Be Yourself

Annie Baker’s first film is a slow burn. Much of the action unfolds patiently, in real time, whether it’s a child running down a hill or her blintz warming in a microwave. But its long takes also cut abruptly, interrupting the feeling they’ve built: Baker’s scenes, slyly cued to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Fourth Duino Elegy, “while wholly concentrating on one thing,/already feel the pressure of another.” One character reads a passage from the poem to the woman he is courting. She asks him to read it again, because she “spaced out for a second in the middle.” She was thinking about something else.

Janet Planet takes place in the summer of 1991 in the world of a single mother and her eleven-year-old daughter living just outside Amherst. Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is an acupuncturist; Janet Planet is her practice. Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) spends her days practicing Suzuki on a lap keyboard and molding Sculpey pies for a cast of figurines that live on a bookshelf fashioned into a miniature stage. In three acts, they receive three visitors at their tasteful cabin in the woods: Janet’s taciturn boyfriend Wayne; her old friend Regina, an out-of-work actress; and Regina’s ex Avi, leader of a nearby communal farm and director of its puppet theater group.

Baker shows us Western Massachusetts in deep depth of field, relegating her actors to the very edge of the frame or viewing them from such a distance that they are nearly lost in the textures of the summer countryside. Night peepers, lawnmowers, and tinny keyboard are dialed up to distraction. “Eyes up here,” commands the piano teacher when Lacy’s gaze wanders. “Very good. You’re ready to concentrate.”

If we didn’t see her at piano lessons, we might not assume that Lacy has trouble concentrating. From her perspective we notice the smallest details: the sun on her mother’s ear, a lost earring on the floor. As well as seeing what Lacy sees, we see a deadpan child in a baggy T-shirt, always hanging around in silent reproach. Ziegler has a naturally affectless demeanor and can look quizzical, pained, or bashful with the subtlest shift. Lacy’s stride is frank and clomping. She lies supine under the kitchen table. She reads on the toilet for forty-five minutes.

She and Wayne (Will Patton) vie passive-aggressively for her mother’s affection. After Janet leaves Lacy’s room to sleep with Wayne, Lacy spies on them in bed. Wayne won’t make eye contact with Lacy, who asks guileless questions about his kids and their custody arrangements, and the camera accordingly treats him less like a person than a body, obscuring his face. The tension between them breaks in a claustrophobic scene: Wayne, suffering from a migraine and made frantic by Lacy’s watchful presence, slams the door in her face.

Exit Wayne, enter Regina (Sophie Okonedo), costumed as a celestial orb and monologuing from a dais. She leaves the commune and renews an old friendship with Janet, who invites her to stay at the cabin while she looks for work and avoids Avi’s calls. A supporting character with main character energy, Regina privileges Lacy with candid gossip about Janet, of whom she is both effusively admiring and sharply critical. But she, too, eventually shrinks from Lacy’s gaze, walking out on a job at an ice cream stand, humiliated to be seen in so small a role.

Where Regina was mercurial and judgmental, Avi (an unnervingly placid Elias Koteas) preaches impersonal love. Over dinner he proposes that if we hold the Buddhist notion of the eternal I to be true, each of us is responsible for God’s decision to create the universe out of nothing. “I may look like a man, you may look like a woman, but we’re all the same,” he tells Janet and Lacy. While they are shyly attracted to collective consciousness, mother and daughter also seem to suspect, as Rilke does, that “we are not of one mind. Are not like birds/in unison migrating.” Still, they try out the affirmations Avi has prescribed. My own liberation depends on my ability to put truth before the desire to be loved. Truth before ego. Truth before the desire to be liked.

To most people Lacy tells barefaced lies (such as when she denies she’s been using Regina’s shampoo), but she bludgeons her mother with honesty: “You know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.” Janet is unflappable, but not unfazed. “You have a kind of aggressive quality,” she tells Lacy. “It sounds like a criticism, and I don’t mean it as one.” Janet at one point admits that she feels uncomfortably like Lacy is watching her even when they’re not together—yet she watches her daughter with equal if not greater concern. “This is a bad pattern,” she says, after Lacy has called in the middle of the night threatening to kill herself if Janet doesn’t liberate her from sleepaway camp. When the first day of sixth grade arrives, Lacy refuses to get on the school bus, claiming to be nauseous. But she is never punished, never forced.

