Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Oscars and Helen Mirror
The last couple of years have seen the eulogising of the impressionist, the mimic, the imitator to the detriment of the actor who creates a character. Capote, Amin and the Queen are part of the current cultural establishment’s fetishism with bringing out good copy. Actors can spend hours of research with videotapes and radio speeches to try to capture every last ounce of verisimilitude. Very good, but is it art?
I watched a clip of Helen Mirren’s acceptance speech and as she worked gooily up to her finale, the words began to stick together, so unctuous were they. She didn’t fluff her lines for that would be too light and ethereal a metaphor. She gagged them. It was when she was saying that she was only there because of one person – the Queen, herself. The words coagulated in her throat. How bloody marvellous! Helen Mirren had brought the Queen to Hollywood. Funny, I had never seen her as a lickspittle. For me great acting is creating character, not regurgitating it. One reason why Shakespeare is endlessly enticing is in discovering how an actor brings Lady MacBeth or Hamlet to life. It is why Robert De Niro’s burning creation in Taxi Driver far outstrips any bolt-on biography. (Bruno Ganz’s Hitler in Downfall seemed more creation than mimicry in that the reality of Hitler had become lost in a global, mythological symbolism. Somehow, the creation made him more obscenely real).
Meanwhile, another act of copying, The Departed, based on, arguably, the much better Infernal Affairs, won best film, demonstrating that we are clogging originality in the compulsion to create glittering reflections. In literature, these days novels blur the line with biography in their meticulously researched recreations of past times and environments, so that we have fewer and fewer acts of pure imagination and more and more worthy and ‘realistic’ portrayals of bygone times and people. I believe William Golding admitted that he had read one book about the mariners’ world before writing his sea-going trilogy and that was so that he could imagine what it was like to be on board a ship at that time. All else was in his head.
Let's have more outpourings from inside heads than faithful recreations of the outsides of them.
The last couple of years have seen the eulogising of the impressionist, the mimic, the imitator to the detriment of the actor who creates a character. Capote, Amin and the Queen are part of the current cultural establishment’s fetishism with bringing out good copy. Actors can spend hours of research with videotapes and radio speeches to try to capture every last ounce of verisimilitude. Very good, but is it art?
I watched a clip of Helen Mirren’s acceptance speech and as she worked gooily up to her finale, the words began to stick together, so unctuous were they. She didn’t fluff her lines for that would be too light and ethereal a metaphor. She gagged them. It was when she was saying that she was only there because of one person – the Queen, herself. The words coagulated in her throat. How bloody marvellous! Helen Mirren had brought the Queen to Hollywood. Funny, I had never seen her as a lickspittle. For me great acting is creating character, not regurgitating it. One reason why Shakespeare is endlessly enticing is in discovering how an actor brings Lady MacBeth or Hamlet to life. It is why Robert De Niro’s burning creation in Taxi Driver far outstrips any bolt-on biography. (Bruno Ganz’s Hitler in Downfall seemed more creation than mimicry in that the reality of Hitler had become lost in a global, mythological symbolism. Somehow, the creation made him more obscenely real).
Meanwhile, another act of copying, The Departed, based on, arguably, the much better Infernal Affairs, won best film, demonstrating that we are clogging originality in the compulsion to create glittering reflections. In literature, these days novels blur the line with biography in their meticulously researched recreations of past times and environments, so that we have fewer and fewer acts of pure imagination and more and more worthy and ‘realistic’ portrayals of bygone times and people. I believe William Golding admitted that he had read one book about the mariners’ world before writing his sea-going trilogy and that was so that he could imagine what it was like to be on board a ship at that time. All else was in his head.
Let's have more outpourings from inside heads than faithful recreations of the outsides of them.
