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- ISBN-10:
- 0300195788
- ISBN-13:
- 9780300195781
- Pub. Date:
- 02/17/2015
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
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Overview
A provocative, highly engaging essay on the art of pretending on the stage, on screen, and in daily life Does acting matter? David Thomson, one of our most respected and insightful writers on movies and theater, answers this question with intelligence and wit. In this fresh and thought-provoking essay, Thomson tackles this most elusive of subjects, examining the allure of the performing arts for both the artist and the audience member while addressing the paradoxes inherent in acting itself. He reflects on the casting process, on stage versus film acting, and on the cult of celebrity. The art and considerable craft of such gifted artists as Meryl Streep, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis, and others are scrupulously appraised here, as are notions of “good” and “bad” acting. Thomson’s exploration is at once a meditation on and a celebration of a unique and much beloved, often misunderstood, and occasionally derided art form. He argues that acting not only “matters” but is essential and inescapable, as well as dangerous, chronic, transformative, and exhilarating, be it on the theatrical stage, on the movie screen, or as part of our everyday lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300195781 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2015 |
| Series: | Why X Matters Series |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Why Acting Matters
By David Thomson
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 David ThomsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21369-0
CHAPTER 1
Towards the End of the Day
Fade in on a painted theatre curtain, dirty, worn and ragged. Silence. No music. Then knocks and banging can be heard in the wings.
I begin with what is called a "stage direction," in which the theatre itself seems to be the play. But it also feels like indications from a film script; it's on screen that images fade in and out, as slippery as transformation or instability. On stage, appearance is a steadier, dogged presence, appealing at first, but soon helpless or static. Unless the sense of place and décor is elastic, soaring, and in the mind. But saying that leads us to theory and the argument of this extended essay:
For whereas we feel a first thrill when the opening curtain reveals a staged place, or when "reality" dawns on a screen, still we can hardly embark on a study of acting without acknowledging that its attempt at realism or actuality is forlorn and self-defeating. Acting is an escape from reality, as well as an exultation or despair over it. I warn you that the more strenuously real a play or a movie claims to be, the quicker I become bored. The only honorable reality is that of pretending, but that is sufficient reason why acting matters beyond all differences in style, pay grade, or how "good" the process is.
We like to propose that some acting is better than others: so Brando, Olivier, or Day-Lewis (recurring figures in this book) are superior to your Uncle Arthur, the Christmas bore when he does his bits of Shakespeare, or vaudeville. But the same connoisseur cavils over the masters: so Olivier was too cold, Brando gave up his calling, and Day-Lewis gets lost in his roles. Sometimes he was Hamlet for days at a time until he suffered the prince's breakdown. But Arthur labors on with his art and his life year after year without pay or reviews. He may know he is not very "good" or convincing; that hardly matters; no one does his part the way he does it.
We might as well start by admitting that all acting is "bad" as much as it is "good": it could be improved; it is immoral and distracting in that it puts the humbug of ultimate Truth above tedious daily honesty, or the attempt at it; and it is dangerous in that it allows us to give up on "to thine own self be true," while trying to be anyone and everyone. Acting is so essential or inescapable that it easily absorbs and welcomes bad acting. So let us toss out that old chestnut that the play or the actor may help us "to live better." There is no help. The purpose of acting is to evade such considerations—and you can see how fruitful it has been.
The enthusiasm for acting that has intensified in the past five hundred years, or two thousand, whichever size blink you prefer, has come about because we have been drawn to pretense or avoidance beyond any hope for reality. As a rule, we make a mess of reality, whether it is our own and Uncle Arthur's lives or the Fate of the Earth. As it becomes clearer that the evolution of weather may overwhelm us, drown us, dry us out like bones in the desert, so we love the fertile fictional places more and more—Shakespeare's Arden, Beckett's desolate country road, John Ford's Monument Valley, or the Paris of the French New Wave. Acting and the space in which acting occurs matter because they are the material of a ritual to be beheld while we give up our ghost. This evasion or experiment can exist on stage or screen, at the opera, at the ballet, or at a soccer match where a player tries to be himself, or even when a tipsy Uncle Arthur strives to say what life is about. Only the passage of time has to be filled, and when we are fearful of our time being suddenly stopped, we love the dream that we can control it by taking creative charge and replacing uncertainty with performance.
