Strange Case of Norman Desmond

Description:

Featuring slides, voiceover narration, pre-recorded musical backing tracks, and five costume changes, Andrew Paterson’s multimedia solo performance The Strange Case of Norman Desmond charts the unravelling of a Vegas-style showman. Part mockumentary, part film noir, the piece explores how a once-successful media heist inevitably devolves into a harrowing, media-constructed prison. The character of Norman is trapped in a terminal limbo between divine iconography and pathetic humanism.

Paterson’s performance was followed by a screening of his video Hygiene (1985), a forty-two-minute film that draws on prime-time soap operas and Hollywood melodrama. Consisting of a series of alternatives between confinement and exploration, activity and passivity, and naturalism and stylization, the narrative is punctuated by dispatches from an “objective” world outside of the protagonists to set their personal relationships against a wider objectified canvas.