself. The play wasn’t real. Yes, he has anxiety, yes he comes from a shitty childhood and has a hard time accepting the good things that have happened in his life, but he’s emotionally mature enough and intellectually developed enough to know that what he has with Shelly is good. He loves her, appreciates her, and wants to build a life with her. Their relationship is healthy and therefore as Shelly puts it, boring. No one would want (or perhaps need) to watch it, but “living it,” Charlie says, “is fucking fantastic.”

And then Charlie falls down on one knee and in yet another defiance of expectation, the play doesn’t end with an engagement. While Charlie offers to marry her if that’s what Shelly wants, Shelly tells him none of that matters. When she says “I do,” she’s saying yes to the only thing that does matter: building a life together, with him and, she reveals, their daughter.  

Early in the play, Vince says it’s a concept of God that offers hope for dealing with our problems. But one of the things that I love most about Caan’s work is optimism that things can be better. We can be better. Identities and ideas that hold us back can be teased out and overcome. Sometimes, though, the hardest thing to do is recognize when we are being culturally played. This is the trouble we all come from.

But this is why art needs to recognize and focus on what’s broken in our culture. What makes Caan such an important voice at this particular moment in time, is that he uses what’s broken to show how it could be made right.

Scott Caan's "9/11"

A/N: Please note that this is more akin to a dialogue between me and the ideas in the play than a review or critical analysis.

“9/11”

Last January I had the opportunity to see Scott Caan’s play “9/11” in its entirety, as it would happen, just days after the terrorist attack by religious extremists on Charlie Hebdo in France. It was eerily timely, for despite the passage of thirteen years, “9/11” remains remarkably on point and sadly all too relevant.

Originally written in 2001, “9/11” takes place hours after the planes hit the towers. It follows a handful of characters’ attempts to deal with and make sense of the enormity of the tragedy, brothers Matty (Mark Pellegrino) and Sean (Scott Caan), Sean’s best friend Vic (Val Lauren) and several other characters they meet along the way. It is at heart a conversation about anger, fear, helplessness and ignorance.

Matty, Vic and Sean all have very different reactions to the tragedy. Matty is angry and vengeful, sensing that the world he knows has forever been changed. He sees danger around every corner, expects more attacks, and is ready to grab a gun and go to war. He knows exactly who his enemy is: Muslims, Arabs, people easily identifiable by differences in physical features, dress and language. He’s a racist and he knows it. He also doesn’t care.

Vic is struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy, clinging to the President’s direction that citizens should go about their usual business, go out, go shopping, and spend money to prop up a stock market in a tail spin. Vic’s attempt to behave as if nothing has changed infuriates Matty, who becomes increasingly agitated as Vic conducts business on the phone.

Matty is just as appalled by Sean, who shows up seemingly having no reaction to the attacks at all. But Sean, who is having quite the day himself, simply doesn’t know. When Matty fills him in, Sean, while horrified, can’t fathom the possibility of going to war. “This is America,” Sean says, “We don’t go to war. We bomb people.”  In Sean’s mind, “people” is synonymous with a place, the Middle East. Through that abstract conception, Sean erases the myriad of human beings who make up that place and thus has no problem imagining the entire region bombed out of existence.

Things come to a head when Matty attacks a man he perceives as Middle Eastern, only stopping because Vic intercedes and pulls him away. Matty’s defense of his actions leads to one of the most powerful exchanges in the play:

Matty:

            I see this guy and he’s giving me looks. He’s not American looking.

            He’s not European looking. He’s got brown skin and a beard down to here, follow me?”

Sean:

Yeah, he’s from the Middle East.

Matty:

             Middle Eastern cocksucker’s looking at me and giving me fucking

             looks, right?

Vic:

            Who’s giving who looks Matty? Who said he didn’t hear you call him

            camel fuckers?

Matty:

            Dude that’s what they are. That’s what they are. They’re bad people.

            I call bad people bad names.

Vic:

            He’s a person [emphasis mine].

