Playing to the Balcony: Screen Acting, Distance and Cavellian Theatricality

Taylor 1

Playing to the Balcony: Screen Acting, Theatricality and Distance

The infamous final fifteen minutes of There Will Be Blood (Paul

Thomas Anderson, 2007) have presented a number of critics with a

puzzling dilemma. During this sequence, Daniel Day-Lewis’

character – the monstrous, early twentieth-century oil baron,

Daniel Plainview – ritually humiliates and eventually murders his

old nemesis, a faith-healer named Eli Sunday (played by Paul

Dano). Day-Lewis’ performance in these climatic moments has

struck some as bizarrely fustian. Voiced in numerous critical

reviews, blogs, chat forums and other online discussions of the

film, the problem with the actor’s performance choices can be

paraphrased as follows: why does Day-Lewis suddenly veer so

wildly from the conventional dramatic principles of moderation,

plausibility and coherence, to modes of behaviour that have been

evaluated as excessive, unrealistic and even farcical?

Undoubtedly, the cult status of the so-called ‘Milkshake scene’

(named after the flamboyant metaphor that Plainview uses to

explain the concept of oil drainage) has much to do with this

ostensibly unmotivated shift in performance styles. Put simply,

the actor abruptly abandons the absorptive restraint of a

Taylor 2

classical realist performance for the disruptive ostentation of

theatricality.1 For voting members of the Academy, Day-Lewis’

blackly comic grotesqueries are the climax of an Oscar-worthy

achievement. For his detractors, Day-Lewis is at his most

unhinged here: his overripe histrionics bring about an

unwarranted shift in tonal register that destroys the film’s

stylistic and emotional continuity. Indeed, more than one writer

has pejoratively likened Day-Lewis’ take on Plainview to a ‘hammy

pantomime pirate.’2

Obviously, the dilemma is not specific to There Will Be Blood.

Indeed, theatricality is frequently construed as a problematic

concept. To describe a film performance as ‘theatrical’ typically

entails a concomitant evaluation – most often a negative one.

1ENDNOTES

? For negative or ambivalent assessments of There Will Be Blood’s theatricality,see the various essays, reviews and blogs by Mike D’Angelo (Esquire), DavidDenby (The New Yorker), Tom Gilatto (The Huffington Post), Charles Maclean(Channelblog), Sean O’Connell (bc Magazine), Theo Panayides (Theo’s Century of Movies),Brent Simon (ReelzChannel) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon).2 For examples, see the following: Daniel Bradshaw, ‘Daniel Day-Lewis: godlikegenius or hammy panto pirate?’ guardian.co.uk, January 21, 2008. See website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/jan/21/danieldaylewisgodlikegenius; Joe Griffin, ‘2008 in Film,’ Moviedrome, December 13, 2008.See website: http://joegriffinwrites.blogspot.com/2008/12/2008-in-film.html; AnimalStructure, posting to There Will Be Blood discussion forum, Ain’t It Cool News,January 7, 2008.See website: http://www.aintitcool.com/talkback_display/35168.

Taylor 3

Certainly, the most venerable of hams – Emil Jannings, George

Arliss, post-50s Bette Davis, Charlton Heston, Robin Williams –

have received their share of such backhanded compliments. In a

consideration of the merits of screen acting, then, why should

theatricality as such be perceived as a problem?

As a rejoinder to critics from the School of Less is More, I

would suggest that Day-Lewis’ performance in There Will Be Blood is a

sustained exercise in theatrical alienation, befitting the film’s

insistence on the irredeemable separateness of an other. To be

sure, however, such an effect is not always warranted. As a

tribute to Day-Lewis’ histrionics, then, I would like to propose

a reconfiguration of ostentatious performance: that it is as much

an experience of self-consciousness on the viewer’s behalf as it

is a deliberate rhetorical strategy undertaken by an actor. By

offering this alternative conception, I aim to clarify what is at

stake in positing theatricality as the antithesis of dramatic

absorption.

Absorption and Theatricality

Let us be clear about how the term ‘theatricality’ is to be

Taylor 4

understood with regards to the description and assessment of a

sound film performance. ‘Theatrical’ is a descriptive adjective

often attributed to film performances that are perceived as

excessive or sensationalistic. At best, the term indicates a

proclivity for baroque flourishes and grand gestures; at worst,

it is a euphemism for self-indulgent ‘overplaying.’ It is not

always a mere euphemism for ‘bad’ acting – one can recall

memorably poor performances whose failings were not the result of

inflated grandiloquence. Rather, it is the very brazenness of the

performance style itself that is the source of potential

disquiet. The discomfort produced by such grandeur is due to its

presentational character – the attention it calls to the

aesthetics of a body and voice in creative motion.

Why should this presentational quality be unsettling? After

all, are we not accustomed to a substantial degree of protrusive

behaviour in our everyday interactions? Erving Goffman uses the

term theatricality to identify a condition whereby an individual

establishes a front that creates a specific frame of public

engagement. A theatrical subject becomes a subject that intends

to be looked at, and in turn, this presentation establishes the

Taylor 5

grounds of interaction with his or her audience.3 But

theatricality in the cinema is a rhetorical effect that is not

nearly as neutral as the theatricality of social relations. For

viewers who are predisposed to regard an actor’s performance as

the representation of a fictional character, the situation

defined by theatrical acting is a potentially troubling one.

