In one of my favorite non-BP films, The Prestige, two young magicians, Borden and Angier, witness the greatest performance they’ve ever seen. It doesn’t take place in the theater, and Angier is skeptical if he is even observing a performance opposed to a way of life. What they are watching is an ancient Oriental magician being helped into a carriage. Borden insists the old man’s “real performance” is not the tricks he performs while on stage, but his constant pretending (every single moment of every day) to be frail and in need of physical assistance. According to Borden, the old man demonstrates “total devotion to his art,” which requires “a lot of self-sacrifice.” He has become what he is portraying in order to ensure the success of his act. We see something very similar in this week’s BP All About Eve.

Like 1940’s Best Picture, Rebecca, All About Eve is very much about identity. Let’s begin with the slithery Eve since the film is all about her. This young, aspiring actress puts on a persona very unlike her actual conniving one in order to get what she wants, sacrificing her own self for fame and praise. Upon first meeting her idol Margo and being asked to relate her life story, Eve shares how, as a child, acting began to take over her life: “It got so I couldn’t tell the real from the unreal. Except that the unreal seemed more real to me.” This quote pretty much sums up Eve’s life as an adult. She is completely unreal, a fake. She no longer even knows her real self because her actual self has been replaced by a sham one, one that manipulates those who can promote her career goals and tramples those who are in her way. Identical to the aging magician in The Prestige, Eve’s performance is constant. She lives her work unceasingly. Contrary to the old man, though, Eve’s routine is only for herself. She is the only human being for whom she has any regard, the only one for whom she considers or cares at all. It really is all about Eve.

Eve receiving the Sarah Siddons Best Actress of the Year award, which she earned through back-stabbing and deception.

But why? What might cause someone to dismiss the rest of humanity in favor of only him/herself? The film does not neglect to address this issue as well. During one conversation Eve has with director/Margo’s boyfriend Bill Simpson, Bill declares that anyone wishing to be a good actor or actress “can’t be ordinary” because so much self-sacrifice is involved in return for “almost always so little.” Eve is slightly taken aback and replies: “So little. So little, did you say? Why, if there’s nothing else, there’s applause. I’ve listened backstage to people applaud. It’s like, like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine to know, every night, that different hundreds of people love you. They smile. Their eyes shine. You’ve pleased them. They want you. You belong. Just that alone is worth anything.” Worth anything? Worth stabbing “friends” in the back and creating an entirely false life? For Eve, yes. But in looking closely at her words here, we can notice that she mentions love twice. To Eve, applause is evidence of love, of belonging to others. In essence then, Eve is searching for love, for something that fills the empty longing of her heart to feel wanted and valued by others. It’s tragic that she has convinced herself that to achieve such love she must discard everyone she uses. As the cold theater critic Addison DeWitt tells Eve, she (and he) possesses “a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved.” What Eve wants she cannot truly have because she cannot demonstrate it herself.

Eve and Margo

Let’s turn to All About Eve’s other main female actress, Margo. Like Eve, Margo struggles with identity; but although Margo is often outwardly more irascible than even Eve, inside she is less confident, more tender and vulnerable. Margo admits she doesn’t know her real self at all. She confides to her friend Karen: “So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me.” Karen replies, “You’re Margo, just Margo.” But that is not enough to tell Margo who she really is. Margo continues: “And what is that besides something spelled out in lightbulbs, I mean, besides something called a temperament which consists mostly of swooping about on a broomstick and screaming at the top of my voice. Infants behave the way I do, you know. They carry on and misbehave. They’d get drunk if they knew how, when they can’t have what they want. When they feel unwanted or insecure or unloved.” And there’s that word again: love. Margo seeks love and affirmation just like Eve does—but not exactly how Eve does. While Eve wishes to elevate herself to a platform above all of humanity, Margo just wants to find her place within humanity. Eve wants to be worshiped. Margo wants to belong. Both have attempted/are attempting to use the stage of the theater to reach the kind of love they are seeking, i.e. to use falsity to reach truth. What Margo knows (and what Eve does not yet know) is that all the human praise in the world cannot provide the satisfaction of real love. Just like the acting that occurs on the stage, the love that is supposedly evident in applause is pretend as well.

Ironically, it is Margo’s age and the experience it brings with it that allow her to realize that there is a higher fulfillment than just that found in people’s approval. Yet it is Margo’s age and her fear of becoming irrelevant that lead to her hot-temperedness and ungoverned lifestyle. Other characters in the film frequently call Margo childish, and she herself constantly harps on her age and the fact that she is eight years older than her lover Bill. But her experience with Eve and the change in perspective of observing self-centeredness and how love of praise affects a person allow Margo to relinquish her insecurities about aging and failing to be lovable. After her and Bill’s engagement, she matures quickly, declining the role that Karen’s husband wrote for her in which she was to play a “twenty-something” woman. She declares: “I mean it now…I don’t want to play Cora…It isn’t the part. It’s a great part in a fine play. But not for me anymore. Not for a four-square, upright, downright, forthright married lady…It means I finally got a life to live. I don’t have to play parts I’m too old for, just because I’ve got nothing to do with my nights.” For Margo, the real-life pretending is over. She has found a real purpose, a real love, and a real identity. For Eve, the charade continues.

Is this the real Eve? Probably not.

For Me Then…

I really enjoyed this film, but I find it unfortunate that Margo only realizes her true identity as a married woman—as if she is incomplete until she is married. It makes me wonder if the film is hinting this is Eve’s struggle as well—if she was properly married, she would quit her scheming because she would have more fulfilling pastimes such as housekeeping and pleasing her husband. Along with this idea of women needing men to complete them…All About Eve makes a pretty blatant statement about women in showbusiness being willing to do anything to succeed. The film’s final shot of Phoebe, the “next Eve,” wearing Eve’s cloak and holding Eve’s award while reflected countless times in the mirror implies that there will be an endless succession of desperate, scruple-less pretty faces in the world of entertainment. Are we to take warning not to believe the rags-to-riches tales they will undoubtedly tell us? Do they all need men to set them upon a straight path in this world?

Again, I wish the film would offer us a little more hope than marriage and friendship as a way to find meaning in life, but it still provides plenty of food for thought regarding what is truly important in life and how to achieve that state of contentment. How many young ladies (and young men as well!) feel the pressure to conform to what the world tells them it wants only to find that conformity doesn’t bring the love and acceptance that they so desire?! And this idea extends beyond Broadway and Hollywood. For those of us with more “mundane” lives, there is also the insistence of looking a certain way, possessing certain gadgets, etc., etc. All of us are searching for meaning and fulfillment and not finding it in how we look, things we own, or activities we do. All About Eve might say that we can find our best selves by not seeking fame and by being satisfied with establishing a stronger familial unit, but there is a greater love than even that. We can find it here: John 3:16, and here: I John 4:8, and here: John 15:13, just for starters. Living in this love allows one to be his or her truest self.