Vic brings home the brutality of racism: ripping someone’s identity from them and imposing a falsehood that negates their own behavior and actions.  It’s something Vic knows all too well, for as it’s revealed a little later, Vic himself is of Iranian descent, a fact he and his family have hidden from everyone to avoid painful stereotypes, discrimination and violence.

But Matty is unrepentant, unwilling to truly hear what Vic is saying. The exchange continues:

Vic:

            What if that guy had blond hair and blue eyes what would you

            have done? Would you have slapped him? What if he was a fucking

            Nazi like you?

Matty:

            No, I would have done nothing about it. I would have walked away.

In forcing this admission, Vic lays bare the indefensible position of having to prove your loyalty if you are obviously an “other.”  It’s there in the demand that all who identify as Muslims or who are Middle Eastern voice a condemnation of Muslim extremists, as if without it, the suspicion will always linger that they are extremists themselves.

America has had a hard time letting go of this concept. One only need look back to the interment of Japanese Americans during World War II to see it in motion. For a country with an ideology built on the concept of freedom, we have a long history of doing violence to any signs of difference.

The real breakthrough in the play comes when Sean is speaking to Matty about Vic’s heritage. “Who cares,” Sean asks, “you love the guy. Who cares where his uncle or his father’s from?”

Finally Matty cracks, confused and vulnerable for the first time, as he faces the possibility that he completely fucked up.

But let’s take that concept a step further. Who cares what his religion is. Who cares what his sexuality is. Who cares what his race is. He’s a friend, he’s family, you love him, and that’s all that matters. They are different from you and that’s okay. To me, this is the most salient, and the most powerful, point of this play.

Individually it’s overwhelming to figure out how to impact change on a global level. And the fact of the matter is, most of us don’t have that kind of power. But at the level of the personal, we have all the power. We decide if we’re going to listen to the Vic’s in our lives who hold us to account when we’re on the wrong side of things, whether it’s a friend, a co-worker, a journalist, Jon Stewart, or someone you met on twitter.

I found myself thinking a lot about this play as I read stories about mosque attacks in France in the wake of Charlie Hebdo, as I had discussions with a Muslim friend about the discrimination she and her friends face every day, as she spoke about how disheartening it was to see the only representation her religion, which she loves, gets in the media is to be used synonymously with terrorism. And how when she tried to share those feelings with people, they dismissed her complaints as irrelevant and refused to listen.

The simple fact is, it’s the agitators who are brave enough to call out discrimination when they see it and the people who are brave enough to take a long hard look at their own flaws, at their own contribution to the ugliness in the world, who have the most chance of impacting the lives of everyone around them in a positive way.

In a world where terrible things seem to happen on a daily basis, it may be the best that we can ask for.

Scott Caan's "Vanity"

On August 30, 2014 the Martha Otero Gallery in Los Angeles held a showing of photographs from Scott Caan’s most recent book, “Vanity.”

It was an absolute treat to be able to view some of the actual photographs from the book. For those who are curious, I’ll include a list of the photographs on display at the end of this piece.

I have always been drawn to black and white photography, which is partly why I enjoy Caan’s photography. The other part is what he chooses to shoot. It’s not surprising, really, that the majority of Caan’s pictures are of people. As both a writer and an actor, I would imagine that people must fascinate him, and Caan’s portraits certainly fascinate me.  

One of the photographs included in the gallery was “Joanna in the pool at the Oakstone, 2007.” Joanna is in the water, her back against the edge of the pool, staring straight at the camera. The camera’s focus is entirely on her, her eyes the focal point of the picture, the physical background a blur. Her gaze is unflinching. Her eyes capture mine, hold mine, and yet she is unreadable, despite how desperately I want to know what has put that look in her eye, the set to her lips, the tension in her shoulders. The photograph is a story, every detail a piece in a puzzle, the answer to which is tantalizingly unknowable.

It’s easy to forget the photographer in this equation, that the subject of the photograph is actually sharing a gaze with the person taking the picture, filtered through a camera’s lens.  Quite a few of the people in Caan’s collection are staring straight at the camera, just like Joanna. Their faces are a study in diversity, young and old, wrinkled and smooth, smiling and resolute. The number of times I find myself staring straight into their eyes reminds me of how often in life I don’t.

