The love of the game is a power move
And why the Inner Ring "will break you" (Part 2 of 3)
I was in callbacks and final callbacks for a good deal of Broadway shows that season.
I’d hear my phone ring and sprint to it like I was Jackie Bradley Jr. saving a home run from the Green Monster.
I was always hoping it was a 212 area code. Hoping one of the big casting agencies was ringing to inform me my big break had finally arrived. That I’d be initiated into the Cool Kids’ Club. That I’d be making my debut.
I wanted to be on Broadway so bad.
I wanted the casting folks at Telsey & Co to like me. I wanted Andy Blankenbuehler to mentor me. I wanted New York Theatre Workshop to have me at their invited call instead of the EPA where a casting intern, who was never really casting, waited out every monologue of the day.
I wanted in.
That Broadway season, I hadn’t heard about the Inner Ring, but if I had, I would have known instantly that I was in its hot pursuit.
The all-consuming pursuit of the Inner Ring
The Inner Ring is that in-group where, if you’re accepted into it by those you perceive as better than, you will start to see yourself as better than.
It’s that mythical place where all is well. The phone never stops ringing, the wire transfers never stop transferring, and you’re cooler than James Dean smoking a cigarette on the back of a Porsche.
At least that’s what you think is inside the Inner Ring. And so you try, desperately, to get in.
But let’s pause for the nuance:
The Inner Ring itself is not inherently problematic.
C.S. Lewis points this out, he says (bolding mine):
“I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an Evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together…It is necessary: and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.”
Lewis warns that even if the Inner Ring itself is neutral, this pursuit of status, if it’s not investigated, can turn real bad real quick.
Broadway itself is morally neutral.
My pursuit of it often wasn’t.
I would berate myself when I screwed up a callback. I would act a fool in circumstances where I could have just been myself.
And I would find myself trying to scale the walls of all sorts of Inner Rings only because I felt they led to that ultimate Inner Ring (Broadway).
Inner Ring Layer 1: The dance captains who ran callbacks for the big choreographers.
Inner Ring Layer 2: The “right” acting classes with the “hottest” teachers.
Inner Ring Layer 3: The casting directors. Oh. The casting directors.
What I used to call “networking” was mainly a pursuit of ever-spiraling Inner Rings. I never did it well.
I never befriended a casting team, I never “got in” with the Broadway dance captains, I’m not sure my acting teachers even knew my name. I was really really bad at all of that. I was a tourist of the Inner Ring, a lurker on the outside, hoping someone would just casually invite me in without me having to embarrass myself.
And yet, embarrass myself I did.
One time in an audition, a casting director said to me “I like your boots.” And in an effort to be seen as dazzlingly charming and enter the Inner Ring of Telsey & Co. beloveds, I said with a wink and a smile “I like yours!”
He was wearing sneakers.
So my pursuit of that Inner Ring corrupted me (in the gentle sense of the word) to act in a wholly unaligned, fake, desperate sort of way to get inside.
I could have just said thanks.
End stage capitalism loves for you to love the Inner Ring
We’re set up to pursue the Inner Ring from the start. From preschool admissions to college admissions, our culture instructs this kind of competitive “insiders-only” mentality from birth.
So it makes sense that we rarely flinch or take issue when we see folks step over others and scurry up a leaderboard to get toward a perceived better than status.
It seems natural. Almost correct.
Why wouldn’t they do whatever they could to get theirs?
C.S. Lewis goes on to say we can all fall trap to what he calls scoundrelism (bolding mine):
“Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life…Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man.”
So what do we do the prevent this? Aren’t we supposed to be ambitious? Aren’t we supposed to aim high and swing for the fences?
If we aren’t trying to get into the Inner Ring, are we just giving up altogether? Isn’t this the only way to truly be ambitious and gutsy in life?
Turns out, no.
