METHOD ACTING MEMOIR: SOME PROVOCATIONS
1. We love real stories. We also love to see how close real stories can morph into the drama-curve of its fictional counterparts.
2. We may or may not appreciate — that is to say, hold onto, grasp, observe — the method actor’s junket-talks about how he lost or gained 35 pounds for a role. We may or may not appreciate the otherwise regular life transformed an into the five-act Shakespearean tragedy.
2a. The interplay of real and fictional is something that has always fascinated me. How close can they come together without negating each other?
3. Several years ago, Arthur Miller wrote in Harper’s Magazine (and reprinted in different form here) that the TV age has “created a quantitative change” in our consciousness. “For many if not most people, our life consists in emotional transactions with actors, which happen far more of the time than with real people.”
3a. “Not only is all the world a stage,” he writes, “but we have all but obliterated the fine line between the feigned and the real.”
3b. Feigned memoirs and real fictions abound.
4. Research/weight-gaining/training in pole-dancing/professional wrestling to play the hero in the new pole-dancing/professional wrestling film.
4a. Conversely: real-life pole-dancers/wrestlers filmed and edited into high drama.
4b. Actors on sides of the fiction-nonfiction fence dole out equal parts of skepticism and suspensions of disbelief. The audience now knows how the truthful experience is edited into fiction, how fictions are method-acted into an image of the truth.
5. For memoir, unfortunately, there’s only so much truth to go around, only so many veils to swirl, before a more comprehensive skepticism takes over; a kind of skepticism, I would argue, that is specifically reserved for the memoir.
6. I’ve tried to think of reasons.
6a. We live in a participatory age of audience voting, enforced collaboration. Creative Commons founder and legal guru Lawrence Lessig calls ours a “remix culture.” In an age of wikis and democratized technology, we regard each cultural product as remixable, rewritable.
6b. And that includes truth.
6c. Memoir’s appeal lives off of what we now perceive as the scandal of one person who dares to place his or her view over the someone else’s un-rewritability. We don’t get to participate in memoir, other than as passive reader.
7. The Modernist cult of the singular genius/artist atop Mount Inspiration has largely dispersed, and much of that is a good thing. Maybe we will have group memoirs now, collaborative memoirs. Maybe online writing will offer new forms that will ease our now-eternal skepticism of the individual mind at work.
8. Another try: The methods by which art is produced — recording, printing and publishing, video editing—have been demystified and placed into regular people’s hands. If a 15-year-old hears a song she thinks is cheesy, she films herself in a gorilla suit singing it out of tune and posts the video online, and we all get to see it.
8a. We are all auteur critics now; we all know the artists’ processes.
9. And the epistemic channels through which we receive truth? That too, is itself rewritable. Lessig and others compare our remix culture as a return to campfire stories and folks who their own autochthonic and passionate songs on the porch, as opposed to having a single uberculture handed from down high. A commendable notion. But there’s no way around another consequence, which is that we all have our own remixed versions of the truth now, and so are skeptical of others’. The center does not hold because there is no center. There are only niche markets for the truth.
10. We’ve grown used to different versions of stories told from different points of view. A memoir is now regarded as revisable, heckle-able, to readers who have every source document and transcript at their fingertips, every opportunity for the anonymous jackass comment box quip. Readers will, more often than not, choose that version which pleases or reinforces or comforts them.
11. There is a story that’s been going around for years about actors Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier on the set of John Schlesinger’s 1976 thriller Marathon Man. Olivier plays Dr. Christian Szell, a dentist and former member of the Nazi SS, “the White Angel” of Auschwitz. He has been hiding out in New York City and trying to tie up loose ends — i.e., killing off people — to smuggle diamonds out of the country. Hoffman plays Babe Levy, a graduate history student mistaken for a player in the conspiracy.
11a. The story involves the filming of one of the most infamous torture scenes ever portrayed on film, in which Dr. Szell employs his dentist equipment — drills, pliers, chair — to torture Levy into submission. Few who have seen “Marathon Man” can forget Olivier as he repeats over and over in a German accent, “Is it safe? Is it safe?” as a strapped-in Hoffman writhes around, screaming.
