The Read: Isaac Butler, The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I heard Butler being interviewed on NPR and was fascinated by the conversation. I also have had in the back of my mind a kind of half-formed conjecture about the idea of “mobile subjectivity” (e.g., about the way modern societies enable or make possible the idea of ‘being another person’ for a particular purpose) and the history of The Method seems important to thinking more clearly about that idea.
Is it what I thought it was?
Oh yes. It’s a really good history, very readable, but also full of good insight and analysis.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I almost think there’s a possible course I could put together on theories of experience in historical scholarship—Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience, Joan Scott’s famous critique of experience, etc. and if I did, this book would definitely be on the syllabus.
If I keep working on that analysis of “mobile subjectivity” (I have several specific cases I want to apply it to), I’d use this book as an important backstop for it.
Quotes
“The harmonious ensemble of the Moscow Art Theatre was a pre- “system” invention. If anything, the “system” had nearly destroyed this ensemble, and, in the eyes of Stanislavski’s detractors, ruined him as a director. But in the press, and onstage at the Princess Theatre, it was the ‘system’ that received the credit for the Moscow Art Theatre’s success. This was the first major confusion that would remain in America in the wake of Stanislavski’s visit. It would not be the last.”
“One of the most revolutionary ideas of the ‘system’ was that an actor’s inner life could be trained. The creative will, affective memory, and imagination were not fixed qualities given by God, but rather capacities that could be developed deliberately.”
“To Boleslavsky, theater was life. The creative theater, collaborative creation, spiritual concentration, experiencing the role—all of these were important not only because they made plays better but because they made life richer. Humans crave and move toward mysteries. They also crave perfection of the fallen world, and of the broken self. Theater grows out of these impulses by giving the audience the mystery of existence refined—perhaps perfected—through art.”
“The Group talked nonstop about the importance of America’s social problems to their work, but white supremacy was one they barely touched on. During the 1930s, they wanted to be the most American theater company on earth, but their America was the America of Walt Whitman, not Langston Hughes; they listened to Beethoven, not Ellington; they were friends with John Dos Passos, not Zora Neale Hurston.”
“Harold and Stella began their relationship in earnest before arriving that summer, and they fought constantly, as they would for the rest of their lives. The fights were at heart all the same: Harold wanted to be loved by Stella as passionately as he loved her, and Stella wanted freedom and respect.”
“Relaxation, to Strasberg, was key. If you weren’t physically relaxed, the muscle tension would impede the flow of your work, and of your emotions. But Lee was a difficult man to relax around. He was quiet, imperious, withdrawn. When he worried that he was showing emotion himself, he hid behind the sports section of a newspaper. He was also prone to rages, screaming at actors when they didn’t do what he wanted. The Group’s growing adoration for Strasberg over that summer only made him more difficult, his standards more demanding.”
“I knew the principle, but I also knew the practice,” Carnovsky said, decades later. “The principle of equality was there but the ass-kissing of Strasberg was also there. The principle applied to everyone else but not him.”
“As the ‘system’ had done with the First Studio, the method made the actors less compliant, less willing to submit to the assumed power of those in charge, particularly as the directors’ personal weaknesses became more apparent.”
“While it’s true that Stanislavski’s working methods shifted toward the physical during the final decades of his life, the story of a great artist evolving away from bourgeois psychology toward a materialist acting technique aligns a little too neatly with the interests of the Soviet Union to be accepted on its face.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I vaguely knew about Stanislavski and the beginnings of the Method but not very much, so on this point alone, the book was a delight to read and largely new to me personally. The particularity of the Russian history of theater is drawn out very well—that in part the naturalism of Stanislavski and Nemirovich’s vision of theatre was among other things about trying to move theater out of the control of the Tsarist state. It’s also great to have the famous series of maxims about theater and acting that Stanislavski and Nemirovich came up with (e.g., “there are no small parts, there are only small actors”) put into context.
There’s clearly a meta-story here of which this is only one facet that is about the relationship between modernity and realism, modernity and mimesis (the idea that art should mirror or reproduce the world), modernity and naturalism, about modernity and interiority (a notion that what have inside us was mysterious and needed to be revealed and investigated through art). This is one of those titanic shifts in consciousness and expectation that is so big, so abstract and so pervasive in our own forms of common sense that it is hard to get many people to understand what it was like to live in cultural and social worlds where expectations about art, performance, and personhood were in some way fundamentally different (both in their formal character and their inward experience). One thing I like about this account is that Butler doesn’t fully commit to the semi-Foucauldian proposition that no one ever thought of acting or performance as experiential or inspired by the feelings and life of the actor or performer before the Method’s beginnings—he points out that there is an old current of dissent in theatrical performance that goes back a long ways, a subset of people who have argued that what an actor really feels makes a performance both technically better and more potent for an audience. But it wasn’t a common thought either for the audiences who watched performances or the people who theorized and taught performance until the 20th Century—and as Butler observes, even if the Method itself is now mostly mocked or marginalized among performers and in the wider public, the basic propositions it brought to performance have also become widely naturalized and integrated into cinematic and theatrical acting.
