Often attributed to Charles Bukowski, amongst other noted poets “Wear the mask long enough and eventually it becomes your face” is an idea (expressed to me differently at the time) I was warned about back in 2019 when I was first dabbling with the character Tom Gillespie.
However, It wasn’t until the past six moths or so that I indeed became rather overcome by the notion that I, an Englishman with an early background in Skateboarding, Reggae music and the Arts might well forever be know in the digital realm as an Australian Journalist, with little credibility outside that in which I manifest the character within faux documentaries of my masters creation.
(scratches head)
Don’t worry this text is not a confession of a supposed or concerning developing mental illness, or even a self perceived unwillingness to let go of such a character of my own creation, a character now with enough universal matter to have my own birth given name frequently forgotten by folk, in favour of Tom, and even without the eye glasses and snappy atire.
It does make me wonder though, have I made a character more real in the eyes of those that frequent with me the digital realm; than I the characters creator?
And If so, have I inadvertently created another parallel me? a me without my history, a me without my fully lived life experience, but somehow embodied with structural components of my life experience.
It can all come across as quite concerning at times, especially now I tap tap these perfectly engineered keys, finally getting the time to sit here and write it down in my usual unusual stream of consciousness way.
I convince myself you who has been reading me for sometime will forgive me for my negligent use of the power of the word and all it’s gloriously restrictive ways made apparent in the bad schooling of my youth.
(scratches head, sips coffee)
So what of the Mask Rich? What of Your face?
About this far down the page, one would start to query their robot of choice, indeed can we pull up some key philosophers on the topic? After all I started this post with a fellas name Charles Bukowski as a jumping off point, as if that gave some historical or qualifying weight to the subject, making it appear more worthy of writing about, somehow making it feel more important.
But as i also began to highlight above, I was originally made aware of the concept by a theatre director, who at the time was helping me practice my lines and delivery back in the days of The Fakefluencer; which indeed appears to have eventually made me a type of Fakefluencer.
One that continues to peddle “documentaries” via a character entirely fabricated, only made real by the correspondence he finds with other assumedly real humans online.
The Mask, much how we all wear the mask, most notably that being the mask of our employment – what work we do tends to overly determine who we are to our immediate surrounding class, at least to the extent it helps people gain satisfaction in thinking and knowing why you’re here, there or anywhere.
The Face however changes over time, it gets old, tired looking, sometimes happy often confused. The Mask in contrast appears to become iconic, static, always the same, always predictable. Should the expected and predictable performance given via the mask change in any way and the entire self enforced illusion becomes broken, people get mad, sad and eventually bored which of course is a death sentence for he who makes a living wearing The Mask.
So here I lie in wait, in my sixth year, after my third “documentary movie film series” and the three hundredth and something social media clip of wearing The Mask I designed for myself and I feel I can honestly look back without regret. I had the opportunity to have a solid stab at being a Filmmaker, a Documentarian an Actor, even a Journalist to some degree, and the lessons learned we’re deep full of interesting and amazing people and places I might never had a reason nor opportunity to visit or be with, and for that I’m satisfied.
But as you may have detected there resides a lingering doubt in the corner of my mind as to whether I’ve done enough, or If I reached the goal I set myself those five years ago. It’s not even a matter of if what I produced was good or pretty, entertaining or informative, ugly or even true but sticking to my original thesis and objective of can I make an otherwise boring subject mater like DeFi more accessible simply by injecting a character with some entertainment value into the journey.
While my first production The Fakefluencer was certainly a solid effort and given it was scripted, provided me a pretty concrete path to pursue, I wasn’t fully prepared for what came afterwards. It’s very much a case of looking back and realising I wrote myself into a world that over time ended up holding me captive, not fully against my will but more in a splitting reality kind of way, the deeper I went into each following production the deeper I began to embody the characters reality.
Indeed on a number of occasions over the past years I realised I needed a break from the character I had assumed, merely due to the quantity of brain matter he began to take up, his story arc and infinite potential became something like a burdensome obsession and no doubt had I been younger and perhaps less media literate I might have ended up becoming a live streamer or started pursuing sponsorships as a dedicated online personality, things I never wanted to be; and still to this day feel somewhat sad for those young folk that have been drawn down that path.
Now in my sixth year on this indie filmmaker path, with the release of my latest documentary Im glad to be retuning to the land of the scripted, often well mapped out but not entirely predictable workflow, the question is not where to go from here, quite honestly Im a wash with ideas for what to produce yet. It’s more of a question of how and when to proceed with what.
Beyond that is how to properly hang up a character without the ‘what if’ feeling that had at times plagued me to an extent that I felt extremely far far away from home. When I look back to how Tom Gillespie came into being, I recall it was due to another character I had been toying with back in 2019 named Bitman360, after one year of running an “crypto influencer” experiment online with that character, at the end of that year I wondered what was the ultimate result?, what had I achieved?, where was I to go from here?
From that Bitman360 experiment came the script for The Fakefluencer and the character Tom Gillespie, which went on to become my first ever feature film which arguably I was only able to realise thanks to the re imagining or reconstituting of that character Bitman360 into something new.
I didn’t hang Bitman360 up, but over time in following productions Bitman360’s role petered out becoming more of a prop than a fully flung character, and it seems that shall also be the path for the character Tom Gillespie, The Mask I crafted and chose to wear, The Mask that almost ended up wearing me.