I was watching Flea Bag last night, the Amazon Prime series that got an Emmy, and the main character keeps looking out of the movie at Me, the viewer, making eye contact and making comments about what her character is saying in the movie, a little secret aside just between her and me.
This breaks the convention of the movie and shocks us into awareness that I am separate from the movie….I See You, she says, like in Avatar.
Flea Bag is my new movie metaphor that I must work with. What is the truth here? Oh…that outfit she is wearing is the outfit of a French Mime…Is Flea Bag a mime of a sound mime?
Now that I open the bag, instead of fleas insights are jumping out. Our comic character is a tragic figure, isn’t she? She makes us laugh through her pain. She is constantly caught in the double-bind of consciousness trying to fit into relationship. She reminds me of the silent movie Charlie Chapman and Harold Loydes who made us laugh at their suffering.
The character keeps looking at me, pulling me into her life. What’s with that? I”m the audience. I don’t exist in her world. I don’t’ exist in my world, for that matter, when I lost in the show. I don’t exist, the suffering me, the complaining worried me that exists when the show ends. Heck, that’s why I watch TV and movies, to escape my suffering, to have a mini-vacation from me?
But she doesn’t obey that convention of the absent me. She looks at me. I SEE YOU, she says. What…Is this Avatar? When she looks at me, she and I are sharing a secret, a joke, a private aside that no one else sees. What is that secret?