Do They mean Me?

A review of They: Screening and Q & A at Aviva Studios 8th March 2024 https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/they-film-screening/

'They' at Aviva

Factory International signage, Aviva Studios, Manchester.

I think I might be They, or maybe Them, or maybe it was significant I was there on my own so maybe I think I might be Him who is one of them so is part of They.

I am not sure what happens in these buildings but I attract attention. The kind of attention you do not want to attract and a bit like walking into someone else’s wedding. Maybe it was the fur coat, but it’s only the collar and that’s fake. Or the hat, I have slept in that a few times recently but I am pretty sure you could not tell that by looking. Whatever it was, the first person to approach stood right in front of me and asked ‘what is that you are looking for?’. Not in the philosophical sense. I knew that because the path was blocked as he then went on to say, ‘Dark Noon’? and I was perplexed at that, wondered what this was and why he was in front of me than the others in front had walked straight in. ‘This building is...’ he was saying but by then I blurted out ‘They’ and was fumbling in my pocket for my paper ticket to hand over. He did not want my ticket but he did then point out much more friendly now, that the bar was to my right and the toilets on the far side. He’d also opened the body gate to let me access and I did not need the directions as both Bar and Toilet have the biggest signs you could ever need to see, both 15 feet high, elevated and illuminated. So big are those signs that if you just arrived here after a coma they would be guaranteed as the first two words you would see and remember, the foundations for your new post-coma life. There could be far worse options.

The t-shirted guy also told me I would be in the warehouse which was to my left and the three security guards there had already made eye contact and still held me in their gaze. What is it with this place? Or is it me? It is probably me.

Upstairs in the vast black hall of They screening the tiny chairs low in the reaching forever height of this place. There are some photographs about twenty feet in the air. I take a seat in the last but one row, on the end. Could not really get any farther back but there are some bean bags against the back wall which seems about a couple of penalty box lengths away. You could relax there, and be forgotten there. Not sure about the relax, I was not the first in by any measure but the only one that the bomber jacket man approached. ‘Are you happy in this seat?’ he asked. Either this is a philosophy course in some experimental pedagogues dream vision, or I am missing an obvious point. I said ‘yes’, I did not add of course, that’s why I sat here or anything flippant. I really did not feel flippant, and I was genuinely puzzled by the question. Nobody else got it. I am still puzzled. We then had a strained conversation that felt like information gathering. I had not read They the novella, nor even researched anything about it beyond the blurb on the poster and website. Now, writing this after, I am glad of that. it was a bit like I was being screened for They-ness. I think I am spotted as a non-belonger and there is always something to hang that hat on. I know the organisations never want that, they say so in the statements and websites and emails. Maybe it takes longer for the people there to cotton on what that means. Or maybe it’s just me. It will be just me. Nobody else got asked that question because they looked like they already were pleased with their seats.

The play on screen was brilliant. I thought that. I loved it and 50 minutes did a lot. I have since heard how popular it is, how prescient, how ‘of now’. the Q & a was insightful and that was when I realised, I might well be They.

And that was the oddest part of it. Not the film, or the building, or the questions that were never quite questions. It was the realisation that They is not a group you recognise by looking outward, but one you feel closing around you when you realise you are being quietly accounted for. Nothing overt had happened. No rule had been broken. I had my ticket. I was in the right place. I liked the work. But all evening I had been gently positioned — checked, clarified, located — until it seemed less important what I thought of They than whether They had decided what to do with me. I left with that unsettled feeling intact. I was the first out, to get the last train. I think I stooped, kind of apologising in the form of contemporary sloping. Not excluded exactly, but noted. And perhaps that is how it works now: not with force or refusal, but with attention. With the sense that you are always already legible to someone else, even when you are still trying to work out who you are meant to be.