Janet returns her daughter’s clinginess with her own dependency, leaning on Lacy to settle her uncertainties, such as whether to break up with Wayne. She distrusts antibiotics but leaves pills on the counter for Lacy with the daunting guidance, “It’s your decision.” Lacy washes them down with milk. The next day she finally boards the bus, her spindly frame burdened by a backpack conspicuously larger than those of the other kids.

“Then, for a sketch/drawn at a moment’s impulse, a ground of contrast/is prepared, painfully, so that we may see.” In The New Yorker, Richard Brody finds fault with Baker’s direction, which does not permit the “excess that distinguishes a richly imagined person from a puzzle-fitting cipher”:

Baker’s retentive manner…inhibits the actors, whose performances feel constrained and overcalculated, because they’re directed so as to deliver meaning rather than unleash the fullness of their characters’ experiences. The characters live on the page rather than in the space of the action; the actors shrink to the confines of the frame rather than expanding to inhabit the world. From the limited focus of concentrated intending, this fine cast seems rather to be pretending instead of ever simply being.

Several critics have missed the mark on Janet Planet, but I single out Brody because he comes closest to articulating what Baker is up to, even as he doesn’t understand it. If there were a straightforward way to convey the difficulty of simply being, of unleashing the fullness of one’s experience rather than confining it, one might not have any trouble in the first place. It’s a “complete mystery” to Lacy why she doesn’t have any friends, but she can tell she misjudges social cues: “I thought nobody liked me, but I was wrong.” (In a coup she does hit it off with Wayne’s daughter, who speaks mostly in a sort of pig Latin.) If you find other people perplexing, paying close attention might turn you into an expert on how they behave; you might become acquainted with their flaws and tics, even anticipate their wants and needs. But you may never develop an intuition as to what, or how, they’re thinking:

I will not have these half-filled human masks;
better the puppet. It at least is full.
I will endure this well-stuffed doll, the wire,
the face that is nothing but appearance.

Baker has been a celebrated playwright since her off-Broadway debut, Body Awareness, in 2008. Her plays offer what Brody expects on the screen: characters so vernacular they seem to have been transcribed from the strip mall. Here are the stoners who hang out by the dumpster, the staff who sweep up the popcorn between screenings. Baker’s people overshare, interrupt, contradict and struggle to articulate themselves. (While some of their naturalism might fairly be attributed to the actors’ interpretations, every filler word, pause, and glance is exactingly scripted; in a note to Circle Mirror Transformation, from 2009, Baker warns that “without its silences, this play is a satire.”) These characters pace in their vivariums—confined, contrived settings that include a kitschy bed-and-breakfast, an acting workshop, and a health retreat—until they lose it; their performances, strained by the demands of the other players, collapse. “The answer to every terrible situation always seems to be like, Be Yourself,” says Avery, the nerdy cinephile in The Flick (2014), “but I have no idea what that fucking means.”

Baker’s work embraces Avery’s destabilizing premise that we perform our identities in everyday life just as an actor performs a role, an idea reinforced by the mundane realism of her characters and, in The Flick, by the presence of a movie theater’s screen beyond the fourth wall. Janet Planet, which makes many references to theater, takes us through the looking glass into a world that, with its tangible reality, can serve as the setting for characters who would be less legible on the stage—people who don’t as readily express their inner lives, who “shrink to the confines of the frame rather than expanding to inhabit the world.” The film ends at a contra dance, to which Janet and Lacy have been coaxed by a friend. Janet has misgivings but gamely follows the caller’s commands from embrace to embrace. Lacy watches the tumult of flushed and laughing people alone from the sidelines, her rippled brow betraying a mind working overtime. Baker says that after auditioning many child actors, she cast Ziegler because she had no impulse to please, and so did not know how to perform.

