Face It
I was very low on spoons yesterday, so T suggested we watch one or two of the episodes of Revolution that a friend of his had recorded. We ended up watching all of them back to back.
While there are some stock characters and storylines (several times we were able to tell what the basic story arc was for the episode and who was going to turn out to be heroic/treacherous or have a personal growth spurt), it is pretty good post-apocalyptic fun. No mention of nuclear reactors having melted down in the 15 years after all the electricity in the world got cut off, and how everyone has great clothes and plenty of paper and candles isn't touched on; on the other hand, it's a cracking militia vs rebels and young woman's coming of age story.
The down side? Elizabeth Mitchell's botox or surgery - I don't know which - means her eyes never crinkle, her eyebrows barely move, and her mouth is downright peculiar. It's fine for photos, I'm sure, but it's incredibly distracting to have fakeness so loudly broadcast. At first, it's a minor irritant. Within minutes, you've worked out that the thing that's so unsettling and aggravating is that she's not just wooden in the way that someone who's just a bad actor is wooden; it's that the microexpressions just aren't there. There's no discomfort showing, no trying too hard. It's the sheer absence of emotional signals that is disturbing.
And once you've noticed it, you can't stop noticing it.
I've recently seen several programmes on iPlayer in which women actors I really admired have featured as guest stars. These were women who were on tv when I was a kid, whose work was always a guarantee of quality, regardless of what they were in. Some of these women - and it's all women - have aged naturally. They have wrinkles and sags and sun spots and grey hair. Their lips have thinned, their necks and eyelids have lost their elasticity. These are the actors who convince. Others have had surgery and/or botox, and anyone who saw them for the first time at this stage would think them old hams and wonder why they had such good reputations. And it's morbidly fascinating to watch this latter group of women. I wonder what they see when they look in the mirror or watch the rushes.
Over the years, I've come to appreciate what an intense profession acting must be. In order to convince in the unforgiving eye of the camera, you must have the body language, the microexpressions, and they can't be faked - you have to really feel and embody those emotions while simultaneously controlling them, calling them up over and over again at will. There's never been a time when actors needed to be so authentic in their work. What does that do to you? If you're feeling emotions sufficiently to convince others, your bodymind isn't going to differentiate between what's "real" and what's "acting" - calling up fear, anger, sorrow, discomfort, etc., means flooding your body with the hormones that go with them, the raising and lowering of blood pressure, cortisol, adrenaline. Inhabiting a role means creating changes in your brain.
Maybe acting could be used consciously as a means of therapy, and of becoming who you want to be through building those neural pathways.
And botox and surgery for vanity's sake is a great way of ensuring your own body can't produce the signals needed to convince. It may even have a corrosive effect on your ability to read others' emotional states. These don't affect actors only, of course; anyone who wants to interact with other humans might consider weighing the fear of ageing against the ability to have satisfying emotional relationships with others. It just strikes me as very weird that we've a cultural bias against ageing that is so entrenched that people whose careers depend on their ability to emote prefer to destroy the tools of their trade rather than risk being seen to get old.
It seems to me even sadder when I consider that some of the women whose faces I've been shocked by have been great advocates for women's equality and social justice. It's much easier to value others than to apply equality to ourselves.
I wonder what would happen if actors just decided that ageing was perfectly OK - especially now that the "grey pound" is beginning to affect box office takings. Would Hollywood really go all Logan's Run and stop casting people over 30, or would the scripts and casting start to change? Would older women feel more confident in setting up their own production companies for inclusive and diverse casting?
And I wonder whether this issue bleeds out into other creative endeavours?
All this because Elizabeth Mitchell's face is now so distracting as to make every scene she's in harder to focus on. Weird.
While there are some stock characters and storylines (several times we were able to tell what the basic story arc was for the episode and who was going to turn out to be heroic/treacherous or have a personal growth spurt), it is pretty good post-apocalyptic fun. No mention of nuclear reactors having melted down in the 15 years after all the electricity in the world got cut off, and how everyone has great clothes and plenty of paper and candles isn't touched on; on the other hand, it's a cracking militia vs rebels and young woman's coming of age story.
The down side? Elizabeth Mitchell's botox or surgery - I don't know which - means her eyes never crinkle, her eyebrows barely move, and her mouth is downright peculiar. It's fine for photos, I'm sure, but it's incredibly distracting to have fakeness so loudly broadcast. At first, it's a minor irritant. Within minutes, you've worked out that the thing that's so unsettling and aggravating is that she's not just wooden in the way that someone who's just a bad actor is wooden; it's that the microexpressions just aren't there. There's no discomfort showing, no trying too hard. It's the sheer absence of emotional signals that is disturbing.
And once you've noticed it, you can't stop noticing it.
I've recently seen several programmes on iPlayer in which women actors I really admired have featured as guest stars. These were women who were on tv when I was a kid, whose work was always a guarantee of quality, regardless of what they were in. Some of these women - and it's all women - have aged naturally. They have wrinkles and sags and sun spots and grey hair. Their lips have thinned, their necks and eyelids have lost their elasticity. These are the actors who convince. Others have had surgery and/or botox, and anyone who saw them for the first time at this stage would think them old hams and wonder why they had such good reputations. And it's morbidly fascinating to watch this latter group of women. I wonder what they see when they look in the mirror or watch the rushes.
Over the years, I've come to appreciate what an intense profession acting must be. In order to convince in the unforgiving eye of the camera, you must have the body language, the microexpressions, and they can't be faked - you have to really feel and embody those emotions while simultaneously controlling them, calling them up over and over again at will. There's never been a time when actors needed to be so authentic in their work. What does that do to you? If you're feeling emotions sufficiently to convince others, your bodymind isn't going to differentiate between what's "real" and what's "acting" - calling up fear, anger, sorrow, discomfort, etc., means flooding your body with the hormones that go with them, the raising and lowering of blood pressure, cortisol, adrenaline. Inhabiting a role means creating changes in your brain.
Maybe acting could be used consciously as a means of therapy, and of becoming who you want to be through building those neural pathways.
And botox and surgery for vanity's sake is a great way of ensuring your own body can't produce the signals needed to convince. It may even have a corrosive effect on your ability to read others' emotional states. These don't affect actors only, of course; anyone who wants to interact with other humans might consider weighing the fear of ageing against the ability to have satisfying emotional relationships with others. It just strikes me as very weird that we've a cultural bias against ageing that is so entrenched that people whose careers depend on their ability to emote prefer to destroy the tools of their trade rather than risk being seen to get old.
It seems to me even sadder when I consider that some of the women whose faces I've been shocked by have been great advocates for women's equality and social justice. It's much easier to value others than to apply equality to ourselves.
I wonder what would happen if actors just decided that ageing was perfectly OK - especially now that the "grey pound" is beginning to affect box office takings. Would Hollywood really go all Logan's Run and stop casting people over 30, or would the scripts and casting start to change? Would older women feel more confident in setting up their own production companies for inclusive and diverse casting?
And I wonder whether this issue bleeds out into other creative endeavours?
All this because Elizabeth Mitchell's face is now so distracting as to make every scene she's in harder to focus on. Weird.