Method (Realism part 2)

This week’s vocab word is a continuation of my rant about Toxic Realism and misuse of authenticity in acting.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: As a reminder, This whole elaborate rant is based on an online panel/lecture I did back in 2020 for Page 23 at Denver Pop Culture Con. Last week’s coverage of Realism was from the beginning of that preso, and now you’ve got the second half today, plus! I also have added a couple clips of some early proto-posts that later morphed into “I Do My Own Stunts” which ended up published in stage combat journal The Fight Master. Obviously since 2014 and 2020, I’ve had many new thoughts and many new things have happened on these topics too, and so I have adapted all this to more align with my current thoughts and our current pop culture sitch. And if you think I’m done complaining about Joaquin Phoenix, I’m definitely not.

Toxic Realism: How ‘Method’ acting is a dangerous joke(r)

Part 2: Method

Holy shit, is he taking direction??

I Do My Own Stunts

Why do we glorify things like actors doing their own stunts instead of professionals? Or, even worse: things like DiCaprio cutting his hand open for reals in Django Unchained? How about the mental health problems like panic attacks on that set?

There are several possible answers, the most obvious of which, to me, are: 1) machismo; and 2) a false equivalency of real to Realism, and that into quality.

In the case of moments of violence, onstage or onscreen, reality actually looks way more fake than rehearsed Realism. Or it’s not even visible–especially on a live stage, a real fight move is usually far too quick and small to be seen. And if an audience can’t see it, then it doesn’t really matter how ‘authentic’ it is, does it? At that point, we’ve stopped telling the story, which “at the first and now, was and is”* the aim of all acting.

Stage combat needs to be choreographed, performed within safe distance, rehearsed about a gajillion times so as to ingrain the moves into an actor’s body, that he can feel safe acting while performing the potentially dangerous moves. In film, all this is true plus the stunts themselves need to be performed by another actor, a stuntperson. Problems come in when the actor or director begins to feel like the fight move is, well, rehearsed, and opts for a more dangerous choice because it feels more authentic than the rehearsed one. One example is from my first book, when I recount the actor choosing to receive a real slap to the face because the stage slap he rehearsed (only twice) didn’t feel authentic enough. This leads to a bad-looking slap (or a too quiet one, or a flinching attacker, or any number of non-realistic looking things) or, worse, an actor getting hurt. Another experience I had with this concept was when I was fight director for a play that required a gun to be fired into the ceiling. I insisted there was no reason to have a gun that shot blanks (which is what the director wanted), because a) guns that shoot blanks are way way way dangerous and shouldn’t be used unless necessary, and b) a localized sound effect would sound real, and the audience wouldn’t be the wiser. The director heard me out (I think) but opted to use the blank-shooting-gun anyway, because she said, and I quote: “I just want it to feel more authentic.”

Thing is, the sound effect would have been just as ‘authentic’ to the audience in that particular case. Even more so, as the actor ended up flinching before firing, which was totally inappropriate for the tension of the scene and where the character should have been emotionally at that point. And of course, blanks being the tetchy things they are, often the gun wouldn’t fire at all. And so they had to rig the sound effect anyway, just in case. Would’ve been no ‘in case’ had they just done it that way to begin with. And the acting would’ve remained intact, the character’s crisis uninterrupted by the actor’s legitimate fear of the dangerous weapon.

*Shakespeare again. Look at last week’s Realism rant for the whole speech (“trippingly on the tongue”).

Counterpoint: Doing it right

I’m sure you’ve heard about Tom Cruise and his recent base jumping stunt for the new Mission:Impossible film. It’s considered one of the biggest, most insane stunts  ever accomplished in cinematic history. If you’re into this sort of thing at all (or even if you’re not), I have no doubt that you’re also thinking about Keanu Reeves and his John Wick legacy–a film series written, created, and directed (and performed) by Reeves’ stunt team. And did you know that Ray Park worked as a stuntman for a good long time before being cast as Darth Maul?