If Lacy is familiar in her strangeness, a kid we’ve met before, Janet is a deeper enigma. Men and women are inexplicably drawn to her, and Nicholson plays her with an unassuming grace. She never raises her voice; often she seems about to say something but will instead make a terse gesture and walk away. We see her run her fingers along Wayne’s meridians and tap the needles in. Janet is generous with every body in pain, every drifter who needs a place to stay or an ear to listen. When Lacy asks for “a little piece of you to sleep with,” she wordlessly plucks a hair from her head.

She’s had a string of disappointing relationships—“terrible taste in men”—and many jobs before her acupuncture practice, for which she went back to school with money from an inheritance. “I’ve worked really, really hard,” she insists. “I’ve changed my life.” Lacy has faith that the hell she’s in won’t last, but Janet is discovering that no amount of getting your act together can subdue a nagging uncertainty. “You develop an identity as an untrustworthy person, untrustworthy to yourself,” she explains to Regina, in the comedown of a mind-altering drug. What she can only say to Lacy is more revealing: “I’ve always had this knowledge deep inside of me that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.”

For Janet no less than for Lacy, the language Brody finds “overcalculated…to deliver meaning” is itself prerequisite to full experience. If nothing much seems to happen in Baker’s limbos, it’s because her characters are too busy processing. Lacy eavesdrops on the ceaseless, intimate conversation between the adult women, which falters when Regina contradicts Janet as she’s trying to articulate an insight. Janet is disillusioned in the friendship; worse, she loses her train of thought: “I think I was onto something, and you stepped on my toe.” These women, an actress and an acupuncturist, require precision but hold separate notions of accuracy. Regina believes that we—specifically, Janet—can make objectively bad decisions. Janet is skeptical of claims to moral value and objectivity: “Even the word bad…I would never say that to one of my patients. That’s my narrative of myself, but who’s to say? Who’s to say but me whether it’s a bad decision?”

Baker’s mother was a psychologist, and the plays are full of characters who diagnose each other and themselves. An ex-girlfriend has “borderline paranoia or something.” “Elias thinks I have OCD.” Elias wants to get back on Cymbalta. Rose, a self-described nymphomaniac, teases her coworker for not knowing his sign. Genevieve was “clinically insane! That’s what they called me!” In Body Awareness, a mother tries to convince her adult son that he has Asperger’s syndrome:

Joyce:                                              Jared:
            Do you think—                                   I don’t have it.

Joyce: …Okay. We don’t need to jump to any conclusions right now. I…Phyllis and I just wanted you to think about it, and then—

Jared: I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that I don’t have it.

Joyce: That’s great. That’s great.
            (after a pause)
I just think that if we all went and met with a psychologist he or she could give us a more definite—

Jared: I AM NOT FUCKING RETARDED.

We are meant to assume that Jared definitely has it, but Baker’s older brother, Benjamin Nugent, was misdiagnosed with Asperger’s by their mother when he was seventeen (an experience he has written about). The slippage in the plays between the clinical register and casual or occult ones diminishes the authority of the former, preventing any too-neat revelations. For years Baker worried that therapy would put her “farther away from the answer, and farther away from self-knowledge than ever before, just because the second you pin something down like that, it’s probably wrong,” she said in a 2015 interview. “I think it’s really dangerous to just be like, this is who I am.” And yet the recklessness, even futility, of finding an answer does not make it less urgent for characters who are suicidal, or at best “pretty unhappy,” as Janet admits to Lacy—because if you can be wrong, you can also be right.

“What are we even talking about when we talk about mothers?” Regina asks. For years Baker tried to write a play about a mother and a daughter, but “it never found itself…it just didn’t find a higher meaning.” She grew up in Amherst with her divorced mother, to whom she was intensely close. She doted on a shelf of figurines, feeding them three meals a day. Yet Brody’s suspicion that Baker “offers more than hints at autobiography or intellectual self-portraiture—she conveys the sense that she knows much more about the characters at hand than she’s letting on” assumes a degree of fidelity that the director has dismissed. For a period film primarily concerned with what its characters know about themselves, the more salient question may be what we know in our time that they don’t in theirs.

