June, 2003

Mitch McCabe changes her hairstyle frequently. No, make that a lot. Recently, she has sported the “bob,” the “layered,” the “long,” and the “real short.” In her autobiographical film Playing the Part, which won the 1995 Academy Award in the student category, she switches do's approximately 14 times in 40 minutes. She even explains, in voiceover, why changing her hair “makes her feel good.” These days, McCabe is letting it down soccer-mom style - only it's more soccer ball than mom with its hip white streaks - and spending her days at MacDowell writing a script called Frosted Blonde with Dark Roots. It's true she's hair-obsessed, but there's more to it than that.

“I'm obsessed with where you've been and where you're going,” McCabe says from her studio at MacDowell, where against the wall, she has tacked a stack of index cards outlining the new script. “I like characters who change, who are capable of complete makeovers, who seem Darwinian in how they adapt themselves to any situation.” How they do their hair? Well, maybe not specifically, but Frosted Blonde is about a sharp, ambitious woman - the picture of feminist success - who leaves her PhD studies in women's history to marry a man whose family bankrolls the religious right. Inspired by a true story, the woman disappears from her friends and her former self to become this new person, and in this “tailspin of identity” arrives at a very dark place. Hence the title. And its embedded metaphors.

Of course, appearance and reality is a tried and true theme, but McCabe is not merely interested in juxtaposing them. She is more compelled by understanding the appeal of appearance and the lengths people will go to preserve it for the sake of acceptance and privilege. It is an interest, or obsession, born out of her family and one she explores deftly and poignantly in her first film Playing the Part, which she will show at June's MacDowell Downtown.

Playing the Part traces McCabe's journey as she attempts to come out to her parents. Her mother, an interior decorator, and her father, a plastic surgeon, are the unwitting players in this visual diary about forsaking the comforts of appearance for a more honest, if threatening, reality. The film - often humorous - alternates between McCabe's life as a gay Harvard student and a dutiful daughter in tony Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Throughout its 40 minutes, everything becomes counterpoint, right down to her mother's tchotchkes, which, in one scene, are inter-cut with McCabe's inventorying the privileges afforded to her by her parents: SAT courses, Brownies, and figure skating are comically offset by antique chairs, china, and assorted decorative sculpture. The conflict between the conventional and authentic is underscored even more while her parents sleep, a time McCabe steals to re-enact stock domestic scenes befitting her mother using herself as the stand-in. The stills - complete with the makeup, the clothes, and of course, the hair - find their way into the film and evoke the filmmaker's struggle to be honest within the confines of her family.

Underneath the comedy of Playing the Part is a lonely, unseen young woman who feels the tug of adulthood and the responsibilities it implies. One of which is truth. “I think one of the things adulthood is about is articulating what you want your life to be, but I think, we're often scared of adulthood for that reason. But the gift of adulthood is turning that corner and saying this is who I am.”

Coming of age and the loss of innocence that defines it is something McCabe revisits in her work. She finds them both profoundly relevant to all of life's changes. In her film September 5:10 pm, a stirring eight-minute docudrama about the death of her father, McCabe splices the messages left on her answering machine during that tragic time with painterly images of childhood. It is the kind of expressionist film that is felt not interpreted, and here again, she communicates the juxtaposition of appearance and reality, this time through the lens of tragedy. We are privy to the outpouring of love by family and friends at the same time we are struck by her desolation. “The film was about finding a way to document absence,” she says.

There is something worthwhile about seeing a young artist, especially one in a youth-obsessed culture, embrace the onset of adulthood in spite of its attendant losses. Understanding how those losses become gains by virtue of the truths they impart makes the transition that much more meaningful and moving. “Being an adult is knowing that time is not forever,” says McCabe before pulling her hair into a ponytail.