Under the dictums of classical realism, actors are said to

represent possible people rather than figures presented to our

look – subjects-to-be-looked-at.

There has long been an assumed correlation between the

classical realist style, medium specificity and quality acting.

Indeed, the illusionist principles of absorption, plausibility,

representation and verisimilitude are frequently the normative

ideals by which a ‘good’ performance is measured. These qualities

can be regarded as the touchstones of what Richard Maltby

describes as an ‘integrated performance’ – one that tends toward

the erasure of the distinction between actor and role, and the

emulation of psychologically credible action and feelings.4

3 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Press,1959), 22.4 Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 399.

Taylor 6

Furthermore, despite Richard Dyer’s linkage of this naturalist

conception of acting to the ideological preoccupations of

individualism, a number of theorists have suggested that the

integrated performances of classical realism are distinctly

‘cinematic.’5 Leo Braudy, for example, contrasts film’s apparent

exploration of the private and authentic feelings of individual

persons with the exposure and acting out of social roles in the

theatre.6 Similarly, James Naremore suggests that cinema

privileges a ‘representational’ form of acting due to the ‘closed

boundary’ of the screen that separates audience and actors.7

Above all, the representational tendencies of the integrated

performance can be said to be in the service of classical

realism’s efforts to establish the illusion of a self-contained

world. Hollywood illusionism follows the principles of absorption

in the visual arts, whereby an artwork strives to ‘evince

awareness’ from a beholder and then ‘neutralize or negate the

beholder’s presence.’8 Performances should not seem to be

5 Richard Dyer and Paul McDonald, Stars, 2nd ed. (London: BFI, 1998), 101.6 Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame, 25th Anniversary ed. (Chicago: The Universityof Chicago Press, 2002), 196-197.7 James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press,1988), 30.

Taylor 7

intended toward a viewer; actors comport themselves in a manner

which suggests that their characters exist in a possible world

independent of the camera’s gaze. Such an absorptive illusion,

however, is never completely realized. Richard Rushton has

astutely argued that this aspiration for absorption is an

impossible ideal, and that a classical realist film is ‘non-

theatrical’: it oscillates between the neutralization of the

spectator and an acknowledgement of his/her absorptive desire.9

Star performances are instrumental to this vacillating dynamic:

both the film and the viewer are occasionally cognizant of the

actor’s publicly known persona and their embodied character

simultaneously.

This dual consciousness can certainly be prompted by the

chameleonic virtuosity of certain celebrity character actors. On

some occasions, it may overwhelm an audience’s absorptive desire

altogether. In such obtrusive, ‘actorly’ performances, a player

foregrounds his/her exceptional technical skill. Theatricality

here can be aligned with what Richard Maltby terms an ‘autonomous

8 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 108.9 Richard Rushton, ‘Early, classical and modern cinema: absorption andtheatricality,’ Screen 45, no. 3 (2004): 234.

Taylor 8

performance’ – one that emphasises distraction, excess,

presentation and spectacle.10 Performances that tend toward

autonomy from narrative integration thus emphasise rather than

diminish one of acting’s fundamental tensions: the gap between

the actor’s body and the virtual text that s/he inscribes upon

it. For Eli Rozik, stage actors imprint images of indexes upon

their own body. These indexes refer to and describe a character

within a textual world, rather than an individual within a

possible world. Therefore, theatrical acting would remind us that

what we see on stage ‘is not a world, but a description of a

world.’11 There is a degree of reflexivity to theatricality,

then, insofar as a performance (intentionally or not) serves to

display its own constructedness.

We should be clear that this reflexivity should be

understood expansively as a resistance to the classical realist

principles of diegetic absorption, rather than a revelation of

the cinematic apparatus or the mechanics of spectatorship.

Following Michael Fried, theatricality establishes the performer

10 Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 389.11 Eli Rozik, ‘Acting: The Quintessence of Theatricality,’ SubStance 31, no. 2-3(2002): 123.

Taylor 9

as a subject who is presented to our look. We are acknowledged as

beholders by ‘an artificial construction in which persuasiveness

[is] sacrificed and dramatic illusion vitiated in the attempt to

impress the beholder and solicit his applause.’12 In its hailing

of the viewer of the viewer as such, the reflexive tendencies of

theatricality are not inherently political. Although

theatricality can be used for political purposes, as Sylvie

Bissonnette, Jeremy Maron and Billy Smart discuss in their

respective contributions to this book, theatricality does not

necessarily call for the viewer’s critical evaluation of a scenario

(as in Brecht’s alienation effect), nor does its exhibitionism

seek to disrupt or question the viewer’s ‘voyeuristic ambitions’

(as in Godard’s ‘anti-theatrical’ modernist cinema).13 Rather, a

theatrical performance is reflexive insofar as it emphasises

dramatic fiction’s ‘performant function’ – a term Marvin Carlson

uses to refer to a key aspect of theatre’s non-mimetic role as

‘an arena for the display of creativity.’14

12 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 100.13 For more on ‘anti-theatricality’ see Rushton, ‘Early, classical and moderncinema,’ 239-244.14 Marvin Carlson, ‘The Resistance to Theatricality,’ SubStance 31, no. 2-3(2002): 246.

