Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
17 - Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Recall walter shandy's statement: “No matter whether [Toby] loves the service or no – being once in it – he acts as if he did; and takes every step to shew himself a man of prowess.” Walter is not just proposing a theory of love but also, by implication, a theory of acting. It says a proper actor need not feel the emotions he is portraying to portray them well; he need only act as if he felt them. It is all about adopting the outward signs – the visible postures, words, and behaviors – and getting them exactly right. Inner states will either come along for the ride or not, but that is not the actor's concern, only the justness of the visible and audible form, of playing the role as it should be played from the viewpoint of an audience. Contrast this with the view that a good actor should enter his character's psyche so as to generate the feelings the character would feel; that the best way to get the outside right is to get the inside right first. This was an actively fought battle in the eighteenth century and continues to be disputed.
Diderot and Actors
It was the philosophe and encyclopedist Denis Diderot who took the strong position that acting is about mimicking gesture, posture, expression, about external representations of feelings and motives, not about feeling. He even argued that it is better not to have the feelings should you be able to generate them.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Faking It , pp. 195 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003