By Carly Stone.
Castro Theatre, 1984. David Byrne walks onto the screen. He’s carrying a boombox and an acoustic guitar. Behind him, an exposed backstage: ladders, stairs, visible scaffolding.
He hits play, strums, and sings:
I can’t seem to face up to the facts
I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax
The film is Stop Making Sense; it comprises concert footage from three Talking Heads performances at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, assembled by Byrne and Jonathan Demme (dir.) into what A24 calls “the greatest concert film of all time.” After its Castro premiere, the San Jose Mercury described “pandemonium” in the audience, as “hundreds of fans” pushed down the aisles to “get as close as possible” to “the man of the hour.”
The man of the hour. Who is he? Born in Scotland, David Byrne studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he met his bandmates, and formed the Talking Heads. Byrne is “stiff, earnest, Anglo-Saxon,” says Jon Parales in the New York Times. He “sings like a kindergarten teacher, or a Rosetta Stone language bot,” says Pitchfork critic Stacey Anderson in a review of the album Speaking in Tongues (for which the Hollywood shows served as a promotional tour). Pauline Kael, in her 1984 review for The New Yorker, called him the “gaunt David Byrne,” and emphasized his “long-necked,” “jerky,” “jiggling” disposition, his “disembodied” affect, his “mechanical-man movements.” On paper, Byrne reads more like a puppet than a rock ‘n’ roll frontman, but, somehow, he pulls it off—Kael calls the film “euphoric,” “intense,” and “close to perfection.”
What to make of these euphoric effects? On September 22, 2023, A24 will re-release Stop Making Sense on one of the largest screens in North America. The band will be taller, Byrne’s neck will be longer; in the forty years since the film’s premiere, the Heads have only gotten bigger. This is a strange film, with strange powers. How else would three tense, nervous, gaunt, jerky, jiggling, long-necked, disembodied, mechanical concerts generate four decades of euphoric pandemonium?
In 1984, critics tended to attribute a musician’s success to things like ‘power’ and ‘command’. It was the year of Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ tour, Wham!’s ‘The Big Tour’, and Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’; reviews pointed to George Michael’s “command of the stage,” Bruce Springsteen’s “spellbinding” presence, and Prince’s “legendary control.” When you read Rolling Stone issues from the era, you can feel an unexpected set of values in the texture of the sentences: an exaggerated respect for authority.
Do the Heads have ‘control’? I’m not sure. They did run a tight show. Byrne plays Psycho Killer with his right foot planted in place, and his left knee jumping up and down—that left heel is so securely fastened to the kick-drum, you can almost see the pedal beneath it. Between him and the drum, though, it’s hard to tell who’s leading the beat: at the end of Psycho Killer, when the drums syncopate, he stumbles around the stage as though the rhythm were a Spaghetti Western villain, shooting beats at his feet. This isn’t a man in control of his music. It’s music in control of a man.
Toward the end of the film, Byrne puts on his ‘big suit’: a mega-oversized, squarish, grey polyester affair, with wide shoulder pads and a girdle. It’s a ridiculous costume. “Most of the suit isn’t even touching you,” he said in an interview, “it’s just hanging from this scaffolding.” The suit makes his head look so small, and his limbs so long and floppy—one has the impression of a child marooned in an adult’s body. “When he dances,” writes Kael, “it isn’t as if he were moving the suit—the suit seems to move him.” Here lies the strange power of Stop Making Sense. Where his contemporaries (Prince, Wham, Springsteen) made music that moved their audiences, Byrne’s genius comes from his capacity to be moved.
While I was looking for a way into this essay, I came across a chapter about the concert cinema genre, written by Jerome Delamater. Concert films take place, he writes, “in a world of the fantastic rather than the naturalistic.” For this reason, they “demand a suspension of disbelief possibly greater than that required by most other films.” I wondered if Byrne’s euphoric effects had something to do with this suspension. Because the film seems to adhere to multiple contradicting laws of physics: the frontman controls the music, the costume controls the frontman, the beat controls the costume. And so on.
Suspension of disbelief. I last heard that phrase in the kitchen at a party in the Lower East Side. I was talking to a woman who grew up in a Pentecostal church—she described churchgoers who rolled around in the aisles, spoke in tongues, and encouraged each other to let the spirit in. Was any of it real? She shook her head. “I think we were all suspending disbelief.”