Taylor 10

Theatricality, therefore, is a ‘presentational’ style that

emphasizes the ‘ostensiveness’ of a performance: the degree to

which it signals the contextual bracketing of a subject as an

object for our regard.15 Such presentational ostentation

typically occurs in classical realist fictions during moments of

‘expressive incoherence’: metaperformative instances in which an

actor signals that she is enacting a character who is acting.16

Typical examples are instances of deception (such as Plainview’s

various expedient false promises to Eli) or repression (such as

Plainview’s efforts to contain himself after sending his troubled

adopted son away on a train bound for San Francisco). These are

opportunities for a performer to showcase their technical skill

by manifesting conflicting emotions or demonstrating the

simultaneity of the character’s opposing private and public

selves.17 It should be noted, however, classical realism

recuperates the ostensiveness of this moderate theatricality by

contextualising an actor’s expressive incoherence within the

15 Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 22.16 Ibid., 72.17 Ibid., 76. Interestingly, Paul Dano also literally plays two opposingcharacters: the religious opportunist, Eli Sunday, as well as his enterprisingtwin brother, Paul, who alerts Fairview to the presence of oil in LittleBoston before leaving his family’s homestead altogether.

Taylor 11

demands of the narrative. Plainview’s forced smile and paralytic

grimace are intended to register as diegetically motivated

instances of a character’s emotional responses to given

situations more than they are to be appreciated as exemplars of

Day-Lewis’ considerable performative talents.

In other moments, however, the ostensiveness of a

presentational style becomes much more pronounced. The

reflexivity of such moments occurs when the narrative itself

brackets a situation as theatrical – that is, during a

performance-within-a-performance. Characters might explicitly

comment upon the front established by another character, or,

dramatic action is literally centred upon a performative context.

There Will Be Blood, for example, stages a number of extensive

performative circumstances involving both Sunday and Plainview.

During a service held at Eli’s Church of the Third Revelation,

Sunday enacts a particularly dramatic laying on of hands, which

director P. T. Anderson stages frontally in a single long take. A

bemused Fairview calls it ‘one goddamn hell of a show.’

Similarly, pivotal scenes of ritual humiliation involve the

declamation of painful personal confessions, which both

Taylor 12

characters are forced to perform with quasi religious zeal in

order to secure personal business interests.18 At Fairview’s

forced baptism, Sunday urges Fairview to admit to the abandonment

of his deaf son, and he eventually complies apoplectically. In

turn, Fairview later forces Sunday to repeatedly proclaim, ‘I am

a false prophet. God is a superstition,’ as if he were preaching

to his congregation. The ostensiveness of these sequences and the

presentational acting styles of the performers within them thus

serve as adumbrations of the histrionics enacted during the final

sequence. At the impressionistic level of tonality, then, Day-

Lewis’ final ‘display of creativity’ is not entirely out of

keeping with the theatrical register of these earlier moments.

Thus, a film actor’s theatricality offers dramatic

potentialities that are both exciting and repellent. On the one

hand, performative bombast is engagingly sensational in that its

18 Fairview requires the permission of property owner, William Bandy, to builda pipeline through his acreage. After Fairview murders an impostor who claimsto be his half-brother and buries him on Bandy’s tract, Bandy implies that hehas witnessed the killing and insists that Fairview be baptized into Eli’schurch before he grants Fairview the lease. Eli’s own enforced proclamation isa sadistic condition of the business arrangement he later attempts toestablish with Fairview. Rendered destitute by the stock market crash of 1929,Sunday visits the manor of a drunken Fairview and offers to sell him Bandy’sland. Eli is first forced to perform a cruel inversion of the degradingbaptismal confession he demanded from Fairview, only to be informed – inspectacularly hyperbolic fashion – that the tract is now worthless.

Taylor 13

ostentation calls attention to the exhilarating aesthetics of a

creatively dynamic body in motion. On the other, an aggressively

presentational style can be regarded as thoroughly alienating.

Rupturing the illusion of diegetic absorption, it discomforts or

aggravates, rather than provokes critical contemplation. For all

its exuberance, the distancing effect produced by pronounced

artifice is not inherently ideologically progressive, nor is it

experienced as such; rather, it is experienced affectively by

some as a mere irritant, or aesthetic failure – especially when

judged against the absorptive ‘norms’ of classical realism’s

integrated performances.

I would argue that a theatrical performance by a screen

actor is potentially troubling because it may reinforce a

spectator’s awareness of herself as a viewer. If theatricality is

a self-referential effect whereby one becomes conscious of the

exhibitive condition of a dramatic work, then it follows that one

also becomes cognizant of one’s presence before a film as a

beholder. This perception differs in kind from our hyper-

consciousness of an actor’s persona or technical skill. Instead,

the discomforting theatricality of an ostensive performance

Taylor 14

triggers an intensified self-awareness. It is this acknowledgement

that is at the root of a viewer’s discomfiture – even more so

than the perceived incommensurability of theatrical ostentation

in a classical realist film.

