Last night, on November 26, my boyfriend and I watched Moonstruck on a laptop in his Brooklyn apartment at around 7 pm. Meanwhile something like 10 or so others might have watched it something like cotemporaneously where they live. As we enjoyed scenes of a previous Brooklyn, Cher, and Italian-American New York, our thoughts also went to a man we knew who died three years ago on November 26; a man who loved this movie, and quoted from it frequently. We watched on the request of this man’s widower who informed us by text that he might try watching the film for the first time since his husband died, and in memorium, but only if he knew we had his digital back.
I have been thinking about the audience (an activated group bent on listening, feeling, and learning with others), and similar technologies of time and presence, including the blog, since rebooting this as a space to think in public about how to live and learn in the interval between election and inauguration. Of course there are other intervals of uncanny openness, distress, and possibility: the time of desire or the sublime; the vast and uncertain space waiting for or after the death of a loved one.
Watching Moonstruck at home while knowing some other people might be watching Moonstruck, and also maybe co-thinking of a dear friend or his widower, raises what, about being in an audience, is most evanescent and therefore curiously helpful in times of duress (while I am writing here about a virtual audience, I think much of this holds for meetings in material space, or hybrid gatherings; some of my work in this interval is trying to better understand, so as perhaps to make use of, the affordances, constraints, and conditions of each). Sometimes being in an audience allows for a felt understanding that you have momentarily aligned with others through a shared experience and about a mutual commitment. This can happen for me at a protest, in a classroom, at a film screening or concert. Participating in such audiences online has the added benefit of access and inclusion, as well as witness and support, otherwise less available for some due to constraints of time, place, and health. In all these scenarios, the power of being in an audience comes through a recognition that you are one with many and also much more.
In Moonstruck, this happens at the opera. Peak romance as co-presence with a crazy love, a knowledge of human suffering, and the ecstatic sounds of La Bohème.
During COVID lockdown, we turned to Zoom as a lifesaving digital communication device albeit one that rarely if ever reached the kinds of summits pictured above. My friend and colleague, Nishant Shah and I are organizing workshops on the Present and Future of Coming Together, where we help resurface memories of Zoom and other technologies that were used to save (and control) us during the lockdown phase of the ongoing COVID pandemic. We think that many of these technologies and their linked practices became normalized during lockdown use, restructuring daily life, and reformatting presence, communication, and community until this day. Our workshops in Hong Kong and Delhi have allowed us to better understand how platform capitalism and the many nations that benefit from it used COVID lockdown as an opportunity to grow our use of technologies of surveillance, consumption, isolation, and control. At the same time, many people with disabilities or chronic illness, or those caring for people who are immuno-compromised, remind us that such technologies have been long used as access tools for connection and participation.
So what are some of the conditions, constraints, and affordances whereby a (virtual) audience can provide (enough) presence to hold another, to have his back? Certainly, participation in such an audience would demand attention and compassion. But learning from our putative Moonstruck audience, I think that conjuring, belief, and trust are also critical. Conjuring of those un- or no longer visible; belief that there are others who are there for and with us (even if we can’t see or hear them); and trust that others will respect our invitations and their constraints (co-watching at 7 pm EST, for instance), together conjuring unseen but projected viewers as well as those who are lost to vision altogether.
I can’t help but notice that what I seem to be suggesting for the (virtual) audience sounds less procedural than mystical; what I previously worded as evanescent or uncanny. While, I don’t go to church or synagogue, I know that the gay, Italian-American, Catholic, romantic, opera and Moonstruck-loving man who we were asked to recall last night did. Ritual, community, belief by and in audience.
Unlike the projection of an “audience” we have been programmed to seek on social media, or perhaps from an (un)responsive God, the imagined but felt crowd of a virtual memorial online co-viewing accrues strength and meaning not from number, or even concrete evidence, but from a heartfelt service to the needs of some and the memory of others.