Eric Mattingly shared The Atlantic's post.
This is old (ish), but I agree that so called
"method acting" has become more stunt than a direct pipeline to
gritty human sublimity these days.
- - - -
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Right now it would seem perhaps more
accurate to say that doing method acting means for being ridiculed as
fancifully, self-glorifingly feminine. The cool guy just "acts" and
is done, hardly knowing it even happened.
Lizzie Nicholson not quite sure what you're saying...
Lizzie Nicholson i don't see the 'feminine' side to method
acting
Peter Hoffman overly-emotional, flamboyant, gesturing =
female
Lizzie Nicholson Peter, let Patrick answer...
Chris Okum I don't
think method acting or the preponderance of actors glorifying their preparation
is feminine at all. And Ed Harris is hardly a method actor, but his
performances couldn't be more emotional. Being vainglorious and self-important
is a human trait, not masculine or feminine.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston The article writer wants us to think
she's against macho, and so encapsulates method acting as a way of sissifying
other actors that don't make the same demands on themselves. But she also
explains that, "method techniques prompt actors to draw on their own
experiences and emotions as a way to strip their performances of
artifice," which, if we withdrew our sense of method acting as associated
with the likes of Brando, Bale and DiCaprio, and instead imagined we were
learning of for the first time, doesn't immediately scream macho: drawing on your
own emotions, might sound a little bit like therapeutic silliness, discovering
the five love languages of your soul, or whatnot, in today's culture.
What sounds, if not macho, at least manly... an older kind of manliness, that has come back: how the article describes Rowlands, which for me was akin to a working class "gent" who knew to attend to her various other responsibilities, and still did first-class art. She comes across as a disciple of father-knows-best, and the new method actors, as fey artistes who want to abandon all for broadway. And I'm quite sure this isn't true for Rowlands, but I suspect these days that those who are lambasting those who ostensibly, and to justify this critique, probably are, risking a lot of self-uncovering to best play their roles, are primarily motivated by justifying a safe, detached approach to all of their lives, that the 60s generation rejected for being repressed. I don't want to make being frozen cool again.
What sounds, if not macho, at least manly... an older kind of manliness, that has come back: how the article describes Rowlands, which for me was akin to a working class "gent" who knew to attend to her various other responsibilities, and still did first-class art. She comes across as a disciple of father-knows-best, and the new method actors, as fey artistes who want to abandon all for broadway. And I'm quite sure this isn't true for Rowlands, but I suspect these days that those who are lambasting those who ostensibly, and to justify this critique, probably are, risking a lot of self-uncovering to best play their roles, are primarily motivated by justifying a safe, detached approach to all of their lives, that the 60s generation rejected for being repressed. I don't want to make being frozen cool again.
Chris Okum I agree
wholeheartedly with this. You read old interviews with great actors and most of
them are loathe to discuss their 'method.' Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall
probably roll their eyes at actors like Jared Leto, who seems incapable of
playing a simple human being, which is the hardest thing of all to do. Same
thing goes with Johnny Depp now, whose movies are all about him and the
character he has created. Obnoxious. What I find most obnoxious of all are the
actors who play soldiers and who tout the two weeks they spent preparing for
the role under the guidance of some retired drill Sargent turned Tech Adv. , as
if playing soldier with the knowledge that absolutely no harm will ever come to
you is somehow a fool-proof way of getting into the mindset of someone who has
seen real combat. But, hey, whatever works for you. If the only way you can
play someone from the 1800s is to live in a cabin for a month and make yr own
shoes out of cowhide then bully for you, but keep it to yourself. I make an
exception for movies that are about the acting process, though, like the recent
Kate Plays Christine and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, as the art of acting itself is
nothing to sneeze at and can be quite fascinating to learn about. The stuff
with 'method actors' talking about how deep they got into character is pure
vanity, though.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Chris Okum Stereotypically
feminine traits, and you must know that. Traditionally, it's what is expected
out of women, and if men carry themselves like that, that's whom they are
becoming: traitors to real manhood. Your previous post is all about the
fundamental manliness of warriors (who unlike actors, subject themselves to
"genuine risks"), men of action, about men who are loathe to talk,
who'd roll their eyes at our current, disgusting, cowardly and pretentious
behaviour. This manner of understanding real men carries with it a sense of men
who are vainglorious and self-important as being female-men... men who desire
being courted. What's happening is that we are creating an environment which
will make it that much more of a combat zone, that much more risky, to dare
becoming deeply sensitive to other people. This regression originates out of a
lot of men, particularly, feeling themselves as compromised, too much men of feeling,
and needing to make their social environment one which helps staunch it all
back in. Hence, Jaret Leto, who represents how they feel, must be made an
example of... pushed off the map.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Method acting has become vain, wanting to
promote and flaunt oneself... to be stereotypically feminine. It's not being
discarded for macho bulls*t as the article suggests, but to privilege something
ostensibly more fundamentally manly, resurrected from out of times past. It's
basically coming across as anti-metrosexual, and is promoting people robots.
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