A Duality in Film Performance: Personality Vs. Method (Core Post)

As we have been discussing contradictions in term of stars’ personae it was interesting to see in this week’s readings how theories surrounding film acting also have dualities. One concept that really caught my attention was Henry Fonda’s quote that “in film acting, unlike theater, ‘you do it just like in reality’” (Dyer 139). Based on this idea, I will try to organize two dualities within film acting by drawing from this week’s readings.

In Stardom: Industry of Desire, Barry King argues that if an actor is limited only to roles that work within his or her personality, then that is considered poor acting (168). I am reading personality as the idea that Dyer mentions about acting styles consisting in the repeated use of mannerisms, within films throughout a star’s career, which characterizes the actor’s performance style and personality (139). I understand Barry’s argument, but I cannot help but wonder if these repeated mannerisms and restricted personalities could work in an opposite way to what Barry negatively suggests. Focusing on Henry Fonda’s idea that film acting is just like reality, it is possible that an actor’s personality supports this notion of film mirroring life and looking real. If the audience notices repeated aspects of an actor’s personality in their performance, it can remind them that they are watching an actor, a real person, bringing the film closer to reality. This recognition of the actor works because it is limited; the audience is not pulled out of the movie as only pieces of the actor’s persona are on the screen, and not his or her entire personality. Thus, this personified performance points to reality without crossing the limit between diegetic space and real world. In this sense, film performance underlines reality to make movies authentic.

On the other hand, we have Method acting, which, according to Dyer, is all about becoming the character completely and how it marks authenticity (142). With the Method, there is no room for the actor’s personality to show through. A Method performance exists by itself, the actor is merely an instrument for the character to come alive in a natural way. As James F. Scott wrote, the Method performer must “put aside [their] own personality to think [their] way into an alien psyche” (Dyer 142). In this sense, when thinking about film looking like reality, film performance turns away from the stars’ personae to make movies authentic.

Here we have two sides of film performance: one that emphasizes the star and one that prioritizes the character. They both share the purpose of making film look real, of marking film as authentic, but they differ in how they achieve this goal. The former reaches authenticity through a mild breaking of character and construction under familiar conventions of reality, while the latter reaches authenticity by looking away from the actor’s persona, constructing a specific and unique character (and film), which feels authentic as we are all different from one another.