They are on the cusp of several consequential developments in psychology. In the last thirty years, neurodevelopmental conditions that were historically considered pediatric male disorders have gradually been acknowledged to persist into adulthood and affect significant numbers of girls and women. In 1994 a conference was held on sex difference in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder out of concern that girls, who had been almost entirely excluded from research, might be expressing their symptoms in different ways. Similar revelations were made about autism spectrum disorder, under which Asperger’s syndrome was subsumed in the DSM-5, leading to the recognition of a “lost generation” of overlooked girls.

Recent studies have proposed that ADHD and autistic girls are more adept at “masking” or “camouflaging” their differences by imitating the social behavior of others, and that this coping strategy puts them at heightened risk of anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and suicide. While boys might be referred for diagnosis by a parent or teacher and treated with medication or behavioral therapy, girls are more likely to self-diagnose later in life, some only when their own children are diagnosed. The belated investigation into their experiences converged with the autism rights movement and the concept of “neurodiversity,” which upended the clinical perspective that psychological differences are disorders that require correction; society, instead, should adapt to accommodate many kinds of minds.

By setting her film in 1991—by having Janet turn to Zen Buddhism rather than the DSM—Baker avoids the trap of diagnostics and tells a story about how to live when you don’t know why living is so hard. She also suggests that an answer to the effects of gendered socialization might be found in something the characters do know: the lessons of second-wave feminism. When Janet worries that her daughter’s forthright personality will someday make her relationships with men difficult, Lacy’s advice to her mom is that she “stop trying” to make men love her.

Baker’s early plays trained their exacting gaze on men—depressed, delusional, deranged by estranged mothers and lovers. Body Awareness, however, made a bold swing at feminist identity politics. Joyce’s partner, a psychology professor, scolds her for suggesting it might “be freeing” to pose nude for a male photographer:

Phyllis: WHAT WOULD IT FREE YOU FROM?

Joyce: …Well, my own embarrassment. My own self-consciousness. All that stuff you always talk about. Like being able to look in the mirror? And feel proud? I want to—

Phyllis: When I talk about looking in the mirror I’m talking about looking in the mirror in private. I’m talking about being able to get away from the male gaze. Do you get it, Joyce? Are you stupid? THE POINT IS BEING ABLE TO GET AWAY FROM THE FUCKING MALE GAZE! AND YOU’RE WALKING RIGHT INTO IT!

That question—free from what?—recurs in other plays, but it’s not until Janet Planet that it’s again associated with women’s liberation. Regina offers Janet ecstasy (she assures her the dose is very low) as they’re watching a C-Span broadcast in which Betty Friedan asserts the need for women to articulate and conceptualize the self “beyond the male model.” It’s easy to miss it, but in a film so spare, every signal that penetrates the womblike world of its principals telegraphs Baker’s larger concerns.

The Feminine Mystique argued that psychiatry and psychoanalysis had failed women, and instead took an anthropological approach to their discontent. By privileging women’s testimony over preexisting theories, Friedan could describe the “problem that had no name,” the patriarchal oppression that touched every facet of their lives. She had turned away from an early interest in psychology because of the male bias and misogyny embedded in the field, and many women on the left steered clear of it for the same reason. The second wave was fueled by small meetings in which radical activists discussed their personal lives in order to expose shared experience and “raise their consciousness.”

Kathie Sarachild, cofounder of the feminist collective Redstockings, explained in 1973 that the purpose of consciousness-raising “was never to end generalizations. It was to produce truer ones. The idea was to take our own feelings and experience more seriously than any theories which did not satisfactorily clarify them.” Consciousness-raising was frequently misconstrued (and derided) as group therapy, and it did provide relief to women whose consciousness, as Anne Forer put it, had “been cramped, darkened, frustrated, undeveloped, misguided or even seemingly replaced by a false consciousness.” The aim, however, was to lay the groundwork for political organizing. By understanding and taking responsibility for their decisions—their chosen “roles”—women would be empowered to transform society. To treat consciousness-raising as a therapeutic end-in-itself risked losing sight of mass liberation.