Here’s the thing–all these actors are highly trained and possess the skill to do these stunts. They’re not doing these because they can’t act without it being real, they do them because they have put in the time and the work into their training. In all these guys’ case, it’s more training, not less. Park began as a stuntman first, before then becoming an actor. Reeves has had extensive and intensive years of firearms and martial arts training, not only for the fight-heavy movies he’s starred in, but beyond. Cruise is a highly trained stuntman himself, and one of the only performers: actor, stuntman, or both, who would be qualified to pull off that recent motorcycle/base jumping stunt. 

PLUS! These stunts and fights that the abovementioned actors perform are thoroughly CHOREOGRAPHED, PLANNED, and include comprehensive SAFETY PROTOCOLS to insure a successful result. It’s not a dickbag breaking his own foot because he thinks he’s too precious to rehearse. Just look at how many smaller pieces of that stunt Cruise practiced over and over and over again before performing the final version. Look, too, at the large group of experts and stunt safety protocols he had in place, that he consulted closely and worked with, in all the many phases of the process (and it was a long process) of constructing that stunt. And that extensive rehearsal process is what makes the amazing action sequences of Mission:Impossible, the gorgeous fight scenes in John Wick, and the stunning swordplay of Darth Maul look so good. It’s because of the artifice of the art, not in spite of it.

Is it even acting, if the actor himself is hurt? Is it good acting, if an actor has so little self control that he hurts himself for real instead of using technique to show it? I think not.

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Adherence to Toxic Realism is an elevation of an actor’s bad behavior, an honoring of the central star having no regard for boundaries, self control or indeed training, and–and this is the most dangerous– an equating of the actor with the character. A good actor can seem like they’ve morphed into their character, but they don’t lose themselves, ever. There’s always a seed of the actor, the artist and craftsman, in control at all times. Not doing good acting technique but becoming the character instead, especially when we’re talking about damaged and dangerous characters like the Joker, is a really, really bad idea. For the mental health of the actor as well as the safety of those around him.

Directly connected to this is the fetishizing and worshipping of the tortured artist (also a literary trope). This goes back to Byron, Van Gogh, and today it’s echoed in artists like Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, and Joaquin Phoenix. Look at how we still worship asshole geniuses in turmoil: my reviews of especially Season 4 of Sherlock point this out several times. We excuse horrific behavior in the name of the (usually white, usually male) tortured geniuses that we give way too much credit to.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Samuel Taylor Coleridge first coined this particular phrase, of a concept that’s been essential to the art of theatre since before classical times. But we use this particular phrase since his coining, to refer to the pact that is agreed upon between a performer and an audience. Basically, what ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ is, is the voluntary mode an audience member goes into, where she ‘forgets’ that what she’s looking at isn’t real, in order to be able to enjoy the story presented to her. Of course, unless she’s a little child (and tbh often not even then), she doesn’t really forget that those are actors onstage or onscreen, that those aren’t real people and real violence and real etc.—she just agrees to suspend her disbelief in order to enjoy the show. 

Theatrical arts require the audience to suspend their disbelief. If they don’t or aren’t able to, it’s usually the artists’ fault—they’ve jogged along in a narrative and then break that narrative, disrupting the story being told.* Or an actor may forget his lines, dropping character in his panic. Sometimes actors might start cracking up and can’t stop, and if they can’t integrate that laughter into the rhythm of the show, that can ruin it too. Now this doesn’t normally pose a problem on screen, since they can just do another take if one gets ruined (The Carol Burnett show being a hilarious exception to this). But mainly what we’re all doing when watching a thing is agreeing to pretend to forget that what we’re seeing isn’t real, so we can then get immersed in the story—something the ancient Greek theatre guys would call catharsis. 

Audiences these days, though, have trouble with this. Audiences to a large degree are not willing anymore to suspend their disbelief. Why? 

