Everyone Pretends

“Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. I don’t mean just ordinary pleasure or the kind you can buy, I mean great pleasure, and nothing that’s happened to me or to Heavenly since can cancel out the many long nights without sleep when we gave each other such pleasure in love as very few people can look back on in their lives” (36).  

 

I think it’s interesting that Chance regards the biggest conflict in life—that is, love—as a performance, because performance is, at its core, powered by imagination. Imagination can be more pessimistically viewed as the vehicle for pretending and, by extension, denial. 

There’s a lot of pretending in Sweet Bird of Youth. The Princess hires Chance to pretend to love her as she pretends that her reputation as the beautiful young star can be immortalized if she hides behind her makeup and aliases wherever she goes. Chance pretends that he still has a chance with Heavenly and that their love is true when in reality, he treats her as nothing more than a sexual object. He wants to pretend that he is successful around the people of his past by using the Princess’s resources; he believes that through this pretending he can get Heavenly back. I wonder what this trend of actors play-acting in real life in the plays we have been reading could be telling us.

While most of the pretending is for less than noble purposes, there are some that seem to have been inspired by benign intentions. That being said, I don’t know what to make of Boss Finley’s final act—pun intended—for his dying wife. He bought her the diamond pendant the day she died to allow her to pretend that she wasn’t close to death, and he pretended with her. The sweet gesture soured, however, when he promptly returned the pendant the next day after she died. He also mentioned that she didn’t stop pretending until the very end, so she must have had a less painful end. So should we pretend? Does it hurt less in the end if we lie to ourselves than if we confronted the reality and the pain of such confrontation head-on?

-Ly Pham