The Mirror of Performance: Kinaesthetics, Subjectivity, and the Body in Film, Television, and Virtual Worlds

But I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty¹

Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928) opens with a shot of an art-deco gold statuette of a dancing woman frozen midkick, her elbows jutting and her hair swinging. Dissolve to a pair of shoes in front of a three-way mirror. Then, another dissolve adds a woman's feet and legs. They begin to dance, fast, and soon we see that they belong to Diana (Joan Crawford), and she and we watch her dance into her clothes. In the mirror images she shares with the spectator, and in her exuberant dance, which she will not pause even to slip into her modern step-in underwear, Diana embodies a modern kinetic aesthetic—a kinaesthetic—of an active ludic femininity that encourages viewers to imagine and emulate a playful subjectivity based on the lived, bodily experience of the dances and movement shared by both flapper spectators and flapper actresses.²

Joan Crawford's performance in the mirror reveals the character's sense of self as a fusion of being visible and kinetic. Diana is her body, and it is a moving body; she knows and experiences the world through its movement, even in the private moment of dressing in the mirror. Yet this moment it is not private but, rather, shared by the spectator, who is also herself engaged in the gaze at Diana's performance of herself for herself. The definition of "performance" is contested by Performance Studies scholars, but common ground emerges around the idea that performance, whether on stage, before a camera, or in everyday life, is an action done for someone, even if that person is the performer him- or herself. And so there is a doubling, a sense of an Other, either in the actor taking on a character or in the idea of performance for an audience.³ Vivian Sobchack eloquently catches the doublings of performance and meaning for the film spectator from a phenomenological perspective:

Watching a film is both a direct and mediated experience of direct experience as mediation. We both perceive a world within the immediate experience of an "other" and without it, as immediate experience mediated by an "other." Watching a film we can see the seeing as well as the seen, hear the hearing as well as the heard, and feel the movement as well as see the moved. As viewers, not only do we spontaneously and invisibly perform these existential acts directly for and as ourselves in relation to the film before us, but these same acts are coterminously given to us as the film, as mediating acts of perceptioncum expression we take up and invisibly perform by appropriating and incorporating them into our own existential performance; we watch them as a visible performance distinguishable from, yet included in, our own.⁴

But there is even more to the mirror of Crawford's dance performance; in the brain of the spectator, the actions she sees on the screen are also "mirrored" by mirror neurons, brain cells that activate when a primate does an action but also when a primate observes an action.⁵ There is a reason performances of dance, movement, sport, action, kung fu—whether on the screen or live—are so engaging to watch, especially for those who have done that action themselves: "Your mirror neuron system becomes more active the more expert you are at an observed skill. . . . Male ballet dancers have a weaker mirror response when they watch videotapes of moves typically made by female dancers, even though both sexes train together. The same goes for ballerinas watching male ballet movements. The actions you mirror most strongly are the ones you know best."⁶ If one has not performed the specific action, mirror neurons still fire, in a general way related to your experience of balance, or running and jumping, but in a less intense way than the mirror neurons of an expert, and there are specific kinds of...