On Masks: With Candice Wuehle’s “Monarch”
Candice Wuehle | Monarch | Soft Skull Press | 2022 | 256 Pages
Every day, a new uncovering. People, places, and ideas are revealed to no longer be what they’d seemed to be. The tricky thing about masks is what they really show: the performative nature of the self and the fractured, amalgam nature of identity.
After we broke up, my high school ex instructed me to “remember who you were before we started dating.” This instruction followed a period of prolonged misery in which I attempted to convince him by any means possible to take me back: a revived relationship with his friends, petitions to return to that feeling from when we first started dating, and an email containing an entire monologue spoken by Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, which I’d dreamed he’d whispered in my ear before I went on stage to deliver some kind of speech. At the time, the performance of the dream felt unrelated to my life, but in retrospect, I think it may have foretold the life I was about to live. A year after the breakup, I acquired a collection of colorful wigs, could quote diligently from The Power of Now, and got mixed up into the world of immersive theater.
Immersive theater is a whole other beast from, say, the musical The Lion King. When people hear “immersive theater,” I assume the first thing that comes to mind is Punchdrunk’s Macbeth-inspired Sleep No More, a New York City site-specific theatrical installation that leads audience-participants through a series of well-decorated, dimly lit spaces. The immersive theater projects I got involved with shared some elements in common with the New York-based show, including an eclectic cast, an air of mystery, and a reliance on heavy, rouge-colored fabrics, but were different in their explicit content ratings and exclusivity. The main project I worked for was a members-only goth-themed nightclub set in an abandoned warehouse in Chicago (you had to follow a strict all-black dress code just to get in the door), catering mainly to rich and often Insta-famous partygoers. When one of the club owners first contacted me, I had to pass a strange and foreboding first test: “sending him a couple photos of myself.” He never asked to see my work, though my job would be to type sibylline, personalized poems for the partygoers.I got the job, and I was excited to get started. From the time I’d spent reading Ram Dass and other spiritual self-help books following my breakup, I’d come to believe that my “true self” was unstable, ever-changing—a blank slate capable of containing infinite multiplicities. The club was an opportunity to explore that fully. I could pick a new name. Wear a mask. I believed I was enacting some secret of the universe. Good on my word, I was remembering myself.
The protagonist of Candice Wuehle’s Monarch, Jessica Clink, learns to perform, to wear masks, from a very young age. A child beauty queen of the late nineties, Jessica is a self-proclaimed “brat” who decides she likes her babysitter enough “to allow her to behold her Caboodles of industry-grade cosmetics, her closet of tulle and sequin, her tiaras.” The narrator even refers to her own storytelling as a “performance.” Jessica’s pageantry is at the behest of both of her parents: her father, Dr. Clink, who regards his daughter “with the neutral attention a trainer gives to a show dog” and works as a professor of Boredom Studies at Midwestern University, and Jessica's mother, Grethe, a former pageant champion who looks less like Jessica’s mother and more like her doppelgänger. Jessica’s parents hire Crystal, the wife of one of her father’s colleagues, to work as Jessica’s pageant coach. Over time, Crystal teaches her to look in the mirror and “remove her entire face and replace it with another.” Eventually, Jessica removes the mirror itself, letting “various faces flow over” her in “the darkened basement rec room.”
On the eve of the goth club’s opening, we were asked to arrive early to meet the team and set up. I wore a black pinafore dress with a mesh, sparkly black undershirt, which, upon seeing the rest of the performers' outfits, I worried introduced too much light into the environment. No doubt, the other entertainers were more practiced: half of them were flown in from a club in LA, paying little attention to me as I unloaded my typewriter and basket of trinkets, including a turn-of-the-century blue medicine bottle and a taxidermied alligator head. It was allowed, I guess, for props to not be black. One of the women had covered her face, arms, and neck in weird, black marks that looked like alien script and wore clothes I can only describe as possessing an unnecessary amount of adaptable features: straps, buckles, random pockets. Another guy wore gloves that looked like they were made for riding motorcycles, a leather vest, and a skeletal mask with a cross stamped in the center of the forehead. Others wore dog collars and strappy lingerie.
The owners and senior performers led us in a conversation about consent as people lit a few stray candles and snagged one last drink before opening—guests would be brought into dark, secret rooms, asked to reveal their deepest fears, even blindfolded. "We want this to be a safe space," one of the club owners said. "Seductive, but not sexual," was the refrain. I wondered what exactly that looked like. What that meant. Then, we were sworn to secrecy, instructed to never reveal what happened in the club, or else face eternal banishment and other, unspecified consequences. I made the promise. "Seductive, but not sexual."
When Jessica falls in love with a fellow beauty queen, Veronica Marshall, her performances in pageantry begin to suffer. She stops practicing the mirror technique and rebels against Crystal. Finally, her memory begins to fail, or the facade of memory Crystal has implanted in her brain begins to crack: “I missed the step in a dance routine” or “I forgot to smile as I walked on stage.” Eventually, Jessica quits doing pageants altogether, and something insidious enters the narrative, a sense that she has been tricked into believing an essential lie about her personhood. “I, too, believed my mask was my face,” she relates. Following a particularly poignant experience in a church, Jessica begins to question the reality of this sentiment. She becomes fixated on the words of the priest, Corinthians 6:19-20: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.” Later, she pores over the priest’s words at her new job at the University photo lab. How much was she bought for? And by whom?
