Devin Glenn - Core Post #4

    In “Stars and Performance,” Richard Dyer explores performance styles and techniques as they are intrinsically tied to how stars access the characters they either act out or inhabit on screen. Dyer begins by introducing two primary schools of thought when it comes to acting: the observational and traditional training championed by Diderot and Coquelin verses the more experimental qualities of method acting as promoted by Stanislavsky. Dyer summarizes the difference between these schools, stating that their “opposition is sometimes referred to as acting from the outside in vs. acting from the inside out” (132). Dyer then discusses differing types of performance and how each one has influenced popular conceptions and discourses surrounding acting. Perhaps most significantly in this section, Dyer draws out the way in which radio performance inspired modes of acting that rely upon notions of “domestic immediacy,” “instantly recognizable characters” (whether through archetypes, star images, or a combination of both), and “people playing ‘themselves’” (Dyer 139). Evident here is the way in which the star’s persona, as a character performance, in turn mediates and influences the star’s performance of a specific character type.

    Since watching A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) last week, I’ve been thinking about Vivien Leigh and how her performance as Blanche both evokes and subverts her image as the Southern [Jeze]Belle established in Gone with the Wind (1939). These two roles, both of which won Leigh Academy Awards for Best Actress, deconstruct the illusion of Southern hospitality and gentility in complex ways. While Scarlet is a much more malicious character than wide-eyed Blanche, both of their respective narratives attempt to place the blame of their ruin upon their own heads. But while A Streetcar Named Desire makes sure to emphasize Blanche’s wrongfulness in beginning the love affair with her student, it does not shy away from the fact that Stanley plays a far more sinister role in Blanche’s psychological demise. In addition, though Scarlet and Blanche both metaphorically fall, Blanche’s tragic ending acts as the final catalyst to her sister’s change whereas Scarlet’s tragedy is framed as ironically self-serving. As a future project, I would be interested in conducting a comparative analysis of Leigh’s characters in Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire as companion melodramatic metaphors for the South’s defeat in the Civil War and its subsequent collective repression.

After identifying the major distinguishing factors between traditional acting methods and the Method, Dyer points to some of the ways in which the Method has sought to legitimize itself as the more authentic of the two in its privileging of emotional meaning over social behavior and “intellectual physiognomy” (141). Drawing from James F. Scott’s evaluation of Brando’s performance in A Streetcar Named Desire, Dyer demonstrates how Brando’s method acting reduces his performance to “a given basic psychology,” in this case a kind of “animal aggressiveness,” through the way Brando communicates Stanley’s brutality in how he uses his mouth and his hands to destroy (142). Dyer than concludes his chapter with an evacuation of the actor as a driver of emotion in film and how other have argued—and in some instances failed to make a convincing case to prove—that emotion arises from the editing and mise-en-scène which negotiates and can reconstruct the actor’s presence and performance.