Authentically Fake

Who is Sophie Loren?

Is she the Arabian mistress of an Arabian oil millionaire?

Or is she a Jewish spy?

In 1966, she appeared in two movies, “Arabesque,” in which she was the Arabian, and “Judith,” in which she was the Jewess. (1)

And in the following year, Signorina Loren ascended to the Russian nobility in “A Countess from Hong Kong.”

Back to 1966. In early January, the following advertisement appeared in The New Yorker:

The English theatrical knight Sir Laurence Olivier was to be the Black Moor leader of the Venetian military. Despite some achingly bad reviews (2), Sir Laurence was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards (he didn’t win).

*

Fast forward to the present.

According to the BBC,

The days of "cripping up" - a term disabled actors regularly use to describe those with no physical impairment playing disabled characters - appear numbered now. (3)

This in a report that a disabled actor will take on the role of Richard III in a production of Shakespeare’s play at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The actor selected to play the 15th Century villain, Arthur Hughes, said,

I think a lot of disabled actors will think playing Richard is their birthright.

*

Should homosexual actors think that playing gay characters is their birthright? 

Recently, in the New York Times, Tom Hanks addressed the question “could a straight man do what I did in ‘Philadelphia’ now?” His answer was “No, and rightly so.” He went on to explain:

I don’t think people would accept the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy. It’s not a crime, it’s not boohoo, that someone would say we are going to demand more of a movie in the modern realm of authenticity. (4)

But as The New Yorker recently pointed out, “Last year . . . introduced an octogenarian Hamlet: Sir Ian McKellen.” (5) 

Now, if in the name of “authenticity,” a gay actor—rather than Hanks—should play the part of Andrew Beckett, what “authenticity” are we looking at when it’s acceptable for English gay octogenarian McKellen to play a young heterosexual Dane? Or, as the same New Yorker article pointed out, 

The casting of a female Hamlet . . . is now conventional enough not to raise eyebrows. 

*

Somehow lost in all these “authenticity” debates about casting is the fact that the theater is not about “authenticity”; in its very essence, the the theater is about fakery—the show is all pretense. The actors are not the characters—and the characters are not real. 

The world of the theater is a corrective to the world of life; characters are shot, immolated, poisoned, etc.—and yet everybody lives to take a curtain call. 

In turn, real life is better than the world of art. We feel, we love, we change. We can be “authentic.”

*

Mulling over the problem of “authenticity” in the realm of the the performing arts, we here at drnormalvision have come to the conclusion that the only way to achieve “authenticity” is to have everyone play him/herself. That would place performance beyond the bounds of criticism. The only problem is a major one, however. What we would be left with is a landscape filled with reality shows.

Imagine a world of Kardashian-lites.  

***

(1)  And in “Judith,” Peter Finch plays the head of a kibbutz!

(2)  In The New Yorker, Brendan Gill’s “chief complaint” about the movie was “Sir Laurence’s utterly daft reading of the title role.” (Feb . 19, 1966) 

What Bosley Crowther, in the New York Times, found “most distressing” was “Sir Laurence’s allowing himself to look like a white actor made up in blackface for a minstrel show.” (March 6, 1966)

(3)  https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61549419

(4)  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/13/magazine/tom-hanks-interview.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share

(5)  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/a-hamlet-for-our-time

Faces

Lying on his hospital bed staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, Alan Grant was one very disconsolate copper. The books that friends had brought him to pass the time elicited not a whit of interest in him. The Scotland Yard detective, having fallen through a trap door in pursuit of a small-time criminal, was—maddeningly—hors de combat.

Relief from boredom—if not from the prison of his hospital bed—came when a friend brought him, instead of another unreadable book, a collection of reproductions of old portrait paintings:

“Faces . . . . Dozens of faces for you. Men, women, and children. All sorts, conditions, and sizes.”
 It was the friend’s idea that Grant, who had made a “conscious study” of faces could winkle out some possible solutions to historical mysteries by his examination of the portraits. However, none of them aroused his curiosity until he came upon this one:

“A judge? A soldier? A prince?” But when Grant turned the picture over and read the name of the subject, he was taken aback to learn that this man who Grant assessed as “[s]omeone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious” was the notorious Richard III.

And so The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey unfolds as Grant searches for the truth about the alleged villainy (which he didn’t perceive in his face) of the last Plantagenet king of England.

*

I see this sense of privilege in the child’s eyes, and it cuts to some core, sick emotions connected with race in America that I think are still with us today.—Carolyn Drake

This photograph captures the essence of racism and servitude in America
for all time. The contrast between the expression of cold entitlement on the very white baby’s face and the calm resignation of the black nurse who is holding her only amplifies the great difference in their skin color and positions in life.—Mary Ellen Mark*

This is the photograph that those two photographers were commenting on [it is from The Americans by Robert Frank]:

I’m sorry—but this is crazy. A baby with no hair, who can’t even walk,** but has a “sense of privilege” in its eyes and an “expression of cold entitlement” on its face! (I wonder what Alan Grant would find there.) Let us attack racism for the beastliness it was in Charlestown, South Carolina in 1955 and for what it still is today. But let’s pick the right symbols and language. 

*

Here’s a photograph I took in New York City about two decades after Frank took his:

What do you want to make of it? 

