Okay, so, I have a big ass.
It is so large as to make the purchasing of jeans nigh-impossible. My waist-to-ass ratio is more than a little (and more than a little inconvenient). On a BMI scale, I am overweight. And you know what? I'm cool with this.
There was a little while there when I was not so cool with it. I would beat myself up about my weight, cry for long periods, stare into the mirror, and chastise myself for eating. Pretty nominal stuff, all told... most girls get preoccupied with these things. Guys too.
One night, I remember crying and thinking that I was useless because I was not skinny. As a female in the world, there was no place for me because I was not slender. Mind you, I don't hold anyone else to this line of thinking - for my more ample-bodied and beautiful friends, I hold nothing but the highest regard. I feel untold love for more "curvy" girls, for their daily strength and bravery. I believe, most of all, that people are genetically predisposed to different weights - and that a healthy weight for one person is not the same as a healthy weight for another.
But in that moment, I felt sick, and wrong, all because I could not find a cultural mirror to hold my body type to and find myself beautiful.
It need not be reiterated that, here in the modern world, we are obsessed with skinniness; worse, we are obsessed with finding a "cure" for certain body types. Look on the faces of magazines. How many topics are about finding some new way to tone up, to lose weight? For many people, the bodies we have are the ones we're stuck with, and no amount of booty-shaking and carb-avoiding will ever change that.
As I have been dangling my toes in the waters of body acceptance and living the philosophy of being healthy at one's natural weight, so too have I been seeing glimpses of the sordid underbelly and workings behind our culture's perpetuation of "skinny=good". It is no coincidence that these things coincide.
The more I see about body image in the industry, the more I am sickened by it.
Let me preface the following by saying that I love the agents I work with. They are intelligent, progressive, and kind. I am so lucky to be "apprenticed" to them, as it were.
That being said, in the past few months, I have heard more totally average-bodied girls referred to as "fat" and "dumpy" than I would really like. I have heard Catherine Zeta-Jones referred to as "overweight". But today's conversation with my boss really took the cake.
We had recently found out that a client of ours had been turned down from a role for being too "curvy". To my naive mind, she is very beautiful and slender. So, outraged, I made my opinion known. I told the agents that I felt our client was by no means "curvy" out in the real world, but that didn't seem to matter.
"She has a big bum," my boss said. I tried not to look crestfallen.
It was then explained to me that girls with big asses could never be romantic leads. That no audience member would ever believe that a large-assed girl could be "the one" in some man's life. What my boss explained to me was matter-of-fact, wisdom garnered after so much experience in this business.
That didn't stop it from being awful.
She also mentioned that someone with that figure would be better suited for comedic roles. Whether or not it was meant this way, I understood it to mean that our culture at large does not take the ample-bodied seriously. And it's true. We see overweight men and women in primarily comedic roles, with notable exceptions (Christina Hendricks is not fat by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a hard time picturing many agents taking a chance with other girls of her body type; likewise, James Gandolfini struck it big with such an interesting and dramatic role as Tony Soprano). We equate the larger body with a larger personality - bold, brassy, but ultimately silly and certainly not romantic.
In the world of showbusiness, the cycle perpetuates itself, and seemingly no one makes the rules - and no one stops the buck. Agents will rarely chance working with an actor who doesn't fit a certain mold; they do this because they know casting directors won't hire someone outside "type"; casting directors won't cast against type because they believe audiences won't buy it; audiences are then taught that only thin girls get songs sung about them, and only thin girls fall in love.
And we curvy girls - myself, and those larger than me - learn that we are not "the one," and that no one with a big ass can be an ingenue.
This is a gigantic crock. But it is also a business. Actors are in the business of selling themselves, just as a jeweler would sell a bracelet or a writer would sell a story. To the public at large, and especially in the business, being thin is equated with caring for oneself and being polished. (This opens up other doors pertaining to weight and class, but that is for another time.) But what the public also tends to forget is that, since actors are selling themselves as products, they are not like real people.
In fact, actors are not even the approximation of real people. Stoppard said it best... "actors are the opposite of people". They are chosen not as slices of life, but as "paragons". They are fantasies. But no matter how many times we say it out loud and rationalize that sentiment, it's so hard to shake the cultural mirror that pervades our society.
The media does not, in many ways, reflect life. It reflects what a set group of people believe life should be like. How many times do we need to repeat that before it starts to sink in? How many working actors, and working people, do we have to put through the wringer before normal bodies can be normal again?