It’s also another view into a different metastory, which is the association between modernity and novelty, modernity and originality, the idea that it is the task of modern people to relentlessly overthrow any hint of stable practices and traditions—often as a kind of way to “stimulate sales”, e.g., to draw audiences or buyers or patrons, to convince employers and institutions of your value. The irony being that histrionic performances of novelty are in that sense as static and practiced as the “highly conventionalized gestures” of the “symbolic style” that was the orthodoxy prior to the emergence of the Method. We all know how to make claims about innovation or originality in order to communicate our value, and then many of us go on to play the role of conservator, curator, guardian of tradition to retain our value later in life. But the emergence of the Method, and of impressionism, and many other examples across art and social practice in the 19th and early 20th Century, are where we learned to stage modernity in these terms.
It’s also clear from the beginning—I am sure this is something that historians of theater and cinema have known for a long time, but it became clear to me in new ways reading this—that the history of the Method is not just a history of acting but of directing, and in particular, of the idea of the director as a dictatorial (and patriarchal) ruler of actors entitled to command them to become what the director deemed their real selves to be—again a kind of modern metastory of (mostly) men putting themselves in the position of seeing, revealing, ordering, reshaping the subjectivities of men and women put under their authority in distinctive institutional contexts (in classrooms, in psychotherapy, in religious congregation, in charismatic political movements, in social work, in rehabilitative prisons, etc. Sometimes to the point of claiming that the authoritarian patriarch at the heart of these relational moments must produce trauma in their subjects in order to crack open the shell of their interiority and liberate it for some powerful refashioning. A worst-case scenario version of this might be Alan Moore’s V in V for Vendetta claiming that he had to subject Evey to brutal imprisonment so that she might truly become free just as he had, but there’s a ton of stories from film history that fit as well—Hitchcock terrorizing Tippi Hedren, etc. It’s an interesting counter-factual (and maybe plausible in the sense that there were women directing early films) to imagine a more conventionally feminized way of doing something like the Method from its beginnings (and thus all those other institutions and professions that became fixated on understanding, revealing and remaking the interior personhood of individuals) where the performer was coaxed and encouraged and the role of ‘director’ was dialogic and mutually involved in the revelation of emotional interiority, where no one ordered anyone. In some ways, I think that’s been the afterlife of all of those early 20th Century roles, to somehow hold constant their implicit authority or status while also creating that kind of mutualism, that sense of supportive facilitation. (Not to say that it’s just about “what if it had been women instead of men”, because Maria Ouspenskaya taught “the system” in an “unremittingly harsh” way that “frequently reduced students to tears”.) There’s also the point that Butler makes in discussing the Group that the “system”/Method did in fact succeed in making actors more independent despite the authoritarian approach of directors within the Method.
Has anyone discussed the relationship between Stanislavski’s “Magic If” in “the system” and the concept of “magic circle” that is (sort of) derived from Huizinga’s Homo Ludens? I would have to reread Eric Zimmerman’s essay about his and Katie Salen’s elaboration of the idea to see, I guess.
Another counterfactual that occurs here involves the cultural specificity of “the system”/the Method. E.g., Butler observes that there were already pressures in Western European theater and in American theater towards performative naturalism by the time that the Moscow Art Theatre toured the US (to be seen by Lee Strasberg among others), steered by some of the same general currents as in Russia, but maybe they never would have had the same systematicity that made them reproducible as a school or a dogma (and thus produced systematic forms of reaction from dissenting philosophies). What’s also important is the way that the Method as it was received by Strasberg and others ended up isolating the part of Stanislavski’s technique that concerned acting from the rest of the approaches that he and his contemporaries put into practice in the Moscow Art Theatre (the dramaturgy, the style of direction, etc.)
Richard Boleslavsky’s lectures about “the system” to Americans included a talk at Bryn Mawr College, which is a fun local connection. Yet another metastory: the pseudo-positivistic claim that Boleslavsky made that “the system” had made acting into a “science”. The content of Boleslavsky’s lectures as reprised by Butler also feel to me like what many scholars in the humanities even now want to say about what they study—that culture is “life”, that it makes life “richer”, only it’s become difficult for many to say that whole-heartedly or unreservedly or naively and it’s become difficult for audiences to trust fully that inquiry into the humanities or even disciplined—systemic, as it were—approaches to art and art-making end up making either life or art richer.
The irony of Strasberg insisting on true emotion while not exhibiting it seems familiar—it immediately made me think of Harry Harlow as described by Deborah Blum in Love at Goon Park : the scientist who showed that love and affection made a huge difference to the mental health and sociality of rhesus monkeys while being completely unable to apply this lesson to his own life. It’s something we mostly talk about only with humor or fatalism but it seems important—that you can understand something intellectually, with great urgency, and yet be the person least capable of benefitting from that insight, or even recognizing that you’re the person most in need of the lesson.
The serendipities involved in how the Method entered into film acting are interesting, though I’ve heard a bit more of this story before elsewhere. (It’s also tied up, as Butler points out, in the great postwar influx of cultural and intellectual talent into Los Angeles.) The point at which the specific experiences and knowledge of the Group (and before them, people who had worked with Stanislavski) began to diffuse into a repertoire of techniques and ideas that were available to influence actors who had no direct connection with that history is especially interesting—though just as interesting are the last points of direct connection that had such enormous impact, as in the case of Stella Adler teaching Marlon Brando.