Background Figures


Matthew Horrigan, Simon Fraser University

Background figures wander blurred by a dirty window, interrupting the beams of lamps that backlight faces leaning into a romantic conversation at a café with a big-lens camera inches away. The camera does not see the wanderers circle and cross the same window again. They follow commands. Break your rhythm. Be less repetitive. Someone comments below a YouTube documentary they call "woke." Look at these people, the commenter argues, and their solidary bandwagoning. They ideate similarly over and over despite changing keywords faster and faster. They resemble background characters in a videogame, "non-player characters," "NPCs" (Gallagher and Topinka, 2023), breaking no scripts, doing no heroics, surely submitting to shadowy orders. A crowd communes at a concert, rippling in time. For some, plans liquidate in the liminoid throes of musics dominating vibe (Henriques, 2010, p. 78). For most, a good time coincides with mutual recognition among neighbours (Reicher, 2002, p. 196). Guards and police fear their surge, but the crowd catches falling members and puts them upright. Someone crowd-surfs in a wheelchair. Motivated by three projects, an archival and ethnographic study of the "service production" industry that makes Hollywood movies in British Columbia, a textual analysis of a Grand Theft Auto V police role-play group that replaces NPCs with human-played "civilians," and an ongoing analysis of how musics license subcultures, I develop a theory of background people—backgrounders. Most people, most times, register to others indistinctly: traffic, sometimes conference applicants, sometimes former students with forgotten names. Blurrily we make each other’s ordinary atmospheres (Anderson, 2009; Stewart, 2011, p. 452). But stigma attends playing background. (Dis)figured as lumpenproletariats—too deprived of agency to become agentic—crowds framed as stupid have given a point of agreement to Marx (Barrow, 2020, pp. 22–23), some of his readers (Kamola, 2021), and their conservative recuperators (Gallagher and Topinka, 2023). In videogames, NPCs remediate cinematic backgrounders, human bodies removed to leave patientic entities that red-pilled writers memeify as icons of adversaries. Against a majority, deriding backgrounders has become an argumentum ab populum . For cinema, a tantalizingly sparse literature considers backgrounders (e.g., Didi-Huberman, 2009; Fortmueller, 2021; Lauwaert, 1987/2023), usually not on their own terms but as the "extras" that assistant directors "wrangle" and "set" (like non-human animals and furniture). The term "backgrounder" comes from the West Coast Backgrounders Union, a short-lived group that tried to advocate for "cash extras" from 1999 to 2003. Defeated and absorbed by the actors guild (see BC Labour Relations Board Case 46166, 2003), the backgrounders union achieved little more than to give backgrounders an emic name. But in theory, that is something. I theorize backgrounders aggregations as momentary or fixed. Cinemas flatten crowds, allowing the face of one actor to tower over many, reducing a groups ambience to something balanced lightly against an individual charismatic. So different from what crowds do live—they desolidify and resolidify, pour themselves into flexible solidarities with a flowing tentacularity (Haraway, 2016), yet more flexible than limbs and skin. Gathering and parting, less brute forcing than dividual, to become suddenly bigger and smaller, to acquire and jettison new organs, is a crowds transhuman capacity, its agency to morph. As a robot is a crowd of components, so backgrounders compose cyborg bodies. Common among milieus that degrade backgrounders is a fixity of difference between backgrounder and foregrounder. Directors avoid "upgrading" extras. NPCs rarely become human-played. But like Keith Johnstone theorizes friendship as flexibility of relative social status (Johnstone, 1979/1987, p. 37), I consider backgrounders mutable backgrounding, their potential to come forward momentarily. A background not only gives a place of safe retreat, but now seems a repository of measurable history for scientists who consider the complexity of a reproduced thing in terms of the group of other objects that evolved with it (Sharma et al., 2023). Perhaps an adequate theory of backgrounders must be a "dedramatize[d] theory" (Stewart, 2011, p. 445), whose subjects effect momentarily rather than persist as moral heroes. Suspended between a heuristic that foregrounds one actant stretching tendrils in a network, and a heuristic that feels many as an atmosphere, I consider how to value a backgrounder not as "upgraded" to the fore but as a part-distinct part of an affecting crowd.

This paper will be presented at the following session: