[COLUMN] In Poker Face, All the World's a Stage | by Darren Mooney

Note: The second season of Poker Face launched this week on Peacock with three episodes. It’s good fun. The nature of the show involves revealing the identity of the killer early on, so it’s not really “spoilable” in the conventional sense. But if you want to watch those three episodes completely blind and come back, we’ll be waiting.

The concept of Poker Face is remarkably straightforward. It is a series with one credited lead character, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne). Cale ventures across the great nation of America, wandering from place to place, inevitably stumbling into some murder or criminal conspiracy along the way. It is a classic episodic television format: Have Plymouth Barracuda, Will Travel. Although Poker Face is a streaming show, it harks back to a more innocent age of television.

The unique selling point of Poker Face is that Charlie has an uncanny and inexplicable ability to tell when a person is lying. She can just detect when somebody has told her something that is untrue, which inevitably prompts an almost reflexive “bullshit!” from the no-nonsense wanderer. The series is, wisely, somewhat ambiguous about the mechanics of this “almost supernatural infallibility.” As she puts it, her sense is “just that something is off, that’s the best way to describe it.”

However, while the show never explains the exact logic of Charlie’s gift, that ability feels central to the thematic dynamics of the show around it. Although Poker Face is ostensibly a classic procedural, a “howcatchem” in the style of Columbo, Poker Face is fascinated by performance. Charlie generally doesn’t unmask the perpetrator through forensics or laboratory work. Instead, Charlie exposes the criminal by seeing through the persona that they present to the world.

This idea often becomes the text of the show itself. Poker Face is populated with iconic images of the vast American landscape: the cheap and dingy casino of “Dead Man’s Hand”, the desert truck stop in “The Night Shift”, the outdoor barbecue of “The Stall”, the speedway in “The Future of the Sport.” The opening segment of “Escape from Shit Mountain” finds Charlie drifting through the Colorado Mountains. Poker Face is a romantic invocation of the idea of America as a country.

However, more specifically, one of Poker Face’s recurring interests is show business in its various forms. Many of the criminals featured in the show are presented as celebrities, albeit of the minor and local variety, like small town radio show host Taffy Boyle (Lil Rel Howery) in “The Stall” or up-and-coming racing driver Davis McDowell (Charles Melton) in “The Future of the Sport.” These characters are not world-famous, but they are known and respected in their communities.

Charlie occasionally finds herself drawn to the less glamorous side of show business, selling merchandise to support a tour by washed-up rockstar Ruby Ruin (Chloë Sevigny) in “Rest in Metal”, working as a waitress at a dinner theatre in “Exit Stage Death” or becoming the personal assistant to the largely marginalized special effects artist Arthur Lipton (Nick Nolte), a character transparently based on Phil Tippett, in “The Orpheus Syndrome.”

The three episodes that comprise the second season premiere lean into this motif. The first of these episodes, “The Game is Afoot”, casts Cynthia Erivo as a set of quintuplets, four of whom worked on a cult classic television show called Kid Cop. These children are the daughters of monstrous stage mother Norma (Jasmine Guy), who spends her final years tucked away in her mansion in an obvious invocation of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) from Sunset Boulevard.

It is perhaps interesting that this is far from the first time that Poker Face has invoked the specter of Norma Desmond. Ellen Barkin’s character Kathleen Townsend from “Exit Stage Death” was singled out in reviews as “a dinner-theatre Norma Desmond” and “a cut-price Norma Desmond.” There were also shades of this to the character of Ruby Ruin, another aging woman who was cast aside by the industry and whose justifiable anger metastasizes into something monstrous.

It makes sense that Poker Face would return repeatedly to this archetype. The show is a vehicle for Natasha Lyonne, who emerged as a promising young performer in films like Slums of Beverly Hills, American Pie and But I'm a Cheerleader. However, struggling with addiction and the expectations of fame, Lyonne found herself adrift with no real industry support. American Pie director Chris Weitz compared how Hollywood tends to treat stars like Lyonne to “throwing someone under the train.”

Even after her return to Hollywood with Orange is the New Black and Russian Doll, Lyonne has talked about the industry’s reluctance to embrace her, seeing her as “potentially intimidating” when measured against comparable male auteurs like Bill Hader or Donald Glover. She is extremely close friends with Chloë Sevigny, and Sevigny’s performance in “Rest in Metal” certainly mirrors Sevigny’s own experiences; she’s talked about her “total disdain for directors” based on her early experiences.

