Why is it that if you want to enjoy a non-naturalistic performance at the cinema these days you have to watch a kids’ film? Alice In Wonderland sees Johnny Depp give a characteristically idiosyncratic and highly stylised performance as the Mad Hatter, played as a cross between Vincent Price and Oliver Sacks by way of grotesque American comedian Carrot Top. A remarkable character actor, any time Depp gives a sensational or heightened performance, it’s in a fantastical kids’ film; Pirates of the Caribbean, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory et al. And it’s not just him. If you want to see a less banal performance from renowned method actor Dustin Hoffman then you must endure tedious kids’ flick Mr Magorum’s Wonder Emporium. Perhaps the only performance in which Meryl Streep doesn’t play Meryl Streep is her delirious turn in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Robert De Niro? The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. The justification for this is obvious; these heightened performances reflect the unreality of the story they’re a part of; all these characters have a tenuous grip on their sanity in a world already removed from reality. This is tantamount to confining all non-naturalistic performance styles to a mental institute.
Heightened performances are one way to get in touch with our deeper organic selves in an age where reason threatens to turn us into automatons
In the sixties, Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that mental illness was not a symptom of some underlying disorder but rather an attempt to communicate mental distress. Laing wanted to show that patients were driven insane by family life, and that classifying them as simply mentally ill was society’s way of dismissing anybody who didn’t fit the family model that supports the status quo. This is precisely what we see with film acting. Performing outside of the naturalism box is fine in kids’ fantasy films since they can be compartmentalised and dismissed as nonsense. For serious drama, however, nothing but po-faced naturalism will do. The mainspring of this penchant for naturalism was Russian acting guru Konstantin Stanislavski, who around a century ago strived to devise acting techniques that could produce complete realism on the stage. It’s easy to see how Stanislavski’s highly methodical theories were a part of twentieth-century Russia’s enslavement to Reason, their over-reliance on Enlightenment values for which Stalin would ultimately sacrifice human life. The prevalence of naturalistic acting is down to modern industrial society’s drably rationalist beliefs.
The West’s inheritance of Stanislavski’s system signaled the birth of method acting. We’ve all heard the stories; De Niro driving around in a taxi for months, Daniel Day-Lewis living as a butcher, Dustin Hoffman staying up all night for the dentist scene in Marathon Man, all perfectly ridiculed by Lawrence Olivier’s oft-repeated response to the latter instance, “Why don’t you try acting?” It’s been said that if you push reason far enough, it capsizes into its opposite, and this certainly seems true in the above cases. Similarly, there’s an undeniable air of absurdity in watching actors behave naturalistically in the ridiculous, mind-numbing nonsense of a Michael Bay film, though of course any actor who signs up to such a movie in the first place must have lost their reason sometime beforehand, no doubt misplacing it somewhere along with their artistic integrity.
There are alternatives. One of Stanislavski’s students, Michael Chekhov, nephew of the great playwright Anton, also developed a theory of acting in Russia. Feeling that Stanislavki’s over-reliance on reason would suffocate the actor’s intuitive creativity, Chekhov insisted on the importance of an actor’s imagination. But Stalinism was on the rise, and Chekhov’s theory of acting was deemed too mystical, with authorities advising him instead to visit factories and “learn to like the machine”. In 1928, when Chekhov refused to alter his highly stylised production of Hamlet, a warrant was put out for his arrest and he fled the country. Consequently, Chekhov’s ideas never caught on in the way Stanislavski’s did. But it may be a strong indication of audiences’ craving for something other than naturalism that the three performances with arguably the most cultural impact in the last thirty years are non-naturalistic and whose actors have all explicitly acknowledged using Chekhov’s techniques: Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector (a rare case of a semi-serious film endorsing a heightened performance, though of course the character is insane) and Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Kubrick is perhaps the only filmmaker in the second half of the twentieth century to seriously challenge the dominance of naturalism. His films contain some of the most audacious and fascinating performances in the history of cinema, owing to what his collaborator Michael Herr refers to as “that strange irresistible requirement he had for pushing his actors as far beyond a naturalistic style as he could get them to go, and often selecting their most extreme, awkward, emotionally confusing work for his final cut”. Jack Nicholson recounts how Kubrick related his theory of acting: “He said, ‘In movies you don’t try and photograph the reality, you photograph the photograph of the reality’”. Meaning that the performance itself should have some degree of stylistic interpretation. The theory was never more aptly applied than in Dr Strangelove, a film about the madness of nuclear weapons as a metaphor for the irrationality inherent in much scientific discovery despite its basis in reason, something that the likes of Richard Dawkins fail to acknowledge. The actor George C. Scott complained that not only did Kubrick direct him to act way over the top but also chose the most outrageous takes. But if the film is about the unreasonableness of much reason, what better than to abandon the drab rationality of naturalism?
Kubrick doesn’t appear to have been aware of Chekhov, but he was a strong subscriber to the thought of Carl Jung, whose theories about the collective unconscious and archetypes is surely the inner-storehouse to which Chekhov insisted imagination was the key. Certainly theatre thespian Simon Callow, who laments the similar but less extreme prevalence of naturalism on the stage, has described Chekhov’s work as a way to “invade the collective unconscious of the audience…breaking down the prison walls of logic”. It is this deeper level to which non-naturalistic acting appeals. Richard Dawkins no doubt believes the naturalism of a De Niro performance is a healthier thing for audiences than Depp’s sensationalistic portrayal of the Mad Hatter, just as he believes fairytales may have a detrimental effect on children’s rationality. But heightened performances are one way to get in touch with our deeper organic selves in an age where reason threatens to turn us into automatons. Naturalism should not be the only game in town; non-naturalistic acting needs to break out of the asylum to which it has been confined.