The private rooms were supposed to help guests transform their lives, somehow. Like the books that taught me to revel in my many-parted self, the rooms were of the New Age-y "self-help" genre, only sexually-charged (sorry, “seductively-charged”), monochromatic, and full of drugs and alcohol. Some performers had jobs as "runners." They were responsible for locating prospective initiates and leading them to the private rooms’ top-secret locations. Twenty minutes before the doors opened that first night, after one of the owners handed me a little black membership card with the addendum that I should return it to him afterward (so, technically, my membership was only temporary, and so too, my oath to secrecy), one of the runners approached me and held out her hand. She looked at me with eyes that stank of the allure of some mischievous, unknown, future event, and I knew then what the owners meant when they encouraged us to use our powers of "seduction.” Refusing her hand, while technically permitted, would have placed me in a position adverse to the entire operation: the girl, the owners, the coolness of the club, the "privilege" to have been chosen as an initiate.
She led me out past the dance floor and down a flight of stairs, then through a set of heavy black doors, around a turn, down another flight of stairs. It was a kind of preparatory disorientation, being spun around and around, though I had no knowledge either of where or what my target was. We came to the basement. There were still pizza boxes, liquor-infused chocolates, and black lipstick strewn about from when the cast had gotten ready just half an hour before. I didn't see anyone as we walked across the large, open room, but it was brightly lit, a stark contrast to the candlelight illuminating the rest of the building. This was the only time I felt I could be in over my head. Something about the backstagedness of the space raised an alarm in me, but the alarm's sound came and went. I only need put on the mask of my courageous self and I would get through it.
What actually happened in the private rooms was less memorable, to be honest. In fact, every ritual I participated in at the club reminded me of the kinds of games I used to invent with my friends at sleepovers in the mid-2000's, except these were less inspired. I entered a room of three or four hooded figures covered head to toe in thick, black covers. It was kind of like entering a poorly-lit, gothic office and meeting a group of expectant, dementor-like business people. The girl, my runner, left and closed the door behind her, and one of the dementors shouted, "Sit!" I sat on the carpeted floor. Then, one of them turned their head and began to speak in a constructed language. It sounded otherworldly, alien-like, punctuated by clicks, consonant-heavy. In English, another one asked me, "what do you desire?" They gestured at three magical-looking objects laid out on the coffee table in front of me. I picked something. It was cube-like. They told me what it meant. That part I don't remember.
The sequined veil of Jessica’s beauty pageant life unravels even further when signs that she has been unwittingly involved in a deep-state operation start to appear. After uncovering a series of disturbing photos of herself with bloody hands in another country, Jessica begins to have intense nightmares from which she wakes up in actual pain and with in-the-flesh bruises, unable to identify their source. Eventually, it is revealed that she is a Multi-Dimensional Identity Acquisitor, part of the MKUltra offshoot MONARCH, which means she has several different “personas” she can “transition” into, each with “its own memories, education, talents, languages, gestures, postural and muscle memory.” The program is run by Jessica’s father, and every moment of significance in Jessica’s life no longer belongs to her. Jian, a fellow MONARCH agent, explains to Jessica why a recurring dream of hers does not reflect reality:
They do that to you girls. They implant narratives in your dreams so that you don’t ask questions in life. Mostly they do it to the honeypots, they implant these vivid dreams of fucking strangers so that the girls don’t wonder what compels them to seduce the assets. They think it was their own idea.
We tend to think of violence as an explicit physical act, as something we can see, but some of the worst violences are those which are less visible. It’s their invisibility that creates their treachery.
I worked at the goth club for six months, typing poems for people in that musty service elevator, warding off the advances of older men, occasionally requesting that some couple who’d decided to take over the booth I was stationed at when I went on break please find a different place to make out. Eventually, the owners decided the model didn’t work in Chicago like it did in LA (“the people weren’t cool enough” is what they’d supposedly said), and they shut down the operation. Then, a few years later, I discovered the LA club had closed its doors following a slew of sexual misconduct allegations. Multiple performers and guests had reported uncomfortable interactions to the club’s higher-ups, and they failed to do anything about it. They failed to see and acknowledge the environment they’d created. And it was easy, I suppose (actually, it was the perfect breeding ground) for perpetrators to hide behind the club’s boundary-pushing aesthetic, for them to believe their own convenient lies: that saying “yes” in that environment was ever a free expression of consent. That harassment doesn’t happen in the nuances of everyday interaction, in the presence of others. That the structures that enable such abuses of power aren’t intricately woven into everyday life.
Initially, I thought the irony of my ex’s advice to “remember who I was before we started dating” was contained in the fact that the person I’d discovered once I actually went on that journey was anything but a single entity. I was many, multiple, the potential to play the role of anyone, fearless, reveling in that mystery. Now, I look back on what he said and read the irony in a new way. His request is an impossible feat, lacking awareness of what it means to live in the truth that as a woman, my “self” was always shaped by men like him. Like Jessica, I was full of implanted narratives. All potential versions were impure, influenced. And like Jessica, I used my art to survive. As she says, “this is the story of the creature’s creature. At some point, monsters learn to create their own art.” Even the perceived “spiritual understanding” I had gained, my journey into mystical ideas about the self’s multiplicity and capacity for play, the thing that got me into immersive theater in the first place, can be read as another way I tried to cope following the traumatic relationship with my ex. Nothing is sacred or immune.
But Monarch offers us some hope. It contains glimpses of experiences Jessica may understand as truly hers, the most prominent being her love relationship with Veronica: “The idea was that if everything about her had been someone else’s idea, then that feeling with Veronica could only be her own.” There are certain felt experiences that can, maybe, escape the system of patriarchal influence. Perhaps the utility of masks, of the self’s fracturing, can be redeemed, depending on the shard of mirror you salvage.