Emma Heath and Evan Murphy
I
PLAYING DEAD
Evan comes over one afternoon to take my picture. He asked over text if I could sit still for 15 minutes and I said I could and so now he is here in my living room, with all his stuff like something is about to begin. I probably need a space with light, he says, and so we go up to the roof where the wind is vigorous, and my hat almost comes off. Meanwhile, Evan tells me to lie down next to the power line. His hair is blowing in his eyes and he is setting everything up quite slowly and I’m getting cold so I zip my jacket tighter. I am, I know, supposed to be dead but I am in my puffy jacket and my hat is in my pocket so it doesn’t fly away. The image will be of an oddly cozy corpse, insulated from the cold she cannot feel. This is part of the point, however: Evan doesn’t want me to be mistaken for dead, he wants me to play dead.
But what is it to play dead?
What, for instance, is the difference between playing dead and lounging luxuriously, indulging in motionlessness, on a sofa or bed? Playing dead is not lounging, it is not sleeping, or even being dead. Playing dead is an activity reserved for animals and children, moved by the equally extreme impulses of fear or imagination. Both lie there, against the forest floor or the playground, bark and tanbark pressing into fur and skin, their bodies—those uncontrollable beats and breaths and skips-– betraying the intentions of their mind, and creating a new kind of life, an in-between.
Once, playing in the pool on vacation, I decided to float face down for as long as possible. This childlike playing dead, initially compelled me as a breath-holding challenge. Dipping my face in the water, the initial premise was soon usurped by the much more thrilling promise of my own stardom, the idea that I was suddenly a protagonist, the pool my stage and the driving action the moment my parents would—noticing my lifeless form floating between splashing children — be brought to a revelation of their luck—how fortunate they were to have had me, their star, their golden, alive child! My every action, in this scene, took on momentous weight: I would now be privileged with almost-having-died, of their awareness that I was precious and mortal. Inevitably, in situations like these, reality drops down on the protagonist with a ghastly weight: the parents are preoccupied, the pool is full, and hers is a performance for no one. And just when she wonders: Am I enough of an audience for myself? She is compelled by lack of breath to come spluttering to the surface, gasping, back to the sea of splashers, moving among the rest. Spotlight dimmed. Curtains closed. This last part is important – the moment of playing dead when you are confronted with your total absurd aliveness in all its spittle and desperation to be noticed.
Or else: A soccer player flies into the air after a gentle brush with a defender. He’s flopping, we yell, what a fake, a phony,a limp biscuit, but there he goes nonetheless onto the grass like a ragdoll, so perfectly deboned we think—Might he have ripped something deep and-yes-fatal? We flinch at the possibility that he might never reassemble. And just when this seems to resolve into a reality, he grimaces and gets up. The faker. The flop. This twist of the gut is the point—the absolute absurdity of playing dead, only heightened by the relief of living. The soccer player and pool floater remind us that it is the need to breathe and beat, to get back up and continue on that is ridiculous.
II
TIME
In one photo: A boy lies in a field of tall grasses, one hand outstretched, the other placed delicately over his chest. In the background, clouds hover over him in psychedelic shades and the whole field beyond him has taken on that shimmery elusiveness of an acid trip – greenest greens overlaid by filaments of pink. Some of that gleaming violet bleeds onto the boy’s khaki pants. Otherwise, he is untouched.
Evan achieves this effect by taking a photo with a red, then a green, and then a blue filter over the lens, each spaced out by five minutes, so each layer captures the background as it moves. The boy in the field, myself in my puffy, become the canvas and time, an iridescent cotton candy wrapping itself around us. From my place on the ground, I hear Evan talking on the phone, fading out, like he might be walking away. I begin to wonder if he has left the roof, if this is all a big prank, to see how long I’ll stay. I see the image of myself lying there for hours, days, rain and branches falling over me, debris coating my torso and the possibility swells inside my helpless body that the world will continue on without me, forever spinning itself out in shades of blue and red and green.
III
COMA
In college, I fell into a state of unresponsiveness for four days. Monday to Thursday linked together like a zipper, rendering Tuesday and Wednesday irretrievable. What happened was: I did LSD with my friends on spring break and eventually everyone came down, except for me – I just stayed up there, out there, somewhere. The doctors called it a coma, my mom called it my incident, and I am now calling it the time I played dead.
The “incident” was different from my early aquatic theatrics because I had no control or awareness of my own centrality in this narrative. There I was, the center of my parents’ and friends’ attention, a mass of un-self-conscious flesh. My own story floated above, or beyond me, as I stayed—where? In some submerged state. And yet, I did wake up. A four day stitch, here to there. And like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, who falls asleep for 7 days and wakes up with a new gender, I expected a reward for this submersion. Instead I woke with a pounding headache and craving for a grilled cheese sandwich. I resumed classes. I went to parties. I ate grilled cheese sandwiches. Nothing much had changed, except a patch of emptiness trailing me. Those four days, a gash in my life’s tale.
