5.4: To Be (an) Extra
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- Vicki Mayer
- University of California Press
“It’s the trend to work on the set, to be on the set, to be an extra, or have a friend that was an extra,” said an African American student who grew up in an affluent uptown neighborhood. The excitement, he posited, came from the narrative itself.
“The show has the potential to be truthful and realistic to the city,” he said. This appeal to the real and to fundamental truth-telling about the city in the post-K era was a frequent logic for joining the production. In this, extras were no different from fans in loving the show’s careful attention to vernacular culture, regional musical and culinary traditions, and painstakingly accurate archive of the urban cultural geography. Moreover, extras described, in very emotional ways, the solidarity they felt with the series creators in telling the story of a city under threat of disintegration. As a recent resident, a retired professor who became an extra, explained, he felt like he became an insider to the city’s trauma by watching Treme weekly in New Orleans with a group of Katrina survivors:
That experience certainly changed [me and my wife’s] relationship to the show both in terms of the knowledge gained but also a sympathy towards it. People talked about how, you know, in the opening credits, there’s the patterns of mold, and people said, “Yeah, that one looks like the one I have in my [flooded] house.” And so you get connected to the show in ways that are very unusual. But Treme has been and continues to be this booster for New Orleans as a city. And right after Katrina that was critical. So I was a worshipper of Treme at that time because I felt people had given up on New Orleans, I mean really had given up.
Here the speaker’s desire to work for the show was imbued with a near spiritual investment in the city as portrayed through the program. Inevitably, the labor of being an extra could never live up to these lofty aspirations of being real, telling the truth, and satisfying souls.
The emotional solidarity with Treme served the labor needs of the production well. They stemmed from an imagined belonging, first, to a community of empathy with the residents of a traumatized city and, second, to a television program imbued with the agency to help in the recovery. By generating a community of empathy with New Orleans, the number of people who could imagine themselves doing extra work stretched beyond a period of residency or even the geography of city boundaries, bringing in new residents and even regular pilgrims to the city. These people could believe in New Orleans as a standpoint or a way of being expressed in a popular T-shirt: “Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are.” The motto, which recognizes the real exile of New Orleanians throughout the world, could also recognize anyone who felt the same passion as Simon and Overmyer did. One of my interviewees, commenting on a nonnative friend who regularly appeared on the program, called these extras the “super–New Orleanians,” those residents who “go to everything more than the people born here. They are the ones who know the musicians. They have all the connections. They are kind of in love with something they want to embrace much more than in the natural way. . . . They can be almost arrogant about the real New Orleans.” These extras put to work their shared dispositions toward the city precisely by being the kinds of culture bearers and bards that the show spotlighted as authentic. The program succeeded in promoting and preserving this vision of the city and its citizenry in part because so many people were willing to be part of the drama’s background.
For extras, however, their personal experiences were in the foreground when they considered why they would take off work or spend their leisure time working at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy on a Hollywood production. People spoke of how Treme had become part of their own traumatic stories: “I guess just living here and having been through Katrina and coming back. The first two months were so intense, and I think the show shows that in a really accurate way, just how intense everything was” (female, thirty-seven, housekeeper). “The show was close to home. There was a connection” (female, thirty, tour guide). In these quotes, the locational shooting of Treme became part of their own temporal and geographic locations: respectively, Katrina and home. This close siting of the series meant for some people that they felt they had to appear on the program. Extras spoke of a kind of doppelgänger effect, in which they already saw themselves in the story, and thus wanted to memorialize it. A middle-aged man who lived through the storm spoke of audibly laughing or sobbing through scenes, replaying them as he did his own memories: “I kept expecting to see myself in the background because the scenes were so real to me. . . . I think there’s some weird thing in my brain that I think I’m already a part of it. I think that would be really neat to be historically there and on film, to be part of New Orleans” (male, forty-seven, barista and composer).
This emotional and psychological investment in the series spoke to a heightened expectation for Treme that locals did not express for other productions around the city, even those specifically focused on Katrina. On one hand, the investment spoke to the role of media in memorializing tragedies. Amanda Lagerkvist, for example, has written about how television recurrently reminds viewers of its own heroic role not only in broadcasting the tragic events of September 11th to global audiences but also in dealing with the traumatic aftermath in nationally specific ways. 9 Seeing their lives unfold on the screen, Treme viewers wanted to be in the program, as if to merge the lived and its representation. One interviewee, a local musician, related her uncanny feelings about the program and her desire to work for it to looking at a Beatles album: “You’re just looking around. It’s like when I saw the big protest march in the last episode, I just keep seeing all these people from different parts of my life. They were all there. They were all extras so I joked that it was kinda like looking at a Sergeant Pepper album cover, you know, to see all these people you recognize” (female, forty-seven, nonprofit worker and singer). Extras wanted to not only “be in it because everyone else is in it,” as one said, but to be remembered as having been in it with everyone . Extras merged the politics of their labor recognition with the politics of belonging to the city and its historical record.
