Natalie Portman  / Parade, Nov 28 2004

related material on personality typing : .identity : page 4

trying on voices like hats

Billy Corgan [photo] : After a while you just get this knack for saying momentous things in four words. Literally, you walk around all the time compacting life into sentences. I'm sure you do the same thing.

J.T. LeRoy : Yeah, but it's very different. With you music you had to learn how to do things in sound bites... You know how to put words down for lyrics. It's like finding these other voices that kind of infiltrate our beings for a little bit...

Billy Corgan : That's why it sounds funny when people get possessive about whose language it is, because we're brought into language from common usage. 

Finding your own voice is having to differentiate between that which is yours and that which is someone else's.

One criticism I got when I did my poetry reading in Chicage was that I was trying on voices like hats. At first I was offended, but then I realized it was the same criticism that I got with the Pumpkins.

You're sort of not allowed to go into another skin. It's verboten. 

Part of their potency is that they found that voice, but that doesn't mean they created that voice wholly of themselves. 

I think in my particular case, coming from an abusive background, you basically have your voice beaten out of you, and you learn to speak with other voices. 

You learn the art of using other voices to say what you want to say without really saying it -- hence the songs of the '50s talking about "great balls of fire." 

The ultimate implication of that criticism is that I don't know how to speak with my own voice, and that's not true: I do. It's that I chose to slide in and out of voices because that's the way I choose to communicate. 

Being free to do that, I have found my own voice. It's an interesting distinction.

J.T. LeRoy : It's true for me as well.

I feel the need to assert my identity in the most militant way possible because otherwise, as an American, I am invisible. In a culture where nothing happens until it happens on TV, I don't exist.

As an educated, native-born, English-speaking, fifth generation Mexican-American and a feminist, there is almost no reflection of me in the movies or television, which is almost as bad as being stereotyped.

My paintings make my own statement that I am true to my emotions even if they are unpleasant ones like rage and obsession which may upset the viewer and I boldly declare that my passions, needs and desires are not pathological.

I often use my own face in my paintings. By becoming the stereotype I also break it, because as the artist I have control of the image and what it conveys to the viewer.

Being the "Angriest Woman in the World" is a moniker I come by honestly and I can tell you that it takes years of insults and disrespect to reach the level of rage I'm carrying around.

Even beyond sexuality, I'm generally interested in identity. As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be. 

For example, Orlando is ostensibly about a varied existence -- a change of gender. But I made my task something very specific, which was to remain the same. 

By the same token, in The Deep End, you have a woman who looks like a J. Crew mother who can manage it all. 

Then we begin to realize what's going on inside. 

Every time I see one of those women stuck at a stoplight with the children in the back of her car, I sort of think, "What have you just done? What's going on in your life?"

And you just don't know. You can sit next to somebody on the underground, and you can look at them quite intensely, but you can never, ever know what they're wearing under their clothes. 

I'm interested in that whole question of where we wear our identity and how can we see it. The interesting part of the task for me is how you signify it. 

So sexuality is, of course, a great way of having a conversation between people. I'm particularly interested in that, and in this film in particular ["Young Adam"], showing the way in which having a sexual dialogue with someone can be something developing and changeable and maybe uncomfortable and complicated. Just complicated and human, no more and no less.

..
..

I have a fear of labels. If someone labels me, I have to respond -- do I acknowledge it, reject it, deny it, live up to it, and defy it? Labels can affect your ability to be yourself.

If you're not careful, like I wasn't when I was young, that can take a toll on you. You find yourself conforming to everyone else's ideas of who you are.

Yes. And as a result, I have issues with what it means to be myself. I've made great strides.

It's an ongoing challenge, and it's aligned with wanting to be a parent and presenting the best of yourself to your child.

I'd better figure out who I am before Jackson gets too old and says, "Who the hell are you? Who am I supposed to be if you don't know who you are?"

Without explicit demands and support, being labeled "bright" or "gifted" is akin to being conferred an aristocratic lineage -- a heritage that exists independently of what you do with it.

The difference is that the labels "bright" and "gifted" come with implicit demands, and when appropriate explicit demands are lacking, the labels sit there like ticking bombs.

One the one hand, these labels tell you that merely being bright or talented is enough, but on the other hand, the longer you go being praised for talent alone, the more anxious you become about the time when you will be required to deliver. ///

We can be particularly resistant to change when it threatens to alter what we believe about ourselves.

As we have seen, the idea of who you are resides at the center of your sense of reality. It is part of the glue that holds your reality together. 

You believe that if you know anything, you know yourself. And you feel you know the way you behave and what is possible for you. ... 

The problem is not, has never been, and never will be, who you are. The problem is always what you choose to do. 

Certain actions you have taken habitually have short-circuited your success. Change begins with noticing your ability to choose new actions and then acting.