I’ve talked to other people who have experienced a period of extended absence. A man with a moustache at a party once trapped me between his large frame and the fridge and as I felt my leg grow colder with the metal edge digging into it, he told me that he had once fallen into a similar drug-induced trance. His was so long and so vivid that he lived a whole other life within the course of his slumber. In the extended dream, he realized that he was in love with his best friend’s sister; they dated, got married, had kids; he sat by her death bed as she breathed her last breath. When he woke up he felt harrowed and empty, as if experiencing the second loss of his beloved – the death of her in his dream and the death of the dream in his life. His playing dead was a performance of life as it might have been. His eyes glossed slightly as he explained that every time he runs into her now, he feels that death again.
Simone Weil says that Whoever endures a moment of the void either receives the supernatural bread or falls. It’s possible that the man at the party and I both were thrust into the void and that it is by grace alone that we managed to emerge.
IV
PRETENSE
It is a pretense to play dead: we must be not dead, in order for it to be playing. But pretense also comes from praetendere – “stretch in front.” The cellophane over a bowl of salad, for instance, a swimming cap over hair, a yawn, an extension of the legs, tension in the muscles – all pretense – but here I am not stretched at all, a limp pile of well insulated fabric on my Brooklyn roof. Slack, flaccid, impotent.
Instead it is the lens that stretches out – the green, then red, then blue over the camera’s eye – visual cellophane, capturing the wind that shifts the clouds left. The violet that slipped onto the boy’s pants in the picture, blood, the violence of time against a body asked to stand still.
Later, I will see other of Evan’s images. They are largely of the first boy; I’ll learn that he was a hot flush of a love affair, a friend turned lover turned absentee. In other images, he is shirtless or looking into the mirror. With each glance, you see each relationship blossom again, like the three lenses capture all the roles he has played, people he has been to Evan and without him, layers of feeling exposed in some psycho-geological dig.
Later I’ll learn that this extended absence partly inspired the images. That Evan, too, fears the endless drudge of unchanging experience: the interminable silence, the open wound, waiting for the call that never comes, the suffering with no change, time stretching out, as Morrison puts it, in circles and circles of sorrow.
For now, I don’t know any of that. I am merely trying to sit still, to let time take her meandering course. And yet – I am anxious, twitchy, I am unsettled. I am convinced that Evan has forgotten to put the timer on, and finally when the camera clicks again, my foot twitches violently, betraying my pretense.
I could have been a better corpse. But I guess that’s kind of the point.
V
PLAYING POSSUM
It’s true that possums play dead. Possums are not alone, however: snakes, frogs, green head ants and even common swifts are all prone to thanatosis, or “tonic immobility” when, sensing danger, their bodies are involuntarily paralyzed. Scientists have another name for this state: Apparent Death.
There’s a chance this I was doing this when I fell into my coma – playing possum, thanatosis, tonic immobility: I had a hard final quarter of college: I experienced the death of a family member, and an extended break up, and was anticipating the inevitable diaspora of my friends around the globe. These losses might have been too much to face at once, especially on acid; and possibly, my body sensing the dangers of my own aliveness, played possum, spared me until it sensed I was ready to wake into the bright square of the hospital window—my mother asking me who was president, and face the rest of my life, which was a pain my body thought I could live through.
Possums maintain thanatosis for about an hour. I was out for four days. But there are humans who play possum for years. Take Charles Lamb of Columbus Ohio, who has earned the title “Dead Body Chuck” for his appearance as a corpse in movies with titles like Thankskilling, and Horrorween. There’s an interview with him online which is cheaply made and overlaid with a montage of his many deaths—slippings, tumblings, drownings, stranglings, stabbings, he’s succumbed to them all. In one scene, he sits in the bathtub when a hair dryer falls in and faux lightning covers his surprised visage. “I’ve got a dead face,” he tells the camera. It’s true. There is something about the pallor, bags under eyes, and excess flesh in his face that looks deathly. He’s become such an icon of death that he even gets fan mail. That’s part of why Chuck plays possum—For legacy, he says for the memories. At the end of the interview, he turns solemnly to the camera—I’ll be doing this til the good lord takes me.
Chuck’s playing possum is not out of a response to danger but the fact that his own life so closely resembles death. He’s a programmer, with a dead face, and a capacity to hold his breath for up to a minute. Playing dead has become his life. The last line in his bio on IMDB is that his catchphrase is “Never quit living your dream”. The dream of playing dead. He is so close to living a meaningless life that he has created meaning again; but there are lots who don’t.
VI
PLAYING ALIVE
Think of the man in Carly Simon’s “Playing Possum” from 1975 who gets a wife and a house and runs a bookstore and loses all of his formerly radical feelings and politicized urgency. The song is called “Playing Possum,” but it might well be called “playing alive.” She repeats the phrase: “but are you finally satisfied / Is it what you were lookin’ for / Or does it sneak up on you / That there might be something more?” She captures this sense that sometimes we need to feel that the lives we are living are brief reprieves from the lives we actually want to live, or from the lives we will eventually lead. That sometimes we need to convince ourselves we’re in hibernation, in order to believe that we’re coming back. And at what point do you admit that the balance has shifted, and that this performance, this playing possum is what life is for so many, that eventually, we are all just playing alive?
