ON WRITING<\/p>\n
WORDS, PART 1: ACTING LIKE HAMLET<\/p>\n
\n\nAt the end of the 1962 film \u201cTo Kill a Mockingbird,\u201d Robert Duvall makes his screen debut as Boo Radley in a scene that lasts three minutes at most. But in that brief scene the young Duvall turns in a performance that stands as the epitome of great acting. <\/p>\n
Radley, the mentally ill recluse who never leaves his house, risks being caught in public to save Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell\u2019s attack. He carries the wounded boy back to Atticus\u2019s house and hides behind the door in Jem\u2019s room until he\u2019s discovered by Atticus, Sheriff Tate and Scout. <\/p>\n
When he\u2019s first discovered there behind the door, Radley recoils in horror, in his eyes a look of sheer terror. But then he sees Scout. Their eyes meet, Scout smiles, and slowly the look on the face of this poor frightened man changes from terror to tenderness and to a love that overcomes his fear. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s a beautiful moment, but the incredible thing is Duvall\u2019s performance, which is nothing short of amazing. He effects this transformation from terror to tenderness without moving a muscle on his face. Nothing changes in the features of his face, not the mouth, the eyes, the brow \u2014 nothing. But somehow everything changes. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s all in the eyes. The eyes: windows of the soul, right? Duvall has discovered Boo Radley\u2019s soul and shows it in his eyes. But even Duvall\u2019s eyes don\u2019t seem to move or change in any empirical way that analysis can describe. I don\u2019t know how he does it. Some kind of magic, I think.<\/p>\n
I compare Duvall\u2019s performance to what I call the Mel Gibson School of Acting, where Hollywood celebrities try to fake (and end up falsifying) real human emotions by gesticulating wildly and contorting their faces. <\/p>\n
Mel Gibson is not alone in this approach, of course, but our subject at hand is Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet (we\u2019re getting there, trust me). And it tickles me to no end to recall that Mel himself played Hamlet, in a manner of speaking, in Franco Zeffirelli\u2019s 1990 film of the play. <\/p>\n
Zeffirelli\u2019s film unintentionally brings these two different acting styles face to face when Mel as Hamlet meets the ghost of Hamlet\u2019s father, played by the great British actor Paul Scofield. On one side of the screen we see a real, tormented ghost\u2014fearsome, deeply aggrieved, and back from the dead to spur his son to revenge. And on the other side of the screen is Mel Gibson making faces. <\/p>\n
I draw this distinction between real acting and the Mel Gibson School of Facial Contortion, because Shakespeare drew it first \u2014 in Hamlet\u2019s instructions to a troupe of actors about how (and how not) to imitate human nature. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking about Hamlet a lot since last month when Gold Town Nickelodeon presented the film of the British National Theatre\u2019s production, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role. But, really, as my wife Michelle will tell you, I\u2019m always thinking about Hamlet. It\u2019s that kind of work: once it gets under your skin, it\u2019s always there, just below the surface. The trick is to let it get under your skin \u2014 like life itself. This play has become germane to how I think about writing, philosophy, life and all. <\/p>\n
But back to this acting business: like a good critic, Hamlet presumes to tell the actors how to do their job. Don\u2019t rant and rave, he tells them, and don\u2019t gesticulate wildly and make faces like Mel. (Well, he doesn\u2019t actually mention Mel, but he may as well have: we all know who he\u2019s talking about.) An actor should represent even the most tempestuous passions in modest and measured tones \u2014 like a real human being, not a caricature. <\/p>\n
And as Hamlet reminds the actors of the purpose of acting \u2014 to portray real human behavior \u2014 Shakespeare lets his audience see how that\u2019s really done. <\/p>\n
With the play \u201cHamlet,\u201d Shakespeare and his friend Richard Burbage (the first actor ever to play Hamlet) were quietly effecting a revolution in the art of acting \u2014 a revolution needed to stage a new kind of play, the kind of play Shakespeare was writing, a play like \u201cHamlet.\u201d <\/p>\n
It\u2019s a play where the plot has very little to do with people\u2019s actions \u2014 \u201cactions that a man might play.\u201d The plot focuses instead on the characters\u2019 inner lives, the very stuff that, as Hamlet says, cannot be seen on the surface: \u201cthat within which passeth show.\u201d <\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the problem: in so many ways, Shakespeare suggests that language is not a very good tool for communicating our inner lives. In \u201cHamlet,\u201d it\u2019s quite the opposite: words are more often used to hide the truth, to cover up the real, to disguise the way a character apprehends his or her experience. Sometimes a character\u2019s words hide the truth from others, sometimes a character\u2019s words hide the truth from himself. <\/p>\n
In the few instances where a character speaks honestly, speaks as clearly and sincerely as possible, other characters think he\u2019s talking about something else anyway. <\/p>\n
\u201cHamlet\u201d is a play about words, and it doesn\u2019t have nice things to say about them. As Hamlet lies dying, he pleads with his best friend, Horatio, to stay alive to tell Hamlet\u2019s story \u2014 which Horatio does, but he gets it all wrong. <\/p>\n
Hamlet\u2019s famous \u201cTo be or not to be\u201d soliloquy concludes that our problem is that we don\u2019t know what comes after death. Toward the end of the play, as he commits himself to the play\u2019s closing act of violence, Hamlet reaches a different conclusion: we don\u2019t know what comes before death either. The truth of Hamlet\u2019s experience, so strenuously sought after throughout the play by others and by Hamlet himself, is a truth no one ever grasps. In the face of this fundamental ignorance, aren\u2019t all words pretty much useless? Hamlet\u2019s final words are perhaps the most honest of all. \u201cThe rest is silence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next column (the day before Christmas Eve): \u201cWords, part 2,\u201d where we take issue with Hamlet. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ON WRITING WORDS, PART 1: ACTING LIKE HAMLET At the end of the 1962 film \u201cTo Kill a Mockingbird,\u201d Robert Duvall makes his screen debut as Boo Radley in a scene that lasts three minutes at most. But in that brief scene the young Duvall turns in a performance that stands as the epitome of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-31093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31093"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=31093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}