Acting Method Training, Paul Newman

Examining the neural basis of dramatic acting. While all people play multiple roles in daily life—for example, ‘spouse' or ‘employee'—these roles are all facets of the ‘self' and thus of the first-person perspective. Compared to such everyday role playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions and behaviours. Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be, by assuming a ‘fictional first-person' perspective. Through a series of functional MRI studies, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing. Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced visible reductions in brain activity and deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe. Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a ‘loss of self'. Dramatic acting is the process of portraying a character in the context of a theatrical performance. Acting can be thought of as a form of pretence, in particular the act of pretending to be someone who the actor is not. This idea is central to the acting method derived from the writings of Stanislavski that dominates the teaching and practice of acting in North America. Despite the central importance of role playing to social interaction, the topic of role playing has scarcely been examined in experimental psychology or cognitive neuroscience. Instead, there is a large literature devoted to the perceptual phenomenon of theory-of-mind, which is the process of inferring the intentions, thoughts and emotions of other people. It is about decoding the intentions of others, and displaying those intentions to people in the context of a theatrical performance.

In a general sense, acting methods can be polarized along the lines of being either ‘outside-in' or ‘inside-out', although these approaches are thought of by most acting theorists as complementary methods for getting into character. Outside-in approaches are gestural methods that emphasize the physical and expressive techniques of the actor. In contrast to this, inside-out approaches are psychological methods that rely on perspective-taking and identification with the character. The Stanislavski's approach is strongly oriented towards interpreting the motivations and emotions of the character. Actors appear to be living through the performance as if the events were happening to them. Achieving this can involve a large degree of 3P perspective-taking with the character. However, it is important to keep in mind that, while the process of assuming a 3P perspective on a character may be a central part of the preparatory phrase of learning a role, it should not, according to Stanislavski's method, be an active process during a performance itself. The commonly understood goal of method acting is for the actor to ‘become' the character in performance. The principal objective of the current study was to examine dramatic acting for the first time using functional neuroimaging methods. The imaging results showed that acting led to deactivations in brain areas involved in self processing. These findings might suggest that acting, as neurocognitive phenomenon, is a suppression of self processing. The major increase in activation associated with role change was seen in the posterior part of the precuneus. If so, then the deactivations seen in the prefrontal cortex for acting would represent a loss of self processing related to a trait-based conception of the self.

It is telling to point out that acting theorists for over a century have talked about the ‘split consciousness' involved in the process of acting. The actor has to be himself and someone else at the same time, and this could lead to a splitting of attentional resources devoted to the focalization of attention and consciousness. This is not simply the ‘divided attention' of multi-tasking procedures, but a fundamental split of resources devoted to a maintenance of one's identity as a conscious self. According to this interpretation, activation of the precuneus would represent a dispersion of self-related attentional resources, whereas deactivation would represent a focalization or internalization of such resources. Neither gestural modification in the form of a foreign accent nor other-orientation in the form of 3P mentalizing had an influence on this neural mechanism, whereas the explicit psychological process of role change through character portrayal did, perhaps resulting in the double consciousness that acting theorists talk about. Again, acting was the only condition in which self-identity was explicitly split during the task. We conclude that the loss of deactivation in the precuneus for the acting process might represent a departure from a unified and focalized sense of consciousness, towards the dual consciousness that typically characterizes dramatic acting. The most surprising finding of the study was that gestural changes while still maintaining the self-identity led to a pattern of deactivations similar to that for acting. This study was approved by the Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board, St Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton (protocol no. 10-3457). Source: royalsocietypublishing.org

In the early 1950s, Paul Newman seemed the most unthreatening of Hollywood’s angry young men – less eruptive than Marlon Brando, less twitchy than Montgomery Clift, less surly than James Dean. Tempering the fury unleashed by the others, he played a redeemed hoodlum in Somebody Up There Likes Me and an introverted outlaw in The Left Handed Gun. Eventually, as a fated loser in Cool Hand Luke and a wise-cracking robber in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he settled down to be wry and irresistibly charming. Like the alcoholic husband he played in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman relied on liquor to ease him into a merciful numbness in real life. Newman developed his crackpot theory, probably concocted when he was sloshed, which maintains that the British never get as drunk as Americans do because they like warm beer and don’t put ice in whisky, which means that their bodies have no need to heat up the alcohol they consume to blood temperature before it can be absorbed. “My whole system,” he said, “was based on catching up with those ice cubes.” 