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
The Tragedy of Tonal Dissonance
A big perk of working at the agency is being able to see new theater in the city for free. Last night, I went with the agents to Malfi, Inc. at the Milk Can Theater Company. It was an interesting experience, though a heartbreaking one in some ways.
Malfi, Inc. is an adaptation of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The original is a relentless tragedy, often criticized for its over-the-top violence, though just as often praised for its timelessness and deep social resonance in any era. The work was adapted by Bethany Larsen into a unique and modern version, replacing cardinals with senators and duchesses with socialites.
I'm not going to go into the plot. Let us suffice to say that it involves werewolves and badass mercenaries. It is, in essence, something I might have written myself. I can see why such a play would be tempting for an adaptation; however, watching the play last night, I felt that I could not only see the writer's hand, but also where she went terribly wrong.
The answer lies, as it so often does, in the tone of a piece.
As I mentioned before, the original Malfi is a tragedy. Which was why I was surprised to see the following in the author's written intent:
"When I started working on my adaptation, I looked hard at the framework of the original... How could I make that modern? How could I make that funny?"
Oh dear, dear dear.
Anyone who knows me personally knows that I like to walk the same, strange line between comedy and tragedy, classical and quirky. But, over the almost-two-hour run of the show, it became very clear to me that this play didn't quite know if it was a tragedy or a comedy, born as it was of both mothers. By the end of the play, when every character was brutally murdered, the audience was laughing harder than it had at any of the jokes that had been crafted into the piece.
It was too bad, and dare I say, almost triggering to me personally.
I am nowhere near as successful as Ms. Larsen, but I have been involved in my share of readings, workshops, and even one staged performance. And there is a certain special kind of pain that comes from your audience laughing when it isn't supposed to.
During the final death scene, out of respect to (what I thought was) the authorial intent of the piece, I kept silent, trying to live in the space I thought I was supposed to be in - a space of mourning for these characters. However, the more the bodies hit the floor, the more the laughter pealed. I began to question myself as an audience member, which took me completely out of the play and its world. Was I doing the wrong thing? Is this a comedy?
Whatever Malfi was, it failed to define itself clearly as such. With caricatures for characters, the initial minutes of the play were set up as a satirical comedy. However, when it came time for the ditzy socialite, her slang-spewing, cokehead best friend, and her bizarre family to die, I couldn't bring myself to feel anything, try as I might. I was still unclear at this point whether the people I had been watching for two hours were supposed to be more than two-dimensional. As objects of mockery and vehicles for satire, the writer scarcely seemed to care for these people. How was I supposed to?
To make matters worse(?), two characters caught my eye - and my heart - in a way befitting a tragic piece. The first, Antonio, was soft-spoken but masculine, interesting, and relatable. The second (and more interesting to me) was Daniele, Larsen's Bosola analogue. I was excited by her; she was unlike most other female characters brought to the stage, and the kind of character I had always dreamed of playing in my green and soft days as a theater geek. These two seemed to have little place in the world of Malfi, Inc. Where the Malfis and their cohorts were campy and strange, Antonio and Daniele were utterly human.
During Antonio's demise, and during Daniele's "heel face turn" (sorry about that link, by the way), the play failed to make the jump from campy comedy to serious tragedy, leaving these two dramatic characters behind. The result was awkward confusion and a case of tonal dissonance.
There is something even sadder about this particular case: even if it were perfectly crafted, this play has a definite shelf life. Malfi, Inc. is set very squarely in the early 2000's. Certain references (Angelina Jolie in "Salt") and slang terms (an overabundance of "totes") date this play in a way that will make it impossible to translate in later years. Larsen has effectively taken a timeless play that resonates in any era and created a campy sketch that can only live in one decade.
I hate to be that guy. I really don't usually react this way... when I spend my time at a theater, I REALLY want to like something. I open myself up to where the playwright wants me - it is the least I could do, since it is what I hope an audience would do for me. And Malfi, Inc. wasn't a disaster. There were parts of it I did like, and I truly can respect Larsen for taking the Duchess in a new direction. But until someone figures out if this play wants to be a comedy or a tragedy - and takes it to that place - the result is simply unfortunate and sad.
Malfi, Inc. is an adaptation of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The original is a relentless tragedy, often criticized for its over-the-top violence, though just as often praised for its timelessness and deep social resonance in any era. The work was adapted by Bethany Larsen into a unique and modern version, replacing cardinals with senators and duchesses with socialites.
