Cheap Essays: Protagonist Culture

Protagonist culture.

What I mean by this is culture in which you become the locus of attention, you become the protagonist in the narrative of the world, the telos. Rather than looking at objects, we think of the objects as looking at us. This finds its apotheosis in the internet and social media: an interconnected web in which I am its centre, a sprawling matrix – a simulacrum of the world – in which we are the gravitational axis.

In the world, we don’t matter. But in the internet we have our own page, our own fanbase, every connection we see is made to us, every foreign word is translated into our own, every advert is perfectly primed to make us see ourselves more clearly, and every instant of our lives is rendered ordered and recogniseable: a wondrous panopticon, constantly shifting depending on where we put our attention.

It’s a beautiful thing, social media. And while it does serve to connect people – to allow people to communicate openly and instantaneously, the primary reason it has succeeded is because it allows us to curate our own personal narrative, our own experience of the world – always partial, always private, always and for everyone, unique.

So far, so… well… every cultural theorist ever.

But I wonder whether this is what attracts people to particular kinds of cultural experience, specifically immersive theatre. I’ve been to a couple of immersive theatre experiences over the past few years – I guess probably everyone who has ever claimed to be interested in theatre has been to them as well (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the majority of them have been gifts from kind, well-meaning friends and family who are not involved in the theatre). I’ve always been suspicious.

I think immersive theatre has its head more firmly turned towards a theme park ride, than theatre. And is precisely of the kind of thrill that rollercoasters offer: whoosh, your body is being flung around and this experience in this part of the ride is yours and yours alone, and though you might be on rails that are strictly controlled, you are in your body – the flinging of you is what matters for this brief moment. One might think of the rise of video-games as offering the same sort of relief to a sudden painful realisation that you are not really that important: here’s a narrative where the world is everything it never will be, there you go, run free.

So, too in an immersive environment: you are what matters, your good time matters, your body is the locus of our attention, and though you are the puppet being led through a controlled environment, ignore that for a while and feel the thrill of being all you.

In a piece of immersive theatre (and I wonder too whether part of the attraction of certain kinds of fourth-wall-breaking theatre where the audience becomes within the play, cf gig-theatre) you are never asked to do anything more than be yourself and allow yourself to become a part of the story, to become a protagonist.

Which stands in direct contradiction with theatre: where the locus of attention is so determinedly not you. Is so determinedly somewhere else, so determinedly not of your world, where you are not the protagonist nor even a bit-part, and you have to accept that you are just one node in a matrix that doesn’t really have much of a centre, and certainly does not spin around you.

I’m not sure I want to conclude that this makes it better. Or worse. Or that social media is bad for us. Or even that we are wrong to want any of this. I really like rollercoasters a lot and I use twitter all the time. But… well, I’m suspicious, I suppose and this explains – to me at least – why my suspicions about immersive theatre and what it’s doing are less inchoate and more based on a cultural model of which I am also suspicious.

Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Oh, and don’t go and see immersive Great Gatsby or else you are a tory. Theeend.

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