Inconvenience and Craft in Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Showing Up’
No movie released in 2023 better illustrates the stakes of original work and artistic creation than Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Showing Up’.
In a media landscape where conflicts are impossibly large, where heroic, larger-than-life protagonists must overcome the Big Bads of not only their world but a growing multi-verse of other worlds, it becomes apparent that when everything is at stake, then, actually, nothing matters. When n+1 asked, “Why Is Everything So Ugly?” in 2023 — skewering the hideousness of our increasingly grey surroundings — they did not ignore the “ugly sameness” at the movies. At the multiplex, we’re trapped in “the late green-screen era” of underlit films and remade remakes.
Amidst a year full of self-reflective auteur cinema, franchise film, and ensuing franchise fatigue, no movie released in 2023 better illustrates the stakes of original work and artistic creation than Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up. In place of gimmicks, nostalgia, and new technologies, Showing Up reminds us that nothing replaces craft. This is not to say that the film eschews the realities of working within an industry, one which exerts extreme financial and cultural pressures on art and which commodifies both art and artist for a wider audience — if anything, Showing Up produces a deeply unromantic view of creativity. Reichardt’s film is a 108-minute reflection on the artistic process, from its joys and labors to its tediousness and interruptions.
In her fourth collaboration with Reichardt, Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor at the Oregon College of Art and Craft with an upcoming gallery show. Throughout the film, Lizzy seems to want nothing more than time and space to work. She asks for time off from her boss at the college (who is also her mother). She repeatedly seeks out comfort (or, rather, livable conditions) in the form of a working water heater from her landlord slash colleague slash more successful artistic rival Jo (Hong Chau), setting up a contentious dynamic that painfully and accurately captures the tensions of such a tangled relationship. The two are repeatedly forced to interact because of Jo’s insistence that Lizzy help nurse an injured pigeon found outside their houses, a task Jo takes on out of either resignation or guilt that it was her cat who maimed the pigeon the night before. In addition to her lack of hot water, Lizzy faces a number of other obstacles: her brother Sean (John Magaro), whose reclusiveness and paranoia reach a peak in a mental episode; her mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett), who refuses to acknowledge the truth of Sean’s condition, defending him as simply too much of a creative genius; and her father Bill (Judd Hirsch), whose friends have taken up residence in his home with a bit too much comfort.
In other words: Lizzy’s hell is other people. Not as the mutual torture Jean-Paul Sartre captured in No Exit, however, but something more akin to Lauren Berlant’s On The Inconvenience of Other People, where they write, "Mostly, though, other people are not hell. Mostly, the sense of friction they produce is not directed toward a specific looming threat. Mostly, people are inconvenient, which is to say that they have to be dealt with." Showing Up reminds us of the inescapable problem that is others, whether that be tolerating them, caring for them, loving them, or needing them. Reichardt demonstrates that this is as true in art-making as it is in life.
Despite her largely solitary process, Lizzy must still collaborate with others to make her art. Whether it’s negotiations for studio time, gallery space, or firing her pieces, she cannot avoid it. Pushing against the popular images of the singular artistic genius, Showing Up makes visible the multiple hands a piece must go through to reach completion — a sharp contrast to the brilliant, pristine artists we often see on screen, for whom assistants, employees, and collaborators move seamlessly and invisibly like stage-hands.
Of course, this collaboration cannot always be a smooth one. Collaborators rarely share the same care or vision as the artist, and sometimes, accidents happen. It’s bad news for those who weren’t group project people and grew up to realize that life is one group project after another. In one of the film’s more devastating scenes, one of Lizzy’s pieces has burned too close to the fire in the kiln; it feels like a betrayal when the kilnman Eric, played by André Benjamin, tries to suggest it provides an interesting effect (side note: those who were surprised by the release of André 3000’s 2023 flute album had clearly not heard his contributions to this film’s soundtrack). Though he may not be wrong about the burned piece telling its own story, neither is Lizzy, who considers the figure ruined.
