Christmas Stockings Explain the Theatre’s Appeal

December 16th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Who’d have thunk it? Smack in the middle of a frivolous New Yorker article about Christmas stockings and the overpriced things we can stuff in them, I found a quote that distills one of the biggest reasons I love the theatre.

But before I get to that: Only in The New Yorker will you find five pages of gift ideas gussied up as a cultural think piece with no photographs. I kind of love that. “No, no Cyril! This isn’t anything like your tacky photo spread of the year’s best coffee table books! This list of knick-knackeries contains a quote from Claude Lévi-Strauss!”

And yes, Lévi-Strauss is the one whose quote got me excited. Midway through her story, Patricia Marx discusses our fascination with miniature things (books, pianos, etc.) by writing, “Claude Lévi-Strauss believed that the appeal of miniature has to do with its being a scaled-down replica, and therefore easier to grasp than the big, messy totality.” Then she quotes Lévi-Strauss himself:

To understand a real object in its totality, we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it. Reduction in scale reverses the situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively different, it seems to us qualitatively simplified. More exactly, this quantitative transposition extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed, and apprehended at a glance.

That makes immediate sense regarding, say, a dollhouse-sized grandfather clock. To fully consider a traditional grandfather clock, we have to look at it in pieces. We can apprehend the clock face, the pendulum, and the glass door, but not at the same time. It takes mental effort to be aware of those pieces and then knit them together in our minds as a whole object.

But a miniature grandfather clock fits in our hand. We can see it all in one glance. We don’t have to see it as a collection of parts, but as a full thing, solid and complete. Being able to apprehend an object so completely gives us a feeling of control and satisfaction, and that satisfaction increases when we can suddenly apprehend something that previously was so large and unwieldy.

Now apply this process to larger concepts: Justice. Marriage. Kindness. Betrayal.

Though they don’t tangibly exist, ideas like these shape our lives, and lord knows, we spend lots of time trying to understand them by breaking them down into smaller parts. The notion of justice is overwhelming, but thinking about the outcome of three criminal trials is fairly simple. We can consider each case, decide if the outcome is “just,” and then assemble our reactions into a larger notion of “justice.”

But what if someone miniaturized justice, instead of just breaking it down into pieces? What if someone took the huge concept and reduced it to a form that we could take in all at once?

That’s what the theatre does. When we watch a play or a musical, we are watching an actual world. Sure, we all know it’s temporary and that it isn’t the world we live in, but at the end of the day, there are still living people on the stage in front of us. They are performing actual actions. They are moving through the exact same time that we are moving through. They are living in a world.

But the world on stage is so much smaller than ours. With a turn of the head, we can see its walls. We know just where it stops. We know that beyond that ceiling or that aisle, this world goes no further.

What’s more, we can witness every second of this world’s existence.

Staying with the idea of justice, let’s consider The Merchant of Venice. That play’s world lasts for five acts, and these days, that means about two and half hours. Once the play is over, there is no more world for Shylock, Portia, and the rest to inhabit. Their world doesn’t get any longer. It doesn’t get any bigger. It doesn’t expand beyond the theatre where we’re seated. Much more than we can comprehend our own world, we can apprehend everything about the world of The Merchant of Venice.

That gives us power. It gives us the ability to form a complete opinion, because we’ve seen every piece of a thing.

So let’s say we really agree with Merchant’s vision of justice. Let’s say we find the resolution of the plot—meaning the incontrovertible end of that world—as being especially just. We can be satisfied because we have just seen a complete version of justice at work. Like the grandfather clock in our hands, we can hold that sense of justice in our minds as an honest distillation of an enormous thing.

When we love a play, when we say it’s “honest” or “real,” I would argue that’s because we feel it has given us a miniaturized version of our own experience. It has taken our world and made it smaller, more comprehensible.

And sure, every story does this in some way. Every news report or poem in some way distills the vast world into a miniature form. Again, however, there is something especially satisfying about a live performance because the miniature world it creates is real. It is peopled with actual bodies. It is actually happening in front of us.

From here, I could start spinning off into a hundred directions. There is so much more to say. But this is my core beliefe: The theatre creates miniature worlds that help us better understand our own vast and confusing existence.

And I started thinking about all because of a story about Christmas stockings. Who’d have thunk it?

Tags: Media

3 responses so far ↓

1 Bradley Cherna // Dec 16, 2009 at 6:42 pm

Just had to respond, pardon if I’m being a silly undergrad, but that quote had me thinking on similar terms. Now, I should write my senior thesis next semester on Synecdoche, NY and Thornton Wilder, and the distinction between miniaturization and completeness. Hah. I would add, that there is something more than taste, when you witness a theatrical … See Moreevent and doubt the methodology of distillation employed by the artists. That process of miniaturization is, perhaps, only the work of a master. Masterpieces seem to me to be miniaturizations of the times in which they were written, hinting at the completeness of that time. Even Wilder, who sought to portray the “universal,” seems to me to, in The Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town, miniaturize the times he wrote in. Lesser works tend to violate the completeness of time as experienced by their creators as well as by their future audiences. Perhaps this doesn’t work, though, because it doesn’t do anything to explain issues of relevance. You SHOULD spin off into a hundred different directions, just leave the Christmas stockings behind, cause I’ve never had one (a stocking, that is).
2 N // Dec 16, 2009 at 10:27 pm

Don’t have much to say other than I really, really enjoyed reading this entry. And, word.

(Also, completely unrelated: You probably are already aware, but just in case you aren’t, I must direct your attention to this impending awesomeness: http://www.amazon.com/Downtown-Church-Patty-Griffin)/dp/B0029F2G7E/)
3 Collin H // Dec 17, 2009 at 9:45 am

Very insightful Mark! Well done! I would have never even thought to apply that quote to abstract concepts like “justice”. I think your analysis expands to media far beyond the theater though. The same idea applies just as easily to film, television, books, video games, and anything else that tells a story.

Obviously to the people who know me well, the first thing I thought of when reading the quote is how close it was coming to explaining why I collect action figures. It isn’t that I play with them; it’s what the figure represents to me. Sure, Gremlins 2 is one of my favorite movies of all time, but putting a Brain Gremlin toy on my shelf reduces that entire hour and half of laughter and effects into a single point in space that I immediately associate with a larger, more meaningful experience.

To me, that quote is a powerful observation about one of the ways my brain works under the hood.

PS ~ To Joe Dante: Gremlins 3 needs to happen. We need a good sharp satire of the state of the world today. And Zach Galligan needs a comeback.

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