Babylon Is Everywhere: A Preface

Figure 1.

Design sketches for Babylon Is Everywhere. Illustration: Michael Byrnes

A few prefatory words about the Court Masque, and why the most conservative art form ever invented becomes, in a new era, the most radical.

Pedigree

The Court Masque was an aristocratic entertainment that flourished in Jacobean England. Its most prominent exponents were writer Ben Jonson and architect/designer Inigo Jones. For a single night's entertainment, Jones and Jonson would devise an elaborate and extremely expensive pageant to celebrate, in allegory, the triumphs of the state and those who ruled it. Indeed, the kings, queens, and nobles celebrated by the masque were intended to participate in the event, embodying, through the courtly arts of singing and dancing, the virtues for which they wished to be acclaim'd.

This theatrical reassertion of court relations played out across the entire auditorium: Jones's use of one-point perspective ensured that only the king sat in a direct line with the set's vanishing point, thus vaunting the twin monarchial conceits of (a) the ruler as the center of the universe and (b) the ruler as possessing a unique view of the Universal Order of Things. Depending on your political proximity to the king, you sat at a greater or lesser distance from the throne and thus suffered greater or lesser degrees of anamorphosis in inverse proportion to your "juice" at court.

What's more: King James was known to be a scholar, so Jonson's masques displayed an obscene erudition, ravaging classical sources from the Metamorphoses of Ovid to Renaissance emblem books to the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa. No one in the audience had a clue what was going on iconographically, but it didn't really matter: the fashions were lavish, the spectacle was state-of-the-art, the door policy was draconian, and here you were, at the very seat of power—which, once upon a time, was the very seat of Cool—privy to this complete orgy of self-promotion.

The V(ogue)-effect

Political theater is BORING. It sets the audience up facing the proscenium and points fingers and points fingers and points fingers so that no one in the crowd has to go to the trouble of lifting up their own. Or it goes for a post-Epic Lehrstück that's almost indistinguishable from pretty decent children's theater. And this is supposed to radicalize the audience?

Political theater is not drawing specious analogies between George Bush and Henry V; it isn't a "think piece" set around a banquet table; it's not a shoestring- budgeted political cabaret that's seen only by other lefties. Political theater is your very own president doing a victory lap around Iraq in an F15 and "landing" it on an aircraft carrier the size of a refugee camp. Can you compete with that? Didn't think so.

So let CiNE propose a new perspective: sincere, lavish, excessive self-abasement before the seat of power.

This is the art of flatterers and favor-curriers, the art of poet laureates and courtiers. This is the art of the masque, and it will always trump negation as a form of critique, because only abject love can embarrass everyone: its subject, its object, and especially its audience. In the twenty-first century, where nothing is less hip than the Beltway, the masque's pandering to power, its outrageous patriotism, its commitment to mythologizing the ruler at every turn, sit awkwardly with an audience drawn to the masque's avant-garde aesthetics, its high fashion, its velvet-rope exclusivity and endless, rolling plains of Cool. In the twenty-first century, the masque pits our desire for justice against our desire for glamour. How long won't you stand outside for injustice?

Collaborative Aesthetics

Theater, generally, is BORING. CiNE is committed to the simple proposition that in a fiction, all elements are equally fictional. There is therefore no reason why the set, the lights, the costumes, or the sound should be barred from purveying meaning and emotion as frequently, and as eloquently, as...