The dangers and benefits of pretending

I thought the story in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday about the psychological dangers of actors playing dark roles was pretty interesting. I hadn't heard the story before that Daniel Day-Lewis quit Hamlet after seeing his own dead father on stage, or that Robert Downey Jnr partly blamed playing a cocaine addict in a movie for his own real life addiction.

As the article says, part of the problem is that Western training for actors has come to be dominated by method acting, by which actors are encouraged to internalise and experience the fictional character.

It is, in many ways, a little curious that this has become the dominant idea for actor training. After all, it only came to be popular in the mid 20th century, and at least two of the worlds most lauded actors, Olivier and Guinness, were not into it. Olivier is famously said to have told Dustin Hoffman to "just try acting", or similar words, although the veracity and meaning of that anecdote seems somewhat uncertain now. I am pretty sure it is fair to say that, although he could be extremely thoughtful about what he was doing, Alec Guinness also took a "craftsman" approach to acting which would disdain the need to internalise the role being performed. (I think he also used to say that his approach to acting over the years increasingly came to be one of whittling down the effects to a bare minimum, but maybe that was particularly encouraged by some of the characters he was later to play.) Harrison Ford, who is not the world's greatest actor but has been quite convincing in some serious roles, has also frequently made the comparison to it being a trade something like the carpentry that he did between jobs in his early days.

So if everyone knows that method acting is not essential, why do so many drama teachers still think it so important? I assume that it's because it gives a certain gravitas to the profession that is, after all, a very curious one that is very similar to child's play conducted in public. (Colin Firth, who I don't particularly find interesting as a actor, at least recognizes the semi-absurdity of the job.)

Talking about this reminds me that (I think) CS Lewis said somewhere that if you pretend something long enough, you start to believe it. I can't track down the quote now, but I remember it struck me as important at the time I first read it.

As a an aspect of the human psyche, it is something that can be used in both a positive or negative way. It is related to the idea that a lie repeated enough will start to be believed, but on the other hand, as Lewis said elsewhere: "Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbour; act as if you did."

Certainly, atheists can use it to attack religious faith as being no more than a matter of thoughtless indoctrination. (A point Lewis would surely have recognized, but you have to also concede that he did his fair share to get people to really think about their faith.)

But from the other side of the fence, it is a principle that can be used to justify a critical attitude of the (barely recognized by younger people especially) Freudian psychology which dominates Western thinking in many ways. Why, after all, should we be so concerned with understanding our subconscious landscape, and giving fulfillment to it, if it is something that can be "tricked" into believing stuff quite easily anyway?

The important point that CS Lewis, and the (now Catholic) philosopher Alisdair McIntyre might make is that Aristotle was right in his assumption "that man is as-he-happens-to-be and that this is distinct from man-as-he-should-be," and that "pretending" to the extent that it helps a person become the person they should be is a worthy thing. I really must get around to reading McIntyre one day.

If method acting made people think about this, it would serve something useful.