Other Minds, Scepticism & ‘Presentness’

If we are to accept that Day-Lewis’ presentational bombast

brings about a theatrical effect whereby one recognizes that his

performance is intended toward oneself as a beholder, what kind

of pronounced self-consciousness is being experienced?

Furthermore, why might one experience this self-consciousness as

an unsettling acknowledgement that obstructs the aesthetic

pleasure one might otherwise take in a film? The problem can be

cast in the philosophical difficulties presented by other-minds

scepticism, particularly in Stanley Cavell’s account of how

cinema contends with the solipsistic limitations of our modern

subjectivities. Simply put, theatricality is an aesthetic effect

that exhibits (or externalizes) our isolation from direct

encounters with the world and those within it. In essence, it re-

establishes and proclaims an insurmountable epistemic distance

Taylor 15

between beholder and beheld – a hyperbolic separateness in which

one’s subjectivity interposes itself between one’s experience of

presentness to an other.

What is this ‘presentness’ and why should subjectivity be

construed as an interposition, or barrier? These concepts, or

themes, are at the heart of Cavell’s account of the problem posed

by other-minds scepticism – the question of how one comes to

acquire knowledge of an other’s mental state in the absence of

certainty. The problem is treated most explicitly in a number of

essays collected in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), The Claim of

Reason (1979), and In Quest of the Ordinary (1988), and it informs his

various meditations on the cinema in The World Viewed (1979),

Pursuits of Happiness (1981), Themes Out of School (1984) and Contesting

Tears (1996). For Cavell, modern subjectivity is experienced as a

problematic because it prevents us from becoming present to the

world. One can liken modern subjectivity to a veil of sorts that

separates us from a direct (read: objective) experience of the

world. As he puts it in The World Viewed, our consciousness at some

point became ‘unhinged’ from the world and thus ‘interposed our

subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then

Taylor 16

our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality

became isolation.’19 All that we have to rely upon is the

certitude of our own experience – our endless presence to

ourselves – which is to say that we apprehend our own

subjectivity rather than the world itself.

Moreover, we have become habituated to this distance. ‘Our

condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception

is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world

as look out at it, from behind the self.’20 The distance from the

world effected by our subjectivities has come to be normalized

and results in a resignation to our own impotency. Alienated from

ourselves and others, our skepticism ‘produces and is in part

produced by a certain distance from the world…in which we are to

be characterized as powerless to alter the world, or in which our

alteration of the world would be irrelevant or contrary to our

real need.’21

The crux of the dilemma is that we no longer trust our

19 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed. Enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1979), 22.20 Ibid., 102.21 Timothy Gould, ‘The Names of Action,’ in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Elridge(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 53.

Taylor 17

subjectivity; it is perceived to be fundamentally unreliable. We

can be fooled about the truth of a situation, or misconstrue how

things ‘really’ are for others. Because of this unshakeable doubt

about the trustworthiness of our subjectivity, we yearn for

certainty instead: the purity of objective facticity, which gives

us empirically verifiable data about the observable world without

the interposition of unreliable subjectivity. However, our

yearning for objective verification about the reality of an

other’s mind is impossible, for ‘certainty is not enough.’22 Not

only would a world of certainty or objective fact be unable to

account for my specific, personal, subjective experience of

others, but a pure generalized knowledge about others cannot be

obtained independently from my claims about them and expressions

of their situation. We yearn for certainty about others, but this

certitude cannot be expressed except by way of our

(untrustworthy) subjectivity. A viewer may wish to make a claim

about Plainview – to know with certainty that his diabolical

mania for competition cannot tolerate those who oppose or seek to

profit from his ambitions – but she cannot be sure that these

22 Stanley Cavell, ‘Knowing and Acknowledging,’ in Must We Mean What We Say?, ed.Stanley Cavell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 258.

Taylor 18

expressions are not the products of her own mind. Cavell dubs

this hesitancy ‘the moral of scepticism, namely, that the human

creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the

world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think

of as knowing.’23 What the sceptic refuses to acknowledge are the

very limits of knowledge – what it is possible for us to know –

which she perceives to be a limitation instead of a natural

inevitability.

What are the origins of this modern scepticism – this

‘unhinging’ of our consciousness from the world? One might

connect it to the Cartesian conception of mind: a solipsistic

characterisation of consciousness as a disembodied awareness (res

cogitans) that is separate from the reality of corporeal substance

(res extensa). Following Descartes, one’s mind only has direct

knowledge of itself and cannot be known by, nor can it know,

other minds except through inferences it makes based on observing

the behaviour of others.24 Alternatively, one might take the

problem further and suggest that scepticism of other minds is

fundamental to human development, unconsciously stemming ‘from

23 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979),241.