*

Macbeth: ”There’s no art/ To find the mind’s construction in the face.”

***

* http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/eight-photographers-on-their-favorite-image-from-robert-franks-the-americans

** No Borscht Belt punchlines please.

Fancy That!

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

A despiser of “this weak piping time of peace . . . these fair well-spoken days,” our first speaker, A, is a distinguished warrior, a nobleman of royal blood, unlike every noble and courtier in the room he has just entered:

Because I cannot flatter and speak fair,
Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
Cannot a plain man live and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abused
By silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?

*

Speaker B is another man renowned for his military prowess. Though not of royal blood, he is the heir to a substantial earldom. Here he relates his version of an interruption on the field of battle by a courtly messenger from the king:

I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat, and trimly dress'd,
Fresh as a bridegroom; and his chin new reap'd
Show'd like a stubble-land at harvest-home;
He was perfumed like a milliner;
And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet-box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose and took't away again;
Who therewith angry, when it next came there,
Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talk'd,
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He call'd them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.
With many holiday and lady terms
He question'd me; amongst the rest, demanded
My prisoners in your majesty's behalf.
I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold,
To be so pester'd with a popinjay,
Out of my grief and my impatience,
Answer'd neglectingly I know not what,
He should or he should not; for he made me mad
To see him shine so brisk and smell so sweet
And talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman
Of guns and drums and wounds,--God save the mark!

*

Speaker C is very high up the hierarchal ladder. The previous speaker was “pester'd with a popinjay”; when speaker C is approached by a young courtier, he asks his companion, “Dost know this waterfly?” and then deliberately mimics the “holiday and lady terms” of his interrupter:

Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you; though,
I know, to divide him inventorially would dozy th'
arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither in
respect of his quick sail. But, in the verity of
extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article,
and his infusion of such dearth and rareness as, to
make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror,
and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more.

*

Another military man is speaker D, but he is the equivalent of a modern non-commissioned officer, while the person whose manners offend him is the equivalent of a graduate from Officers Training School:

He takes her by the palm .
. . . Ay, smile upon
her, do; I will gyve thee in thine own courtship.
. . . it had
been better you had not kissed your three fingers so
oft, which now again you are most apt to play the
sir in. Very good; well kissed! an excellent
courtesy! 'tis so, indeed. Yet again your fingers
to your lips? would they were clyster-pipes for your sake!

*

Speaker E, a relation of the ruling family of the area, despises a certain member of a noted town family:

The pox of such antic, lisping, affecting
fantasticoes; these new tuners of accents! 'By Jesu,
a very good blade! a very tall man! a very good
whore!' Why, is not this a lamentable thing,
grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with
these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these
perdona-mi's, who stand so much on the new form,
that they cannot at ease on the old bench? O, their
bones, their bones!

*

Speaker F loyally serves his master, the King; he hates the arrogance and airs of those (noble and otherwise) who abuse the trust of his lord:

Sir, 'tis my occupation to be plain:
I have seen better faces in my time
Than stands on any shoulder that I see
Before me at this instant.

And like speaker C is quick to mock a fanciful mouther of words:

Sir, in good sooth, in sincere verity,
Under the allowance of your great aspect,
Whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire
On flickering Phoebus' front . . . .

***

The identity of the speakers:
A—Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later, King Richard III);
B—Henry Percy (Hotspur) in I Henry IV;
C—Hamlet (speaking about, then addressing Osric);
D—Iago (speaking about Michael Cassio) in Othello;
E—Mercutio (speaking about Tybalt) in Romeo and Juliet:
F—Kent in King Lear, speaking to the Duke of Cornwall.

***

The plain speakers versus the fancy. The blunt, straightforwardness of the former set against the rhetorical flights (indeed excessiveness) of the later. And shown also in the plainness of dress and manners opposed to the peacockery and mannerisms of the fashionable courtiers.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this opposition is the fact that it does not break down into an easy dichotomy of good guys versus bad guys. Look at the plain speakers: Richard III, a usurping, murderous villain; Hotspur, a gallant warrior, but a rebel against the crown; Hamlet, a good guy; “honest” Iago, a treacherous deceiver; Mercutio, a lively, fun-loving good guy; and Kent, an honorable servant of Lear, even when banished by the foolish king.

In a competition between “plain, honest speaking” and affected rhetorical flourishes, we would probably all back the former. But, as we see from Shakespeare’s examples, plainness does not guarantee honesty or honor.

In fact, we need not go back over 400 years for examples of this. Compare two “plain speakers” of about a half-century ago: the honorable “Give ‘em hell” Harry Truman and Richard (“I am not a crook”) Nixon, who resorted to plainness in the “Checkers” speech, which saved his political career (“Well, that's about it. That's what we have and that's what we owe. It isn't very much but Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we've got is honestly ours. I should say this—that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat”).

Patriotism, as Dr. Johnson so famously proclaimed, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Perhaps the first refuge of a scoundrel (or of many of them) is plainspokenness. It is, of course, the perfect camouflage. And we don’t even have to duck back into the last century for a perfect example of this. The pretense of being “natural,” “real,” “honest” is easy to adopt: drag yourself out of the northern tundra, wink a lot at “people like us” and lie through your teeth (“Death Panels, anyone?).

***

It may very well be that the most over-the-top, campy, and affected person in the room could just be the most trustworthy.