Self-narrativization

13 Jan, 2025

Now it's time for another vendetta
Going through the shelves
Picking out my pre-written persona
Children of the city
See only the neon stars
Reflected upon the murky gutter sky
Don't ask me why
I desperately wish to be included in the city's night
Children of the City - Mili

"大女優さん" (Daijoyuu-san, EN: "(great) actress") is a 2023 song by Vocaloid producer iyowa. In it, a young girl decides she's going to shoot a controversial short film and gets some colleagues to act in it. There's some infighting that causes her colleagues to drop out, but she finishes the film herself and it's well-received, even getting a prestigious award. Later on, however, she decides to re-watch the footage and is struck by how overly-convenient and delusional the film is. At this point, it's revealed that the song up to this point has been the short film: the titular actress made a film about her own life and the hardships she had to overcome to make it big. Naturally, since she made the film before the film was finished, this means that none of that story happened: the main character laments that she doesn't have as much control over her life and success as she'd like in the final chorus, and then the song ends with her getting mad at mean comments people are leaving on her film (presumably a flop) online.

I think this song is really interesting because it juxtaposes two forms of real-life narrative construction that feed into each other. I'd like to talk about them for a bit.

We'll start by looking at the video more thoroughly. Though I don't think there's meant to be any ambiguity about which actress is the "real" one, I think entertaining that possibility helps illustrate the two forms of narrativization I mentioned.

If we suppose the failed actress is the real one, then the narrative is overly convenient because it's coming from a place of naivety. The actress thinks that she can achieve success by just playing the role of an auteur filmmaker, by following on the steps of the artists she admires, but that's not enough. For every successful indie short film with a troubled production, there's hundreds of failed ones. In this sense, she failed to concretize the future of the role she decided to play.

However, suppose we treat the successful actress as the real one (which, again, I think is a stretch objectively speaking, but bear with me). How can we explain the fact that her real lived experiences are trite and cliché? Well, it's simple: her experiences are real, but her narrative is manufactured. She's not lying, but rather just picking out the events in the film's production that are in concordance with the auteur filmmaker role. She's also pigeonholed herself, but since she has some control over how her past is presented, she can mold it to fit her role better.

I think these two ideas are very present in the song. It's no coincidence, for instance, that the peak of the successful actress' career is her receiving an award. Award speeches are all about narrative: you have a very small amount of time to convince people you've never met to care about your success. To do this, you inevitably have to construct some narrative about your personal life, or your film's production, or some greater political significance. The main character even lampshades that in her dialogue (free translation):

まさに「完璧」でした。人の心も、世の中の性格、動くと思います。
The movie was truly "perfect". I think it'll move not just people's hearts, but the very nature of society.

ああいうのが一番ウケますよね。
That kind of thing usually gets the best reaction, right?

I think the last frames of the video, where the actress reads the comments people are leaving on her movie, are also pretty illuminating. Two of the comments say:

やっぱ人足りてない感ありますよね。登場人物の関係性があんまり入ってこない
It feels like there aren't enough people. The relationships between the characters don't really come through.

高校生でそのピアスはいかつすぎん？w リアリティ大事よ
Isn't that kind of piercing¹ too much for a high schooler? lol Realism is important, you know.

These comments are interesting because they're obviously kind of dumb things to say about what was almost a documentary, right? The protagonist is a real high schooler, so her having the piercings she has is realistic. The relationships are real relationships between real people. What the commenters want is not realism, but hyperrealism: they don't want reality as it is, but rather reality as it is usually represented in films of that genre. Even her already-manicured narrative is too messy for it to slot nicely into the broader cultural context.

Thinking about this sort of thing is interesting because I do think it's extremely common for people to be required to narrativize their lives in this way. I've been applying to a lot of jobs recently, for instance, and a lot of recruiters put a lot of focus on the idea of "storytelling" (they use the English word even in Portuguese): being able to summarize your skills, or your achievements, or your life into some ready-made character that people are able to immediately empathize with. Social media is also generally similar: if you want to grow your social media presence, you have to pigeonhole yourself into an account for a certain fandom, or a political account, or generally find some kind of character with mass appeal that you can play. These contexts require you to self-narrativize in both of the forms I pointed out in the song: you have to pick a narrative whose future is desirable to you, and then mold your past to make it seem like you've always been the protagonist of that narrative. You have to say you've "had a passion for technology since you were young", or "have wanted to work in healthcare since you met a kind doctor as a child", and so on.

I think this is mostly fine. If you think about it, it's just effective communication: it'd be inefficient if you had to tell people everything about you all the time, so you have to pick just a few things somehow, and you create some narrative about yourself to see what things you should pick. If you want to be popular and charismatic, you have to communicate effectively with people, at least emotionally. But I do think it can be kind of insidious, because it's easy to forget other people are doing it, too.

For instance, most artists (particularly professional ones) will have some easily-understandable narrative about how art has always been in their lives, which can discourage non-artists from trying since they don't see their past in the same way. But this is misunderstanding the process! You don't have a typically artistic life and then become an artist. Rather, you become an artist and begin seeing your past as typically artistic. If I were a musician, I might consider myself playing a little bit of guitar at my friend's house or messing around with making noises on Ableton in high school as a formative experience, even if I don't feel like those experiences were that important to me right now. Obviously some artists do grow up privileged, with better access to teachers or resources that allow them to learn the technical aspects of the trade earlier. But your past probably has a lot of things that you would see, in retrospect, helped form you as a visual artist or a musician or a programmer or whatever, if you decided to become these things. Do your best.

Politically, I do also worry about this with trans women. A lot of trans women early in their transition's primary form of interaction with the trans community is mediated by influencers: big social media accounts or youtubers or tiktokers (is tiktok social media? i guess it is). I feel like this is kind of unhealthy! Putting this in a more general way, when all your points of reference for what it is like to be trans are people with curated, consistent personas and personal narratives, it's easy to get caught up in the idea that your own narrative has to fit. You have to have similar feelings, or similar sexuality², or similar aspirations. But, since you're comparing the full scope of your own self with the narrow scope that influencers have to present to be palatable, you will always feel inadequate! It's a hard problem to solve. I think cis women have to deal with the same thing regarding, like, Instagram influencers, but it's also way easier to have other cis woman friends to ground you than it is to have trans woman friends. And being trans innately puts some pressure on you to self-narrativize, since your identity is always under scrutiny. つらいね…

I don't know, I think this is just an interesting topic to think about. Basically everyone in the world has lived a very messy and complicated life with a lot of half-measures or weird happenstances leading them to where they are now, just like you. And I didn't even mention just, like, lying about your past to make yourself seem more folksy or hard-working or whatever, which happens a lot. It does feel like people are more willing to be transparent about how much of their success was just luck nowadays, which helps, but in general I think it's just good to have some skepticism when comparing yourself to other people? And it's probably good to have some skepticism about how you look at your own past, too³? Let's ponder this together.