Acting from the Mystery Within

 

Who are you?

No. Who are you, really? Do you have a certain answer, or is it a foggy cloud with wispy tendrils reaching far from the center of your normal? Is your answer held in the chalice of your ambitions, or does it rise from dark waters like a shark taking out a seal? Is who you are sending out roots that subtly connect you to the core identity of everything else?

We are, as a people, mostly afraid to act. Henry David Thoreau famously declared: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Yet, “Most people lead lives of paralyzed ambivalence,” would be nearer the mark. We are afraid to act, both in the intensified glow of the stage-lights, but also simply at all. We try to be normal. Our range of expressive behavior generally stays within a narrow band of acceptable characteristics — an unwritten schedule of how to behave (for whoever we think we’re supposed to be). Alcohol loosens the confines a little or disastrously; so also, apparently, does chopping our heads off the pictures we post to Reddit.

But being drunk is not the same as becoming a new person. Flirting with strangers doesn’t transform your core operating system — and most of us don’t want to change that. We quickly find the limits of our willingness to go out on a limb with unusual, aberrant behavior.

Yet, our reluctance runs much deeper. Most of us want to be ambiguous, we don’t want to become pinned to an archetype. Yet we are fascinated by the people around us who do commit to such a persona and role — regardless of whether the archetype at hand is one of success or failure. Oedipus toils ferociously and tragically against his fated character flaw. J.K. Rowling commits with stunning determination to an unpopular opinion that erodes her massive base of fandom which had previously mythologized her brilliance as the creator of Harry Potter.

In the 2006 movie The Prestige, a turn-of-the-19th century Chinese magician commits so totally to his signature illusion of conjuring a large fishbowl on a pedestal during his stage show that he spends every waking minute walking with the bowl pinned between his knees so that the mechanism of his trick will never be outed by those who see him in a different state; he is always on-stage, in a sense…always perpetuating the illusion. It’s a thought-provoking side story that sets up the main character gambit which fully determines the lifetime (in minute gruesome detail) of the protagonist, who is pulling off a similar stunt.

The protagonist, observing the Chinese magician pretending to be an old crippled man hobbling to a carriage after the show (fishbowl still secretly between knees, of course), comments to his companion: “Total devotion to his art. A lot of self-sacrifice. That’s the only way to escape…all this.” He gestures to material reality. His companion marvels. “That man must be strong as an ox!”

But, you see, most people don’t live like this. So, why don’t we go all-in on ourselves?

Psychologists observing celebrity culture in the 20th century coined the term parasocial relationship to describe a fantasy of familiarity, intimacy, friendship, and identification that develops in the audience of a well-known persona, after repeated exposure to constructed tidbits of the celebrity’s personal life and experience are shared via talk shows, tabloids, twitter, interviews, etc (not to mention the endless redigestion and analysis of that information by other pundits). Many people thought they knew who Lucille Ball really was — that they were somehow sharing her life. Certainly, in the age of reality TV and vlogging (where nearly every YouTube personality and Instagram influencer begins their videos with a casual and intimate “Hey, guys!…”), parasocial relating has grown more intense — for both sides of the equation. Content producers are also imagining loyalty and camaraderie on the part of the subscribing audience that can quickly evaporate if the wrong thing is said or done.

But here’s the premise: we actually are in parasocial relationships with ourselves. We have a pieced-together story of who we are, a constructed person we’d like to be close to (or a heel we’re comfortable hating). Our familiarity with ourselves, our self-intimacy, is a mirage significantly based on the frequency with which we have heard, told, thought that story, completed the pattern using the bias of our expectation — rather like constructed memories, which can be more persistent than actual memories.

One of the assumptions you might make about your own character is that you are singular. You might imagine that when you boil yourself down, you come to one essential person. It’s a comforting thought, an easy assumption that fits intuitively with how most of us experience our bodies — more or less the same, day by day.

Of course, your body can pull the rug out from under you, dramatically and suddenly, reminding you that you are a constellation of subtleties which each have their own life and trajectory, as it were. Careful attention reveals that your personality does not ever reduce to one, either, but branches into many tributaries as you move upstream seeking its source.

This is the wild discovery when we transcend our fear to act. To be, to do, is a commitment that flies into the heart of the unknown. The most incandescent character portrays itself unbecoming that character moment by moment — and so exemplifies its living flame.

You don’t walk on stage with a determined motive analyzed and rehearsed. Forget the drama theory you know. No method of acting can encapsulate or shortcut the volume of mystery that is fusing into a cohesive persona and blazing off you like the million-degree corona of a hot star, with each tick of the second hand.

What’s more, we’re here to illustrate and populate stories that don’t neatly fit into the comedy and tragedy categories. After all, we see that comedy is, at root, a style of story where nothing changes in the end, and reigning social values are reinforced, whereas tragedy is the style of story where nothing is ever the same again. All true stories are complexly both comedy and tragedy, because change is the persistent and mysterious fabric of our existence.