When I hear that phrase, suspending disbelief, I picture a marionette artist lifting her puppet, and tilting it this way and that. All acts of suspension involve a close attention to detail. When you suspend disbelief, you have to entertain the false reality, while making sure you don’t fall into it entire. A hyper-controlled loss of control.
Speaking of suspension and belief, I have a few more things to say about puppets. They played a central role in Byrne’s vision for the film. Recently, I leafed through his 2012 non-fiction book, How Music Works, and found a story from early in 1984, when the Heads toured Speaking in Tongues in Japan. There, Byrne attended a Bunraku puppet performance, and detailed the “massive, elaborate costumes” that “moved in ways that were unlike the ways people moved in real life.” Soon after the show, he sketched his idea for a stage costume: the oversized, box-like business suit.
While I was working on this essay, I went to see a puppet show in Park Slope. I knew little about puppetry and wasn’t sure what I was supposed to make of it. I wanted to believe the puppets and their oversized, papier-mâché heads. But I could so clearly see the people who were operating them. There were visible strings, stilts, and sticks. The trick wasn’t working; I thought I would have to work harder to suspend disbelief. For the first act, I tried to trick myself into pretending the puppeteers weren’t there, but they poked their heads out from underneath their puppets, wobbled on their stilts, and waved at the audience. Then I wondered if I could adopt the mindset of those churchgoers, who entertained two realities at once, suspending and unsuspending their beliefs.
Later, I re-watched Stop Making Sense with my suspended-unsuspended, puppet show technique. I felt like I had cracked it open: I was watching the film behind the film. Stop Making Sense suspends its performers in an incomplete physics: from the choreography (arms dangle from elbows, as though attached to strings) to the costumes (a suit so big it makes no contact with the body; instead, it hangs from its scaffolding, like a marionette) and the voices (bright falsettos that spring from deadpan faces, as if via ventriloquism).
What is a puppet? It’s an imitation. A pretend person attached to a real person by strings or wires or something. The puppet is a good analogy for the Heads, whose personas hang loose from their selves. David Byrne, with his puppetish jiggling, snapping into position, bouncing till he aches: here is a man so out-of-touch with his own celebrity that his stage costume barely even touches his body. My friends know I’m a Heads head, and they sometimes send me alerts from Manhattan, where Byrne gets around like any other person. There he goes cycling down the bike path on Fifth Avenue. There he is, in a diner on the LES, ordering a single poached egg. When my friend-of-a-friend set down the plate, he rubbed his palms together and said, “yummy!”
But you could apply the puppet metaphor to any old musician. There’s always some distance between a performer and their persona. You could apply the metaphor to any person, in fact. Because that’s all a personality is. A puppet, a construction, a fantastical illusion. Perhaps we can think about ‘personality’ the way Byrne thinks about Bunraku performance:
A whole group of assistants would be on stage operating the almost-life-size puppet. We weren’t supposed to ‘see’ them, but they were right there, albeit dressed in black. The text, the voices, would come from a group of guys seated off to the side. The character had in effect been so fragmented that the words they spoke didn’t come from close to or even behind that puppet but from other performers on an entirely different part of the stage. It was as if the various parts of an actor’s performance had been deconstructed, split into countless constituent parts and functions. You had to reassemble the character in your head.
That a character (or a personality) can be ‘assembled’ from ‘constituent parts’: this idea forms one of the central obsessions of Byrne’s songwriting. With the image of the deconstructed puppet in mind, take a look at the lyrics of “Social Studies”:
I thought that if I ate the food of the area I was visiting
That I might assimilate the point of view of the people there
As if the point of view was somehow in the food
So I would make no choices myself regarding what food I ate
I would simply follow the examples of those around me
I would study menus very carefully
Making note of important differences and similarities
When shopping at the supermarket
I felt a great desire to walk off with someone else’s groceries
So that I could study them at length
And study their effects on me
As though if I ate their groceries I would become that person; until I finished their groceries
And we might find ourselves going to the same places
Running into one another at the movies
What is a personality? Is it something inside a person, like a soul? Or is it something outside a person, like food, or supermarkets? When I first listened to “Social Studies,” I was reminded of a paper I studied in undergrad, called “Self as Center of Narrative Gravity.” In the paper, American philosopher Daniel Dennet refers to an object’s center of gravity as a “well-behaved concept” (we can use it to make predictions about how that object and the objects around it will behave), but it isn’t a thing. When you take apart an object, you won’t find its center of gravity inside. Selves are similar. When you take apart a brain, you won’t find the self in there. Instead, you’ll find a “yoked-together bundle” of independent parts and functions, characters reassembled in the head. If we take Dennet seriously, it follows that personalities are more like Bunraku puppets (fragmented, disorganized) than they are like the characters those puppets represent (cohesive, life-sized).
