An advanced seminar on the art of acting, part two: “… it is all about DETAIL”

 

Inwardly returning from my summer holidays, after a great “anniversary” weekend which I started with renting “The Crucible” from Digital Theater (like my favourite films, this gets better every time I watch it!) and closed sitting on the bank of the Isar with Claudia talking about relationships with fictional characters (and loads of other interesting stuff), I am coming back refreshed to my seminar about acting:

 

The next important thing I understood about acting appears self-evident as well, but it really is at the heart of what the kind of acting I am so interested in – as well as the kind of reading! – is all about. Immediately after I got my master’s degree, I realized that what I had been working on for my thesis hadn’t been what I would have wanted to work on. And that, if I would ever write a doctoral thesis - which didn’t appear impossible at the time - it would probably be on a theory about REALISM. It was only on a hunch, though, and I didn’t really know why I wanted to look into that. Now I know that it had always been my focus where reading and literature is concerned, and that I wanted to find out why. But only much later, reading “The Lord of the Rings” and really getting into a fantasy world for the first time since childhood, I noticed that it doesn’t have anything to do with the kind of literature dubbed “naturalism” or “realism” – not in the FIRST place! - though this was my main focus at the time. Of course I read all kinds of stuff for my studies, but these novels from the 19^th century were what I really liked and selected for recreational reading. I didn’t much like to read crime novels then, for example, because I always felt that I couldn’t “believe” these exaggerated stories and workings of distorted minds. But what does this even mean?

 

Now I put this question before me again, realizing that it is actually the same question that Tom Hiddleston’s teacher at RADA always asked his students when he said: “I don’t believe it. Do you believe it?” And this rather worn out guideline is still what I use to SELECT what is worth reading. “Do I BELIEVE it?”, and, knowing that it isn’t “real”: “WHY do I believe it?”

 

Later, trying to write fiction, there were always two things I checked when I was writing – that is, mostly they got “ticked off” automatically because, if they weren’t there, I couldn’t go on writing. First: does it SOUND GOOD? I liked to read my stuff aloud, and if it didn’t sound good it got changed or chucked out. After a time, it began to sound good automatically. And I think this is actually the BASIC requirement for realism: that it is well written, and PLEASING to listen to – or, in the performing arts, beautifully and perfectly done, and pleasing to see. It is in fact some kind of “foolery” – or aesthetic spell – because, without the spell of beauty cast on it, “we” single out the bullshit immediately and don’t believe it.

 

So, this was always my first concern, but what always got checked independently – though I didn’t have any obvious criteria for it – was: Do I believe it? I actually remember now that I did want to write a story set in a fantasy world a long time before I read “The Lord of the Rings” because I coveted the story/characters but couldn’t find a world they belonged to. And noticed that I couldn’t because the reality I could conjure up was too flimsy. (As usual, failure is most instructive! It’s just that we only REMEMBER things/events when they have got past that stage.) Obviously “believing it” requires that the text has SUBSTANCE. And the answer to the question about a criterion for realism is exactly what Tom Hiddleston said about successful acting. Which means

 

“grounding a performance in naturalistic truth – which is all about DETAIL …”

 

In my mind there is no doubt that there is a huge and increasing demand for this kind of realism – which, in my opinion, is the reason that British actors – who have “always” worked in this way – are in ever higher demand outside their “natural” (BBC) environment. There is obviously an increase in the complexity of characters and interesting predicaments. Of course the conventionally simple love and family stories are still frequent and used to provide the same kind of motivation in every one-dimensional action story. But there is so much else – so many other areas of our world or dark corners of history that fiction expands into. And formats like TV series that allow it to look rather deep into a whole bunch of different people and relationships. The reason might be that there is a general awareness that the complexity of our world far surpasses our ability to understand it. And to produce this impression of reality as we experience it, the audience has to be overwhelmed with detail.

 

Taking this into consideration, I suppose the inherent criterion I had for my own texts was something like the question about good coffee: Would it “work” on me, or is it too “thin”? I COULD fool myself for a time with good writing, but not for long. If the emerging text lacked substance, I would notice and stop believing it. (It also works the other way round: If I don’t believe it, I lose confidence and aplomb and will not be up for good writing.) In the first place, “believing it” has nothing to do with the story being set in a realistic environment, with characters I might meet in the real world. This kind of realism can be as flimsy and “unreal” as any other kind of literature. And often is – I think even more often than the kind with a lot of imagination in it. (I suppose we tend to believe what comes out of our own heads. At least I do.) Daily soaps that pretend to sneak into the lives of real people and pseudo-realistic crime programs are an example for this. Even the “scripted reality crap” Claudia referred to. If it is bad, it doesn’t FEEL real. On the other hand, recently reading “Red Dragon” and the other “Hannibal” novels by Thomas Harris, I experienced that these books are so “densely” written, and so fraught with “body feelings”, that I got immediately drawn into a world that is not at all a world where I WANTED to be. (I just talked to my 22 years old nephew – the one whom I told the “Lord of the Rings” when he was five – and was surprised that he loves the series. But he also said that he was interested in serial killers. I am not!) And it is certainly not a world that has anything to do with my own reality, or any reality I know of. If anything, it’s the realism of a nightmare while we are dreaming it … It is a great example because this amount of detail - especially when it is “addressed” to the area BENEATH my throat – obviously tends to turn any kind of bullshit into something I might “believe”.

 

I even experience these fictional worlds and people becoming more “real” than the so-called “real world” because they are usually more completely “filled out” and substantial. So many areas of “my” world are vague or obscure because I don’t understand the motivations of the people acting in them. (For example – as we just discussed - it completely eludes me why people dislike and want to hurt other people JUST because they are different. I never had a clue about it, and no theoretical explanation I received or found has ever satisfied me. There probably is no way for me to find out unless it is going happen to me. Unless something is going to shatter my natural self-love and confidence so that deep-rooted fears might surface. Which would still be unlikely to be about women or buggery because I am a woman …??? There is still a chance, though, that a FICTIONAL text will suddenly explain this to me.) This perspective on the world might apply solely to me because my grip on reality is not what it probably should be. For me, the “real” world is a NECESSARY world because I bodily live there and my means of living and social relationships are there. I actually have scant feelings about it. Nothing much apart from contentment (or discontent) – being pleased (or displeased) with myself or others – awareness, actual discomfort or (minor) fears, and some kind of vague dread about any number of things that might yet come to pass. MY “real” world – where I LIVE and am myself, where my affections and memories lie, where I really enjoy things, allow myself to have “deep” feelings like longing or sadness, where I pursue my goals - is almost entirely fictional or imaginary. So, this might just be me - but I strongly suspect that this “condition” might be more widespread than “we” generally think, with so many people passing so much time with computer games, Netflix series, and all kinds of fictional stuff. And I have this uncanny feeling that there actually might be more orgasms brought on by imagined or “online” situations than by actual sex … No wonder that we have this abundance of surrogate worlds - and the kind of actors that can make them feel real with their compulsive search for completeness and detail in the characters they are playing. To “inhabit a character fully”  in this way is the secret behind “being truthful in IMAGINARY circumstances”. And this is at the bottom of the kind of realism I refer to. In part three of my “seminar” I will look further into this special relationship between actor and character.