Core Post 4 - Sabrina Sonner

 

I was interested in the discussion of acting styles in soap opera in the Feuer article from this week, particularly with its comparison to 19^th century style melodramatic acting. Feuer writes:

In fact it is the acting conventions of soap opera which are most often ridiculed for their excess, their seeming to transgress the norms for a. ‘realistic’ television acting style. Compared to Peter Brooks’ description of melodramatic acting in the nineteenth century French theatre with its eye-rolling and teeth-gnashing, acting on TV serials approaches minimalism; nevertheless it appears excessive in comparison to the more naturalistic mode currently employed in other forms of television in the cinema… [yet] forms of melodramatic acting are keeping with related conventions for distilling and intensifying emotion. (10)

In undergrad, I took a course that covered the history of different approaches actors have taken when it comes to acting and different styles of “good” acting (THTR 404 with Dr. Sharon Carnicke, at USC’s theatre school, though I don’t know if it’s still offered or not). Within it, some of the main ideas were that the styles of acting seen as good or bad are subjective based on time period and context, and the ways that different acting methods were reflective of different methods for understanding people. We discussed a shift that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century from an Enlightenment mode of understanding human behavior as scientifically observable through long study of specific actions and behaviors, to trying to understand people’s underlying motivations and inner lives. Correspondingly, there was a shift between acting that represents emotions/ideas, to acting that more directly depicts them (i.e. it would be irrelevant to spend time trying to get an actor of this older style to feel the emotions of their characters, where 1920s onwards there’s an immense focus on that in some schools).

 

With this in mind, I thought what the article was saying about the focus on this style of acting on emotionality made sense, but I also was interested in considering it further in terms of how this might evoke a different sense of how people meant to be thought of on the show and how the shows are meant to suggest a different form of spectatorship. It definitely evokes a sense of an older, less fashionable style of acting, but also suggests people could be understood through this idea of observation and that representation of an emotion/idea is a valid form over identifying that an actor themself is going through it. It suggests that these people, and that people in general, can be understood through the act of spectatorship. As the article itself discusses, soap opera viewing is a different sort of spectatorship, around knowing that these aren’t the literal emotions or situations, but representations of them to be understood as such. Which to me honestly makes a whole lot more sense than the acting game of realism that is “what could have motivated that subtle eyebrow twitch?”, and might lead to more understandable if not more realistic depictions of situations. Based on my schedule, I’m having to submit this before we have screenings for the week, but I’m curious to see how this might or might not track through them.