The Managed Heart. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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same resources can be used to advantage, though to a lesser extent. But when we enter the world of profit-and-loss statements, when the psychological costs of emotional labor are not acknowledged by the company, it is then that we look at these otherwise helpful separations of “me” from my face and my feeling as potentially estranging.
SURFACE ACTING
To show through surface acting the feelings of a Hamlet or an Ophelia, the actor operates countless muscles that make up an outward gesture. The body, not the soul, is the main tool of the trade. The actor’s body evokes passion in the audience’s soul, but the actor is only acting as if he had feeling. Stanislavski, the originator of a different type of acting—called Method acting—illustrates surface acting in the course of disparaging it:
[The actor portrayed] an important general [who] accidentally found himself alone at home with nothing to do. Out of boredom he lined up all the chairs in the place so that they looked like soldiers on parade. Then he made neat piles of everything on all the tables. Next he thought of something rather spicy; after that he looked aghast over a pile of business correspondence. He signed several letters without reading them, yawned, stretched himself, and then began his silly activities all over again.
All the while [the actor] was giving the text of the soliloquy with extraordinary clarity; about the nobility of highly placed persons and the dense ignorance of everyone else. He did it in a cold, impersonal way, indicating the outer form of the scene without any attempt to put life or depth into it. In some places he rendered the text with technical crispness, in others he underscored his pose, gesture, play, or emphasized some special detail of his characterization. Meantime he was watching his public out of the corner of his eye to see whether what he was doing carried across.3
This is surface acting—the art of an eyebrow raised here, an upper lip tightened there. The actor does not really experience the world from an imperial viewpoint, but he works at seeming to. What is on the actor’s mind? Not the chairs that he has commanded to line up at attention, but the audience, which is the nearest mirror to his own surface.
Stanislavski described the limitations of surface acting as follows:
This type of art (of the Coquelin school) is less profound than beautiful. It is more immediately effective than truly powerful; [its] form is more interesting than its content. It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than to move you. You can receive great impressions through this art. But they will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it. Their effect is sharp but not lasting. Your astonishment rather than your faith is aroused. Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty or picturesque pathos lies within the bounds of this art. But delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They call for natural emotions at the very moment in which they appear before you in the flesh. They call for the direct cooperation of nature itself.4
DEEP ACTING
There are two ways of doing deep acting. One is by directly exhorting feeling, the other by making indirect use of a trained imagination.5 Only the second is true Method acting. But in either case, Stanislavski argued, the acting of passions grows out of living in them.
People sometimes talk as much about their efforts to feel (even if these efforts fail) as they do about having feelings.6 When I asked students simply to describe an event in which they experienced a deep emotion, the responses were sprinkled with such phrases as “I psyched myself up, I squashed my anger down, I tried hard not to feel disappointed, I forced myself to have a good time, I mustered up some gratitude, I put a damper on my love for her, I snapped myself out of the depression.”* In the flow of experience, there were occasional common but curious shades of will—will to evoke, will to suppress, and will to somehow allow a feeling, as in “I finally let myself feel sad about it.”7
Sometimes there was only a social custom in mind–as when a person wished to feel sad at a funeral. But other times there was a desperate inner desire to avoid pain. Herbert Gold describes a man’s effort to prevent himself from feeling love for a wife he no longer has:
He fought against love, he fought against grief, he fought against anger. They were all linked. He reminded himself when touched, moved, overwhelmed by the sights and smell of her, or a sight and smell which recalled her, or passing their old house or eating their foods, or walking on their streets; don’t do this, don’t feel. First he succeeded in removing her from the struggle.… He lost his love. He lost his anger. She became a limited idea, like a newspaper death notice. He did not lose her entirely, but chipped away at it: don’t, don’t, don’t, he would remind himself in the middle of the night; don’t feel; and then dream what he could.8
These are almost like orders to a contrary horse (whoa, giddyup, steady now), attempts to exhort feeling as if feeling can listen when it is talked to.† And sometimes it does. But such coaching only addresses the capacity to duck a signal, to turn away from what evokes feeling.9 It does not move to the home of the imagery, to that which gives power to a sight, a sound, or a smell. It does not involve the deeper work of retraining the imagination.
Ultimately, direct prods to feeling are not based on a deep look into how feeling works, and for this reason Stanislavski advised his actors against them: “On the stage there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake…. Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer for its own sake. All such feelings are the result of something that has gone before. Of the thing that goes before you should think as you can. As for the result, it will produce itself.”10
Stanislavski’s alternative to the direct prodding of feeling is Method acting. Not simply the body, or immediately accessible feeling, but the entire world of fantasy, of subconscious and semiconscious memory, is conceived as a precious resource.*
If he were in the hands of Stanislavski, the man who wanted to fight off love for his former wife would approach his task differently. First, he would use “emotion memory”: he would remember all the times he had felt furious at his wife’s thoughtlessness or cruelty. He would focus on one most exasperating instance of this, reevoking all the circumstances. Perhaps she had forgotten his birthday, had made no effort to remember, and failed to feel badly about it afterwards. Then he would use the “if” supposition and say to himself: “How would I feel about her if this is what she really was like?” He would not prompt himself not to feel love; rather he would keep alive the cruel episode of the forgotten birthday and sustain the “if.” He would not, then, fall naturally out of love. He would actively conduct himself out of love through deep acting.
The professional actor simply carries this process further for an artistic purpose. His goal should be to accumulate a rich deposit of “emotion memories”—memories that recall feelings. Thus, Stanislavski explains, the actor must relearn how to remember:
Two travelers were marooned on some rocks by high tide. After their rescue they narrated their impressions. One remembered every little thing he did; how, why, and where he went, where he climbed up and where he climbed down; where he jumped up or jumped down. The other man had no recollection of the place at all. He remembered only the emotions he felt. In succession came delight, apprehension, fear, hope, doubt, and finally panic.11
To store a wealth of emotion memories, the actor must remember experiences emotively. But to remember experiences emotively, he or she must first experience them in that way too, perhaps with an eye to using the feelings later.* So the conceiving of emotion memory as a noun, as something one has, brings with it a conceiving of memory and of spontaneous experience itself as also having the qualities of a usable, nounlike thing. Feeling—whether at the time, or as it is recalled, or as it is later evoked in acting—is an object. It may be a valuable object in a worthy pursuit, but it is an object nonetheless.