There are several possibilities to look at: the Vietnam war being the first televised war: suddenly we’re seeing napalmed children in our living rooms and so the rah rah sis boom bah of Hail the Conquering Hero that was WW2 soured quite a bit in Americans’ nostrils; decades later, the new trend of Reality TV and other types of live TV that aren’t scripted (well, we’ll get to that in a minute); and the mistrust, stemming from years of more transparent news reporting, much of it televised, of our politicians and leaders. There’s a mistrust, too, of those artists long touted as the Masters, or those in the old school ‘canon,’ since the elevation of those artists have for so many years been the results of racism, misogyny, and colonialism. Audiences, in other words, don’t really trust much of anything that holds power in our everyday lives. They can’t trust those in charge anymore; they’re doing horrible things. We can’t trust experts; they’re swindling us.

And so this lack of trust bleeds over into when people then comprise an audience. Think about it—it’s a huge change in attitude: If an actor is pretending, he’s lying, and lying is bad. If he really does the thing, he’s a) sacrificing himself for his art, and b) he’s being truthful, authentic. Also badass. And we all still agree that masculine badassery = putting yourself in real danger. And revolutionary theatre groups like the ritual-based Living Theatre of the ‘70s; La MaMa modern theatre who put actor-created theatre and performance art in a blender; the performative Beat poets who never edited their works (they actually did, but); and the raw pared down Poor Theatre of Grotowski or therapeutic torture of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty moved those Realism goal posts farther and farther afield. Method Acting sprouts right out of this. (And if you thought I could go another few paragraphs without mentioning Grotowski? Hi, have we met?) 

But authenticity to quality is a false equivalency. 

*Not to be confused with ‘breaking the 4th wall,’ which is a different thing altogether, and if done well and consistently with the story, doesn’t have to disrupt the willing suspension of disbelief. Think Deadpool. Of course, if this happens on accident or inappropriately, it will lead to that interruption of enjoyment that I’m describing.

The false equivalency of artifice to lies means that performing arts are being undercut. Artists today either need to show that their art is somehow real, or they need to be ‘good’ enough to fool the audience (whom, even if they succeed, will see them in social media afterwards and know they’re different so that doesn’t work anyway). But fooling the audience is lying to them, making them feel stupid. Nobody wants to feel stupid. And so, here we are.

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Are audiences starved for a sense of wonder? I’d argue that the continued popularity of Disney and as of today, the massive popularity of the Barbie movie says yes. Audiences are bitter, jaded creatures, true, with a contemporary sharp mistrust of experts and authority, but boy do they hunger for wonder. Maybe there’s hope?

Artifice = fake = lies = bad

Authentic = real = truth = good

The big question then, is: How can contemporary (post-postmodern) audiences willingly suspend their disbelief? Answer: they have to choose to. It’s a ‘willing’ suspension of disbelief, after all. How do we get them to make this choice? It’s a conundrum.

I must admit I used to watch Fear Factor, and Survivor, back in the day. I was also a bona fide Food Network addict. My ex loved The Apprentice, too, but the less said about that, the better.

Reality TV

The phenomenon of Reality TV, ostensibly begun with Survivor in 2000, and exploding during the writers’ strike of 2008, has continued to be one of the most-watched genres in American television today.* The premise of Reality TV is simple: that there are no actors, no scripts, no direction, just real people having real reactions to each other and their real, albeit induced, dramatic situations.

This is problematic.

First of all, Reality TV, whatever the premise, is in reality (heh, see what I did there?) CAST from auditions, STAGED, SET UP, DIRECTED, and often even SCRIPTED just as much as the average sitcom. This is a problem because a viewer who is uneducated in the ways of show biz will watch a Reality show and equate what she sees to reality, not knowing the difference between RealITY and RealISM as an artistic style. This then leads to the uneducated viewer into thinking that any schlub can act, no training or talent necessary. Which then leads to our epidemic of what I call “empty celebrity,” and what Peter Brook, as far back as 1968, called The Deadly Theatre.