Taylor 19

imaginary conditions of infantile omnipotence.’25 From a

psychoanalytic standpoint, scepticism is based on a misplaced

investment in certainty – a fantasy whereby the other is

absolutely present to the self – and results from a residual

disavowal carried over from pre-Oedipal stages. Like the infant

who only recognizes the separateness of the world based on its

failures to meet his or her needs, the sceptic does not

acknowledge the externality of the other – the other’s autonomy

from him or her.26

Thus, we remain ever at a distance from others, unable to

accept their separateness from us. In turn, we experience a

feeling of isolation from – of being unknown to – others, whose

humanity we disavow. It is for this reason that Cavell

reconfigures our struggle to attain selfhood (to acquire self-

24 This inferential assumption of the reality of the other minds is referredto as the argument from analogy: you infer that others have the same mentalstates as you based on their exhibition of behaviour resembling yours insimilar circumstances. For example, I observe that my behaviour results fromparticular mental states, ergo others who exhibit the same behaviour in thesecircumstances must also have the same mental states as I. See John StuartMill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, Vol. 9, Collected Works of John StuartMill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 191.25 Richard Allen, ‘Hitchcock and Cavell,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64,no. 1 (2006): 46.26 Stanley Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1994), 216-217.

Taylor 20

knowledge) as a struggle to make ourselves present to others, and

to make our experience of others and the world present to

ourselves. By ‘present’ we mean the recognition and avowal of an

other’s separateness from one’s self, and hence, the acceptance

of the claim that this autonomy makes upon us. As Cavell puts it,

‘what scepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world

exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing.

The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is

not to be known, but acknowledged.’27 For example, in granting

that your suffering is your own – regardless of certainty that it

is genuine and not something I alone attribute to you – you

become present to me and I do not withhold a response to your

pain, but submit to my responsibility toward you. The acceptance

of an other’s separateness – their presence – requires one’s

responsiveness to him or her.

Acquiring knowledge about an other, then, is not about

insisting upon certitude, but requires one’s acknowledgement of

the other: coming to an awareness of their situation without

recourse to certainty. Moreover, one’s attainment of selfhood is

27 Stanley Cavell, ‘‘The Avoidance of Love,’ in Must We Mean What We Say?, ed.Stanley Cavell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 324.

Taylor 21

actually contingent upon one’s acknowledgement of others:

accepting and affirming their autonomy from me, being responsive

to their claims on me. The lack of acknowledgement of an other

results in a repudiation of one’s own existence within a human

community, which is why foregoing acknowledgement of others for a

desire for certainty about them renders us unknown to and

isolated from them. Indeed, we perceive isolation to be inherent

to the human condition – that our subjectivities inherently

alienate us from others. But to label our distinctness as

‘isolation’ misconstrues the nature of our separateness from

others, and the autonomy of others from us: separateness becomes

perceived as alienation, or distance – a state of unknownness –

rather than being acknowledged (that is, being accepted and

affirmed). We believe and perceive ourselves to be closed and

inscrutable to others, just as they are believed and perceived to

be closed and inscrutable to us. And just as external-world

scepticism ‘involves a failure to acknowledge the world’s claim

on us, a failure to open ourselves to what it expresses,’ so too

do we fail to open ourselves to what is expressed by a

performance that we disavow as theatrical.28

Taylor 22

Does film have the capacity to challenge scepticism – to

overcome the endless presence of our subjectivity? Cavell answers

with a reserved affirmative. In one sense, film as a photographic

art is able to restore reality’s presence automatically without

the need of the artist’s subjective consciousness. Movies are

said to overcome our subjectivity ‘by automatism, by removing the

human agent from the task of reproduction.’29 Further, film’s

material basis as a series of mechanically produced world-

projections makes present a past reality, and simultaneously

screens us from that reality, which is to say that we view the

world as if unseen by it. Insofar as movies are able to project

images on the screen that appear real, yet do not really exist

now in our presence, and insofar as they also answer our wish to

view the world unseen (to exist in a state of isolated anonymity

within it), they offer ‘a moving image of scepticism.’30 How is

this to be understood? Cavell writes,

In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expressionof modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’sprojection explains our forms of unknownness and of ourinability to know. The explanation is not so much that the

28 Allen, ‘Hitchcock and Cavell,’ 46.29 Cavell, World Viewed, 23.30 Ibid., 188.

Taylor 23

world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from ournatural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it.The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it makesdisplacement appear as our natural condition.31

By automatically displacing us from our presentness to the

world, film absolves us from our own usual responsibility of

self-displacement, acts as a relief from the way we make a

fantasy of our own distance from others. Plainview may abjure his

ties to community and family by disavowing the claims they make

upon him, but the fact that it is the camera that makes him

present to me takes the ordinary distance I must assume from such

an unfathomable creature out of my hands. Through automatism,

Plainview is mechanically presented to me (he is projected) as an

other, and I am now in a position to acknowledge his unique way

of inhabiting the world.

The ‘naturalness’ of displacement that film automatically

evokes is paradoxical: it expresses the subjectivity that we hope

to escape, even as we desire to be unknown and unacknowledged.

And yet, it is crucial to note that film has the potential to

overcome not just our subjectivities that make a fantasy of

isolation, but scepticism itself. Film ‘permits the self to be31 Ibid., 40-41.

Taylor 24

awakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longings further

inside ourselves.’32 That is, film’s automatisms have the

capacity to awaken us to the condition of isolation that has come

to be felt as natural. How does this absolution work exactly, and

why is it unique to film?

