The comedian & actor Pete Holmes talks about how a lot of his work is about “getting over the embarrassment of playing pretend.”
It’s a subject that Holmes discussed at length with actor, musician, writer David Duchovny on his podcast “You Made It Weird.”
“I’ve always been embarrassed by it,” Duchovny says. “It’s silly…but that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful.”
It’s beautiful
We’re storytelling animals, Duchovny explains. “We want to go on those rides, and it’s legitimate.”
A legitimate and beautiful hunt for understanding, says moi.
Not blame. Blame only takes us so far.
Understanding drives art-making—to understand is to swim in different points-of-view, different personal histories, different motivations.
Yes, that’s beautiful. Thanks David Duchovny.
Art fosters understanding, not blame. Blame is boring. Blame has run its course.
Like you, there are several books and films that have meant something to me. What’s only become clear very recently is how immersion into story has shifted something in the cellular, neuro impulse cavities.
I can read the news, I can read the wikipedia page, I can hear the voice on the megaphone or balcony and get amped up, but, to me, it’s not nearly as satisfying and revealing as entering the world of the German soldier and Jewish girl, for example, who help me see in 3D, and in the heart space, where a frozen place starts to thaw, and an expansion of all forms begins its course. Hopefully, to come back around and change the news story, change the megaphone voice, change our institutions, change our cycles of violence…but maybe that’s too grande a hope…
Nonetheless, I’ll keep believing in the power of “playing pretend”, like Duchovny.
Another reflection:
In the book Washington Black, a young slave befriends an Englishman who is to inherit a plantation in the Caribbean. A story unfolds about the act of running away, of familial ties and the wild. The author Esi Edugyan takes me far into the realm of human suffering and relationships, and it’s devastating, beautiful, unjust, tender all at once.
Through the book’s existence, I am allowed to enter into that space of many feelings, many truths.
Her creative act of “playing pretend” brings forward a reality and pause waking up the human to seeing with wider eyes and in deeper heart spaces. No?
“You’re in sync with something”
When asked about acting and writing, Holmes asks Duchovny what does it mean to create? Do we become in sync with the nature of reality? All it’s paradoxes, all its uncomfortable questions?
“You’re in sync with something,” Duchovny responds.
And it’s a conversation, they both go on to say, that has something to do with what you’ve been given in this world and are trying to give back to the world.
At this, I pause the interview. The YouTube video freezes on the image of both men with their eyes closed. How many times does the creative toil with making sense of things? with honouring things? with bearing more fuller witness? And all to give it back to the world. To hold up some kind of mirror…
How gangster of us to go there, while there are a hundred things to do, a hundred more ways to make an individual feel worthy of their place in this world, when money is the culture’s calculus, and money not assured after the thing is made.
I say, call an artist a prep-school gangster. I heard the phrase on the Vampire Weekend’s latest record.
Yes, creators are prep-school gangsters, in sync with the shadow lands and irregular spaces that bring us back to ourselves again—all that playfulness, all that grief, all that floating high above…