Corroding our authenticity
Catherine Keener [left, photo from her new film "Friends With Money"], in an article about “Capote,” said she “understands how a perfectly nice person with a talent for acting, or directing, or music making builds a big career and in doing so loses much of who they were to begin with,” as writer Mary McNamara put it [Los Angeles Times Dec 6, 2005].
“I see it happen with people I like,” Keener says. “They feel manipulated, by the press, by the system, and they start to manipulate back. Like, ‘OK, I’ll do what you ask, but I want this and this and this.’ … But still I want to shake them and say, ‘What does it matter if you turn into someone you don’t even like?’ … It’s so hard when that happens. When a friend crosses a line that maybe you didn’t even know was there.”
The “manipulating” behavior can be the kind of psychological coercion that Truman Capote employed when writing “In Cold Blood.” The movie, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman [left], was “about a man whose great achievement requires the surrender of his self-respect,” as film critic Roger Ebert described it.
Another form of “crossing the line” may be playing the diva.
[Erica Jong says in her new book Seducing the Demon : Writing for My Life that she “longed to be able to do the diva on appropriate occasions, but I’m too short.”]
The comically exaggerated diva behavior of soap operas is one thing, but in real life it may be a form of self-destructive narcissism.
In a NY Times article [Acquired Situational Narcissism] Robert B. Millman, professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School, talks about the psychological dysfunction he identified. “Psychoanalytic literature is filled with jargon about how narcissism happens really early,” says Millman, “but I realized that given the right situation, it could happen much later. When a billionaire or a celebrity walks into a room, everyone looks at him. He’s a prince. He has the power to change your life, and everyone is very conscious of that. So they’re drawn to this person. What happens is that he gets so used to everyone looking at him that he stops looking back at them. They are different. They’re not normal. And why would they feel normal when every person in the world who deals with them treats them as if they’re not?”
Actor Heath Ledger recalls his mother seeing an early and bad acting performance of his, but not coddling him with false compliments about it: “No one else around you, except your mum, is going to tell you that you suck,” he said. He thinks the problem with many actors in the industry is “We all just think we’re brilliant, you know? And 98 per cent of us are crap. And we’ve got to realise that before we can improve.” [London Observer, 02 April 2006]
Developing and using our talents can take many choices and compromises, but isn’t losing touch with our authentic selves too big a price to pay for success?