Implicit throughout Showing Up is Reichardt’s appreciation for her own collaborators, like Williams. This is a sentiment we also saw in Asteroid City, the play-within-a-play of which captures Wes Anderson’s respect for the work Jason Schwartzman and other actors frequently put into his projects — not only do they put his vision and life into motion on the screen, but the cast bring their own interpretations, backgrounds, and characters into these roles, too. Other films also come to mind: Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II also portrays the frictions of drawing others into your semi-autobiographical endeavors, and Hong Sang-soo’s The Novelist’s Film similarly reflects on what it means to create films that reject the logic of studio success. There’s a strong affinity between Showing Up and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, too, which also used fine art as an analog to filmmaking when exploring the intimate and vulnerable relationship between the person being portrayed and the person doing the portraying.
In de-romanticizing artistic labor — bringing us away from tortured geniuses and glamorous, bigger-than-life personalities — Showing Up pokes fun at the everyday tensions and negotiations in the life of a practicing artist, at how ridiculous it often sounds. I am reminded of Ben Lerner’s “The Hatred of Poetry,” in which he claims that claiming poetry as a profession appears as “both an embarrassment and accusation.” To call oneself a poet, Lerner writes, is to wear your humanity far too openly for a casual social interaction. Throughout Showing Up, one spots how easily the film could fall into a full-blown parody of the fine arts. The students at the college and local artists are just so incredibly earnest about their pursuits. A woman shows off a knitted, wearable piece, proclaiming, “A whole year of my life!” A group of students sway gently on the lawn for a class called “Thinking in Movement.”
It would be easy, in a much lesser film, to turn Jo into a pretentious fraud. Beyond simple one-sided competitiveness, we can see why she grates on Lizzy. When Lizzy insists she needs hot water because of an upcoming show, Jo casually replies that she is also busy, as she has two upcoming shows. Lizzy’s thorniness and persistent negativity amplify Jo’s joie de vivre, and vice versa. Unlike Lizzy’s small sculptures of carefully posed girls, Jo’s installations (made by Michelle Segre) are humongous and require multiple people to set up. Her work has speculative, magical titles like “Astral Hamster.” Her excitement at turning a tire into a swing — it’s rolled into her backyard at such an enthusiastic running speed that it makes her resemble a child with a stick and wheel in a period piece — is almost too much for the world-weary. One wants to believe it’s a performance, but Jo and Lizzy’s relationship is much more complicated than that.
While these scenes are incredibly funny to observe, Showing Up never suggests that pretensions, character flaws, or awkwardness compromise art as art. Notably, Reichardt’s characters withhold artist statements or explanations of the pieces we see in the film — a choice reflective of the director’s characteristically minimalist approach. In doing so, we watch Lizzy, Jo, and a series of students at the college who are immersed in painting, craft, and other media with curiosity and an appreciation for the labor and time that goes into a final product. Showing Up argues that the fundamental reward in art, as in our everyday relationships, often lies in the process itself.
In images gorgeously framed by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt (another frequent collaborator of Reichardt’s), we see intention, hunched postures, and care in works that may look deceptively simple, rough, or straightforward. Scenes of Lizzy absorbed by her sculptures (which were created by Cynthia Lahti) and carefully carving, glazing, and adjusting these figures fill the film. Amidst an increasingly automated and corporate artistic landscape — whether through the proliferation of AI or the devaluation of human labor — Showing Up feels like both a radical examination of how we evaluate art and a celebration of craft.
Though Showing Up made its debut at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the ideas it raises about creative labor resonate with the spotlight put on the film industry’s workers in 2023. The movie’s release in the spring of 2023 was quickly followed by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, which demanded funding and job security for those in the industry whose livelihoods were increasingly being threatened by streaming media, disproportionate studio power, and the threat of AI in writing rooms. The momentum of the strike (and the subsequent SAG-AFTRA strike) brought to public attention the devaluation of not only writing but also stunt performing, animation, VFX, and other jobs — and, finally, the challenging (if not fundamental) conflict between the studio as profit machine and the creator as artist.
