By Illaria Dana, Education Major

It’s Wednesday night, and actor Shia Labeouf has been streaming himself in real time onto the Internet for 29 hours and 40 minutes. He is watching all of his films in reversed chronological order from the most recent films to the oldest. He is in the Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston Street, NYC. The public is invited to watch with him, and the tickets are free.

The live stream features Labeouf’s face a bit off from centered. The light dims and brightens along with the film’s content, which the viewer has no indication of besides a listed schedule: the stream has no sound. Labeouf never looks into the camera, nor do the few other viewers who are visible around him. Those watching the stream have the indication that they are invisible, or spying on Labeouf, while he obliviously eats popcorn and watches movie after movie in which he is a star.

This stunt is a “performance art piece” put on by Labeouf, Rönkkö, and Turner who have written an artist statement called the Metamodernist Manifesto. The Manifesto states that, “We acknowledge the limitations inherent to all movement and experience, and the futility of any attempt to transcend the boundaries set forth therein. The essential incompleteness of a system should necessitate an adherence, not in order to achieve a given end or be slaves to its course, but rather perchance to glimpse by proxy some hidden exteriority. Existence is enriched if we set about our task as if those limits might be exceeded, for such action unfolds the world.”

All My Movies, the name of this performance art piece, is then a metamorphosis of what is means to be an actor in, and viewer of, modern cinema. The viewer is called to question what a movie means, what performance art consists of, and the objective experience of watching films becomes a subjective experience when one is forced to look a mirror image of her- or himself looks like consuming hours of media. (This mirror image of course is “acted out” by Labeouf.) Watching movies is supposed to be a form of relaxation, or enlightenment, one in which the viewer is removed from her or his reality and placed into a scripted world that has some sort of intellectual, visual, or anesthetic credence.

The use of the suffix “meta”, which originally meant “after”, as in “metaphysics” meaning that which comes after physics, paired with the question of what it means to be a passive viewer of television is not an original concept. It was the basis of David Foster Wallace’s novel, Infinite Jest. Wallace was often called a postmodernist writer, meaning that critics viewed him as part of a literary genre that came after modernism (defined by its hyperrealistic descriptions of life as it is and use of short, matter-of-fact sentences), though he claimed not to understand what exactly postmodernism meant. Wallace portrayed the influence of technology and television on society as a great loss. He said that, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

One admires Labeouf, literally watching his face on a screen for hours, and figuratively, for the unabashed criticism of the narcotized public’s utilization of media sources over direct action in their lives with other people. When one reads about, “a glimpse of some hidden exteriority,” she/he is forced to contemplate the limits of what is humanly possible in actions, in thoughts, in love. However, this is the kind of stunt that Wallace would never have pulled. It is in no way “unsexy”. Wallace, in interviews, was incredibly self-conscious. He constantly referred to his own inability to be considered an authority on whatever subject he was being asked to speak about.

In All My Movies, Labeouf seems to be telling us exactly what we are and exactly what we will be: passive viewers. He resembles the victims in Infinite Jest, who, in the novel, have seen a film so compelling that they cannot stop watching to eat, sleep, or live their lives. He models the passivity he wishes to see change. There is no sign of “the ability to truly care about other people and sacrifice for them,” the ability Wallace so yearned for. One is forced to wonder if Labeouf is trapped in the very system that he wishes to viewers to examine.