A less professional example of authenticity is the kid on the street. He is “swell” because he goes his own way. The parents are on the sidewalk, but the kid marches along the street, next to the curb, singing, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” He has a pretty voice and is just singing “for the hell of it.” Cars zoom by, some apparently having to screech their brakes to miss the boy, but he is not perturbed. For Holden, this is pure, innocent, and real, a living example of art for art’s sake although he does not state it that way. The performance is the better because neither the kid nor Holden, his only audience, takes it very seriously. The event brightens Holden’s day. The scene is even more significant because it foreshadows Salinger’s revelation of the central metaphor of the novel, the source of the novel’s title, in Chapter 22.
In contrast are movies and the theater. It “depresses hell” out of Holden when people make too much of going to a movie, especially when they form lines all the way down the block. Live performances are just as bad. He hates Broadway, and he hates actors, even the so-called “great” performers like Sir Laurence Olivier. When D.B. took Phoebe and Holden to see Olivier’s legendary performance in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Holden didn’t much care for it. He thought that Olivier was handsome and had a great voice but acted more like a general than a “sad, screwed-up” guy struggling to find his way, which is what he thought the play was supposed to be about. Holden usually does not enjoy performances because he is concerned that the actors will do something phony at almost any moment. Even if an actor is good, Holden thinks the actor acts as though he knows he’s good and ends up pandering to the audience the way Ernie does when he plays the piano. Audiences usually can’t distinguish between phony and authentic, as Holden sees it, and applaud at all the wrong times.
