“The Look”
The phrase “dance like no one’s watching,” Live Laugh Love as it may be, holds within its cliched recommendation an example of The Look as explored by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Our feelings toward being observed by the “Other,” whether neutral or antagonistic, can change how we behave in the world and influence our self-image, like when there is only one other person on the sidewalk around me and I suddenly become painfully aware of my herky-jerky anxious girl walk. I would love to be graceful, but I have short legs and places to be, so I can’t help but to cartoonishly skitter around with a dust cloud around my feet.
Something happens inside us when we realize we are being observed, and we can’t easily control how we respond to it. Suddenly we feel naked, because in some quiet way, being perceived is violating. We become aware that there are tiny fictional versions of ourselves being held prisoner in the mind of everyone we’ve ever met. We can obsess over our every movement; we can do our very best to come off a certain type of way, but people are allowed to perceive us however they want to. Someone out there can hate you just for having a herky-jerky gait and there is nothing you can do to change that.
In the hell of No Exit, the heavy gaze of the Other is a means of eternal psychological torture. Coincidentally, the gaze of the Other happens to psychologically torture me here on the Earthly plane every waking moment. Before us are three doors, and each of them contain torturous experiences of self-awareness described as very specific types of hell.
Door #1: Pretty Hurts
I am getting ready to go out to a jazz bar with some friends. It is my best friend’s birthday — she wants everyone to show out for it, and all of her friends are gorgeous. I have a huge closet filled with flattering silhouettes and plunging necklines, and it is my eternal punishment to try on countless cute little outfits. The catch is, when I look in the mirror, instead of seeing my reflection I see the horniest and most socially inept man in existence saying whatever the hell he wants to me. I don’t even get the satisfaction of a fun fashion montage. I have to stand there and steep in discomfort, looking some guy in the face and feeling his humiliating, violating gaze until it’s time to change into the next outfit.
Since it is eternal damnation, there is no jazz bar, and my closet doesn’t have any cool trench coats or wide-leg pants to protect me. I am a sexy little steak dangling over a cage of rabid dogs for all of eternity.
Door #2: The Bench
I am constrained to a bench on a busy sidewalk with a book in my hands — in this version of hell, I am completely illiterate, but my sentence is to sit here and pretend to read. I can feel the gaze and hear the thoughts of every single passerby, and not only do they all notice me sitting there and quietly make fun of me simply for existing, but they all see right through my façade. The cruelest of them will stop and patronizingly ask me about my book and I have to lie, because again, I can’t read. I don’t even know the title. They have no sympathy for me; some openly mock me, others do it quietly to themselves, but I am condemned to an eternity of knowing their judgment.
Door #3: No Edit
I am strapped to a chair next to a movie theater screen with a wire contraption holding my eyes open. The room is packed full with my exes, former professors, old friends, bosses. On the screen is a highlight reel of all the most embarrassing and painful conversations I’ve had with each audience member. But this is the Director’s Cut — rather than simply reliving every embarrassment and social failure, viewers can now see everything I typed and erased and hear my every thought during each exchange. If I came up with some pathetic response in my head weeks after the fact, they can hear that too. They gaze at the screen and bear witness to my painstaking editing, my delete and re-type, the neurotic combing over of long-passed interactions. A man stands next to me and applies drops to my strained eyes every sixteen seconds as I watch myself tamp down my rage, tinker with unimportant wording, stall an important admission, pivot my truth to a lie. Everyone I have ever known laughs at my suffering, and I have no choice but to Look at them.
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