#me thrown for a loop by pete's I don't have feelings no wait YES I DO: I'm gonna spend SO MUCH TIME THINKING ABOUT SOCIAL THEORY

[clandestinegardenias]

Pete: Front Stage and Back Stage

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, but Ep 13 really drove it home for me so I’m back on my social theory meta bullshit bandwagon! JOIN ME. 

Today’s theorist is Erving Goffman, who did work in the realm of social psychology; basically how individuals interact with society and social groups. 

[Special Skills: Accidentally invented postmodernism?]

One of his big theories was dramaturgy, aka the idea that individuals have social ‘personas’ that they act out in everyday life. These performances are intended to convey a certain impression to a given audience. They allow us to manage how others see us. 

A big part of this is the concept of front stage/back stage. 

Front stage is the show that we put on for the audience; the intentional impression that we act out and work to provide. The audience, we are aware, is judging this performance and evaluating what kind of person we are. 

Back stage is the relaxed, core, true self. It’s the parts of ourselves that we hide, disguise, and choose not to show to an audience, thereby managing their impression of us. 

A classic example is customer service, where a helpful friendly persona is put on so that customers feel at ease and accommodated. The workers true feelings towards the customer are hidden in the backstage–the act may or may not be genuine, but the IMPRESSION is given that it is. 

The back stage normally comes out when the audience is not perceived as being present to judge an individual’s performance–but what happens if the audience never leaves? What happens, say, if you’re a bodyguard under literally constant surveillance or threat of surveillance? 

You might put on your front stage ‘mask’ all the time, to the extent that NO ONE gets to see your back stage. It might seem, even to yourself, that you don’t have one any more. You’re permanently in customer service mode. 

You have become the mask, the cardboard cut out version of you that you put in front of your true self. 

This really hit me with Pete when he’s breaking down in Ep 13 after Vegas threatens him. 

His assertion that he “has no feelings” and even no humanity…

( Image @vegastheerapanyakul )

…is quickly replaced by an equally strong pleading statement to Vegas that he’s human and has feelings.

(Image @liyazaki​ )

So why the quick turnabout?

My front stage/back stage take is that Pete’s initial statement that he has no feelings and no humanity is all about the front stage that Pete has constructed. 

Everyone around Pete (us as the audience included) sees him as relatively one-dimensional for the first ¾ of the season. Pete is friendly, happy, silly, maybe a bit naive, and he lacks depth. 

However in the arc with Vegas we learn that this is all a show–Pete has trauma, and soul-deep sadness, and complicated emotions. He’s a fully realized person, but no one ever sees that Pete; he never SHOWS that to anyone (except perhaps Porsche in little doses?). 

I think that when Pete says he has no feelings/humanity, he’s referring to the act, the mask, the cardboard cutout version of Pete that is so firmly in place at all times that Pete is afraid that’s who he has BECOME–so afraid he’s ready to die rather than go back to that.

And Vegas threatening him, going back to their earlier dynamic, is shoving Pete back behind that mask. Denying that Vegas has SEEN Pete’s back stage and should KNOW that Pete is more than he first appears.

Pete’s asserting that he DOES have feelings and is human is a reclamation of the fact that he has a back stage, he has depth and complexity and trauma and darkness, and finally, FINALLY someone (Vegas) has seen all of it. 

Pete is begging, pleading with Vegas to confirm that–you see me, right? You see that I’m a full, true, complex person. I’m not just your pet, your cardboard cut out version of me. 

Don’t make me go back behind the mask–I half believe that’s all I am myself, don’t you believe it too. Not after you’ve seen otherwise, and reminded me to see it too.

(tagging fellow KP social theorist @yeetlegay​ and my muse @stormyoceans​)