*And one has to wonder whether the current (as of this writing) WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike will cause another boom. It’ll be interesting to see. I feel like TikTok might be a big disrupter here, but that’s another article.

The Deadly Theatre

It’s pretty amazing how much Brook’s iconic theatre book, The Empty Space, still speaks to multimedia and theatrical entertainment today. I would posit that his discussion of the Deadly Theatre is maybe even more relevant today as it relates to Reality TV.

“If good theatre depends on a good audience, then every audience has the theatre it deserves” (Brook 21).

Why is Reality TV so popular? Schadenfreude, for one thing. Another reason is actually at the heart of theatrical Realism as it first came about in the late 1800s: it’s the direct opposite of elitist. It (supposedly literally) displays the Everyman, and isn’t lofty art that only the educated can understand. Problem is, the extreme that is Reality TV plummets into the deadliest theatre of all: the theatre that encourages incompetence in its audience, and thereby in its performers.

“Incompetence is the vice, the condition and the tragedy of the world’s theatre on any level” (Brook 31).

The most obvious/common way this widespread addiction to authenticity manifests is the bleed-over into the mindset of theatre/film professionals. Even in the minds of the conceptual artists, now Hyper-realism or Naturalism equals good acting. Not just audiences, but directors and even actors themselves think that if the performance isn’t ‘authentic,’ isn’t Realism (to its extreme), then it isn’t high quality. At best, this limits the versatility of actorly styles, at worst it puts on display the untrained and even incompetent, in the name of authenticity. The artists forget that they’re doing, well, art. But when done well, when one acts in a Realistic style, “the character is still a mask, created by choice and selectivity; it is not the simple revelation of the actor’s self, though it may make more use of it” (Harrop 189). As audiences, we often see what Brook called the “crude gesture of self-expression” (19) but nothing more skilled or refined than that.

Basically, as artists and viewers, we need to understand the difference between Reality and Realism, between raw authenticity and a skilled, artistic expression of such. Even fight scenes are part of the dialogue, of the physical storytelling of the piece. Relapsing into a Reality TV style with our fights is a dangerous game. Leave the actual drunken hair pulling to the Bad Girls and the Jersey Shore. I’ll take my rehearsals, thank you very much.

Is Reality TV the ultimate degradation of realism? Have we finally deconstructed Realism so far that it has dissolved? Reality TV (and more recently and pervasively, the aligned theatricality of social media) has ruined what was once a style (Realism) and fetishized it into a hot mess (authenticity). It is telling that it was first invented through a writers’ strike. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the current one–lots of differences as far as theatrical options, TikTok being one of the biggest. But again, that’s a whole ‘nother article.

REALISM—>NATURALISM—>METHOD….. (Reality TV)

It comes down to a matter of trust: Dorothy pulls aside the curtain and the Wizard of Oz is revealed as merely a dude with some cool mechanical effects—a ‘humbug.’ It’s a betrayal. Dorothy doesn’t applaud the Wiz for his artistic ingenuity, no. She berates him (and then of course, so does the audience) for misleading and fooling everyone. 

Myth: you can’t be ‘artificial’ and also ‘authentic.’ Of course any trained actor will tell you that of course you can be both–that’s what good acting is. This myth also means that artists who don’t know any better will eschew editing/revising/rehearsing, because to do those things is to take away the authenticity or heart of the art. It doesn’t actually do this, obviously, doing so just makes for bad technique and therefore bad art. I’ve written about this concept a few times before, notably in ‘Actually, Don’t’ and ‘Discipline.’