The magic of Showing Up is that there is little magic: Lizzy’s work is not punishing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not work. Reichardt’s film is a kind of antidote, not only to the devaluation of artistic labor but, more specifically, to the commercial promises to expedite, outsource, and cheapen this work in the name of productivity and profit. There are obvious reasons to be skeptical or outright disdainful of AI in art. Many examples that circulate the internet show hideous images with little to no understanding of human anatomy, let alone perspective. Generative AI is also artistically dishonest, proposing a model of plagiarism and theft that has none of the commentary that an intertext’s intentional incorporation brings. But most of all, it is a mode of creation absent of any genuine process, and one which reduces artwork to its premise. Though AI salespeople often adopt the language of democratization, what they actually do is stunt the development of any kind of original artistic voice. Ted Chiang, who calls ChatGPT “a blurry jpeg of the web,” writes:
Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.
Who embodies this “amorphous dissatisfaction” better than Reichardt’s Lizzy, frustrated at every turn of her process? It’s not surprising, then, that critics have read Showing Up as a kind of self-reflective film. Reichardt did, after all, earn her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It is tempting to see the film’s interest in hand-made art as analogous to Reichardt’s own commitment to realist cinema. Reichardt’s film takes shape as Lizzy’s sculptures take shape, and Lizzy’s sculpting mirrors Reichardt’s own lens: how do you support and position this human figure? How do you do your job so the next person can do theirs? The firing of the kiln becomes akin to the development of film — a parallel that makes the aforementioned misfire by the kilnman Eric almost terrifying because it gestures at the figurative or metaphorical violence that can be done in careless representation.
This process is also mirrored in Lizzy’s sculptures, which Adam Nayman argues are “obviously self-portraits.” Similarly, Lizzy’s brother’s “earthwork” project of digging holes in his backyard reflects Sean “literally and figuratively digging himself deeper into a hole.” That Lizzy sculpts ceramic women in stages of movement makes for a fascinating tension: a woman who is antisocial and easily irritated by others but fascinated by colorful human forms that imply play and mobility. Williams has said that Lahti’s figures “are where [Lizzy] is able to embody whatever she wants, where she isn’t limited to her physical self.” While all art might be some kind of self-portrait, then, the self is always tangled with the environment and people surrounding it.
Even though the film works towards Lizzy’s gallery show as an endpoint (where all the characters “show up,” as it were), there is no greater promise at the end than the promise that our characters will continue making art. Throughout the film, the college’s artist-in-residence expresses interest in Lizzy and her sculptures, even bringing in a gallery-owner friend to the exhibit. While this attention may certainly suggest bigger success or future prospects for Lizzy, the movie keeps these implications at arm’s-length. Simply put, to make an argument for Lizzy’s art with the validation of monetary success (crudely signaling that her efforts are, in fact, “worth” something) would undermine the film.
There is no make-or-break climax for Lizzy’s career in Showing Up, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t tension. Lizzy’s family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances gather at the show, and we brace for some kind of explosive culmination as her divorced parents squabble, her brother unceremoniously appears after having been missing, there may be too much or too little cheese, and two young girls unwrap the pigeon’s bandages. The pigeon takes flight, capturing the attention of everyone in the gallery. Then, it flies away. Everything — and everyone — is intact.
By ending with the gathering of the family, the escape of the recovered bird, and Jo and Lizzy’s final departure together, Showing Up ends in a place not dissimilar from where it started. Lizzy’s relationships with Jo and her family have progressed, backslid, and recovered — just like the injured bird she and Jo nursed. In capturing this uneasy equilibrium of self-expression, collaboration, and day-to-day living, Reichardt tells a timely story without stunt or gimmick.
Beautifully written