Kate Berlant's right eye is twitching. As usual.
It's brief but powerful, at once voluntary and completely out of her control. Sarcastic with a hint of wistful self-deprecation. A comedic tic.
She's recalling her first audience. You see, Kate Berlant was a flasher when she was young, and apparently people found the sight of a little girl lifting her shirt hilarious. Looking back, it might not sound like the most tactful foray into performing. But hey. A laugh's a laugh, right?
Berlant's eye will twitch a few more times as we eat lunch on a sizzling Thursday in West Hollywood, just like it did when she parodied Marina Abramović on Netflix's "The Characters". And like it did when she and John Early ― her professional accomplice and platonic life partner ― aced a six-minute bit on "The Tonight Show" in which they feigned shock at being on "The Tonight Show." She also did it when they doled out holiday gift advice next to Jimmy Fallon, her eyes crossing before the right one shuttered. And again during a Comedy Central stand-up routine proclaiming that women should get to steal cosmetics. ("If you don't have certain creams, powders, lotions, the state won't recognise you.") In a YouTube video, she twitched while reminiscing about the french fries she'd devoured in Paris. And she twitched as a conceited, kiss-ass Hollywood agent in the satirical Vimeo series "555", produced by Adult Swim veterans Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim.
Somehow, she managed to avoid the twitch on "High Maintenance" and "BoJack Horseman" (animation helps) and in the fantastic new movie "Sorry to Bother You", which opened in the U.S. on July 6, after being the toast of Sundance in January.
Berlant has been in showbiz only a few years, if we don't count her stand-up rounds as an undergrad at New York University or her line on "Lizzie McGuire" at age 15. But she already has a signature that perfectly accentuates her surreal brand of humour. The twitch says more about the world around her than it does about Berlant. It's a spasm that winks at the nutty words pouring from her mouth. It can make a harsh blow more palatable. It mocks anything too serious. It externalises the reactions we typically muffle when faced with disappointment, embarrassment, marginalisation, pretentiousness.
Not much thought goes into the twitch, Berlant swears ― the mark of a natural performer, someone who was raised around capital-A Artists with big personalities.
"Maybe I should think about doing it less," she half-jokes.
Kate's father is Tony Berlant, a pop-art baron known for found-object assemblages. His friends ― Frank Gehry, Angelica Huston, Robert Graham, Ed Moses, Chris Burden, Kenneth Price ― shuffled through the family home for festive dinner parties stretching past midnight. She grew accustomed to being the youngest person there, commanding attention from adults as they chattered through a haze of booze and weed, noirish Santa Monica sitting just outside the window.
An only child lacking an outsize rebellious streak, she maintained a certain loneliness, and the way to make her presence known was to subscribe to her parents' disposition: "They're big storytellers. I was raised around that, without really realising it. Being entertaining was valued."
So Berlant entertained people, at home and at school, specifically by distorting her face and adopting zany accents ― "just trying to make myself hideous". It worked, so much so that her "feminine and beautiful and graceful" mother would gasp at her improvised deformities. Years later, when New York University handed Berlant money to pursue a master's in performance studies, she realised the implications of her self-imposed disfigurement.
"Feminist appropriations of the grotesque, that's what I was doing," she says as if singsonging a line from a textbook. "But that is what I was doing. I was like, 'I will be ugly. I just want to be ugly, so I don't feel like I'm assessing what I am.'"
For Berlant, everything is a character ― or at least it would be if she weren't so smart. Across our nearly two-hour lunch, she slips into about a dozen foreign tongues: Old Hollywood studio magnate, Valley Girl prepster, game-show emcee, snobby crosspatch, stilted robot. If any of these are meant to conceal her true self, I couldn't tell. At 30, Berlant is reflective about her life and the industry she's breaking into, able to annotate experiences with an articulate nonchalance. She's well-spoken without the signifiers that turn coastal kids touting graduate degrees in something as esoteric as performance studies into walking clichés.
Most important, she is f**king hilarious.