A fan
Right now, it’s hard not to feel like real art is under attack.
Every poster on the walls is for a franchise film about superheroes.
Every song on the stereo in the theatre lobby is either a fist-pump EDM anthem or a stomp-clap ditty by men with banjos and beards.
And yet, when everything else seems like it’s being dumbed down, there’s still hope, because there are still visionaries.
Clara Cowan is delivering a talk here tonight.
For this particular fan, it feels like the culmination of an obsession that started a long time ago.
Clara Cowan is not famous. Not yet, at least. But when she is, this fan will say: I was there first. Cowan’s future followers might be surprised to hear that the director started out as an artist, that she once had a blog on Tumblr called ClaraScuro, posting scratchy black illustrations, snippets of experimental stop-motion and stilted puppetry.
In the interplay between Clara and Scuro, light and dark, it’s clear that at some point the darkness won.
That’s when each picture started to gain more reblogs, each video more views.
Nowadays, people like Cowan can become famous simply for being, and for being someone others would like to be.
This follower, this fan, imagines that Cowan is a lapsed ballerina, perhaps of Russian heritage.
That she drinks vodka martinis without even flinching, and turns off auto-capitalisation on her phone so that every sentence starts in the lower case.
Cowan’s Instagram feels tortuous, less a feed than the feeling of being drip-fed.
She hides things, obfuscates her personal life.
But to create in the public sphere is to belong to the public.
So, the fan knows that Cowan has a sister with a baby, that she has an adorably snaggle-toothed dog.
That there’s sometimes a tattooed hand on the other side of a table, and that it belongs to Seb Bonami, an up-and-coming British actor whom you might have seen in something, though you can’t remember what.
A face one might one day recognise, closed-mouthed and uncomfortable with the camera trained on him, sitting in a rented tuxedo at the back of a ceremony room while Clara Cowan makes a speech.
In the lobby, an announcement is made, and the throngs of people begin to move towards the auditorium.
It’s a short-film festival, and though Cowan doesn’t have anything new out this year, her two existing shorts were so well received that she’s been asked back to screen them, back-to-back, and then be interviewed about them on stage.
First, there was A Vulgar Explosion of Colour and Sound: the story of a couple whose relationship is doomed by a cosmic event that turns the world inside out.
Senses are thrown into disarray, and things that once seemed sure become anything but.
They transform before each other’s eyes, shift colours like chameleons.
To her, his skin feels as soft as silk. To him, hers becomes as coarse as sandpaper.
Then Strings, which blended live-action and puppetry to disorientating effect, spinning a surprisingly subtle narrative about the insidious ways in which a woman is manipulated by the masculine world around her.
When she first saw it, the fan felt as if it was made for her and her alone.
It wasn’t. Cowan won her first prize for Strings. She’ll win more.
The fan makes her way towards the double doors.
Inside, she watches those shorts again. Then the lights come up and there is Cowan, arriving on stage in a pair of tailored trousers, a men’s shirt cinched at the waist. Her hair is shaved on one side.
Occasionally, when she’s deep in thought, she’ll run her slender fingers across the shorn side of her skull.
‘Something that seems to connect both of your films is the idea that the domestic is a veil for something more sinister,’ the moderator says. ‘Do you think that’s a fair analysis?’
‘I had a privileged upbringing, but not a happy one,’ Cowan says.
‘I assumed everyone else’s house had a pantry, and that everyone else was miserable, too.
’ She touches her head. ‘I think that’s why I’m unnerved by the idea of happy homes filled with happy families.
I’m still not sure they genuinely exist.’ Several people around the fan are nodding.
Several are shaking their heads. ‘I’ve always felt abnormal for that,’ she goes on, ‘and I think my art is a reaction to that abnormality. The happier things get, the further inwards I go.’
‘So you’re battling with yourself?’
‘Always,’ Cowan says. ‘I doubt myself constantly. And I doubt the intentions of others. I’m thirty-one now, and it feels like the conversation has suddenly shifted. It’s all anyone talks about, so it’s impossible not to think about it.’ A pause. ‘I think about it all the time.’
The moderator’s face seems to say: about what?
‘We spend our lives being elbowed out of the way,’ Cowan says, trying to clarify. ‘But there has to be more to us than this, this journey from dutiful daughters to doting wives to downtrodden mothers. I’ve never been any of those things, and I never plan to be.’
A smattering of laughter.
Cowan shrugs. ‘I want to be my own person. Is that so crazy?’