The opening credits sequence of Kate Plays Christine is an early indicator of what documentarian Robert Greene and his subject, actress Kate Lyn Sheil, have on their mind. When the title flickers in through static onto a black screen, a mimic of a VHS tape tracking, the first word to appear is “Christine.” “Plays” and “Kate” soon follow in that order. It’s a subtle yet resounding gesture for a film whose pretext is an actress investigating a part for a film. Under its surface – and Greene paints a thick one – simmers the question: Does Kate play Christine, or is Christine playing Kate?
Director/writer/editor Robert Greene has performance on the brain. His last nonfiction film was Actress, a deep dive into the life of The Wire actress Brandy Burre. It is a refracted portrait of a modern woman navigating the roles of profession and society. A stirring document of personal inhabitation, it’s plays as an existential investigation into the “Who” of Burre. Kate Plays Christine seems to chart the same course, yet Greene finds a shockingly more paranormal thread. Somehow his cinema seems to evoke forces from beyond. What we see is like a séance of motifs about personhood and nu-media.
On July 15, 1974, while working for Sarasota’s Channel 40 news station, Christine Chubbuck incanted words that were by then probably very familiar to her: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts,’ and in living color, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide.” She then placed a revolver to the lower right portion of her skull, below her right ear, and shot herself. It was unprecedented. And if it had happened today, it’d be a viral video shared by millions. Yet no one documented has ever seen the footage of Christine’s fateful act since that day.
That recording is an unrelenting weight which hangs over the film. Kate Plays Christine is precisely structured around the mystery of that well-fortressed footage. What it contains is the key to the film’s entire drive: having real-life actress Sheil embody Christine for an upcoming film role. As the actress heads down to Sarasota, FL to explore Chubbuck’s life, she has to piece together the deceased woman’s psyche like a puzzle. She studies books on suicide, visits with friends and family, coworkers and store owners; she reads the autobiography Christine wrote when she was only 15-years-old. The only literal image Kate has to go off of is a still from an on-air broadcast. The importance of that photo gives credence to the legend that a picture taken steals the soul. Maybe gazing at it could conjure her spirit.
Acting is a strenuous enough process, yet the impediments in this case frustrate Kate on a deeper level. Her own body and mind becomes a psychic wrestling match. She can’t quite embody this woman, yet all the implications of her actions in 1975 and now the thrust of this cinematic endeavor wage war inside of her. Kate isn’t merely playing Christine; an entire modern drama is set within her.
Much of method acting is drawing from one’s own experience to connect with the character portrayed. Flesh and blood and life – the stuff of the role – come from a shared reality between actress and character. The more tied to real emotion, the more real the performance is, ostensibly. Kate has to repurpose Christine from a shared collective memory. Many Sarasotans don’t even know about the tragedy. But they do have opinions on suicide. Others who do remember talk about her as a psychological test case or as a woman who didn’t fit their concept of a “woman.” She was mannish, cold, bitter, a virgin at 30 who’d just had an ovary removed. The way men talk about her is most disgusting. Some who worked at the station near her even said that if something particularly unusual had happened on a given day, they’d blame Chubbuck for the bad mojo. Christine didn’t fit the role they felt she was supposed to, and her memory has been scarred by it.
As “Christine” eludes Kate so the filmmaking eludes the audience. Greene and cinematographer Sean Price Williams (one of the best working today) treat surfaces as temporal realities. Kate is obscured and refracted through windows and panes and mesh, materials which filter her existence in flux. Williams lights her in sequences in every which way possible. He envisions Kate as a prism of existence, a matrix where reflections on gender ideals, local tragedy, memory as social act, the ethics of filmmaking and media, and mental illness all collide in a singular, refracted form. Even the actress herself operates as a surface; her physical transformation is, at times, harrowing. A big deal is made of her purchasing a wig and getting a tan. Greene posits this as dangerous work, a grueling feat of stretching into another person’s skin, in battle with a psychic, unseen will.
The whole film leans on and into Kate. As she presses into Christine’s life, Christine seems to press into her. The film finds its rhythms in its lead actress, and as Kate succumbs to the character she’s to play, she’s like an apparition that looms over the town which seems to have forgotten Christine. Kate’s performance cannot be praised enough. Distance between audience and performer is inherent to witnessing someone learn an acting role. Not only does the cinematic architecture keep us at bay, the insular act of a person learning to act like another furthers the distance. Kate makes it immediate. She performs for the audience. She transfers the burden onto us. And so we feel her frustration, her anxiety, her emotion. Christine plays Kate, and Kate plays us.
At one point in the film as Kate talks about some interview footage with an old co-worker of Christine’s, he mentions to her his uneasiness about the whole endeavor. The monologue she left upon the world was meant as an indictment of America’s obsession with the shameless sadism of modern news. She was calling out public habits which often left her own stories of import, about which she was very passionate, dead. Christine’s “performance” was a living tragedy. She thought, or in actively not thinking, that mediating her own blood and guts would shake the cages. So it’s an unfortunate cosmic irony that Kate and crew would attempt to dig up her memory, to put skin and life back onto a woman whose sole fame lies in her public act of suicide. And it leads to the film’s broader questions: how guilty are we, the audience, in what we consume? What do we ultimately desire when we hunger for more “blood and guts, in living color?”
The key is the taped footage. It is a talisman of understanding, yet an object that constantly repels then beckons the audience. We want to see it. Our gnarly fantasies of voyeurism long to witness the real thing, even if Kate’s efforts to recreate destroy her. In that, the footage becomes like the blue mystery box of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. It’s a portal to an adjacent reality. If it could be found and its contents unlocked, it would shift everything, explain these women, and give us our sadistic catharsis. Actually, much of Kate Plays Christine is like Lynch’s film. Women, actresses, psychically merge despite time and space. The one haunts the other. Dreams and performances are like active agents, demons come to possess and befuddle. Horror isn’t a physical threat but a threat from on high, as if laced within the very fabric of the cosmos. It rears its head in the uncanny and the bizarre.
Though it is a documentary literally about a woman acting, it never falls into the trap of winking meta-ness. Using cinematic reflexivity as text, Greene concocts a modern horror story. Kate’s psyche seems loosed by the end, stressed to the point of not being able to contain these disparate worlds within her anymore. Christine haunts. Her death is a banshee scream. The lost tape traps her between “Kate” and “Christine.” And at the end of all, what was it worth? If it’s done for the audience, to give them some bits of truth, was it worth having psyches bruised and towns haunted? Was having our sadist needs satiated all that mattered? It’s unbelievable to witness, and maybe it was something we should never have seen.