So why do we work so hard to make sense of our selves? Why do we assemble our parts into coherent personalities? The work is so tiresome, false, and painstaking. What would happen if we gave up, stopped making sense?
Speaking in Tongues might be a good example. “I originally sang nonsense,” says Byrne, “and made words to fit.” Still, one can’t help but make sense of the lyrics in this album. For instance, song two, Making Flippy Floppy:
Snap into position / Bounce till you ache / Step out of line / And you end up in jail
And song six, Swamp:
Hi hi hi hi hi / What’s that? Who’s driving? / Where we goin’? Who knows? / I / We come to take you home
When you listen closely, the words arrange themselves into a story. All the allusions to rule-following (‘Snap into position / Bounce till you ache’) rub up against anxieties about freedom (‘What’s that? Who’s driving?’), and you hear a narrator who is free but doesn’t want to be. I think the imperative laid out in the film’s title is also the ‘sense’ of Speaking in Tongues: to cede control of one’s body, to let the spirit in, to be moved by it.
What is nonsense? The negative affix, ‘non-’, suggests that the word, ‘nonsense’, resists positive determination altogether. In philosophy, definitions are hard to come by. For Herman Cappelen, nonsense refers to “any utterance that fails to have or express content;” for Ludwig Wittgenstein, nonsense “fail[s] to express a sense.” Definitions of nonsense are troublesome, paradoxical: the signifier, ‘nonsense’, has no content to signify; the meaning of ‘nonsense’ fails to express any meaning. If it is true that nonsense ‘fails’ to express, then creative expression is invested in nonsense’s suspension (stop making nonsense!).
I’m reminded of a phone interview between Robert Bartlett Haas and Gertrude Stein, where Stein remarked on nonsense’s impossibility:
I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word, and at the same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense.
Words, when spoken in sequence, always make sense, even if that sense isn’t determined by the speaker. Every sentence suspends meaning. Signifiers cast out connections, get caught on one another. In Stop Making Sense, the Heads run up against one of the most salient problems for philosophy in the 80’s: that we can control what we say, but not what we mean. So goes Derrida’s famous line: “one speaks . . . without meaning what one says.” In other words, the very moment we open our mouths to speak is the moment we stop making sense.
After his family left Scotland, Byrne arrived in the U.S. with an accent unintelligible to the other children. Almost immediately, he developed an American accent by following the examples of the people he met. Changing one’s accent is not dissimilar to speaking in tongues. Your voice must come from somewhere outside of you—from an entirely different part of the stage. Painstakingly, Byrne split his Scottish vowels, substituted them with American ones, and assembled the new character in his head. He is both an incoherent ‘self’, and a ‘yoked-together’ persona.
At the premiere of Stop Making Sense, there were indeed two Byrnes in the theatre. There was the big man on screen, to whom the audience rushed, euphorically, pandemoniously. There was also a second, smaller man: David Byrne himself was sitting at the back of the theater, watching the pandemonium; according to the San Jose Mercury, he went “basically unnoticed [by] the audience.” Who is David Byrne? He’s a puppet and a team of puppeteers. A big man and a little man, running into one another at the movies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carly Stone is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor from Narrm. Their essays appear in The Threepenny Review, Meanjin Quarterly, Tampa Review, Fence, The Lifted Brow, and Island, among others. Carly is an MFA candidate at NYU, where they hold an Axinn Fellowship, and edit nonfiction for Washington Square Review.
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