To meet another person’s gaze is to risk vulnerability, of opening a door and inviting communication. Acknowledging someone else’s existence or by contrast, having your existence acknowledged is not always a safe or comfortable space. You may not like what you see or the attention you might get. There is power in a gaze: Even that brief exchange of glances is laden with cultural assumptions and expectation. We are taught that staring is rude. We learn the hard way that it can be confrontational.  But by staring at the ground instead of sharing a glance with each other, we miss too much of the life that is constantly swirling around us.

That Caan’s subjects feel safe enough to share that gaze with their photographer ensures that his photographs never feel voyeuristic. Caan does not shrink from his subject’s gazes and they don’t shrink from him. Caan does not demand they smile for the camera, and it’s not just traditional ideals of beauty that catch his eye. His photographs are not slick or artificial. They are intimate sketches of humanity.

On page 105 is a picture titled “Medicine 6^th and San Jacinto LA 2007.” It’s a photograph of a man sitting on a sidewalk, staring at the camera, as he shoots a needle into his arm (of what I’m assuming is heroin or some other drug).  His expression is resolute, and like Joanna, unflinching. It makes me wonder so many things. How Caan inspired this man’s trust to allow him to shoot it in the first place. And by allowing to have his picture taken, what did this man want us to see? What is his story? What happened that placed him on that street corner and drove him to put that needle in his arm?  When I look at that picture, my eyes keep coming back to his eyes, to his face, and thus to a reminder that his life is big and complex and that one moment in time, captured for eternity in that photograph, is only one small piece of it and even that one moment, I cannot fully know. 

The beauty of “Vanity” is the way each photograph, each captured piece of time, invites you to linger, invites you to marvel at another person’s existence, and invites you to fail at guessing who they really are.

I marvel, too, at Caan’s abilities with the camera, especially considering the way he explained his process to interviewer Mac Sandefur:  “I dig the idea of not knowing what I got and hoping it’s good. I got 36 chances with a roll. If I’m out and about running and shooting on the street, if I get one picture out of that I’m like, ‘I got something. We got a good photograph.’ That whole thing is rewarding.”

In this digital age, it’s eye opening to remember that when shooting film, you don’t know what you’ve captured until after you develop it. What a wild dance it must be to see something that catches your attention, to snap a photo or thirty, and then only after the moment is long gone do you know whether you really had something…or nothing.  Photography is life in 20/20 hindsight, and one that can only be appreciated when it is no longer anything but a memory.

As for the opening itself: it was small and intimate, populated largely, from what I could tell, with family and friends.  I’ve seen a lot of book signings in my day, and I’ve seen many when the numbers of friends the authors expect to come don’t show up. Scott Caan’s friends showed up. And that says a lot. In fact, in my book, it pretty much says everything.

List of Photographs:

Page 7: Christiana and Leopard at the Oakstone, 2009

Pages 12/13: Liz and heater at the Chateau, 2008

Page 24: Amsterdam Red Light Walk Alley tho, 2004

Page 26: Clear Port going somewhere

Page 27: Shallow Lane Museumplein Amsterdam, 2004

Page 33: Eight Hours Straight Prague, 2006

Pages 38/39: Jefe El Salvador, 2006

Pages 52/53: Going to California, 2012

Pages 60/61: Joanna in the pool at the Oakstone, 2007

Page 62: Mickey Avalon The Viper Room, 2007

Page 81: Camping Trip

Page 83: Steve Rudy Bagel Ford P16, 2010

Page 90: Lake Bird Chateau Hollywood, 2009

Page 117: Cloney Shoot Melrose Alley 2011

Pages 118/119: Duane Peters 80s Contest, 2010

Pages 130/131: Bird shoot in the Belushi Suit, 2009

Page 147: The one that got away on her Nikon, 2005

Page 153: Last Frame Ipanema Beach Rio, 2008

Pages 154/155: Atlantic Ocean 2005

Pages 158/159: Back lot super sport, 2008

Pages 166/167: Trailer Park Jacksonville, 2005

(My apologies to Mr. Caan for any errors in my very non-photographic memory of the photographs on the walls that night.)