method acting/role play supercedes irony as cultural strategy

luka

Well-known member
There's been a big generational shift. They've lightened right up this lot give or take the odd riot. Example. In my day the cool thing to do was to walk around scowling if you walked through stratford shopping centre everyone was practising scowling trying to get good at it. If you go there now young people are practicing roller skating and dancing. You would never have been allowed in my day. Um intrigued, horrified and envious all at the same time
 

luka

Well-known member
George mobnbiot says it's cos there's less lead about. Who knows. People are prone to mistake symptoms for causes but the internet seems important.
 

luka

Well-known member
Change is always a good thing cos we follow the storyline. We need narrative development. That's why people follow pthis stuff isn't it, trying to work out which way the wind is blowing
 

luka

Well-known member
I quoted myself it's about fashion. This is where the first clues appeared no? As to what was about to happen
 

luka

Well-known member
fashion goes mainstream in the ealy 00s? rise of fashion high st brands top shop h&m zara
 

luka

Well-known member
but having become a leading film maker i have learned that when constructing a character the first thing you need to anchor it is a costume
 

luka

Well-known member
so once you are free to change outfit, you realise identity is moore fluid than they let on
 

luka

Well-known member
again, we dont want to confuse symptoms for causes. how i imagine these things is as a giant underlying wave that carries everything with it. so the change is manifested in every area. andre 3000 doesnt cause it, hes an early sign of change, kayne takes the freedom andre wins, uses it in a more conservative way. 50 cent well puzzled. whats going on. (this is not about method acting per se just what lays the groundwork)
 

nomos

Administrator
Steve Coogan said:
"For a few years I'd been railing against postmodernism and irony," he explains. "I've got this real anger against people who think the best way of dealing with the world is through sardonic eyes. It's a depressing, defeatist view of humanity. And I wanted to do something that was sincere, that was not smart and clever for its own sake. I had this notion that the most radical, avant-garde thing I could do was to talk about love. There's nothing that will make an intellectual's buttocks clench more than to talk about love."
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/26/steve-coogan-philomena-interview
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Or even:

"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."

DFW, 1993.

Although I think that's different from what Luka's talking about.
 

PiLhead

Well-known member
i think that's different. there's been any number of people railing against, or calling for an end to, irony and disengagement -- calling for a return to sincerity and commitment. David Foster Wallace is probably the most famous, and possibly the first, but there was a guy in the US, young man who briefly got a lot of attention -- i've completely forgotten his name, unfortunately, but he was this sort of 22 year old prodigy who wrote a book calling for A New Earnestness, one of his targets was the triviality of Seinfeld ... anyway, this sort of "enough with irony, enough with quotation marks," has been a recurrent thing for a good 20 years.... basically people calling time on postmodernism

what i think Luka is talking about is not a simple return to "saying what you mean directly and sincerely" / authenticity / honesty / earnestness etc.... which is why he invokes the idea of method acting -- it's an awareness of playing a role in a specific context, but fully investing in that role - not making little winks and nudge-nudges to your audiences

so you can construct a whole persona for yourself out of nothing, but once you've done you have to play it straight, keep it up - at least when you're onstage or in performance

i would connect it perhaps with a strain of religiosity and vaguely spiritual belief-iness you get in quite a lot of music these days, certain films ....

one of the few places wink-wink postmodernism persists is in children's movies - -particularly animations, there are all these references to pop culture, stuff perhaps designed to amuse the poor parents who've had to accompany the kids to the movie theater
 

craner

Beast of Burden
This is exactly what T. S. Eliot did, and it helped him to think and to write, certainly before he found a different guise (and guile) in Anglo-Catholicism and divorced his mad wife. It was a bit different, but possibly even more effective, after that, as the elder statesman at Faber. But who played a role as legal alien and ersatz scion to transcend uncertainty, anxiety and inferiority better than Eliot did in the 1920s? Because the point is he knew exactly what he was doing, brought into it and lived it, but also did it slightly off-kilter and exaggerated for that very reason. Almost a text book case.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
again, we dont want to confuse symptoms for causes. how i imagine these things is as a giant underlying wave that carries everything with it. so the change is manifested in every area. andre 3000 doesnt cause it, hes an early sign of change, kayne takes the freedom andre wins, uses it in a more conservative way. 50 cent well puzzled. whats going on. (this is not about method acting per se just what lays the groundwork)

You know that these sorts of conversations we have, whether sober or plastered, and not always on this level, if ever, remind me of the last line Jenkins writes about Moreland in A Dance to the Music of Time:

He sighed, more exhaustedly than regretfully, I thought. That morning was the last time I saw Moreland. It was also the last time I had, with anyone, the sort of talk we used to have together.

Death is always perched, just so, on one shoulder or the other.
 
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