In the existing world, to know that someone has a mind – to

know that they are in a state of suffering for example – is to

acknowledge the claim that their separateness makes on us. ‘It is

not enough that I know (am certain) you suffer. I must do or

reveal something (whatever can be done). In a word, I must

acknowledge it.’33 However, when we regard fictional scenes of

human suffering in the theatre, we are helpless before them. In

watching a tragedy on stage – say, the ravings of Lear on the

heath – we do not intercede. But our inaction is not simply

because it is a convention of theatre to sit and watch, or

because the enormity of Lear’s suffering is too monumental;

rather, our helplessness before him is actually a form of

acknowledgement. Our acknowledgement of his suffering lies in our

understanding that we cannot take on another’s suffering for

32 Ibid., 102.

Taylor 25

him.34 Our helplessness towards filmic characters, however, is

different from our distance from the characters in a play. In

film, ‘my helplessness is mechanically assured: I am not present

at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something

that has happened, which I absorb, like a memory.’35 Because a

figure on screen exists in a past that is brought into our

presence by projection, he cannot be said to make the same claims

upon us as a character in the theatre. We are ‘present at him,

because looking at him, but not present to him,’ that is, our

space and time is not continuous with his even though we still

have a view of him.36

But does this mean that the character whom the film actor

performs makes no claim on me at all? If that were the case, how

could it be that my view of him might ‘permit the self to be

awakened’ and lead to an acknowledgement? I believe that it is

possible to regard an enacted character as a subjectivity that

requires responsiveness from viewers, and that we can and do

yield to the claim that a performance makes on us.

33 Cavell, ‘Knowing and Acknowledging,’ 263.34 Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love,’ 339.35 Cavell, World Viewed, 26.36 Ibid., 27.

Taylor 26

Acting and Acknowledgement

Although it is ontologically misleading to describe the

presence we see on a screen as an actor (in the same way that we

can claim that the person who is present to us on stage in the

theatre is an actor), there is still a projected figure visible

to us. How might we define this figure? Instead of working his

own self into a role, Cavell claims that a film actor ‘lends his

being to the role and accepts only what fits; the rest is non-

existent.’37 If this description is somewhat obscure, we might

speak of the ideal inseparability of film actor and character.

This is not at all to suggest that an actor’s body must be

subsumed by the body of the character.38 Rather, a film character

‘cannot be separated from, has no existence apart from, the

movies in which she or he is present.’39 In a great star

performance, character and actor are indivisible on screen: a

cinematic figure is fashioned by the actor’s craft but also

created and projected by the camera. A star seems to have no

37 Ibid., 28.38 See, for example, the viewer’s impossible desire for the actor’s body todisappear in Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much,’ trans.Ben Brewster, Screen 19, no. 2 (1978): 50.39 William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed (Detroit: WayneState University Press, 2000), 75.

Taylor 27

existence outside of the film in which s/he exists. For example,

the entity ‘Bogart’ on screen is distinct from Humphrey Bogart

the man, who is ‘only distantly a person.’40 And yet, a star is

not a mere persona (a discursive construct), because they still

resemble – are physically related to – an actual person,

regardless of how distant they might be.

The crucial point in this discussion of film actors is that

movies do not simply provide us with objects to gaze at; stars

present characters as ‘individualities’ in ways that allow us to

acknowledge their subjectivities. The most memorable stars are

mythic types: ‘individualities that project particular ways of

inhabiting a social role.’41 Cavell uses the term type in a

counterintuitive fashion: not to assign a figure anonymous

membership within a larger social category, but rather to

indicate his distinctness. ‘For what makes someone a type,’ he

claims is not his similarity with other members of that type but

his striking separateness from other people.’42 Star performance

is thus given a crucial role in ‘permitting the self to be

40 Cavell, World Viewed, 28.41 Ibid., 33.42 Ibid.

Taylor 28

awakened.’ It constructs a character whose subjectivity

paradoxically becomes present to me, and makes claims upon me,

despite my mechanically assured absence from her. The most

accomplished stars bestow upon the camera seemingly fully present

possible people whose projected individualities offer poignant

opportunities for our attunement. What is most important about

their singularity is that it ‘ma[kes] their difference from us

less a matter of metaphysics, to which we must accede, than a

matter of responsibility, to which we must bend.’43 It is not

that the best film performances are ‘realistic’ – that Day-Lewis’

devout adherence to the Method produces plausible human figures.

Rather, his cinematic stardom asserts an individuality whose

unique way of inhabiting a social role allows me to acknowledge

him as a distinct (and distinctly unforgettable) subject to whom

I owe a degree of responsiveness.

This brings us back, then, to the discomfort one might take

in a theatrical performance. For those heavily invested in

classical realism, performative theatrics threaten one of the

most fundamental attractions of cinema: the possibility of

43 Ibid., 35-36.

Taylor 29

intersubjective connectedness established between audience and

represented subjects. If classical realism is said to aspire

towards diegetic absorption, it is not to promote the illusion of

an unmediated reality for its own sake. Rather, at an

epistemological level, it aims for an empathetic contiguity

between performers (as characters) and viewers. An actor’s

naturalistic performance style serves as a bridge traversing the

distance between character and viewer, and further, clarifies the

nature and quality of their difference.