Yet there are other things that "matter" so fundamentally that it seems folly to brood on them—Why breathing matters? Or taking nourishment, falling asleep, or waking? Such urges have been there since our beginning—haven't they? We seem to be helpless in those processes, or beyond responsibility. So why ask the question about them? Even without much "scientific" knowledge in those areas, I can see that breathing and feeding are instincts, like putting one foot ahead of another in the process of walking. But even in my ignorance, I think I can see how the question "Why does waking up matter?" reaches beyond instinct into consciousness and desire. There does not have to be a God, or a god anywhere. Still, after a busy day of fear, hunger, solitude, and raw nothingness—all in the most perfect jungle or desert—if something in a being hopes to wake up tomorrow and try it all again, then at least there is some thought of improvement, of yearning, some way in which the place and the air have moved us. Here is the start of religion and philosophy, of art and "the future." It's like using italic type. Why am I saying the place seems "perfect," or so much more arranged and calm than my life? Is there something called "beauty"? Why would beauty matter? Is it a natural state of creation or evolution? Is there anywhere natural on earth that is not beautiful? Or is that faith simply my urge to see and exist in something to be known as beauty?
The thing depicted in acting may be hideous and profoundly upsetting. It may be Gloucester having his eyes put out in Lear, or Sophie presented with her choice in William Styron's novel and the film that was made of it. Those are such terrible moments that it may feel indecent to make an act or a pretending out of them. But we persist and we ask "beauty" to come to the merciful aid of existence in the process.
I am going to say something now that is upsetting. It may offend you. But sometimes the cause of creative offense matters. So consider the situation in Sophie's Choice. That trembling, pale mother, Meryl Streep, is presented with the chance of saving one child and condemning another. We are "in" a concentration camp—her cruel choice is as much a prison for our mind and being as it is for her. Yet we are watching, too, like someone in a laboratory or a theatre observing an attempt to describe life more closely.
We know what Styron and Streep did. But let me add an improv: Sophie tells the Nazi, "I can't decide. You make the choice. Toss a coin." The officer immediately loses a layer of his revolting authority. He pats his pockets. He says, "I don't have a coin. Nazis don't carry money." At which point, the story slips into a demented search for a coin in the camp. For neither the prisoners nor the guards have currency. Here is the shock: the situation begins to be comic; it turns towards screwball; and lo and behold, the Nazi and Sophie start to become like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn looking for a leopard in the forests of Connecticut.
That remake is hideous, you say, and appalling—so, if nothing else, you have rediscovered a way to be shocked by a brand of action that has often become a cliché in seventy years—I mean what happened in the camps. You may burst out, "Oh, you can't do such things!" But I can, if I have daring enough and talent to pull it off, and if I can find a fresh form for the horror. The miracle of pretending is that we have learned in a few hundred years that anything may work. So, in fact, we do sit still for the murderousness of Michael Corleone, and for the removal of Gloucester's eyes (six nights a week, with a Wednesday matinee). Perhaps our best retaliation to such numbing terror—our innate urge to wake up—is to make a play of such things that says, yes, there is still a chance of beauty or hope, or playfulness. Perhaps acting matters because of our dying attempt to believe that life is not simply a desperate terrifying process in which we are alone and insignificant. Acting may matter because we resist that atrocious plan.
But if a book implies a question in its title, then the child in us anticipates an answer. And we like to fall into the faux wisdom that says, "Of course, we are a species that asks impossible questions—aren't we?"
Now, there is history in this essay, without its turning into a history book. It has to be said that whereas breathing, eating, and sleeping go back as far as our species, we are uncertain about when "acting" began. I will make a few modest or playful suggestions about that, while noting that we know the names of actors only from the late sixteenth century onwards. Not that we know how good Richard Burbage was ... or Edmund Kean, or even Henry Irving. Were they better than the great Joseph Tura? One day, Daniel Day-Lewis may be no more urgent than a name on the wall written in old script. Even so, acting has surely come to matter much more in the past hundred years as media arrived that could make it available for everyone. And more or less, in that new age most of us have looked at acting. We have been thrilled and amused, and we have taken actors and actresses into our private imaginary worlds.