Treme ’s labor market and strategy for so many extras thus relied on larger processes of popular memorialization, which on this particular program, championed the “super–New Orleanian” as the authentic representative of the city’s recent past. As proxies for the city’s local culture, extras were tasked with being in and engaging with the city in a way that others would see as authentic. According to one tour guide who did extra work during a slow period, this aspect of the job was hardly a burden: “One of the days I did extra work I was down on Frenchmen Street, which I go to all the time, and I went to the Spotted Cat [music club] and watched the Jazz Vipers. . . . Now [in season two] a lot of my buddies have been on the show, so chances are if I do it again, I’m going to hang out with them and get paid for it.” The proposition of getting paid to hang out takes a postmodern spin on the idea of labor, as if being an extra is not really working or somehow subverting real work. At the same time, it was where and with whom that imbued the extras with an exchange value in the first instance. Producers did not need the extras to do anything but hang around with others who could give credence to the authenticity claims for New Orleans as a particular kind of place, where people congregate every day in dark, musty alcoves animated by old-timey jazz riffs and refrains.
Beyond work on the set, the personal commitment on the part of avid viewers transformed extra work into a political project to do more hours and types of media labor off the set. Although production crews frequently refer to themselves as a “family,” in the case of Treme , the city at large was often seen as part of an extended production family. Crew members volunteered themselves and solicited others to manage charity and thank-you events in some of the neighborhoods with heavy location shooting. In an era of compulsory volunteerism at work, 10 many extras saw free labor as a way to build their social network in the film industry, while being recognized by others as a participant in Treme ’s moral economy. Collecting Facebook likes and cheers of recognition at the bar screening consolidated the public meaningfulness of appearing on the show with a veneer of participating in the preservation of local culture. By equating being on set to hear some music with urban recovery, they could pretend that watching the show, being on the show, and then promoting the show through social networks would sustain other local circuits of cultural production.
Meanwhile, for some extras, familial tensions emerged. Not everyone could embody the kinds of authenticity sought by the program. A white university student hailing from the East Coast claimed she was picked immediately and placed prominently in the camera’s view, while many people of color with less capital were turned away. Conversely, extras reported that crews excluded white extras when producers decided that the location should be African American. These occurrences led to various conversations about the politics of race in the production versus the city. Although no one would argue that there are still many segregated spaces in the city, production decisions at times clashed with extras’ expectations of realism and truth-telling. Some of these conversations expressed bemusement, as if to reaffirm the extras’ local knowledge contra the creators. In one instance, two white, middle-class retirees who had spent the day waiting with a crowd of hundreds for a restaging of a music festival pondered why the staff would have brought in buses of black, working-class school kids. Citing the increasingly unaffordable ticket prices and the overwhelmingly white audiences at the festival since Katrina, the interlocutors wondered privately if the decision was aspirational, a vision of how the festival should be populated. Other decisions about extras were more poignant, leading to hurt feelings when producers told extras that they did not belong in a restaging of a moment from their own lives.
If extras had a sense of the uncanny watching the show, they also had moments when their memories were edited for the screen. An extended example illustrates the disconnect on a production that attracted workers with a sense of connectedness. I met one of these super–New Orleanians at a public discussion on Treme that I led at a coffeehouse. She was a white woman in her fifties. I knew her from several moments in my own cultural repertoire in the city, and I knew that she knew much of the informal cultural economy portrayed in Treme . Her regular presence in the Treme neighborhood was also felt in public Treme screenings, which in the first season allowed non-HBO subscribers to see the program. Treme cast members and production personnel were known to drop in. After one powerful screening, the crew combed the crowd to enlist extras for an upcoming scene drawn from real events. The woman recalled telling the crew she was there the night Glen David Andrews was arrested. “[The producers] didn’t really believe it too much, you know. They thought that was kinda strange, but [one of the mothers of the band members] came out and said she was glad I was there. That meant more to me than the money.” Here the slight inflicted by the producers was recouped by another member of the crowd, a Treme viewer who was also a Treme resident. The incident illustrates the difficulties for extras who gave of themselves only to find that Treme did not reciprocate or took too much in return.