Such is the imperative behind the directive of

‘believability’ that unifies representations of performative

instruction as varied as Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937), All

About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) and The Libertine (Laurence

Dunmore, 2004). In these films, acting coaches – performed by

Constance Collier, Bette Davis and Johnny Depp respectively –

coax their charges into discovering ways of becoming present to

their audiences, and to us as well. In coming to appreciate the

magnificence of their unique inhabitation of the world, their

audiences (both diegetic and actual) will grant them their

responsiveness. Perhaps this responsiveness might take the form

Taylor 30

of empathy – ‘I know how she feels,’ or, ‘Yes, that would be the

case,’ – but more fundamentally, it is an acknowledgement of

their humanity: ‘I am moved to recognize that she alone is

feeling this way and in this manner.’ In these cases, through the

achievements of Katherine Hepburn, Anne Baxter, and Samantha

Morton, the separateness of a character is acknowledged – her

autonomy from me is accepted and affirmed.

But if naturalistic acting serves the interests of diegetic

absorption and functions as a metaphorical bridge between

irredeemably separate subjects, then for some, theatricality re-

establishes an insurmountable barrier. The problem with a

theatrical performance is that it evokes a response in which I

cease to acknowledge the character that the actor performs as an

individual about whom I might come to know or believe something.

What do I refuse to acknowledge about a theatrically exhibited

character? I disavow attributing an other mind to them, and thus

disavow their very humanity (their autonomy from me). What do I

view instead? I am confronted by an incomprehensible, unknowable

character whose interiority is denied and from whom I withhold my

response. Or, I behold a mere actor who offers only performance

Taylor 31

signs, and who is in turn equally inscrutable as a ‘distantly

knowable’ person. The end result is distance, or estrangement, if

you will. Again, this experience is not to be confused with so-

called politically progressive alienation; rather, it is a

withholding of acknowledgement altogether. Theatricality, then,

in a Cavellian sense is ‘the condition in which the fact of exhibition

takes precedence over the quality and meaning of the thing exhibited.’44 The mere

act of exhibition for its own sake is an act that is unresponsive

to our need for acknowledgement. Moreover, theatrical

performances only inescapably exhibit our isolation and thus

reinforce it.

Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Plainview becomes an exhibitionist

presentation rather than an embodiment. Its presentational

aspects are similar to the theatricality of posed photographs

that impose a ‘foreign animation’ on their subjects’ bodies,

denying them spontaneity and freezing them in a life that is not

of their own.45 Plainview is not permitted ‘candidness’: the

sense of his subjectivity being revealed on its own accord.

Cavell remarks that ‘candidness in acting [can be] achieved by

44 Ibid., 122. Emphasis mine.45 Ibid., 119.

Taylor 32

the actor’s complete concentration within the character,

absolutely denying any control of my awareness upon him.’46

Conversely, Day-Lewis’ bestows a ‘foreign animation’ on the

potentiality that is Plainview: the character is intended toward

a beholder, or exhibited, rather than having the sense of emerging

autonomously and independent of my beholding.

More precisely, Day-Lewis’ presentational animation of

Plainview’s potential subjectivity becomes an exclusively self-

referential gesture that is merely an exhibition of the actor’s

intention to perform. Such an exhibition denies the character’s

subjectivity and the means by which we might acknowledge him. As

Stephanie Zacharek laments,

Day-Lewis may have located what he thinks is the heart ofDaniel Plainview, but he has forgotten to take us with himon the journey…What I long for in the character of DanielPlainview, and don't get, are contradictions, elusive trailsthat might lead us into some hidden cave of thought, memoryor desire. The performance is all intention, no exploration– a conclusion instead of a set of questions.47

Instead of establishing a situation whereby a subject can reveal

him/herself for our acknowledgement, Day-Lewis’ theatrical

46 Ibid., 111.47 Stephanie Zacharek, ‘Too great to be good,’ Salon, February 20, 2008,http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/ 2008/02/20/daniel_day_lewis/index.html.

Taylor 33

performance – with its belletrist emphasis on technique, vocal

dexterity and gestural protrusiveness – creates a forum for

senseless exhibition.

A viewer’s sense of theatricality, then, is her coming to an

awareness that a performance is intended towards her. As a result

she becomes conscious of herself as a viewing subject – an

embodied subjectivity that only indirectly perceives an other’s

provisional individuality. She comes to feel her subjectivity as

a constraint – an imposition to certainty – that needs to be

transcended, rather than as an opportunity to come to acknowledge

the separateness of an other; to recognize and respond to their

situation (to be attuned with them). Thus, Day-Lewis’

theatricality reinforces certain viewers’ sense of distance from

the world viewed, and foregrounds (rather than transcends) their

mechanically-assured helplessness towards Plainview and his

situation (to say nothing of the situation he places others in –

hence the potential for laughter instead of horror at Eli

Sunday’s final predicament).