Labels: Winning the Oscar
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Who are You? Mark 2
For those who haven't read it, Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, suggested that the flesh and blood persons that you and I are, do not necessarily represent primary life forms. This honour goes to our genes. They ride our bodies through countless lives, reproducing and refining themselves as they transfer from host life to host life, for some survival purpose that seems beyond our conjecture. Curiously, we are at a point in this invisible journeying within us, where we can intercede and block our genes' implacable progress. Not only can we choose to be childless (a kind of ya-booh response to discovering we have been duped!) but we can modify our genes and, thereby, remodel ourselves as hosts (the ultimate cosmetic surgery). Is this a point that the genes are programmed to reach - the point where mastery of the future is transferred to us as hosts such that we can mutate as we wish, to meet whatever faces us? Or will we be, as history suggests, merely the victims of a consummate evolutionary double bluff?
Next time we watch a Family Tree programme on TV, imagine that in some mysterious way our genes are also aware of it, amused at our ignorance of their latest 'spin' in underwriting our misplaced self-importance or, more correctly, self-impotence.
Labels: Ooh, you selfish genes...
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Who are You?
It is a paradoxical fact about a person that, in fact, there is no one there! Ask anyone to be introspective about the self that should lurk behind the senses that connect us to ‘the world’ and a befuddlement ensues. Try as people might, they can’t locate who lives indoors. David Hume wrote about this state of flux in the early 18th century! Instead, they can talk, happily, about their attributes and perceptions, their strong points and their weaknesses. “40 yr old male, GSOH, likes reading, films, bondage, seeks…” etc. In other words people can discuss themselves as though from the outside, as a collection of descriptors and a history of experiences.
Look in a mirror and stare at the image that is, apparently, looking back at you and say what you see. Isn’t it just a physical shell round an emptiness? You don’t see the personality. You don’t see the spirit. You don’t see the self.
It must be that all we are is an amalgam. From birth to death we record every detail, no matter how small, direct or indirect, explicit or implied, and these continually feed the misty picture of the self, changing it, distorting it, illuminating it. It is never an entity. It is never complete in any way. It wavers and shifts as we journey on, adding to what we know, negating what we thought we knew, erasing certainties and raising new possibilities.
Is this a fearful thought or can it be liberating? I think it is the latter, for once we come to terms with the lack of immutable self, at the heart of being, we are freer to become conscious of the flexibility and tolerance of not being fixed in thought or feeling. We can grow more complex and richer. We can empathise with others for we recognise aspects of our shifting interior with theirs.
The alternative is to allow ourselves to believe in a self of internal rigidity which calcifies inside us with its fixed views and fixed responses to everything ‘out there’. The self that is so formed accepts only data which confirms it. It says, happily, “What you see is what you get.”
It is a paradoxical fact about a person that, in fact, there is no one there! Ask anyone to be introspective about the self that should lurk behind the senses that connect us to ‘the world’ and a befuddlement ensues. Try as people might, they can’t locate who lives indoors. David Hume wrote about this state of flux in the early 18th century! Instead, they can talk, happily, about their attributes and perceptions, their strong points and their weaknesses. “40 yr old male, GSOH, likes reading, films, bondage, seeks…” etc. In other words people can discuss themselves as though from the outside, as a collection of descriptors and a history of experiences.
Look in a mirror and stare at the image that is, apparently, looking back at you and say what you see. Isn’t it just a physical shell round an emptiness? You don’t see the personality. You don’t see the spirit. You don’t see the self.
It must be that all we are is an amalgam. From birth to death we record every detail, no matter how small, direct or indirect, explicit or implied, and these continually feed the misty picture of the self, changing it, distorting it, illuminating it. It is never an entity. It is never complete in any way. It wavers and shifts as we journey on, adding to what we know, negating what we thought we knew, erasing certainties and raising new possibilities.
Is this a fearful thought or can it be liberating? I think it is the latter, for once we come to terms with the lack of immutable self, at the heart of being, we are freer to become conscious of the flexibility and tolerance of not being fixed in thought or feeling. We can grow more complex and richer. We can empathise with others for we recognise aspects of our shifting interior with theirs.
The alternative is to allow ourselves to believe in a self of internal rigidity which calcifies inside us with its fixed views and fixed responses to everything ‘out there’. The self that is so formed accepts only data which confirms it. It says, happily, “What you see is what you get.”