You can be ambitious, courageous, and commanding in a way that doesn’t involve excluding or stepping on others or playing for status at all costs. You can have an intensely exciting and universe-sized career without making a hot take be your entire personality.
Wild, but true.
Oddly, the spell only broke for me when I got the closest I had ever been: Off Broadway. It was then I realized whatever I thought was on the “other side” of those final Broadway callbacks was not a very distant cousin to what I was experiencing Off Broadway. And I wasn’t fulfilled by it.
It hurt to tell myself that truth.
It was hard to accept my fading Broadway ambitions.
But the truth was this: I had discovered a writing practice. I was getting better at it the more I did it. And I wanted to tell my own stories. I’d wake up at 6am and write for 3-4 hours, only stopping to go to work or, begrudgingly, drink water and eat food. I loved (and still love) the process. If any accolades came from doing it, those would just be extra.
The writing was the entire point.
When I read C.S. Lewis’ Inner Ring for the first time last year, I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had tried for ten years to infiltrate the Inner Ring of Broadway to no avail.
And it wasn’t until I turned my attention back to craft that my career got interesting.
Here’s what Lewis holds up as the counter-action to desperately thirsting after the Inner Ring:
“The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters.
You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it.
This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know…But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another, meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.”
The love of the game is a power move
To me, FilmStack, the NonDē Film Movement and certainly the NonDē 50 Films Project within it, are active groups of the Sound Craftspeople, eschewing the Inner Ring for something more profound — artists coming together for love of the game.
Let me pause in case you’ve just bristled at that statement.
Please don’t misinterpret me writing “for the love of the game” to mean having a hobby. That’s a capitalist interpretation. It’s a straw man argument to say “the love of a game” is a hobby and not a serious career move. It bypasses a universal law:
The love of the game outlasts status.
I didn’t truly have “the love of the game” when pursuing my Broadway debut. I was in pursuit of status, a position that’d assure me I was good enough. That’s why I stopped. Because status couldn’t sustain me.
Only love can do that.
Writing, and since then, directing, is compulsive for me from the inside. People ask me sometimes how I have time to do what I do, and the truth is, I’m not special. I’m just obsessed. I love this stuff. You probably know what I mean. You’re just the same.
In the non-dependent movement, we are not pursuing hobbies. We’re pursuing craft. Pursuing purpose.
It's far bigger than a career. Far more significant than an Inner Ring. It’s a calling. It’s serious.
And you know the difference when you see it. Game recognizes game.
It’s this shared pursuit that brings the NonDē Film Movement together.
We have a shared belief in craft. We come from everywhere — inside or outside the system. Wealthy or not. Experienced or emerging.
It’s not the pedigrees or the success or the “proof” that are most exciting around these parts. It’s our devotion to the craft and finding others with whom we can multiply that devotion.
If status is the underlying current of our presently dying culture, devotion will be the current of the culture yet to be born.
Until then, there will be a tension. There will be a yearning to be in the in-crowd in those traditional capitalist ways. And that’s okay. That’s human.
But if we can turn towards our devotion instead with what Lewis calls “conscious and continuous effort”, we’ll start feeling fortified by something much stronger, something with staying power. Something that inoculates against insecurity, which is bedfellows with the pursuit of power.
We’ll find ourselves working in ever-deepening ways, surrounded by our fellow sound craftspeople, making ambitiously-authored work, taking big swings, and enjoying a process that alchemizes us into commanding artists and edified humans.
And then one day, I hope not too long from now, we’ll look up from our work and see the world has caught up to us. There will be new faces looking in at us from the outside, wondering how to scale the wall and reach us.
And at that point we’ll say the only thing that makes sense to people like us:
So glad you made it! Come on in.
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Right on, Courtney, right on. Devotion is the real art (and struggle and practice). Great post! Thanks for that.
Check out: https://tedhope.substack.com/p/unlock-the-power-of-loving-what-you
I was in that circle. For a long time. I still have to hustle for jobs. Just saying :)