The particular milieu of Western Mass, with its histories of feminist and antiwar activism, can introduce an eleven-year-old especially clearly to this distinction between the radical and the merely countercultural. When Lacy points out the town common where a man self-immolated to protest the bombing of Iraq, Regina changes the subject to the imaginary phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, mistaking the external for the internal. The commune, which Janet describes to Lacy as a cult, represents another dead end of therapeutic thinking: the model utopia isolated from society. Looking in the mirror in private.

In John (2015), Baker tests the logical extreme of individual liberation. Between acts, an old blind woman, Genevieve, breaks the fourth wall to relate what it was like to become sane after going mad:

All of a sudden I was at the center of the universe, facing out. No more trying to get in anyone else’s head. Oh, what does she think of me? What does that man bagging groceries think of—nope. It’s just me! Alone in the universe! Standing in the center of my own life. I can’t even look in a mirror. It’s just me and my thoughts and sometimes I have no thoughts at all. Sometimes I just lie in bed in the morning and think about nothing. Imagine that…sitting in the center of your own life with no thoughts at all about what other people are thinking.
They can think whatever they like.
You can all think whatever you like about me.

One way to think about the self is that if we can’t truly know other people, then no one else can tell us who we are. We cannot learn someone else’s inner peace; it’s as preposterous as Wayne’s suspicion that Janet has given him her migraine. That Genevieve achieves nirvana by losing her sight suggests that it’s our own gaze that deranges us.

And yet if Janet Planet is anything it’s a cinematic argument for the gaze. The scene in which Janet and Lacy go to the farm to see the puppet troupe is a testament to the beauty of the world, to Rilke’s consolation that “one can always watch.” Huge papier-mâché creatures emerge from the trees and lurch through twilit fields. Lacy, usually so strained and pensive, is delighted when one leans down to greet her; inside is at least one human being. Avi calls the performance not a play but a service.

Baker dramatizes the importance of other people in our self-delineation, those flashes of alienation, particularly from those closest to us, that show us what we’re not. But there’s usually an outside instigator. In Body Awareness and Janet Planet, the character who upsets the peace is an artist whose white, male identity and impenetrable self-assurance make him a blank slate for projection. Phyllis speculates without basis that the photographer, Frank, is a sexual predator, but the threat he poses is to her authority, predicated on her Ph.D., to tell others in the household who they are and what decisions they should make. As well as coming between her and Joyce, he sabotages their work on Jared: “Saying you have it would be taking the easy way out.”

For Lacy, Avi is the final boss in a summer of intruders, and Baker has said that the germ for Janet Planet was to enact a child’s fantasy of making her mother’s boyfriend disappear with her mind. But when this spontaneous combustion actually occurs, it opens up a rift in the film’s realist façade that admits all manner of superstition. The line from Rilke that Avi reads to Janet just before he vanishes, as her thoughts wander back to her daughter at home, has the speaker staring at the puppet stage “so intensely” that, “to counterbalance my searching gaze,” an angel arrives as an actor to give the puppets life: “Then what we separate can come together by our/very presence. And only then the entire cycle/of our own life-seasons is revealed and set in motion.” Is Avi the angel, or is Lacy? What kind of film are we watching?

Friedan, speaking on a panel about “mothers and daughters in politics,” was looking back on a movement whose mantras had become calcified and coopted, and forward to a generation of women who would need to devise their own. “They have different problems,” she said.

These problems may not seem to us as serious as the problems that we started out with. But they must be met and articulated, and we must keep tuning our rhetoric into life…. If it doesn’t open life—if it isn’t true to our own experience—then we have to go back to the drawing board.

While she’s high, Regina remarks that in the womb “there’s no language.” With Janet Planet, Baker goes back to the drawing board to ask: how to open life, when your words are imprecise? How to know yourself, when you struggle to know others? What are we talking about when we talk about mothers? In one scene, mother and daughter have a conversation as Janet braids Lacy’s hair over the bathroom sink. They appear at once multiple and fragmented, meeting each other’s gaze in the mirror. Recognition is rare, it is mysterious, and it demands its own attention. But you know it when you see it.