Spoiler Alert!

One of the reasons I love watching foreign films is that you can discuss them at cocktail parties without having to punctuate every plot point with Spoiler Alert! That’s because chances are good that the people you meet at cocktail parties (nowadays at least) have no interest in watching foreign films. It is with this in mind that I commence to write freely about the most recent foreign film I saw without too much worry about spoiling it for most of those gathered around this virtual cocktail party known as The Nobby Works.
The film is called The Big Picture (not to be confused with the excellent Christopher Guest film of the same name). This is a 2010 French production starring Romain Duris as a loser named Paul. In an American film, of course, Paul’s status as a loser would be conveyed by a conspicuous lack of material comforts. Because it’s a foreign film, however, the concept of loserdom is a little more sophisticated. Paul has a beautiful wife, darling children, a luxurious home, and he’s a partner in a law firm. In the US, he would be free to tool around town in his BMW shouting out the windows, “I'm #1!” and no one would say a contrary word to him. In a world foreign to American culture, a man might very well sense that he’s a loser because he’s lost at his core. That’s Paul, and if he had any doubts about it, his wife Sarah confirms it for him by telling him he's a loser for giving up on his dream of being a photographer to accept the easy law career that was dropped into his lap. Sarah’s disappointment in Paul drives her into an affair with Greg, an actual working photographer with far less to show for it than Paul does for his sell-out. Having more toys doesn’t save Paul from a jealous rage, however, and in a nasty confrontation with Greg, he accidently kills him. To make a long enjoyable story short, rather than accept the consequences of his violence, Paul dumps Greg’s body in the ocean, fakes his own death, and runs off to Hungary with Greg’s identity and his camera. There, under the guise of his former rival, Paul finally finds personal liberation and stunning success as a photographer.
I love the story for so many reasons. For one it was a retelling of one of my favorite short stories from my school days, Clothes Make the Man, about a would-be burglar who’s made to dress up like a cop to stand lookout for his gang. He is so taken by the role that he ends up arresting his buddies. More to the point of this blog, there’s this from our man Norman O. Brown:  “Personality is persona, a mask. The world is a stage, the self a theatrical creation: [quoting Erving Goffman] ‘The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die: it is dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.’”
The idea that we are not locked into a personality, a character, a destiny is not just the stuff of movies, short stories, and Love’s Body, there is empirical evidence that remaking ourselves all over again is not limited to the Great Gatsbys among us.  In fact it seems that choosing a new persona may be as simple as choosing a new avatar for our Facebook page. In their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler report on a game exercise conducted with avatars of varying heights. People who were given avatars of taller stature were more aggressive, less giving, and overall more confident in how they played the game. Those assigned shorter avatars exhibited quite the opposite characteristics. Christakis and Fowler write:

More remarkably, virtual world interactions can carry over to the real world. After playing the game with randomly assigned avatars, people who had been assigned attractive avatars showed more confidence in the real world. In one experiment, they were shown pictures from an online dating site; volunteers who had been assigned attractive avatars felt more certain that attractive people would be interested in dating them. These kinds of effects even raise therapeutic possibilities. Perhaps using avatars to act out roles (such as being disabled) in virtual environments could increase empathy for those who are disabled. Or, imagine assigning attractive avatars to people with low self-esteem or distorted body images to allow them to experience the world differently.

Those examples are just a few of the possibilities avatar research could open up for us. Give a slow student a genius avatar. Give a grumpy employee a sunny avatar. Give a narcissist a humble avatar. And then stand back and watch society evolve for the better. 
Perhaps.
Except for the fact that the science isn’t there yet, the biggest obstacle to such a utopian experiment would be this precious view we have that every human, like every snowflake, is unique. There were a couple of celebrity stories that fleshed this view out recently. When Paul Walker died very young in a car crash on a California highway this week, there were more than a few comparisons of his death to that of James Dean. Such comparisons immediately drew outraged blowback: “How dare you? Don’t ever mention Paul Walker of Fast and Furious in the same breath as James Dean of Rebel Without a Cause!”
Then there was Jon Stewart’s very curious decision in mid interview to show Jennifer Lawrence a picture of a young Helen Mirren and ask her if she didn’t think they looked alike. Ms. Lawrence, although clearly taken aback by it, did not hesitate to reply no to the question. Stewart, oddly persistent in this miscalculation, raised the same question two nights later with his guest Ian McKellen, who also let him know, ever so gently, that he was off his rocker. 
Well, the thing is, of course, if you believe in archetypal personalities, as I do, Paul Walker is indeed another coming of James Dean and Jennifer Lawrence is indeed another coming of Helen Mirren…despite the petty details of their resumes. As Nobby writes:

“…personalities are fixed by archetypal persons and situations: the voices coming through the mask are always ancestral voices. The masquerade or carnival is a danse macbre, a visit of ancestral spirits, represented by authorized bearers of their persons. The life of the clan consists in the perpetual reincarnation of ancestors—a reincarnation achieved by magic, by imitation (identification), by dramatic representation.”

The big spoiler alert here is that we’re not as unique as we think we are. We’re all just wearing masks that generations upon generations before us have worn. And what’s more, we each have a closet full of masks available to us to change into at will. So, like Paul in The Big Picture, if you don’t, say, like wearing the mask of a loser, you can change it.