‘The purpose of these acting exercises’: the Actors’ Studio and the labours of celebrity

Abstract

Celebrity studies has paid attention to the post-modernisation of identity in contemporary celebrity culture; but the ways in which modern discourses of acting-as-work have persisted vis-à-vis larger socio-cultural shifts in both labour and self-performance deserve closer attention. Drawing upon the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello and Ernest Sternberg, this essay explores the shifting styles of self-presentation that are bound up with the history of the Actors' Studio's star and celebrity texts, paying particular attention to the ways in which ‘Method’ actors have been represented as workers. It first argues that the self-presentational style inscribed by the promotional and pedagogical discourses of Method acting circa 1955 can be located within a distinctly modern performance paradigm. It then considers how, although a similar style of self-performance seems to be articulated on the television series Inside the Actors’ Studio (ITAS) the programme's evocation of the Studio's brand of authenticity is, rather, a pastiche performed according to the logic of what Andrew Wernick has called ‘promotional culture’. Thus, whereas the discourse around the Studio in the 1950s positioned Method celebrities as efficiently authentic stars and actors (cf. deCordova), ITAS is concerned ostensibly with the celebration of performers who excel at synergistic visibility.

Keywords:

• authenticity
• immaterial labour
• Method acting
• promotional culture
• self-presentation
• stardom

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr Alison Hearn, who masterfully supervised the thesis from which this article derives. Dr Jonathan Burston, Dr Nick Dyer-Witheford and Dr Joseph Wlodarz also commented generously on a draft of these arguments. As well, I thank the blind reviewers and editors at Celebrity Studies for offering many productive suggestions. Any mistakes or omissions, of course, are mine.

Notes

1. Strasberg was not the only instructor to teach at the Actors’ Studio, and other theorists and teachers complicatedly intersect with ‘Method’ acting (for instance, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner). Nevertheless, Strasberg generated the most visible promotional and publicity discourse, and he is associated most commonly with the term ‘Method’ acting, and so he is the focus here.

2. Of course, Strasberg's status as a ‘Stanislavskian’ has been contested since the time of the Group Theatre in the 1930s. Stella Adler, for instance, argued famously that the emphasis Strasberg placed on sense memory constituted an erroneous reading of Stanislavsky (Garfield 1984, Hirsch 1984). Further, it is well known that Strasberg ignored many of Stanislavsky's later observations, such as those offered in Building a character, which focuses more upon the externals of performance. However, the focus of this paper is not upon the intellectual lineage of Strasberg's theories or on the day-to-day actualities of practice at the Actor's Studio, but rather on what Strasberg's theories – in so far as they have been articulated across mass-mediated discourses – say about self-presentation, work and authenticity. Thus, when I refer to Stanislavsky, I refer more precisely to ‘An actor prepares-Stanislavsky’ or ‘Stanislavsky-as-read-by-Strasberg’.

3. Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and authenticity (1971) remains an indispensable study of the concept of authenticity. See also Keir Keightley (2001) for an excellent history of the divergent discourses of authenticity in popular music culture, which in many ways parallel those in film acting culture seen here (i.e. Romantic and Modernist).

4. As Marianne Conroy (1993) points out, this emphasis on craft has been an element in the cultural legitimation of the Method. See also Christine Geraghty (2000) for a consideration of how Method culture's attention to craft has worked to legitimate particular stars and celebrities qua performers. In their discussion of the Actors’ Studio's promotional discourse, Baron and Carnicke (2006) also point out that there are slight differences between stars of the studio era and Method stars, but they ultimately position the Actors’ Studio's promotional discourse as a representation of acting as ‘natural’ behaviour (they thus downplay the Modernist contours of Method culture).

5. Esch (2007, p. 48) also draws attention to the similarities between Cavett's show and Lipton's, but his discussion rather explores how both television shows feature the articulation of ‘elevated’ discourses.

6. Of course, acting and other traditions of performance are always ‘immaterial’ according to this intellectual tradition. For instance, according to Paulo Virno (2004), the cultural industry's ‘virtuoso’ is an exemplary figure in the era of performative labour. In other words, the work of the celebrity is always phantasmagoric. Historically, however, film star-texts have also been bound up with ‘material’ discourses of labour, such as scientific management and romantic craftsmanship, which has been my focus.