One might counter this proposition by pointing out that

instances of theatricality are typically cited when an actor

Taylor 34

conveys the extreme emotionality of a character. During such

moments, characters seem to be at their most honest, raw,

anguished, defenceless, or ‘open’ to our acknowledgement.

Shouldn’t these histrionics provide us with an ideal opportunity

for responsive attunement?

The simple answer is no, as hyperbolic displays of emotion

are not inherently theatrical; they are usually only perceived as

such when the character’s emotional intensity is incommensurable

with the situation or is expressed in a highly unorthodox fashion

(hence ‘overplaying’ as a common euphemism for ‘theatrical). A

performance is theatrical when it overtly intends toward us an

artificial (seemingly mind-less) construct that does not awaken

us to an acknowledgement of an individuality’s unique and

distinct subjectivity. Instead, the performance creates a rift

between the indivisible actor and character so that either only

the distantly related actor is visible, or that we perceive no

subjectivity with which to engage at all other than one which

merely intends a character, and nothing else. Thus, the temporal

and existential distance between us and the figures on screen

becomes a gap that cannot be traversed.

Taylor 35

I am aware that There Will Be Blood has been somewhat of a

convenient case study for this configuration of theatricality.

The film itself can be characterised as theatrical in both

content and style. That is, it seems to expressionistically

represent ‘our response to this new fact of our condition – our

terror of ourselves in isolation.’48 To that end, Plainview can

be perceived as a surrogate for our experience of an alienating

subjectivity. The character is fundamentally misanthropic and

will not acknowledge others. [As such, Plainview is not unlike

the depthless theatrical villains that Loiselle describes in his

chapter on Grand Guignol cinema]. ‘There are times when I look at

people,’ he professes, ‘and I see nothing worth liking. I want to

earn enough money that I can get away from everyone…I see the

worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all

I need.’ In this regard, his reunion with his long-lost half-

brother, Henry, becomes a potential for acknowledgement, an

occasion for misanthropy’s defeat. During his brief relationship

with Henry, he finds that there is an other whose separateness he

can acknowledge, and to whose needs he can respond. ‘To have you

48 Cavell, World Viewed, 22.

Taylor 36

here gives me a second breath,’ he admits in a rare moment of

explicit introspection. But when Henry turns out to be an

impostor, Plainview’s only response can be a hysterical

eradication of that other. His isolating scepticism returns: the

man is not Henry, not his blood, but a stranger with no claim on

him at all, and so he puts a bullet in the man’s brain, and

mourns his irrevocably lost brother.

Similarly, he eventually disowns his adopted son, H. W.,

when the young man asserts his autonomy from Daniel in the form

of financial independence. ‘There’s none of me in you,’ Plainview

pronounces, proclaiming H. W. a ‘bastard from a basket’ whose

separateness he will neither accept nor affirm. But it is

Plainview’s second killing, the climatic murder of Eli that

proves to be the inevitable end result of a lifetime spent

continually denying others’ claims upon him (there will be blood,

indeed). During the protracted final scene of sadistic

humiliation, Plainview consigns Eli to a sort of half-life

(‘You’re the afterbirth that slithered from your mother’s filth,’

he hisses), and finally condemns him to non-existence (‘I told

you I would eat you up,’ he roars like some nightmarish bogeyman

Taylor 37

fulfilling a nightly promise). It is his psychopathic lack of

acknowledgement that transmutes Sunday’s pathetic plea for help

into a catalyst that incenses Plainview to murder. So sociopathic

is Plainview’s solipsism that his only response to the butler who

observes the bloody aftermath of the murder is an irreverently

nonchalant, ‘I’m finished.’ The utterance is not only a perverse

parody of John 19:30 (in a final scene rife with Biblical

inversions), but it reduces Sunday to a meal devoured by a

cannibalistic ogre. These final words also mark Plainview’s

complete retreat into solipsistic isolation, and his self-removal

from all ties with family and community. It is little wonder that

the film itself is almost entirely interest focussed upon Daniel.

There is little evidence in There Will Be Blood of a broader social

order and its workings; it reflects only a solipsistic

consciousness that will not acknowledge others. In this regard,

the film’s theatrical alienation is deliberate, as its

metaphysical subject is the inability to affirm the separateness

of an other.

Just as Cavell maintains that cinema must always screen the

audience from a staged reality, theatrical screen acting

Taylor 38

similarly obstructs intersubjective connectivity between viewer

and viewed. On film, ostentatious presentational acting

reinforces the insurmountable separateness of individuals.

Theatricality reinforces our sense of the viewing situation as

one that is fundamentally removed from the world viewed. This

reinforcement prompts a concomitant recognition of our status as

spectators – viewers of events to which we cannot contribute,

proceedings with which we cannot interfere, circumstances that we

cannot alter. In other words, some viewers may view theatrical

screen performances in a negative light because such deliberate

artifice tacitly indicates our helplessness before cinematic

figures. Theatrical screen actors do more than present us with a

set of stylized gestures; they speak of a perceived

epistemological dilemma. Hailing us as viewers rather than

confederates, far removed from any possibility of proximity or

shared subjectivity, their radical otherness does not permit

intimacy, only helpless scrutiny.