William Joys
In All About Eve where Bette Davis, playing the lead female role of Margo Channing, is arguing with the writer of the play he concludes “it’s about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto!” From this we can ask whatever happened to the actress as an object? To explore this question, I will be comparing both Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg’s techniques of acting in relation to the homosexual themes brought up in the film. Firstly, the extent to which the professional ‘actress’ Margo Channing, became thought of and thought of herself as an ‘object’ in the literal sense (a piano) with its misogynistic yet perhaps empowering repercussions will be examined. Secondly, an analysis in the light of the film’s historical cold war context in which the invisibility of homosexuality, as much as the invisible communist was deemed a threat to society,(Corber, 2005:1). Eve Harrington posing as an amateur, resembles a different definition of “actress”, with a similarity to the historical homosexual she is as a Google dictionary definition of “a woman who behaves in a way that is not genuine”. She must lie to achieve her definition of the “object—a goal or purpose” she must attain the highest award in the theatre by playing innocent to the group of people she manipulates to get to the object/trophy, the Sarah Siddens award. The title of this essay therefore is a double entendre which risks a nostalgia towards a misogynistic objectification of women and homophobia in order to explore the imaginative potential of being an actress or indeed a homosexual person who must “Pass” as something they are not. By consequence and because the film is about actresses playing actresses I will also be exploring the potential in creating an uncertainty in notions of “self” in relation to truth.
But what do I really mean by ‘object’ when referring to the actress? A cursory dictionary search supplies the following definition: “a material thing that can be seen or touched”. Scene: late afternoon, Margo Channing played by Bette Davis arrives predictably late to assist in an audition at the theatre in which ‘Aged in wood’ the production for which she is the star is playing. Upon realizing, from theatre critic Addison de Witt that Eve Harrington has read in her place she seeks out who has assigned to Eve, her once supposed fan now dangerous rival, the role of understudy without telling her. The feud ends between writer Lloyd Richards and Margo with a crescendo of philosophical debate where the actress as a subject or object is contemplated: “Lloyd Richards: I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. Just when exactly does an actress decide they’re her words she’s speaking and her thoughts she’s expressing?” from the enraged delivery we gather the writer, through a certain misogyny, feels threatened by the actress’s potential to have a mind by using the subjective nature of his words to make them object through her performance. And so he continues “Its about time the Piano realized it has not written the concerto!” The objectification here of Margo as a Piano to be played by others could be read as more misogynistic treatment by the writer. However, I would argue that Margo’s embodiment of the object also creates a moment of absurdist potential from which the film unravels its secret homosexual themes.
To embody objects as part of character formation is a large part of actress and teacher Stella Adler’s technique. A founding member of the “Group Theatre” in the 1930’s and founder of her own academy in New York till the 1990’s writes in her book, “The Art Of Acting” when talking of playing Moses “Say the line ‘I’ll throw a stone’, in your normal voice. Now become a marble statue and say it again. How much more powerful your voice becomes when you turn into a statue!” (Adler, 2000:91) Adler here demonstrated the ways in which the imagining of the self as an object enables the actor to become the character, to become in that moment, a different self. Margo’s sarcastic acceptance of herself as the piano, when talking to her lover and also director/co-star of the play, asks “are you the Paderewski who plays his concerto on me, the piano?” and this, like Adler, also demonstrates knowledge of how through embodying the piano she becomes a character that can be “played”. But as the scene of the film is taking place on the stage of the theatre with all cast members present, it becomes evident that although the audience is absent there is a performance going on. With the grandness of camp, this grand piano is supposedly playing herself, the part is the “real” Margo Channing. But in fact what we become aware of what we are seeing is Bette Davis playing the part of the real Margo Channing, of Bette Davis playing out the behind the scenes feuds between herself and the Hollywood studio system that have come to be her reputation. Certainly the reason why director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was surprised to see that Davis had no complaints about the script was perhaps because Davis was able to perform her objection to the misogyny that attempts to belittle and control women, here represented by the actress, yet she does this through adapting the script with her camp and sarcastic delivery that embraces the object given to her in order to “object”. The piano disagrees, the Piano might as well have written the concerto (Mankiewicz, 1991: 238).
