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Regular Applause readers will know I’m trying to cut down on my TV watching (pro tip: getting two vaccines at once and being rendered essentially unconscious for a day will help with that), so my boyfriend Chris and I are watching Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher judiciously, two episodes at a time. (See Alison Gillmor’s review here.)
Director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass) has a regular stable of actors he likes to use, and many of them pop up here — Henry Thomas, Annabeth Gish, Carla Gugino — along with several other notable performers.
Chris is largely oblivious to this. He has what I would consider face blindness when it comes to most actors (he would probably call it a normal reaction to seeing people he neither knows nor cares about personally).
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“Who’s that guy?” he will say, and then he has to cower as I shriek, “What? It’s BRUCE GREENWOOD!”
“Oh, what’s he been in?” he will bravely continue as I sputter apoplectically. (I’m a real treat.)
You know. Bruce Greenwood. (Chris Young / The Canadian Press files)
Other times, he will take another tack. “Where do we know this guy from?” he’ll ask. “Nowhere,” I will reply frostily.
After a perusal of said actor’s three-credit IMDb page (“Man in Elevator,” “Nosy Neighbour,” “Bystander No. 4”), he will reluctantly concur.
(I should point out that what he lacks in facial recognition, he makes up for with voices — he can name an animated Bob’s Burgers guest actor with incredible speed and accuracy.)
Writing in Esquire, pop-culture reporter Bria McNeal talks about her own shortcomings in this area, saying:
“Take my relationship with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. I’m not the only one who has confused the two, but I’d guess I’m the only one who has confused a young DeNiro with Grey’s Anatomy star Patrick Dempsey…
“Just last week I thought Martin Scorsese was Pacino, when he appeared, briefly, in Killers of the Flower Moon. As for Mr. Godfather and Mr. Goodfellas, well, they look the same! Prove me wrong.
“Even if you could, my list goes on. There’s Regina King, who I love, theoretically, but couldn’t possibly identify. Or Mark Ruffalo, who is also Andrew Scott. Plus, Martin Short and Steve Martin who are entirely interchangeable, and Jennifer Garner who could be Hilary Swank.”
She goes on to posit that the internet has made us more obsessive about stars and that social media has made us feel as if we’re intimately connected to them, resulting in unhinged parasocial relationships.
She concludes that it might be healthy not to invest too much in celebrity culture, that it’s more than OK not to know the difference between Topher Grace and Tobey Maguire.
I mean, of course it is (although I’d argue that confusing Steve Martin and Martin Short might point to a mild case of prosopagnosia. I’d also point out that Chris, after asserting confidently that he knew the difference, thought a pic of Topher might be James McAvoy).
It’s also OK not to know the batting averages of every member of the 1990 Toronto Blue Jays, and yet many people do.
Both are just expressions of fandom and both make you a valuable member of a trivia team, but it sometimes feels as if caring about celebrities is deemed girlishly obsessive, while spouting sports stats is a valid use of valuable brain power.
(Tell me knowing Hugh Grant’s middle name — Google it and prepare to be delighted — isn’t objectively more interesting than remembering who won the 2012 Super Bowl.)
…Mungo? (Jordan Strauss / Invision/The Associated Press Files)
I don’t think of myself as obsessed with celebrities, although I do miss my US Weekly magazine. I would prefer to call myself a bracketeer: someone who can provide the important parenthetical information in sentences such as: “The show is home to some towering performances, including that of Bruce Greenwood (The Sweet Hereafter, Star Trek, ST. FREAKING ELSEWHERE, Chris, for God’s sake) as the Usher patriarch.”
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