The Dark Side of Method Acting (Draft) Jon Leon Torn Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, Arizona, USA
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The Dark Side of Method Acting (draft) Jon Leon Torn Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, Arizona, USA When Phillip Seymour Hoffman died of a drug overdose in February 2014 at the age of 46, the reaction among the acting community and film fans was one of shock and grief. Hoffman was referred to in many of the obituaries and tributes that followed his death as a “beloved” figure who was one of the “greatest actors of his generation.”i His relative youth, his family life (Hoffman, although unmarried, had three children) and his long history of sobriety and avoidance of public scandal all fed the narrative of an unforeseen and devastating tragedy, a brilliant career cruelly cut short. Critic Richard Brody (2014a) struck a sharply different note on Hoffman’s death in an article posted to The New Yorker webpage the night of his death. Hoffman’s death was not a shocking anomaly but was foretold by the actor’s work, particularly his performance in the Paul Thomas Anderson film The Master, a film with a “basis in substance abuse.” Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, the founder of a Scientology- like religion whose “visionary fires and rage for power are fuelled by the poisonous cocktail that Freddy [a disciple played by Joaquin Phoenix] provides. his attempt to create dependents and his own dependency, are inseparable.” By giving “one of the greatest onscreen performances that anyone ever gave,” Brody suggests that Hoffman’s role in The Master gives unique insights into the actor’s personal demons, and potentially into his early demise, by virtue of its very greatness. “Work that’s only good is limited to its technique; when it’s great, a work is virtually inseparable from the artist’s life because it gives the sense of being the product of a whole life and being the absolute and total focus of that life at the time of its creation.” Brody concludes that “genius, whether at its most constructive or destructive, its most sublime or its most repugnant, is unnatural; Hoffman lived for great art, and it’s impossible to escape the idea that he died for it.” The linkage Brody feels compelled to draw between Hoffman’s personal life and his acting career, to the extent of speculating that his devotion to his craft has something to do with his demise, is striking because of what it says about how acting and actors are viewed today. It reflects a willingness to consider the performance of the actor as a reflection of the character and identity of the actor themselves that of recent vintage. While actors as a class have been subject to stereotypes and condemnation for moral failings, the idea that an individual actor’s performance reveals intimate details of the actor’s own self gained widespread acceptance only in the last century. The ancient world saw acting in a quite different way. In the rhetorical treatise De Oratore the Roman statesman Cicero (2001) feigns jealousy of actors, whose personalities are kept separate from the roles that they play, unlike orators like himself, whose public performances are judged against their character, particularly if they perform badly: “if any fault is found in a speaker, there prevails forever, or at least for a very long time, a notion of his stupidity.” With actors, bad performances can be explained away by the actor being “indisposed.” The opposite clearly holds true for Cicero; De Oratore is a celebration of public service as the highest calling available to humankind, and a celebration in particular of figures who exemplify the manifestation of personal virtue through the power of speech. For actors, it must follow that even the most accomplished performance can only reflect a temporary triumph of the actor’s technique; the character, personality and virtue of the actor as an individual remains firmly separate. Cicero’s foundational distinction between the actor and the orator reserves the concept of authenticity for public life, where public speech and action flows directly from the virtue and integrity of individuals. Acting has no such authenticity, rather it is a realm of artifice and play where the unity of the self has no purchase. In Western culture, where the notion of the unity of the self has been most strongly advocated for, this distinction has held for many centuries. In the 20th century, in the United States in particular, things began to change, and acting was considered to be a place where the authenticity of the performer’s own self could impact the quality of the performance. This link between the actor’s self and the actor’s vocation became linked with the phenomenon known as Method acting. The “Method” as it is commonly known originated in techniques taught in acting schools of New York City in the mid-20th Century, techniques adapted, often quite freely, from the practices of the Russian theater director and impresario Stanislav Stanislavski. Stanislavski’s system of acting preparation sought to prevent “artificial” and hackneyed performances by emphasizing the actor’s ability to bring characters and situations to life through the imagination. The influential American teacher Lee Strasburg adapted the Stanislavski system to focus more intensely on the actor’s use of emotion; in particular their ability to generate personal and authentic emotion in service to the role they were being asked to play. Strasberg’s focus on emotion as generated from within the personal life of the actor was and continues to be a subject of controversy among historians of the acting profession, with some accusing him of distorting Stanislavski’s more balanced approach on building a character (Gordon, 2000). However, it was Strasberg’s version of Stanislavski’s ideas that would quickly catch on, gaining adherents in particular among a generation of film actors in the 50s and 60s, among them Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Shelley Winters, and many others. The 20th century’s focus upon an authenticity in artistic endeavor that stressed continuity between creative production and the creator’s own personality and lifestyle was not restricted to film acting; the cult of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac and 19th century artists like Van Gogh and Gauguin are examples of this tendency. But film acting for various reasons, some of them technological, some serendipitous, became prominent in exemplifying the ethos of performative authenticity. Leo Braudy (1974) comments of film acting explore some of the relevant elements: Films add what is impossible in the group situation of the stage or the omniscient world of the novel: a sense of the mystery inside character, the strange core of connection with the face and body the audience comes to know so well, the sense of an individuality that can never be totally expressed in words or action… Sound films especially can explore the tension between the "real person" playing the role and the image projected on the screen. The line between film actor and part is much more difficult to draw than that between stage actor and role, and the social dimension of "role" contrasts appropriately with the personal dimension of "part." Film acting is less impersonation than personation. Although the “Method” originated as a stage technique it is arguably on film that the Method came into its own. The “strange core of connection with the face and the body” that underlines the film actor’s persona on screen demands a discipline where more constructed and formal performance techniques have their process heightened, giving the impression of a heightened artificiality. The blurred line between actor and part Braudy refers to is, for Richard Dyer (1978), precisely the place where film stardom is born. Stars may have extraordinary attributes that make them special, but they must also have attributes that make them seem accessible, like ordinary people who have concerns like everybody else. They must, in a common contemporary construction, be “relatable” to their audience. Method acting on film, as a technique for achieving naturalism of emotions, is perfectly suited to creating and sustaining this relationship. At the same time that the phenomenon of film stardom creates a welcoming environment for the proliferation of Method’s techniques, the paradoxical nature of the relationship – a highly elaborated process for the generation of “natural” emotions – makes it ripe for mockery and deconstruction. The comic unmasking of the Method’s pretensions often take on a transatlantic flavor, with a British actor like Lawrence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins or Gary Oldman often portraying the bearer of a traditional acting approach focused on physical training and diction, external transformation through costume and makeup, and a thorough grounding in stage classics, framed as the other of the primitive, self-indulgent American Method adherent. Olivier’s quip reportedly directed at Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man (“my dear boy, why don’t you try acting? It’s so much easier”) targets the showy part of Method, while Oldman’s comments promoting Romeo Is Bleeding (“Once you do the initial homework, you have it there. You don’t have to spend 20 minutes meditating in a dark room or repeating ‘My dog is dead. My dog is dead.’) targets its purported morbidity (Freeman, 1994). When asked if he stayed in character during the making of Hitchcock, Hopkins responded: I don't go along with being called ‘Mr. Hitchcock’. I think that's a lot of crap. I just don't understand that. If actors want to do that, fine. If they want to be miserable, that's up to them. I'm not interested. It's a job. I do the job. I'm certainly not going to make my life miserable just to be a character.