Making of Val

When I witness a magic trick, I know vaguely what is about to happen. A magic trick is not a scam, I believe, because most people who are being scammed don’t know they are part of a scam until after something has been taken from them. In a magic trick, it is almost required that the participant knows that an essential part of the process is their already conceived expectation of the process. We know the shell won’t be under the cup we choose, we know the magician will always show us our card, we know the coin will be pulled from our ear. The magic comes from the smallest, tiniest want to believe in the impossible, from our own hubris. Magicians and filmmakers have things in common. The layout of the text in this book reads cinematic. Giant white space fills each page directing my eye above or below the horizon line. Whole pages are dedicated to one line; italicized dialogue hangs in the air. Already even in form she is moving my eye, leading my gaze so as I might become captivated and believe in something new. Here is where Mckevitt shines, as a filmmaker and as a magician. 

Making Of is a book Mckevitt wrote detailing events and thought processes that transpired during the making of her film Val. You could say the book and film are about workplace experiences. The story starts with a job the narrator Mara has working for an artist, which then inspires a long-running performance art piece where she emulated the same dynamic, playing both the artist-boss and the assistant. It’s funny to know she was interacting sometimes with the same art world people as both roles, but when she was Val she wore a wig. Mckevitt possesses an impulse you could call Kaufmanesque. In addition to the book Making Of, she also made a second film illustrating the process of working with the director Emily Allan to make Val. Making Of, the book, also recounts the experiences the artist endured to secure the funds needed to make her short film Val. 

Enter Jack. Jack is demonic. He can’t answer questions about his favorite color or candy. Hell, it’s impossible to tell when he is climaxing or if he even cums. Mara and her co-worker Sophia have entered into a convoluted and transactional relationship with Jack, which further expands the breadth of the workplace dynamics illustrated in Making Of. Jack is hiring the pair’s companion services, but he also wants their interactions to take place at his office, an illicit performance going on under his other workers’ noses. Maybe his kink, Mara speculates, is he gets off on the possibility of getting sued. Ultimately Jack wants what any other client truly wants, to know that some small part of Mara and Sophia actually wants to be there, in the office, in the hotel room, that it isn’t “about the money,” that they genuinely enjoy this, that he’s cooler than any other client they could possibly have. When clients can’t have this, they want to cut into you, to saw you in half, take away whatever small power you have. Isolate you. Jack makes a show showering Mara in affection and denying Sophia any. 

Val (2023)

While Jack seems to enjoy fracturing their dynamic, Mara begins to question her relationship with Sophia. If they weren’t under these bizarre circumstances, would they still have a friendship? We all at some point question if our work wife would be our work wife if not for the work. Who is faking it? Later Mara hires Emily to help Mara act like Mara since she has never acted before and she will be playing Mara in the film Val.

Mckevitt relishes hypotheticals. She asks how would this film end if it were video art, a porno, a low budget indie, or a big budget box office? She teases how sex work stories have been made digestible for the masses: “At $8 million, I suspect we would end with something that upholds the possibility of change through the legal system.” She describes a girl-boss film that assures moms everywhere that whores are victims, but also they are actually pretty cool, just only after they transform through a respectability-politics narrative and suffer, at least a little bit! After all these options, we get the end she’s settled on instead: the final image is of Mara and Sophia sitting comfortably in folding director’s chairs. I almost wept. Mara begins the book as an assistant, in a basement, and ends the book in a director’s chair, all the while telling us that, yes, we want rags to riches, we want narrative currency, and giving us this self-conscious meta-plot which is every step of the way executed expertly. Mara knows what we want, to be made aware of the hubris we all have and to leave having been dazzled and having learned something. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I love when the whores win. 

This review of Making Of (Clementin Seedorf gallery), Mara McKevitt’s book of autofiction chronicling the making of Val, is excerpted from Issue 003 of The Whitney Review, which launches at Metrograph on Saturday, May 11.

Val (2023)