A few months ago, I stumbled across a manga called Glass Masks, an amazing (if sadistic) take on theatre, acting, and the Stanislavsky method of acting (also called Method Acting). The reoccurring story theme is how actors achieve characterization by donning an invisible (or glass) mask of the part they are playing. They become someone else entirely, leaving behind everything that smacks of “self” except those bits that might be crucial to the role.
I’m a theatre person. I have modeled for print brochures, narrated industrial films, played extras on TV pilots, and been on stage in the chorus and in speaking roles. I’ve worked backstage as stagehand, costumer, prop mistress, stage manager, set designer, lighting designer, costume designer, director, and producer. I played the mechanical nightingale in a stage production of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Nightingale, as well as a courtier wearing robes and a two foot mask on my head. These are my credentials, all of which serve me well in my current roles as a DBA, a SQL Server trainer, a writer, and an freelance game writer. And when Glass Mask caught my attention, I thought to myself “Wow, I know some people who actually pull that crap.”
Look at Shia Lebeouf, Disney star turned mega-movie star, who admitted to dropping acid so he could understand a role. Or Matthew Lillard, who screamed himself hoarse to properly convey the voice of Shaggy in the live-action Scooby Doo movies. Dustin Hoffman even has a story from when he was a young actor about the lengths he goes.
Actors are paid to assume masks, to become someone else, to be unrecognizable in our own person. Non-actors don’t have that excuse, so when someone is caught pretending to be someone other than who they are, the world around them crashes to a halt.
A month after I started reading Glass Masks, the world learned Manti Te’o’s dead girlfriend was neither dead nor a girl. Half the internet thought he was a dumb dupe, the other half thought he had deliberately scammed the public.
Me? I believed him instantly, because I’d seen the same thing happen to a friend of mine.
The thing about masks is that they are so easy to assume. We have our day-job masks, our family masks, our best-friend mask that differs only slightly from our friends-but-not-besties mask, and our strangers mask. For some of us, we change behavior as easily as we change our clothing. Sometimes changing our clothing changes the mask automatically. A woman in heels and a business suit acts differently than a woman in jeans and a grubby tee. A man in TWPs and a polo acts different from a man in a blazer, dress shirt, tie, and pressed pants. Our masks are ruled as much by our surroundings as our clothes. Are we at the beach with a bucket of beer and a picnic basket? Are we in a courtroom trying to buy a judge’s sympathy? Are we sitting in the office trying not to give the boss an excuse to sit behind our shoulder?
We wear masks to protect ourselves from the blows real life deal to our egos and self-confidence. Masks are our armor, built around the kernel of our sanity to keep us safe through this roller-coaster existence we call life.
Actors are not so different from non-actors in this respect. Regardless of our jobs, we all have masks for the different sides of our lives. Today, Investigation Discovery showed a real life crime program about a man pretending to be an 18 year old marine to a 17 year old girl who turned out to be her mother pretending to be her. All of this occurred over the internet, in chat rooms, where two middle-aged people could set up a fantasy of being younger and sexier and more interesting than they believed they really were. And in the middle of this fantasy, a young man was murdered because the older man believed so much in the fantasy that he thought the “young girl” was cheating on him with the younger man (a coworker and ex-friend of the older man).
When the Manti Te’o girlfriend scandal erupted, experts claimed it isn’t unusual for people to explore their sexuality and sexual identity on the internet by building a fantasy life for themselves and indulging it with other people. The hoaxer did, at one point, claim he loved Te’o. Maybe he did. I don’t know.
What I do know is my own personal experience, back when I played on and co-administered a MUSH. One of my online friends, we’ll call him Bob, and a player few of us liked, we’ll call him John, had their own brush with the mask syndrome. I didn’t care for John because he was something of a bully both IC (in character) and OOC (out of character). Bob was a self-admitted loner who didn’t have a strong social life outside of the internet, but had many friends and casual acquaintances on the MUSH. One day, Bob met a girl in a chatroom and the pair hit it off immediately. It brewed into an online romance. So far as I know, there was no tinysex (what is now called sexting) involved, but Bob was falling for the girl and wanted to meet her.
One day, the girl came out to Bob in a private chat on the MUSH. Or, to be more precise, John started sending Bob private messages with the details of Bob’s conversation with his online girlfriend. Word-for-word details that could only have been gotten from the girl’s hacked account or from someone who had posed as this girl. John wasn’t confused about his sexuality. He wasn’t exploring himself. He put on a mask and roleplayed as the type of young woman Bob would be attracted to precisely to tear Bob’s life apart. It was a mean, deliberate, pre-meditated attack to prove a point. John admitted this to Bob and to the rest of us, smug in his superiority while we watched Bob fall apart and become nearly suicidal.
We banned John from the MUSH, but that didn’t fix Bob. There is no fixing of that kind of damage. Only healing, if healing truly can be had. The only thing we could do was be there for him, and that was so very hard when we’d only met IRL twice and were an entire country away from each other.
I learned then, all those years ago when the internet was just the world wide web, the true power of anonymity. For all that we trade away our privacy on the internet, it still remains a place where we can don a mask different from the day-to-day roles we play. We can be male or female, young or old, gifted or talent-less. We all become writers of fiction, building characters actors can only envy as we craft personas to lure, to tempt, to hurt, and to soothe. The internet gives us the ability to craft glass masks beyond anything that real life gives us, and gives us the privacy to believe our own publicity, to buy into our own masks as if the things we have created here are more real than reality itself.
Yet, as we craft these masks and believe what they make of us, we also open ourselves up to the masks of others. We become vulnerable even as we armor ourselves. Our fantasies become our truths and our truths become part of the fantasy. This is why we find ourselves wounded and grief-stricken when the bullies, the pranksters, the criminals, and haters crack our masks. We forget, while we are riding the high, that we can be damaged by a simple Tweet or a little text or a shared picture. We forget that the masks we are wearing are indeed glass, fragile, delicate, hand-spun glass that shatters at the slightest blow.
These are the masks we wear.