Conclusion

Realism is a style, no more and no less. It needs craft and hard work and skill, just like any other theatrical style. And just like Reality TV, it needs structures in place like: scripts, directing, rehearsals, and acting technique in order to be most effective. Otherwise, it turns into what Grotowski described as a “wet rag.” Or, worse, it leads to actors thinking they have to hurt themselves in order to be great, a dangerous myth that leads to artists’ self-immolation in the name of art.

REFERENCES LIST

Most of the stuff I reference in both these Realism articles (Realism, and Method) is from my own spongy brain, things I know after a bunch of education as both student and teacher, and a few earned degrees and things like that. Here, though, are a few specific sources that I can actually point to, or that I’ve directly quoted. Also, see any articles or news posts I’ve linked that are embedded in the text, for more details on a few different issues I bring up in both parts. I’m going to leave those there as in-text links instead of including them on this list. I’ve also added some sources here for you to use to continue your own exploration of this fascinating topic. My role as professor is part to talk about this stuff in a way that makes it interesting to learn about, but almost even more so, to place cool materials into your face so you can go off and find more neat things on your own. Even though I’m not really your professor. Professor’s gonna profess. Whaddya gonna do? 

Anyway, here:

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Boughn, Jenn Zuko. Stage Combat: Fistcuffs, Stunts and Swordplay for Theatre and Film, 2006.

I remember very clearly, when this book was about to come out, agonizing over whether I’d use my own last name, or my husband’s, as my author name on this book. I hadn’t hyphenated my name upon marriage, but just tacked his name on to mine, and as I have no middle name, it worked out great. I called myself Jenn Zuko Boughn, and my online handles were mostly ‘bonzuko.’ I thought hard about it, and decided on Zuko Boughn. Now? I absolutely regret the decision, obviously, but ehhh what can you do. It’s a name of mine from a different time.

But! I bring this book up because I talk a bit about these topics in the beginning of my last chapter, Chapter 9. You can see in those brief discussions the beginning seeds of this beef just burgeoning. Plus, hey go buy my book so it doesn’t go out of print. 

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space, 1968.

Classic musing on the state of theatre and of the cutting edge acting and artistic styles of the day. Brook was one of the most celebrated and iconic auteur directors of the late ‘60s, into the ‘70s and even on into pretty current times. He talks a lot about Method in this book, as it was a pretty fresh approach when it first came out. Here’s one particularly pithy quote re: Method, from p.26-7:

“The Method actor was trained to reject cliché imitations of reality and to search for something more real in himself. … ‘Reality’ is a word with many meanings, but here it was understood to be that slice of the real that reflected the people and the problems around the actor…” 

Diderot, Denis. The Paradox of Acting / Archer, William. Masks or Faces? with intro by Lee Strasburg, 1957.

This is a weird little tome I found as I did a search for just the Diderot treatise, and it’s pretty fascinating. Both of these works are very old philosophical musings about the form and function of theatre (specifically acting), with an introduction by the Method Man himself, Lee Strasburg. No idea how rare a book this is, but if you can find it, and are interested in digging deeply and historically into this stuff, it’s a wild (if old) read.

Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre, 1968.

I know, I know; you’re sick of hearing me go on about Grotowski. Well, hey. Get into it. Anyway, this is the main seminal work, and it’s less a book he wrote than a compilation of a bunch of his speeches, lectures, and interviews about his revolutionary Poor Theatre concept.

Harrop, John. Acting With Style (3rd ed.), 1999.

Nothing too exciting, just your basic acting textbook, like you’d be required to get if in school for the craft. But as it’s an overview of several acting styles and their techniques (as well as a little history and background of each), it’s essential reading for learning about Realism. And anyway, it’s a pretty clear and easy read, and unlike many textbooks designed for university use, it doesn’t actually cost your firstborn child. More like, 25 bucks. So.

Here’s a quote from p.189 about acting in Realism:

“In Realism the actor’s task is not how interesting one can make a type within the bounds prescribed by convention, but how unique one can make an individual whose character must remain within the demands of the dramatic situation.”

Get it? Got it? Good.