It is perhaps telling that Lyonne co-wrote and directed “The Orpheus Syndrome”, the episode of the show’s first season with the strongest ties to Hollywood, a thinly-veiled allegory about the struggles that artist Phil Tippett experienced within the industry. It has also been read as a metaphorical exploration of the death of Natalie Wood during the production of Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm. Even in “The Game is Afoot”, the four siblings are scarred by the exploitation of the industry.

However, Poker Face’s interest in performance extends beyond its skepticism of show business. The second episode of the second season, “Last Look”, adopts a certain romantic approach to the art of movie-making. When a gaudy horror movie production takes over the funeral home operated by Fred Finch (Giancarlo Esposito), the episode initially seems to sympathize with his disdain for its tackiness. He stresses the importance of his clients, “real people, dealing with real death.”

However, Fred’s wife, Greta (Katie Holmes), finds herself falling in love with the production. The film crew brings the outside world into the “depressing haunted shithole” that has been Greta’s home. It inspires her to make the decision to leave Fred, and to embark on her own adventure. She plans to travel to Miami, to find work as a make-up artist, and to finally live. It is achingly sincere, very similar to the show’s treatment of Arthur in “The Orpheus Syndrome.”

At its core, Poker Face is built around the idea that much of modern life is a performance. It is people pretending to be something other than what they really are. The season’s third episode, “Whack-a-Mole”, finds Charlie recruited by mobster Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman) to find the rat in her crew. It turns out that Beatrix has her own mole, Agent Daniel Clyde Otis (John Mulaney), inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This involves its own kind of performance, with life-or-death stakes.

Incidentally, it turns out that the mole that the FBI has inside Beatrix’s operation is her lover, Jeffrey (Richard Kind). When Agent Luca Clark (Simon Helberg) suggests that they will have to fake Jeffrey’s death to smuggle him into witness protection, Jeffrey insists that he can convincingly die on cue. “I’ll have you know this is not my first time treading the boards,” he assures Luca. “I’ve done a lot of community theatre.” The ensuing confusion takes on the quality of a farce.

There is nothing novel in the notion that life is a performance. Shakespeare argued that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman contended that the self is not an independent object, but “a dramatic effect.” This has always been the case. An individual’s navigation of social situations and group dynamics inevitably involves some measure of calibrated performance, whether conscious or not.

However, it does feel like this basic logic underpinning most human interactions has been heightened in recent years by advances in technology and by broader cultural forces. Social media has given individuals a much larger and more public stage, while emphasizing the illusion of “authenticity” and “intimacy.” Dynamics, moments and thoughts that were once private or secret are now rendered transparent for mass consumption.

“On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” explains Professor Sherry Turkle. Filtered through such a prism, she contends, “Your psychology becomes a performance.” Lying is so normalized and incentivized that even acknowledging the performative aspect of these glimpses of social media – the effort that it takes – becomes “taboo.” It isn’t just the skillful application of filtering or cropping, on social media an entire life becomes a performance.

A quote often misattributed to Andy Warhol predicted that “in the future, everyone would be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” Social media makes this a reality. American culture was always fascinated by celebrity, an appetite that was only fed by the explosion of so-called “reality television.” On social media, users vie to be “influencers” or “the main character”, with a hefty financial incentive to exaggerate and heighten – and lie – for capital in the attention economy.

As a show about a lead character with the innate ability to see through lies and deception, Poker Face resonates in the modern “post-truth” era. America would be a much healthier place if everybody were Charlie Cale. However, the show has more to say about contemporary America. Its fascination with small-town celebrity and the folly of performance feels very much in tune with an era where the President of the United States is a former reality television host.

Indeed, there is something interesting in the way that Poker Face tends to portray its killers as vulgar and inept. These are rarely masterminds. Their motivations are often petty, their crimes slapdash. These characters often want money or fame. They desire status and influence. The structure of the average episode of Poker Face, which devotes an extended opening depicting the crime, often lets these killers be the main characters that they want to be – and in doing so, expose their venality.

In contrast, there is a purity and romance to Charlie Cale, who operates completely “off the grid.” She doesn’t even have a mobile phone. Instead, Charlie drifts across America, taking in “the unobserved pageant of the ordinary.” Perhaps this is what grants Charlier her gift; she is connected and tethered to reality in a way that many of these criminals are not. Charlie lives in the moment, embraces the world as it is presented to her, unconcerned with grander narratives or performances.

If all the world's a stage, Charlie Cale is a critic who can see through – in her own words – the bullshit.