At the end of the 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (played by Brad Pitt) looks into the camera after carving a swastika on the forehead of Standartenführer Hans Landa (played by Christoph Waltz), and says, “I think this just might be my masterpiece.” Narratively, Lieutenant Raine is speaking about the way he has disfigured the faces of Nazi soldiers and officers throughout the course of the movie, and having carved a bloody pattern on such an important and high-ranking officer, he knows this might be his most lasting work. But if we chip at the fourth wall a bit, we can no doubt see director Quintin Tarantino speaking straight at the audience, enthusiastically proclaiming that this is his best film to date. In the poem “Part of a Larger Picture” in Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection, A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf Press 2023), the speaker confesses when examining her house, “Once inside, I speak to myself. And of another.” If we take Bang’s house to mean a poem, which the metaphor aptly applies, then one can’t help but get a sense that throughout her book Bang is pulling back the poetic veil and peeking at her poems directly. Through the eyes of her speaker, we see how she processes grief, history, beauty, the cultural constraints and expectations of womanhood, the limits of self-perception, and the daily ways in which it is imperative to, as is said so beautifully in “A Film in Which I Play Everyone,” make “sense all the time of all the senseless things.”
Like a movie where the end of the plot is revealed in the opening scenes, Bang reveals to readers in an opening poem, “Here We Are All With Daphne,” the ultimate sentiment her speaker feels throughout the collection: helplessness in the face of death:
We are all dying but some more than most,
so says my interiority. It talks to me
as green fills the screen. It takes my arm
and walks alongside me. I never ask
where I’m going. I know I’m not meant to arrive.
While there is no doubt a certain sense of melancholy that comes with knowing that that fabled nothingness awaits the end of our lives, whenever that may be, this sense of hopelessness doesn’t extend to helplessness, and instead we see an acceptance of the path the speaker’s interiority guides her through. To use a tired cliché here, for Bang’s speaker, it isn’t about the destination but the journey, and even if moving toward a tragic fate means never arriving at a place of ultimate joy or fulfillment, it does mean never asking what direction life is going to take you. Nothing can be predicted with certainty, and there comes a point when we must embrace the moments that make up our existence more than the end result. In “Our Evening is Over Us,” the speaker comes to the conclusion that there “is / no getting around the fact that each of us is / a world of our own. An entity. A pageant / of one.” Why not let the pageants that constitute our lives be as glamorous as possible, even if we aren’t crowned the winner at the end?
Bang’s view of life isn’t solipsistic by any means, given that her speaker acknowledges that she must navigate the cruel and beautiful world in front of her. She does, however, express the ways in which women are viewed unfavorably day in and day out. Regardless of the situation in which the speaker finds herself, she lives within the context of a world that is still hauling the patriarchal baggage of the past, and she knows that despite progress, there are still unwritten rules enacted upon women, as shown in “No Questions”:
You know all
there is to know about lying down
and about taking it and this is because
you are a woman and this is what
you were taught women do. Shredded,
red heart, lungs, then cell after cell,
like someone walking behind you,
watching to see if you trip. And you will.
If not, they trip you up. It’s what they do.
Even if the speaker, and women in general, do everything perfectly, someone will undercut their thoughts, sentiments, and actions, ensuring that they follow social rules that have historically been laid out for them. Such a poem will no doubt prompt readers to think of the state of women’s rights, and how despite the progress that’s made on social, cultural, and economic levels over the past century, in this country and abroad, that progress is still being undermined by a narrow view of womanhood, one that places bodily autonomy outside the realm of legal security. Yes, there might be moments where a silver lining appears on the horizon, but as the speaker reflects in “To Say Please and Not Yet Please,” “Bad is about to be worse”:
The chorus,
hovering above in a saucer,
sings “Assume nothing.” I do
as I’m directed and enact. The scene
can be taken for granted—I, a Lady
Jane Grey, am being told to close my eyes,
shut my mouth. The mouth in my head.
The head my mouth will soon be missing.
Women don’t merely face prospects of being told to shut up, but they face the reality of being forced to, and that reality can quickly turn harmful when the directions and actions given by men, and society as a whole, have been exhausted. The speaker is a modern-day Lady Jane Grey (the Nine Days’ Queen who held the throne of England and Ireland from July 10th to the 19th, 1553 before she was dethroned and beheaded for treason shortly thereafter), and while even such a reference to her is obscure, this obscurity is quite fitting given that it reveals the ways in which women, even those who rule over kingdoms and empires, are often forgotten, cast to a historical and literary limbo. Either adhere to patriarchal hierarchy and customs long enough to be accepted and used to continue promoting the status quo, or end up like Lady Jane Grey, harmed, humiliated, and easily forgotten.
Such expectations are nearly impossible to follow, but when they are carried out, over months, years, lifetimes even, it’s difficult not to reflect on what could have been different if given the chance. In “I Could Have Been Better,” we see such lamentation and regret:
Later, lying in the bed I was born in,
I tallied my many errors, then added
my everlasting love of the few
I’d caught sight of in the midst
of being me. It was as if I had gone
of another country and now
couldn’t return without leaving part
of myself behind. I wanted to say
I love you but each time I tried,
the past tense pushed through.
There at the edge of the water—
Venus was where I’d last left her,
standing on a half-shell, staring hard
at reeds bending in the wind. She & I
both wanted to see something change.
One can’t help but wonder if those “errors” weren’t in fact the result of other people’s demands, desires, and actions. We all at some point or another replay scenes from our lives that we wished would have gone differently, or harp on paths we regret not taking, but the burden of the “past tense” always occupies the present, and there is nothing to do but feel as though we are on the edge of something that will never happen. While allusions to Greek mythology are often trite, especially in poetry, Bang’s allusion to Venus, and more specifically Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, is necessary because it provides a visual representation of the speaker’s sentiments and perception of herself: naked and under the gaze of others who expect her to embody hope, love, and beauty, all while being stopped at every chance by those who look to keep the system as it is.
There is no indication of coming out ahead in Bang’s world, but after each poem, it’s hard not to ask ourselves, does anyone truly win in a world filled with such social discrepancies? All we have is living, both the cruel and beautiful aspects of it, and we must endure the triumphs and tragedies equally, enter each day with the mindset of the speaker in “Once Upon a Time”:
The deaths past and present
in ashes, each discrete moment
a memory palace waiting to be built
alongside a suspended high-wire antenna
set to receive the unending message: this is
what is meant by your one and only life.
While the camera might pan out during certain poems, it purposefully zooms in at the end to capture Bang’s core concern: there are no do-overs in life. But even if we realize what the end holds, Bang maintains a sense of pride in knowing we still can live to the fullest extent possible, that regardless of how small an experience, incident, or moment is, we can absorb what we have learned from it and become some version of ourselves that is better and more equipped to meet every certainty and uncertainty head-on. Only time will tell if A Film in Which I Play Everyone is Bang’s masterpiece, but there is no denying that with Bang at the height of her craft, it doesn’t appear that the poetic curtains of the stage she’s built over the past three decades will be closing anytime soon.
