Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [76]
Not long ago I saw Runaway Train, a film, directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, about the flight of two escaped prisoners, with wonderful performances by Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Rebecca DeMornay and Kyle T. Heffner. The picture was only moderately successful at the box office, but I was overwhelmed by it, largely because of what I brought to the characters. As mentioned previously, throughout my life I have always had a strong need to feel free, so in the escaped convict (played by Jon Voight), who stood atop the runaway train in temperatures twenty degrees below zero determined never to return to prison, even knowing that he was likely to die, I saw myself and experienced his feelings. The emotional reverberation made the picture an extraordinary experience for me. Other people, who don’t want that freedom, would see it differently; for them the natural desirable state is to submit to authority.
I recall watching the Nazi propaganda films made by Hitler’s filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, in which thousands of people gathered in a stadium, and as the Führer arrived they raised their hands in the Nazi salute, transfixed and mesmerized by the experience. In such moments as this the German people invented Hitler, just as Americans invented some of their myths about FDR when they listened to his Fireside Chats, wanting to believe that he had a solution to their problems in the depth of the Depression.
The Germans in the stadium at Nuremberg didn’t know that Hitler was an unstable, maniacal personality, and that the people around him were thugs, liars and murderers. They were creating myths about him in the theater of their minds. They cheered, marched and saluted on automatic pilot, no longer masters of themselves because they imbued Hitler with their dreams of wanting to be led and to feel proud of Germany again. There is theater in everything we see or do during the day. As Hitler demonstrated, one of the basic characteristics of the human psyche is that it is easily swayed by suggestion. Our susceptibility to it is phenomenal, and it is the job of the actor to manipulate this suggestibility.
As in On the Waterfront (or, for me, Runaway Train), the most effective performances are those in which audiences identify with the characters and the situations they face, then become the characters in their own minds. If the story is well written and the actor doesn’t get in the way, it’s a natural process.
Ultimately, I suppose that what makes people willing to part with their hard-earned cash and enter a theater is that it allows them to savor a variety of human experiences without having to pay the normal price for them. Maybe it’s equivalent to the emotion people feel when they jump off a bridge with a bungee cord tied to their ankles: they fall two hundred feet and experience the sensation of being at the edge of death, then bounce back safely, just as we do when we walk out of a theater unscathed after undergoing a harrowing experience.
It is no accident that plays are performed in the dark, for this allows audiences to exclude others and be alone with the characters; in the dark other people cease to exist. There is something peculiar about the process, which started long before Greek drama. It probably began when men first left their caves to hunt, and the women, children and old men left behind danced and acted out stories to counteract their boredom.
Acting, not prostitution, is the oldest profession in the world. Even apes act. If you want to invite trouble from one, lock your eyes on his and stare. It’s enough of an assault to make the animal rise, pound his chest and feign a charge; he is acting, hoping that his gestures will make you avert your eyes.
Storytelling is a basic part of every human culture—people have always had a need to