We have even thought that we wouldn't mind being like that—or if barred from the thing itself, by looks, elocution, or talent, well, we could pretend to be actors (or audience).
* * *
Hurrah! We're going to the show, and we're as excited as the Cratchit family on Christmas morning with an epic turkey roasting in the oven! So let us be quite clear—turn to some other book if you do not share in an uncritical love for actors; we revere them, we need them. They nourish us; they entertain us. We have been changed by them (not that this made any useful difference). They are so gorgeous—and casual. How can they be so immaculate and nonchalant at the same time—Are they saying lines? Or are they possessed by some natural grace? So much of hope, dream, and desire rests with them. Don't we go to actors as we might seek analysts or witch doctors or forgiving lovers, on the chance of being made whole? I know, we are respectable and pompous now—we tell ourselves we are going to see this important new play, or the movie that is the talk of the intelligent classes, those lofty works. But it's the pretending that gets us, theirs and ours. If they can be extraordinary for an hour, we may dream of a new life. They act and we are acted on. It is the bargain of our history.
Reality is no longer what it was—or what it ought to be. People sat in packed theatres to watch movies during a war when bombing raids might have lowered the roof! When Laurence Olivier made Henry V at the close of that war, he turned seeing Shakespeare into a patriotic duty.
That is not rhetoric. With Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III, Olivier helped shape a modern industry of Shakespeare as a tourist commodity and a source of pride. This taste was begun by Lillian Bayliss at the Old Vic theatre in 1912, the Royal Shakespeare Company (an offshoot of the annual festival at Stratfordon-Avon), and then the National Theatre itself. As Britain gave up on producing automobiles, battleships, and stiff upper lips (Olivier had a mouth like a straight edge), so it found Shakespeare and theatre, scandals and sensual lower lips—as witness Mick Jagger, Timothy Spall, and Rebecca Hall. That midcentury urge for Shakespeare was also spurred on by the collective of remarkable new actors available—Olivier, Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, Alec Guinness, all born within the years 1902—14.
One of the sharpest moments in the movie of Henry V is at the start, in the glimpse of an unknown Elizabethan actor in the wings, hushed, nervous, in awe of his own occasion, waiting to step on to the glowing stage of the Globe to be the King. Of course, Olivier played both parts in his film, the common man and the transforming example. No one loved acting more than he did, or had such expectations for being changed.
The show! It comes in many forms—a play done on a stage; a movie thrown up on a screen; or even some feverish melodrama on television, jammed between the sofa and that absurd potted rubber tree—though television is not humble any more: it believes it deserves to be a sleek black plasma oblong hanging on the wall, with a remote that is complicated enough to launch a nuclear attack. But we should add dancers in a ballet; singers in an opera; and don't leave out the players and the conductor in an orchestra. After all, that band of brothers and sisters could come to us on the radio, as a CD—and authorities argue that the sound then is clearer or more emphatic. But some of us like to go to the concert hall, to see them all acting like musicians. I don't mean to suggest they are not musicians (though I suppose today they might be miming). But we like to see them play the part. Come to that, I may think tomorrow afternoon of going to see Real Madrid versus Barcelona to see how well Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo manage to be themselves (as opposed to lackluster, off-day stand-ins, not quite the real thing).
