46 | Sight&Sound | May 2020
MODERN ACTINGwhich it might ordain isolation, or social distanc-
ing for me: I became 79 in this process. I had made
a note of Christian Bale in The Big Short (2015), where he
played a maverick financial genius who has Asperger’s.
He was mysterious and entrancing; his instability or un-
knowability became lyrical. Was there a metaphor in
that condition? Asperger’s was first outlined in depth in
1944 in Vienna under the Nazis. It observed a difficulty
some people had with social integration. That has always
been a little vague as a condition, and I guessed that Sight
& Sound might flinch at the working title I had thought
of: ‘A is for Acting or Asperger’s’.
But the existential metaphor was tempting in a soci-
ety where isolation was working its way in advance of
Covid-19, and where Aspergerism (in a non-clinical, cul-
tural sense) might describe people walking the streets
and sitting in the subways fixed on those small screens
and their messages, so that they sometimes did not pause
to look up and study the people they were ‘with’.
Grant that acting had become a strategy for handling
existence – what Erving Goffman called The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life in 1956. Allow that the cult of acting
- or the religion – had taken on some of the numbing we
had noticed at the movies. Did that place us on the brink
of a cultural shift in which codes and auras known as
‘humanism’ were being supplanted by behaviorist sur-
vivalism? Did that mesh with the increasing occurrence
of android lives in our movies, as if we guessed what was
coming? I thought I saw the looming of a notion in which
the culture of the lifelike had a chance to displace life.
“For heaven’s sake,” Penelope Houston would have cried
out, “I thought we were here to celebrate the movies!”
Well, of course we are, but that does not permit us to stop
thinking about the implications in our medium. After
all, we waited decades with movies that rode on male su-
premacy and female obedience, and we knew – really, we
knew; it was implicit in the voyeurism – that the practice
of moviemaking could be as blunt as was spelled out in
the Harvey Weinstein trial. And movie magazines did not
insist on talking about it. So, be warned: there may be a
chill at work in cinema’s treatment of people, and of their
hopes and ideals, that is preparation for social engineering
beginning to take control of our politics. Why not? Would
you rather have Donald Trump or a smart public health
official like Anthony Fauci in charge?
Thoughts of Weinstein lead to a striking example of
modern numbness or enclosed isolation. In The Assis-
tant, directed by Kitty Green, Julia Garner plays a young
woman, Jane, who works in the New York office of a movie
company led by a routine sexual predator. We do not see
this brute (though Jay O. Sanders does him on the phone),
and Weinstein’s name is not mentioned. Nor is Jane her-
self exploited by the mogul. The human resources official
at the company tells her not to worry – she’s not his type.
But The Assistant intrigues in another, Bressonian way.
Jane is not harassed, but she is grilled by the menacing
presence of the office itself, her co-workers, the tele-
phone, the copying machine. She is as much in prison
as Fontaine in A Man Escaped, and the pressure of this
confinement has made her frozen. She works long hours
in a steadily intimidating situation. She forgets her fa-
ther’s birthday. She has no life, or prospects; the company
in the office intensifies her loneliness.
It’s not that Julia Garner is always repressed. In the TV
series Ozark she is explosive, feral almost, and full of her
character’s outrageousness. But in The Assistant she has
gone into hiding. We are jammed against her tense face
and smothered unease. The curtailment of her freedom is
that she can’t act out. So The Assistant is not just an exposé
of the film business, but a model of the traps in which we
live and work, and our creeping withdrawal from what
we want to think of as a humanist faith. I’ve just received
a note from a doctor advising, don’t come in if I’m feeling
ill. But it continues, “For those who live alone, the isola-
tion can become another layer of difficulty and anxiety.”
Got it. So tonight I’ll watch The Plot Against America on
HBO.
Long ago, I felt a hero worship over Red River I could
not understand. I don’t think I was alone in that aspi-
ration to be with actors. It’s still there: I treasure those
seconds in La Jetée (1962) where a woman breathes in
time. I keep watching that scene in Birth (2004) where
Anna ( Nicole Kidman) goes to a concert and the camera
dwells on her close up. As it stays on her, or in her, we
reach beyond any possible Anna (is she in breakdown or
a vision of understanding?) into the realisation that long
ago at the movies we were less carried away by characters
than fascinated by how actors worked, and what that du-
plicity taught us about ourselves.
Some modern acting is warning us not to be too trust-
ful. That is our isolation.RAISING THE BAR
The proof that cinema can
provoke a reaction without
the need for ‘acting’ can be
seen in François Leterrier’s
role as Resistance fighter
Fontaine in Robert Bresson’s
A Man Escaped (1956,
above), a stripped-back
performance style that has
left its mark on Julia Garner
in The Assistant (below)