On Song: Anna Nicole, An Opera ••• voiceworks.org.uk

Anna Nicole, An Opera
Music by Mark Anthony Turnage, libretto by Richard Thomas, production by Richard Jones

Philip Derbyshire explores the performative paradoxes of Turnage's new work premiered at the Royal Opera House in London in 2011.

If, to paraphrase Adorno, every new opera asks the question ‘What is opera?’, then the recent production of Turnage’s new music drama based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith, self-consciously thematises this in the early chorus of ‘What we are trying to say…’ repeatedly intoned by a slickly grey suited male ensemble. And perhaps this opening mise en scène also poses the problem of ‘who’ is trying to say it. The chorus of men have the word – it is their framing and articulation, their stumbling desire that drive the opera forward, and ‘they’ include the composer, lyricist and producer. Opera strives to Wagner’s ideal of the total art-work, but its elements, like those of an Althusserian conjuncture, are differentially dominant. In Anna Nicole Turnage’s music is by far the weakest moment. The rhyming couplets of Thomas’s libretto overcode it and in turn are subordinated to the last instance of Jones’s setting. A good reader of Debord, Jones sets out to stage and critique the appropriation of the eponymous heroine by the machinery of the spectacle and the temporality of the opera is indicated by the growing number of cameras on stage. So the performative paradoxes of Anna Nicole become apparent.

Firstly, as opera it poses the question of form and answers it with a configuration that subtends music to the role of decoration. Turnage’s music is undistinguished in its mélange of Bernstein, Gershwin, Copeland and Sister Sledge. It is not that the opera redefines the genre through an engagement with the popular and the tabloid world, as some critics have claimed: arguably opera has always done this, drawing its material musically and dramatically from the lower orders even if transforming them en route. Rather, the autonomy and formal unfolding of the music is suppressed: it adds no more than a soundtrack. There is never a disjunction or complex articulation with the libretto, which itself is strait-jacketed by its form, the couplet.

Secondly, the opera both stages and attempts to offer a critique of the central trope of the genre: the sacrifice of women. As Catherine Clément would have it, opera is about ‘the undoing of women’ and in this ‘opera is pitiless’. The problem here is that the representation of Anna Nicole’s fate – her rise from hick Texan town to marriage to a billionaire and then her long fall after his death – is itself staged as spectacle, from the outside, performing her decline and fall with critique injected through exaggeration. The grotesque hyperbole of characters and sets is meant to provide the polemic charge against their real content. Unfortunately, Anna Nicole herself is represented in this same mode, so she becomes the object of laughter: complicit it her own fate, her pursuit of the goods that the opera wishes to condemn makes her both comic and then victim, as she is zipped into the body bag from which she sings her last lament. But this double status places the audience where it can enjoy her degradation and then nod hypocritically at her demise and the dubious pleasures of its catharsis.

Similarly, the opera plays out the logic of media manipulation whilst seeking a comfortable refuge in critique. Fascinated by the trappings and sheer power of spectacular affect, the opera seeks to incorporate their simulacra in order to establish its own continuing relevance as form. Arguably, opera is a superseded genre that can only exist as practice as the means to display the possession of a certain cultural capital by its audience (pure discrimination in Bourdieu’s lexicon). It is an elite form that can only live on as a zombie art, making transgressive gestures as it stumbles into a future whose cultural expression lies elsewhere. Anna Nicole works by addressing the historical preterition of its form through a cannibalism of its antagonist (the indifferentiate ‘media’, present on stage as an uncontrollable metastasis of literally mobile cameras) and then a moral censure of its cuisine. The assertion of the aesthetic value of its own genre is bought through a moral disdain for its newly digested content. Splitting its own pleasures between sensual submergence and pious reproof it short-circuits criticism and aesthetics.

Anna Nicole is burdened with the desire of the other (all those others within the opera, its producers and we its audience), which she takes on as her own through plastic surgery. She achieves her social rise on pneumatically inflated breasts which then fall under the force of gravity, dragging her down. Making her a success at lap-dancing, her breasts take her places, the wings of Icarus (silicone implants rather than wax addenda), but eventually burning in the solar heat of fame. And the soprano too is burdened with these hypertrophied prostheses: character and singer must negotiate the accreted monstrosities. So, the mime of back pain, the sung command to her son to ‘bring me my pills and my pillows’, these mammaries have the weight of destiny but also that of hypostasised metaphor. Props that confer (temporary) power they also mark the power of script over Anna, create the dependency that she is powerless against, within the opera and outside. Because the allegory of fame has an ineluctable outcome, based on real-life biography, the possibility of freedom for Anna is curtailed. Her contract with the Mephistophelian cosmetic surgeon is just a commodity purchase, yet leads to her damnation. But we the audience have made our purchase of the commodity opera and escape our damnation by being allowed to see opera as non-commodity: we know (and self-admiringly know we know) the falsity of the falsies whereas Anna can only succumb.

Just as her son is ruined by being like Mum only more so, consuming a fatal overdose of the pills he repeatedly served her. This loss robs Anna of her one unsullied relationship and anticipates her own decease. But it also marks the libretto’s final colonisation by the commodities it seeks to disparage. The dying boy sings out a list of itemised pharmaceuticals, sinking into death as the chemical names form a bathetic litany. This echoes the occupation of Anna’s mother by the misogyny that the opera invokes and would subvert, yet by having this maternal figure shriek the ‘hump and dump’ mantra of the protean chorus, the space of the maternal becomes merely an echo-chamber for the opera’s own gynophobic sadism. The mother is a relay, but Anna Nicole as mother is responsible, a Medea a tergo.

Even though the opera ends on a note of condemnation of the American dream and the costs of fame, such ritual and tired denunciation (how many years after The Air-Conditioned Nightmare?) cannot displace the opera’s own complicity (a little English nationalism here, a little faux anti-capitalism as anti-Americanism) with the very forms it claims to challenge. Unlike, say, Berg’s Lulu (a true dialogue with popular culture) which musically evokes an other fate for the woman who is the object of masculine fantasy and in doing so performs a complex critique based in aesthetic form, Anna Nicole is musically null. It is theatre that would be tragedy but can only repeat the gestures of caricature and take a bow before itself, the spectacular meeting the specular in a riot of self-congratulation.

Philip Derbyshire is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, working on cultural imaginaries and their articulation with nature and terrain.