12. Hoffman is a disciple of the Method acting technique, which is when actors inhabit the physical and emotional circumstances of his or her character. So to prepare for the torture scene, the story goes, Hoffman had wandered the streets for two days, since his character had also stayed up running from his pursuers. When Hoffman — unshowered, baggy-eyed, slobbering — shows up on set, Olivier regards his disheveled co-star, asks him what’s going on. Hoffman explains the method to his acting madness.
12a. Olivier’s response? “Why don’t you just try acting, my dear boy? It’s much easier.”
12b. We love real stories. We love unreal stories dressed up like real stories. We like unreal stories that mirror our real lives. More and more, it seems that if we can verify what an author has gone through — if we can see the writer — unshowered, baggy-eyed, slobbering, like Dustin Hoffman — only then will we believe the writer’s truth.
13. This may work fine for the gonzo journalist who competitively eats hot dogs for a year or the Warholian webcam memoirist for his year of sexual healing.
14. In a culture of Method acting truth, a recipient sits in his or her panopticonal position of multiple vantage points. There is an access to transcripts and raw footage, prequels, commentary tracks, all with the goal of Knowing the Truth.
14a. Manifestations abound: From bases for the invasion of Iraq, to Ashlee Simpson’s caught lip-syncing to a backing tape on Saturday Night Live, to presidential candidates forced by reporters to repeat their position on an issue after a tape of them saying a slightly different worded position is played in front of them, gotcha-style, in some warped version of serving the public service.
15. In each case, an explanation of truth is repeated over and over, morphed ever-so-slightly each iteration, until an adequate explanation is reached. We have been trained, then, to believe an evolved truth is an Absolute Truth.
16. Somewhere along this continuum, I think to myself, an unnatural reverence for the book, the printed word, comes into play. I can’t help but think, lapsed Catholic that I am, that this comes from our thinking of a book as a vessel for The Holy Word, passed down from above or online. The truth is not regarded as inhabited by pixels, but people die every day for what is found there.
17. Nowhere but in memoir, it seems, is the quest for absolute truth now an issue. There is no nitpicking about dramatizations in a magazine’s fawning celebrity profile. There is no gotcha moment in the Fourth Estate’s lack of curiosity over the basis of, say, the Iraq war.
18. Instead, we have the same interplay of dramatic and truthful. Pundits use the term “narrative” more than literary critics now, it seems, and speak of the real world in the third person, as it was a process to be viewed like a move, as if wasn’t their job to craft it themselves.
19. There are no panels being assembled for absolute truth in the blogosphere or correctives to axe-grinding documentary or bio-flics. Maybe it’s because we know the process of how those artworks put together and don’t know how a memoirist can summon a memory and give it the same dramatic energies. Not even in the so-called reality television shows, which numb our palates us to each nugget of massaged footage.
20. Only creative nonfiction, and particularly the personal memoir, that bastard child of journalism, drama, and poetry, has had its feet held to the truth-teller’s fire.
21. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of the god Theuth, who has just invented the use of letters and presents it to Thamus, the King of Egypt. Theuth thinks his invention will give Egyptians “better memories.” Thamus disagrees.
“[T]his discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls,” Thamus says, “because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific thing which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
22. Memory and reminiscence. Truth and the semblance of truth. Experience and mimesis.
23. Perhaps readers need to catch up with what memoir is all about, that it is a kind of method writing where a writer tries to re-inhabit a world lived and recreate it for the reader. It is not the direct presentation of memory; it is reminiscence, a semblance of truth. It’s direct experience; it is a mimesis; it is acting.
24. The story from the set of the Marathon Man has resonated over the years to poke fun at the Method actors’ craft as opposed to those actors who maintain a so-called critical distance from their characters. Hoffman denied the incident ever happened for years.
24a. The truth, as always, is far more murky: in a 2004 Playboy interview, Hoffman finally admitted that the conversation with Olivier indeed happened. He also clarified what was said. He going through a divorce from his first wife and was depressed, and spent the previous two nights partying hard at Studio 54. Hoffman told Olivier this, and his comment related to his overall lifestyle.
24b.Which version do you enjoy better: The real one clarified long after anyone cares, or the unclarified hand-me-down, dramatized, animated for more tiresome company?