The freedom that comes with living our own stories

It’s exciting, when you get up close to this 1939 painting by Edward Hopper, to see the weave of the canvas showing through the smooth paint. You can see it especially at the edge of the red curtain and where the shadow meets the tan-colored wall.

It’s fun to think that Hopper was using paint to represent a wall that was itself painted. The appearance of the woven canvas is like a tiny break in these layers of fact and illusion, a flicker of uncanniness, as when a child watches her mother removing makeup at the mirror.

What are we looking at here?

A female usher in a movie theater.

What else?

Well, it’s dark. And somehow the darkness feels just as important as what is illuminated. Shadows animate our speculative capacities, our yearning for stories. Isn’t that what makes going to the movies so exciting?

Hopper also shows us various light sources, including a fragment of the movie screen, where the action is no doubt rushing inexorably toward a Hollywood climax.

But Hopper’s attention is elsewhere. It’s on the usher. The wall lamp illuminates her blond hair. Her uniform — a blue jumpsuit with a snazzy red stripe — is accessorized by pumps and a flashlight. She’s glamorous. But her demeanor is pensive and, like so many of Hopper’s figures, rather stiff. It reinforces the sense we have of her … stuckness.

She could be in the movies herself. But she’s not a leading lady. She’s an usher, waiting. The loose, purposeless pocket of time she inhabits is at odds with the contrived and efficient time of the movies.

How disappointing, you could say.

Imagining her disappointment put me in mind of a passage from a wonderful essay by literary critic James Wood. Wood noticed that an army officer in the Anton Chekhov story “The Kiss” is disappointed by the account he has just given to his fellow officers of an extraordinary event in his life. He thought it would take a long time, but “it takes only a minute to tell.” Wood notices, moreover, that “many of Chekhov’s characters are disappointed by the stories they tell, and somewhat jealous of other people’s stories.”

You could say something similar, I think, about Hopper’s characters. In this painting, which combines the suspenseful, lamplit drama of Degas’s “Interior” with the boredom of Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” the disappointment, tinged by jealousy, is palpable.

The usher (my projection, but Hopper invites us to speculate) is struggling to reconcile her youth and beauty with her prosaic, low-paying job. She’s seen enough movies: She knows there must be more to life.

Something about her evident disillusion makes us believe in her more. Chekhov’s characters, too, can seem uncannily lifelike, and Wood attributes this to a kind of literary special effect. It’s produced by Chekhov letting his characters be disappointed by their own stories.

By allowing his fictional creation in “The Kiss” to be disappointed by the story he has just told, Chekhov allows him, by implication, to be disappointed by the story Chekhov has given him. “Thus,” writes Wood, the character “wriggles out of Chekhov’s story into the bottomless freedom of disappointment.”

I love this idea. It’s subtle, but it gets at something big: the freedom promised by art. And it helps explain why we get such a feeling of reality from Hopper’s paintings, even though they are highly artificial, radically stripped-down.

We are all in the usher’s position. We are waiting. Our stories feel fatally unformed. They don’t cohere. We did not become movie stars. We are not going viral on TikTok. We don’t have as many followers as the next person. It’s all decidedly disappointing.

But we are — “like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir,” as Leonard Cohen sang — free. Not only can we wriggle out of the fictions society tries to impose on us; we can do it on our own terms, in our own time.

We can step through the velvet curtains, up the carpeted stairs and out into the sunlight of disillusion. Or we can stay exactly where we are, in this state of gorgeous make-believe, this penumbral present, with its rich colors, heavy drapes and musty air of perfume, popcorn and potential.