It’s a shrewd comment on his emotional refrigeration: those blue eyes do often seem glacial. Attending classes for method actors, who were expected to draw on their emotional memories when on stage, Newman realised that he “didn’t know enough about my own feelings to start examining them.” Fear and danger ejected him from this state of anaesthesia. Hence his obsession with racing cars, which began with a movie role as a grand prix driver in Winning but took him “outside that fictional experience into something real”. Newman also encouraged his son, Scott – an addict and an unsuccessful actor, with whom his relationship was “a dance of death” – to take high-speed risks on the road. Scott seemed to have never forgiven that his father had left his mother Jackie (now Robinson) for "that Southern magnolia," referring to Joanne. Paul warned Scott to control his words.

And Joanne, despite her good intentions, had difficulty in connecting with Scott. Joanne had help at home with some nannies and maids when it was necessary, but she was very warm with Jackie's children, and Paul felt Scott was ungrateful to her. At one lacerating moment, Newman recalls that he considered shooting himself to rid Scott of “the affliction that was me”; eventually, it was the unhappy Scott who died prematurely. Some friends wondered why Newman chose to direct a telefilm based on Michael Cristofer’s play The Shadow Box in 1980 because it dealt with death and terminal illness. His son, Scott, had not been dead for very long, and Newman’s mother was to die of cancer two years later (it might already have been diagnosed at this point). The truth was Joanne was friends with Cristofer and Newman would do virtually anything to please Joanne.

After his death, Elizabeth Taylor, who had starred with Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, claimed that “I loved that man with all my heart. He was goodness and kindness and pure integrity.” Given his psychological record, Newman refused to take credit for his much-praised philanthropy, that also applies to his political activities in support of candidates who opposed the Vietnam war; though he voted Democrat, Newman defined himself as “an emotional Republican” – stoic and self-contained. He was serious about giving back to the community — He knew he was lucky, good looking - but didn’t often feel worthy of all the accolades, so at least he could give his money to causes where it might make a difference. Recalling his not so extraordinary trajectory in romance when young, he says: I was 15. And just as Mary Jane Phipps was about to lay back in the hay and enjoy my advances, I started sneezing. I was absolutely crippled. There’d be no lengthy kisses, because there was no way I could breathe through my nose. My losing streak continued even after I enrolled at Ohio University before being drafted. I auditioned for a part in a student production and actually got the role. It didn’t take long before I became infatuated with another cast member, a statuesque French beauty who was likely a full head taller than me; I loved to dance with her because I could just lay my head on her chest. I think she was indifferent to me, but I did finally manage to get a real date with her. I had visions of, if not getting laid, then at least rubbing my lips across her neck. As I prayed for an invitation up to her room, she patted me on the head and affectionately said, “I like going out with you because you’re so harmless!” I was aware that beautiful girls thought I was a joke, a happy buffoon.

"Sometime in the late fifties, I saw a poll in a popular magazine where they asked a group of women which well-known personality or actor they had sexual fantasies about. Well, the “winner” happened to be me. Which I guess is pretty funny, until you consider that had I been killed in my bomber during World War II, had I gone down in flames, that was as hot as things would have gotten for me. My first sexual encounter, for the record, was with an educated young lady from Jacksonville, Florida, where I would undergo part of my naval training. At 18, I’d been laid only twice. Which is a fact that likely would have both elated and displeased my mother." Probably, this losing streak with the dames until Newman met Jackie Witte, it would shape his respectful yet distant rapport he'd share with his leading ladies.

Throughout Newman's account of his life in The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man, there is a sense of real loneliness, a feeling like he wasn't always in control of his own life, and that he even resented the intrusion of fame. He found it boggling how women eventually found him to be such a sex symbol, as he could barely get a girl to even talk to him until after he had been discharged from the military. His mother Theresa treated him mostly like a prop and once he was married to his first wife, Theresa insisted they sleep in twin beds. Despite all his success, there was a clear message that Paul Newman wanted to live a private life. Newman felt he was an ordinary man gifted with extraordinary opportunities. Plagued with chronic insecurity, Newman felt for most of his life like an impostor who achieved success through mere luck rather than talent. Although he reached onscreen rare moments of revelation that proved his talent throughout his long career, Newman probably would not accept that he had much talent at all. There was nothing ordinary about Paul Newman, the Oscar-winning actor, prize-winning race car driver and philanthropist who gave away more than $700 million to charities. The problem of this memoir is that probably the reader won't feel no closer to understanding Paul Newman after reading this thoughts than before. Source: kirkusreviews.com