Those players will be there, earning their money. Messi will look deferential, insignificant, and even furtive—until he strikes —while Ronaldo, no matter how he plays, will have a matador swagger and those overdone, or old-fashioned, movie-star looks. His income is entirely modern, but he looks like a silent star. It may only be in pulling up a sock, or waving a hand of fatalistic, forgiving disbelief when a pass fails to reach him, but for a moment or two he will be "Ronaldo," someone we have come to see. At Manchester United and Real Madrid, there are kids —like the Cratchits—who watched him for the first time with the wonder that Tiny Tim felt when he sniffed the turkey drippings. That's why Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro (born in Funchal, Madeira, and named Ronaldo after Ronald Reagan, his father's favorite actor) gets &8364;21 million a year—because enough of us have hurrah in our hearts when he moves. In a Spanish La Liga season, he makes about thirty-five appearances, with another twenty games in cup competitions and the Champions League. In 2012—13, he played fifty-five times and scored fifty-five goals. He earns another $21 million a year on sponsorship deals with Armani, Nike, Castrol, and many other companies. In early 2014, he won the Copa de Oro—for the best player, best of the best. If he announced he would do Hamlet, it would be a sell-out. Why bother? In three or four games a season he is Hamlet, magnificent yet undone by fate, hardly knowing whether to be or not, or flash that cheeky "Ronaldo" smile round the stadium, like a blessing. Didn't Ronald Reagan have that same all-purpose, smothering grin as if to say, "What do you expect, guys—I am the president. Look in the program."
Ronaldo reminds one of Valentino or Tyrone Power, as well as being the contemporary soccer player with perhaps the sharpest sense of show business. (He's Carol Burnett doing Tyrone Power. He's gorgeous, indecently skilled, but fatuous.) You may say that his play, his athleticism, are natural. But you cannot watch him (and struggle with feelings of awe and disdain) without recognizing that he is camp. Win or lose, in triumph or chagrin, he is like "Ronaldo."
When did this gesture towards resemblance (unique but infinite) come into being? It can't always have been there, though it is possible that cavemen began to paint their lives on cave walls to exult and to manage their fears and their loneliness. That first appreciation of irony must have been a turning point, but maybe it took centuries. It was 1945 before anyone thought to add that hesitant figure of the actor about to be King to Henry V.
But the idea of acting is increasingly active in our culture, and decreasingly the property of professionals. In 1961 Walker Percy published a novel, The Moviegoer, that had uncanny insight into how mundane an acting star could be. The book is set in New Orleans and the central character is Binx Bolling, a lost soul, a man who goes to the movies a lot for their special moments and for the sheltering light they cast on his unhappy life. Early in the story, Percy does a conjuring trick. Binx gets off a bus in the city center, and watches the passersby. Who should come out of an alley ahead but William Holden?! But it's Holden without a role, a script, or a movie. All he has are his performing airs or habits.
We never know whether this is a ghost, a dream, a literary conceit, a real holden, or the actual Holden. But the resemblance is everything: "He is an attractive fellow with his ordinary good looks, very sun-tanned, walking along hands in pockets, raincoat slung over one shoulder."
If you've ever seen William Holden, then you know this figure —you know him as Joe Gillis from Sunset Blvd, and in 1960 you might have seen him lately in Sabrina, Picnic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and so on. Very few reckoned him a great actor: he could hardly have played, or wanted to play, Iago to Olivier's Othello. But in his own territory he was reliable, bankable, a gift to so many films, known and liked by the public, and always reminiscent of "William Holden." He had an ease on screen, an absent presence that Olivier would never trust.
In The Moviegoer, he strolls along and a young couple on a rather awkward honeymoon recognize him. "Holden slaps his pockets for a match"—we know that gesture. The boy offers him a light. Holden takes it. They exchange a few words. The honeymoon is enhanced and vindicated. And the ghost moves on:
Holden has turned down Toulouse shedding light as he goes. An aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it.
This Holden never reappears in the novel. He was only there as a screened figure, though it tells us important things about Binx that he is impressed by the "peculiar reality" Holden gives off. Just as the boy on honeymoon has become a man of the world in providing a light, so Binx's solitude has been fixed. William Holden played many parts, and some of them ended as badly as Joe Gillis. But he had a suntanned ordinariness that had the grace to be photographed without ever noticing the theft or intrusion. He was an actor, and as pleasing as an open window we could walk through.
He still is. Actors conduct many experiments on our behalf, not the least of which is that for more than a hundred years they have been trying out eternal life. Let me explain.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Why Acting Matters by David Thomson. Copyright © 2015 David Thomson. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
act I Towards the End of the Day, 1,act II Twilight, 59,
act III A Moment Later, 115,
act iv That Night, 131,
Epilogue, 163,
Notes, 169,
Acknowledgments, 177,