My talent will be the love I feel for that which constitutes the world of prisons and penal colonies. Not that I want to transform them or bring them around to your kind of life, or that I look upon them with indulgence or pity: I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty — a sunken beauty — which I deny you.
Jean Genet, The Aesthetics of Evil
Jean Genet: the motherfucker understood. Not in some grad school seminar way, but in his bones, in his blood, in whatever diseased magnificent corner of his soul produced these wet dreams about power and sex and the gorgeous rot underneath civilization’s marble facade.
And Michael and I, we took that understanding and shoved it inside San Francisco’s Old Mint like a fist through glass.
Because what else is the Old Mint but America’s own house of illusions? All that Greco-Roman architectural horseshit, those columns designed to make you genuflect before Capital itself, the literal temple where they minted the lies we agreed to call currency. And then, and this is the part that made me lose my mind when I found out, after World War II, they turned part of it into a CIA station. A CIA station. The temple of money becomes the temple of secrets. Espionage in the counting house. Spies operating out of the vaults.
You couldn’t write better Genet if you tried.
We staged The Balcony there. It was so obvious it was brilliant, or maybe so brilliant it was obvious, I could never tell the difference and neither could Genet.
These photographs I took, they’ve got a quality I still can’t name , that thing where the theater becomes more real than reality, which is exactly what Genet was screaming about. Genet would have had the word for it. I don’t. The costumes dripping with that baroque excess, Latifa’s couture against cold institutional stone, fabric that looked like it cost more than the room it was being worn in, which is the point, which is always the point in Genet, the cost of the lie versus the cost of the truth. Our performers half-swallowed by shadows in rooms that actually held power once, back when power still needed physical vaults instead of just servers in Virginia.
There’s Ryan Tacata’s Carmen working those ecclesiastical robes like she’d been preparing for the priesthood her whole life and just hadn’t told anyone yet, every gesture half-sacred and half-obscene and refusing to choose between the two. The General and the Judge and the Bishop all playing dress-up in a building that was designed for dress-up, for the grand theater of legitimacy, the men in vestments looking around at the marble and the gold and realizing, in real time, that the building was on their side. The building had always been on their side. Our beggar’s girl, Nathalie Brilliant, looking like she’d crawled out of a Caravaggio by way of the Tenderloin, all heavy shadow and saintly squalor, her face doing the thing faces do in Caravaggio when they’re being lit from below by light that has no plausible source.
What I notice now, going through these prints now, is how dark they are. Darker than I remember shooting. Darker than the Mint actually was that night. The vaults eat the light. The vaults wanted to eat the light, the way the Mint wanted to be a CIA station, the way the building wanted to host The Balcony a hundred years before Genet wrote it. I look at the frames now and I can see the camera trying to hold its own against the building, the way Genet’s revolutionaries try to hold their own against the brothel. The camera, like them, mostly fails. The failure is the photograph. The failure is what’s interesting. A photograph that won the fight with the Old Mint would have looked like a press release. These don’t look like press releases.
And the thing is, the thing Genet knew and we were betting everything on, is that there’s no difference. The brothel and the government building and the intelligence bureau, the fantasy and the institution, the whore and the bishop and the spy, it’s all the same con, the same gorgeous, necessary, murderous pageant. We’re all just playing roles in someone else’s wet dream of order.
We didn’t stage this in some neutral black-box theater the way most companies would have, with three risers and a lighting grid and the polite agreement between audience and actors that nothing in the room actually means anything. We took Genet’s script about revolutionaries trying to storm the palace of illusions and staged it in an actual palace, a monument to American empire at its most grandiose and delusional. That took either courage or madness. Genet would’ve said the best work never bothers to distinguish between the two.
What kills me looking back at these images is how much they look like documentary photographs from some revolution that never quite happened, or maybe one that’s always happening, always about to crest, always on the verge. That’s San Francisco’s story too, isn’t it? All that perpetual uprising against itself.
Genet would’ve dug it. The thief finding his way into the treasury, making it his whorehouse, his theater, his church. Making it tell the truth for once.