Authenticity in Acting

Taking a break from my English paper for some rambling thoughts on authenticity and experience. It must be the caffeine in my blood - I'm not a big coffee drinker.

Where was I? Oh yes. Just thinking about what kind of movies I like and it somehow progressed to an internal monologue on actors, as always. I was thinking about the difference between the movies that romanticize and the movies that stir far deeper emotions. Generally, the movies deemed the greatest (Citizen Kane, The Godfather, etc.) have a tendency to leave an romantic impact that leaves the viewer mostly unharmed. Movies are fake, of course, but they can make a genuine and personal connection to the viewer, but the ones that mine the deepest are usually too strange or subjective to be universally praised. All the movies I've truly loved - Bright Star, a random Korean war movie, something else - have left me deeply hurt or vulnerable. And I don't mean "general crying and sorrowful emotions for the character", though that occasionally is the case - but rather something that settles in me and feels much stranger and stronger than conventional reactions. A couple of Jane Campion's movies, for instance, unearths this intangible longing, some sense of beauty and loss that - as strange as it sounds, and I'm not a particularly religious person - brings me closer to something like holiness, and I become so unbearably and inexplicably sad that I have to go distract myself. Other moments from movies of mixed quality stay with me over time and wound me in a way I can't even acknowledge. And most of the time I end up scolding myself, but I feel like I can be so easily seduced by cheaply romantic moments. That's why I love movies so much, and aren't we all? But I think that these rarer moments can count as authentic ones, because they always pass and I can't get quite the same feeling again from watching the movie. Or is that a contradiction? Ugh, it's frustrating.

That was the first part of my thought. Then in a bizarre way, I started transitioning from thinking about authenticity in movies to authenticity in actors. Take Kristen Stewart. She and a host of other young, precocious actors are undeniably good and sensitive, but they seem incapable of mining any deeper force of emotion. And though it's all about "good acting", I truly think that great acting has always been able to draw on genuine experience and emotion. All the great actors - from Brando to Dustin Hoffman and Greta Garbo to Meryl Streep - have in common slightly fucked-up early lives that surely lent authenticity to their performances. And I started thinking about Kristen Stewart's constant moping and angst in movies - and how strange, because isn't angst an emotion that's natural but insubstantial, and in our modern culture, mocked for being increasingly fetishized? She may be a smart, sensitive individual who's generally in tune with her emotions, but my theory is that she doesn't have the requisite pain of true experience. She's had too much of a good life insofar. As much as she defines herself as apart from the celebrity sphere, she's still part of the lifestyle and the inevitable complacency and coddling that irons out any surface-level angst pretty quickly. She, like other child performers, may have experienced a taste of pain and open emotions during childhood, but child emotions are just fundamentally different in expression than adult emotions. That's why, in my opinion, so many child actors are inferior adult actors, even if they are successful. Wisdom can't be cultivated through contrivance, and what was originally deemed precocity becomes a static quality that drags you down if it isn't expanded through natural progress. In my opinion, Anna Paquin has given the same exact "precocious" and child-like performance for the past fifteen years or so, I have a feeling that Dakota Fanning will head the same way.

Well, that was an exquisitely unorganized thought process - I was basically shitting my brains out onto the internet, but oh well, that's what a personal blog is for.