35. Integrity

Questions of truth, deception, and hypocrisy—and of how we perceive and try to capture reality—are at the heart of almost everything I’ve been writing about here.

The day after the 2018 Screen Actors Guild Awards, which occurred around four months into the Me Too Movement, my friend Jane called to ask me if I’d seen the broadcast and heard the remarks that William H. Macy had made about acting in his acceptance speech and the anecdote he’d told about David Mamet.

I’d seen the broadcast and had liked what Macy had said about acting. I’d thought it was sweet.

He’d said an actor’s job was to find truth in imaginary circumstances and he thought that was “a glorious way to make a living”—especially at a time when a lot of people either can’t recognize the truth or don’t think it’s important.

He’d started out, though, quoting a conversation about acting that he’d once overheard between Mamet and a journalist.

The journalist had said that actors had a weird job because they make a living telling lies, and Mamet had objected. “No, no, it’s an actor’s job to tell the truth,” he had said.

Jane wanted to know whether I thought I was the journalist in the story.

The same question had fleetingly occurred to me. It was very much the sort of exchange about acting I would have had with Mamet during the years when I was working on my why-we-hate-method-acting book. Moreover, with all the world focused on sexual harassment it was conceivable that I might have crossed Macy’s mind given that he’d known about my tribulations with Mr. New Yorker Writer. Macy and I had had a bit of a fling in the fall and winter of 1990-91 while he and Felicity Huffman, his then-girlfriend and future wife, had been on a break, and we’d stayed friends for a few years after. I’d discussed the Mr. New Yorker Writer situation with Macy a couple of times at some length.

I told Jane that I was pretty sure that I wasn’t the journalist in that particular story. Macy had dated the conversation to “a couple of years ago,” and I hadn’t seen any of those folks for decades. I said I reckoned that Mamet must have had hundreds of conversations like that about acting with hundreds of journalists over the years.

Besides, I said, I never would have said that actors make a living by telling lies. I would have said that actors deceive us in order to get at the truth.

Questions of truth, deception, and hypocrisy—and of how we perceive and try to capture reality—are at the heart of almost everything I’ve been writing about here.

Hypocrisy was, to a very large extent, what the Me Too Movement was about. Men who had seemed like unlikely predators because of the way they had presented themselves—as quintessentially genial or genteel, as harmless or high-minded—turned out to have been grooming us with the very qualities we’d come to associate them with. These proved to have been carefully crafted personas.

The sexual harassment scandals of 2017 and 2018 invited the American public to suspect those above suspicion. Who are the people we trust to be ruled by integrity? The devoted husband and the loving father? The doctor? The judge? The priest or rabbi? The cop? The person who works in the non-profit sector? Sanctity, we were reminded, is only ever an illusion—something we project or assume.

Sexual harassment itself entails a certain amount of theater, and not only because the serial predator shows one face to the world and another to his targets. When a powerful editor at a prestigious publication says, “But gentlemen, I am a happily married man!” in answer to a subordinate’s story that he backed her up against a wall and kissed her, that’s playacting. It’s manipulating people’s perception of the truth. So is Mr. New Yorker Writer trying to play out a love scene with me for the benefit of his colleague in the office next door or telling my editor that he saw me in a bathing suit so that he can then tell me my editor expressed a prurient interest in my person. It doesn’t rise to the level of those characters in Shakespeare who stage elaborate scenes for the purpose of deluding other characters—one thinks of Iago, Edmund in King Lear, and Richard III—but it’s getting there.

The whole response to Me Too entailed an element of theater—beginning with the Weinstein scandal. People had more or less known what Weinstein was doing but pretended they didn’t because he was such a powerful figure. The furor that the revelations about him created was less about what he’d done than about what his board of directors had known and how far they’d been willing to go to conceal the truth and to silence or damage women who might have been in a position to tell their stories.

Most performative of all, perhaps, were the very public and wildly over-the-top responses of the corporations and institutions: the cashiering of men whom those very corporations and institutions had protected for decades.

Hypocrisy was the subject of the Twitter posts Rose McGowan wrote a year before the Weinstein stories broke. She had been saying to the film industry: “If you’re going to make a show of espousing certain moral values, you have to live by them. You can’t make sexual assault and exploitation among the worst things a person can do in movies and tolerate sexual predators in your midst.”

This was an extraordinary thing to assert. Hollywood had always been a sort of oasis of moral pretense in a nation that doesn’t elsewhere openly embrace hypocrisy. Older, more sophisticated cultures see hypocrisy and pretense as necessary to the fabric of civilized life. (England, France, and Russia spring to mind.) Americans take earnestness and sincerity seriously, or like to think that we do, and consequently people in positions of prominence or power are expected to uphold the values they publicly espouse.

Hollywood was the one place in American society where hypocrisy was taken for granted. Nobody ever thought that people who worked in the film industry lived their lives according to the moral values that had been force-fed by movies to the American public.

There’s arguably a connection between American discomfort with pretense and 20^th-century America’s obsession with Method Acting. Historically, Stanislavski’s ideas took root here because the Moscow Art Theater took New York by storm during its 1923 world tour, just as the Berliner Ensemble’s visit to London in 1956 led to the British theater’s love affair with Brechtian non-realism. But if Method Acting has always been taken more seriously here than anywhere else, that may also be due to something like a national character and the high value that Americans place on truth.

What Lee Strasberg and his colleagues at the Group Theater took away from performances and lectures given by former students of Stanslavski was a hostility toward nearly everything that makes the form of theater what it is. For them only the actual and the real could connect art with truth.

The point that I wanted to suggest, back in 1990, was that, for all its aspirations toward integrity and authenticity, Method Acting had allowed a tremendous amount of dishonesty to grow up around theatrical performance.

It always maintained a basically hypocritical attitude toward the audience, toward the whole idea of performance. Method Acting was embarrassed by the possibility of artifice. In order for acting to be authentic, what was supposed to be happening emotionally to a character in a scene had to be actually happening to the actor, and anything else smacked of charlatanism.

The trouble with this is that it makes the experience of the actor the measure of artistry rather than the experience of the audience.

It seemed to me that a lot of what had been proclaimed authentic in a style of acting that fostered great displays of emotion was for the most part self-conscious, self-indulgent claptrap, and docile audiences who raved about performances they had been told were stupendous had not really been moved by them at all. They had been too busy watching themselves respond correctly to something they’d been told was genuine to be able to forget for even a moment that they were watching a play.

This circumstance seemed to me to have undermined an important purpose of theater, which is to remind us that illusions exist and how easy it is to be deceived. If audiences weren’t really succumbing to the illusion of theater, if they were only being deceived by themselves and the powerful tastemakers who influenced them, then theater wasn’t doing its job.

My interest in Mamet’s ideas about acting and theater had to do with his wholesale rejection of the basic tenets of American acting. He maintained not only that it wasn’t necessary for the actor to feel what a character was feeling in a scene but that such a thing wasn’t even possible, because feelings aren’t something that you can control. What was important wasn’t what the actor was feeling but what a character was doing in the scene. That’s what an audience perceives.

Nobody had ever been crazy enough to say that before.