We the audience as well as Margo Channing never get to see Eve Harrington’s audition which so impressed all members of the production. Perhaps the fact that Channing is not regretful of this is because Eve is in fact always performing, always being an actress, in the sense of the latter dictionary definition, “a woman who behaves in a way that is not genuine”. This notion is made poignantly and slyly obvious by the theatre critic and sidekick Allison Dewitt who is seemingly waiting in the foyer for Eve. Upon Margo’s arrival he proceeds to inform her of Eve’s audition, “it was not a reading it was a performance.” Eve does not switch her act until a little later in the film (when she outright blackmails the writer’s wife to cast her as the leading role in his new production) but here Allison gives an account of Eve’s response to the praise of the writer Lloyd which has but one telling sign that contradicts his former statement, “that Lloyd felt as he did only because she had read his lines exactly as he had written them.” According to this statement Eve does not believe she gave a performance but that she “read” the lines. According to both the oppositional acting techniques of Adler and her contemporary and rival Lee Strasberg acting is never just “the reading of lines”. Adler goes further and posits, “the play has nothing to do with words… it has to do with ideas” (Brockway, 1989). For Eve to then have given “not a reading but a performance” belies the false modesty and false amateurism that she has been disguising behind her apparent admiration and fandom for Margo.
However the act she is putting on is of deep necessity for Eve. The reverie’s at Margo’s party in which Eve publicly expresses her love of the world of the theatre, “I’ve listened back stage to people applaud its like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up…They want you, you belong.” Sends signals to Addison de Witt who back in the foyer with Margo says “Margo as you know I have lived in the theatre as a Trappist Monk lives in his faith, I have no other world and no other life.” Their sentiments are unified in the theatre, known as a clichéd but arguably historic refuge for gay persons. From this cliché I draw upon what professor Robert J. Cooper has written about how due to the cold war climate in which the film was made “the invisibility of gays and lesbians [where] linked to the communists and fellow travelers who had supposedly escaped detection and where conspiring to overthrow the nation” (Corber, 2005: 1). the film separates the genuine loving relationships of its heterosexual protagonists to the sterile ambition that brings the homosexual couple Eve and de Witt together. Eve with Addison’s support must attempt to fool all parties that she is unaware of her talent and so more deserved of opportunity than Margo, in order to oust Margo and get to her object; the space of love and refuge from detection: the theatre.
We as the audience are at times also given up to a sense that the character Eve may be being her “true” and translucent self. As if Anne Baxter the actress or Eve Harrington the actress, or indeed acting in general where directly from Lee Strasberg’s handbook. In which what he terms “emotional memory” is employed by the actor, he comments “while people thought he was acting, he was truly re-creating his own personal emotional reality on stage” (Strasberg, 2010: 29). Bringing emotional memory from life into the artificial world of the theatre is in fact later revealed to be the inverse of what Eve was actually doing. Eve is in fact an actress of deception. This is apparent from her first appearance in which she is wearing an unremarkable trench coat which conversely gives her a remarkably masculine and pedestrian look. In this moment where she is taken as a mere fan, as someone who wouldn’t dream of being like Margo, she could be the aspiring actor for which Adler writes: “This actor is a killer. Do not take a single step toward his pedestrian world. This actor kills language. He kills ideas because he makes them common” (Adler, 2010: 22). Yet it is more apparent that this sense of commonness is something that Eve parodies with her continual false modesty and self-deprecation all the way till the end of the film. I would assert here that she parodies Strasberg’s notion that character must have “truthful, believable and logical behavior.” She is successful in being believable and logical but she does it not through channeling the truth of her own experience but through imaginative deception, through having to be an actress in the real world.
When I first came to write this essay I thought “Whatever happened to baby Jane?” but then I realized its “All About Eve.” This formative film made within the context of the cold war dealt, indirectly and directly by its cast members, with the ways in which homosexuality was unpatriotic and a threat to national security (Corber, 2005:1). This need to embrace imagination in order to “Pass” and to remain in the refuge of the theatre is represented within the film by the actors’ life and the acting process. Margo Channing (or is it Bette Davis?) must embrace the object of the piano as her character’s “self”. Here she embraces through sarcasm and camp mockery her sense of being an object in order to object to the foolishness of her male protagonists. It is of no coincidence that Bette Davis had already become a symbol within gay drag culture of the 1950’s, saying on one chat show interview “you know you’ve made it once you start being impersonated”. Eve Harrington used her imagination to produce a performance that would fool an entire group of friends in order to get her to her “object” her aim, the Sarah Sidden’s prize. Which in the end truly became her as Margo remarks: “You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.” Both actress’s embrace the notions of the object in order to expand and challenge the ideas of “self” in relation to “truth” in ways that leave myself thinking, whatever happened to the actress as object?
Bibliography
Adler, Stella (2000), The Art of Acting, Applause Books.
Corber, Robert. J. (2005), ‘Cold War Femme‘, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol.11 No.1, Duke University Press pg 1-22.
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., films in review, Vol 42, No. 7/8, pg 238-245.
Strasberg, Lee (2010), The Lee Strasberg Notes, Routley Press.
Television.
Brockway, Merrill (1989), Stella Adler Awake and Dream, American Masters.