Balzac's Theatre of Literature, the Theater of Cinema, and Oscar-Time (A Note on the Andrea Riseborough Affair)

In an earlier comment on Balzac's classic Lost Illusions I mentioned the hard lessons that his protagonist, Lucien du Rubempre, learns in the world of publishing, not least that "[t]here is a world behind the scenes in the theatre of literature. The public in front sees . . . success, and applauds." What that public is generally unaware of are "the preparations, ugly as they always are," like "the claqueurs hired to applaud," which are as necessary as they are ugly. Such preparations as the hiring of claqueurs enlist individuals to "put forth all [their] strength to win laurels for a man" they may well "despise, and maintain, in spite of [themselves] that some second-rate . . . is a genius," often successfully persuading the public that they are such.

By contrast the true genius who ventures into the world without prospect of such aids will never even get that far, never get published at all, never mind be acclaimed as a genius. ("You know nobody; you have access to no newspaper," he is told, so the book of poems he wrote "will remain demurely folded as you hold them now. They will never open out to the sun of publicity in fair fields with broad margins enameled with the florets" that a major publisher readily "scatters with a lavish hand for poets known to fame.")

Remarking these lessons my thought was for how far, far more truthful Balzac's words about publishing in his time and in our own than not only the drivel we see on TV and in film about the business (where writers are always seen signing copies of their book in some bookshop for fawning idiots). Still, I never forgot that Balzac's images of the racket that is the creation of "success" in publishing are drawn from the theater, with what he said of the stage translating easily to the theater of cinema, and I have found myself thinking on all this amid the recent stupid controversy over Andrea Riseborough's nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Ms. Riseborough's nomination has drawn more than the usual attention to the games that film backers play in getting those little statues from their movies and the people who made them--games extending far beyond even those of Balzac's vile Parisian publishing king Dauriat. Thus does David Mouriquand of Euronews write of "'For Your Consideration' bombardments" which "include sent screeners, interviews, lavish luncheons, place advertisement and direct marketing campaigns, in order to get as many votes as possible" and generally confirm in the process that "[t]he more expensive the campaign, the more chances a film can win a nomination." Indeed, as Variety reported in an item way back in 2019 (how long ago that seems now!) even many years before that the campaigns could run as much as $30 million--"success" here, as in Balzac's publishing world, up for sale to the highest bidder, with a winning bid exceeding by orders of magnitude the production budget of the film that aroused so much controversy, To Leslie (reportedly made for under $1 million).

And indeed it would seem that at least some of the anger is over a low-budget film and a low-budget campaign getting a nomination by going around this vast, crass game. (You would be justified in thinking I'm exaggerating, but one critic actually declares it an injustice that "someone who did everything outside of the system" gets the nomination over those who did--who had elaborately and expensively arranged for them--the "luxury dinners, private academy screenings, meet-and-greets, splashy television spots."*)

The result is that, while I had not even heard of Ms. Riseborough or the film until the nonsensical furor over whether the rules of the cowardly, corrupt and ever less relevant Academy were violated (and the still more nonsensical furor over whether there was an "ethical" failure), it seems to me a good thing that the actress in question is not being deprived of her nomination on these mind-bogglingly hypocritical grounds.

* Yes, I know the critic in question had other things on his mind (allegations of prejudice against the Academy, etc.), but all the same, in making this argument he unavoidably defended the conventional way of pursuing nominations, and that is what matters for the purposes of this discussion.