One of my students comes to office hours, bounces her foot, keeping rhythm for some invisible band. I scoot away, like my heart might hear the rapid pace and try to keep up. She wants to talk about the effect of her English grade on her prospects of getting into Business School. She is creative, excels in poetry assignments, has a natural authorial voice and metaphorical flourish. To the extent that she vibrates with a toxic rigidity off the pages, she is vivid and free in her writing. I inquire about her choice of school, already knowing that she wants to do what her parents do, that it exists in the umbrella term “Business” and that there are already internships, partnerships, luncheons, and galas gathered in an imagined calendar that extends indefinitely out on her mental horizon. Reanimated corpses could be knocking at her door and she would still be more worried about Business School’s acceptance rate. I wonder when it ends – the idea that you could play dead to protect yourself from aliveness, and when it becomes playing alive to protect yourself from the same thing.
After you went unconscious but before your body stopped moving, there was a period in-between. Sebastián tells me this years after the coma. You could walk and move but you were otherwise unresponsive, vacant eyes, like you had become unhooked from the rest of the world. The conversation floats up to me while I’m on the roof; there I sit, a captive audience, the past monologuing at me —like a zombie he says, not quite three dimensional. We walked you to your bed and you laid down. The next morning you were the same. We got you up and we got you out of your clothes and you played along. You kept doing that weird motion, he said, where you pinched your arm. A bad habit, an anxious tick. That was the last thing of “you” before collapse.
It’s strange to think of the artifice of your own habits, of the body repeating its motions beyond its own consciousness. Me, but zombie; me, but chicken; me, but outline. Headless with a head. The empty container holding firm before it crumples. The body, playing alive.
VII
CHOREOGRAPHY OF THE DEAD
In ancient Greek theatre, ghosts were played by actors wearing platform shoes to represent their distance from the earth. Men gliding above ground, separated from themselves, playing dead. Or, in the case of Clytemnestra, men playing women playing dead. That ghost emerges to seek justice for her death, which is in turn a vengeance for another, which was vengeance for yet another. The role of these dead, staged before us, is to grapple with what we might otherwise only know from beyond the grave, and to absorb it into life on earth – that vengeance is an unending cycle, for instance; that something beyond bloody murder might be called for in the name of Justice.
But how best to stage our own deaths? On heels? On the roof? Where does the arm go, or the eyelid? How to render our own dead bodies? This is the question Evan asks in his images.
He tells me to watch the scene in A Single Man, in which Colin Firth toys with the idea of suicide by staging his death in different positions—on the bed, shifting the pillow to absorb the blow; in the bathtub, where he crumbles and re-emerges, unsatisfied; in a sleeping bag, to contain the mess; but the mess will not be contained. As we watch him envision his final position, and the mess that others will or will not have to clean up, no position is suitable. Is it possible that this practicality is the anchor that prevents him from pulling the trigger? The inability to decide on the final vignette? This uncertainty presses him toward an eternity of playing dead, performing death, but never taking the leap. I’m curious about the last conversation. With whom will it be? Elias Canetti asks in his Book Against Death. The last book he reads. Unimaginable. These questions weigh us down, keep us tied to the earth, as death beckons from above.
Later, I’ll learn about Evan’s brush with cancer. At 19, he felt death’s presence woven into the fabric of his days, alienating him from his peers, rendering him reliant on his parents, like a child again. I want to bring death closer, Evan tells me; the project is a way to represent death’s looming form. Like Firth’s character putting the barrel of the gun against the teeth once, and then again, and again, playing dead forces us to look death up and down, to feel its contours, to not look away.
The play “Dead Outlaw,” based on a real-life bandit, Elmer McCurdy, is a study in this confrontation with death. In it, McCurdy is killed 40 minutes into the action and his corpse, embalmed and paraded around the United States, becomes the real star, a perverse sideshow attraction. The actor who plays him, Andrew Durand, put himself through rigorous physical exercise in order to stand still in his open casket on stage for that amount of time. Mountain climbers, pelvic thrusts, physical therapy for his back: His muscles cramp, his mouth goes dry, he has to carefully time his deeper breaths, his toe-wiggling, his blinks. The Times interview with him confirms what we supposed: Playing dead requires great physical endurance, great aliveness. But there is another layer: To inhabit this dead man, Durand is required to witness his own character being witnessed: I’m really reminded of his humanity in that moment, he told the Times. As a corpse, he is subject to the same thing all humans are: the unabating gaze of others. Our bodies splayed for the gawking.
The coma, for me, the cancer for Evan, made us into premature audiences of our own deaths. Alive on the stage for all to see, and fearful that this pretense might never end.
VIII
LOOKING BACK
Long after Evan’s final click, after getting up and going, I realize I had misunderstood something fundamental about the shoot. It was not a prolonged exposure that captured every moment, but rather three shots, separated by five minutes. I could have been anywhere for the time in between, as long as I got back in the same dead body pose by the camera click. Fifteen minutes spent still for the sake of three snaps of the thumb, three blinks of the shutter. Yet again, I played dead for no one.
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Emma Heath is a teacher and writer based in Brooklyn. Evan Murphy is a photographer also based in Brooklyn.