I'm not going to go into the plot. Let us suffice to say that it involves werewolves and badass mercenaries. It is, in essence, something I might have written myself. I can see why such a play would be tempting for an adaptation; however, watching the play last night, I felt that I could not only see the writer's hand, but also where she went terribly wrong.
The answer lies, as it so often does, in the tone of a piece.
As I mentioned before, the original Malfi is a tragedy. Which was why I was surprised to see the following in the author's written intent:
"When I started working on my adaptation, I looked hard at the framework of the original... How could I make that modern? How could I make that funny?"
Oh dear, dear dear.
Anyone who knows me personally knows that I like to walk the same, strange line between comedy and tragedy, classical and quirky. But, over the almost-two-hour run of the show, it became very clear to me that this play didn't quite know if it was a tragedy or a comedy, born as it was of both mothers. By the end of the play, when every character was brutally murdered, the audience was laughing harder than it had at any of the jokes that had been crafted into the piece.
It was too bad, and dare I say, almost triggering to me personally.
I am nowhere near as successful as Ms. Larsen, but I have been involved in my share of readings, workshops, and even one staged performance. And there is a certain special kind of pain that comes from your audience laughing when it isn't supposed to.
During the final death scene, out of respect to (what I thought was) the authorial intent of the piece, I kept silent, trying to live in the space I thought I was supposed to be in - a space of mourning for these characters. However, the more the bodies hit the floor, the more the laughter pealed. I began to question myself as an audience member, which took me completely out of the play and its world. Was I doing the wrong thing? Is this a comedy?
Whatever Malfi was, it failed to define itself clearly as such. With caricatures for characters, the initial minutes of the play were set up as a satirical comedy. However, when it came time for the ditzy socialite, her slang-spewing, cokehead best friend, and her bizarre family to die, I couldn't bring myself to feel anything, try as I might. I was still unclear at this point whether the people I had been watching for two hours were supposed to be more than two-dimensional. As objects of mockery and vehicles for satire, the writer scarcely seemed to care for these people. How was I supposed to?
To make matters worse(?), two characters caught my eye - and my heart - in a way befitting a tragic piece. The first, Antonio, was soft-spoken but masculine, interesting, and relatable. The second (and more interesting to me) was Daniele, Larsen's Bosola analogue. I was excited by her; she was unlike most other female characters brought to the stage, and the kind of character I had always dreamed of playing in my green and soft days as a theater geek. These two seemed to have little place in the world of Malfi, Inc. Where the Malfis and their cohorts were campy and strange, Antonio and Daniele were utterly human.
During Antonio's demise, and during Daniele's "heel face turn" (sorry about that link, by the way), the play failed to make the jump from campy comedy to serious tragedy, leaving these two dramatic characters behind. The result was awkward confusion and a case of tonal dissonance.
There is something even sadder about this particular case: even if it were perfectly crafted, this play has a definite shelf life. Malfi, Inc. is set very squarely in the early 2000's. Certain references (Angelina Jolie in "Salt") and slang terms (an overabundance of "totes") date this play in a way that will make it impossible to translate in later years. Larsen has effectively taken a timeless play that resonates in any era and created a campy sketch that can only live in one decade.
I hate to be that guy. I really don't usually react this way... when I spend my time at a theater, I REALLY want to like something. I open myself up to where the playwright wants me - it is the least I could do, since it is what I hope an audience would do for me. And Malfi, Inc. wasn't a disaster. There were parts of it I did like, and I truly can respect Larsen for taking the Duchess in a new direction. But until someone figures out if this play wants to be a comedy or a tragedy - and takes it to that place - the result is simply unfortunate and sad.
Wilkommen!
Hello readers, and welcome to "Behind the Curtain."
This blog is still in its infancy, but hopefully it can grow to find its place on the internet. While I am not deluded enough into thinking that my opinions and feelings are interesting to anyone except myself (and a select few... hi mom), I finally found cause to create a blog recently, as I began my foray into the world of agenting in New York City. The way I see it, blogs can - and should - accomplish two things.
1) Advocacy - While I am the last person alive to enjoy political blogs, there is a need for advocacy in this day and age. It wasn't until I hit the blogosphere as an "audience" member that I learned the meaning and importance of such a thing.
2) Education - Teaching isn't just for professors and experts, and learning isn't just for students. The internet is valuable for sharing information and experiences, and works as an important community and sounding board for learning new things.
It is my hope that this blog can fulfill both roles. While I am not an expert by any means on the business and the world of entertainment, I want to share what I learn day by day with anyone who is seeking a life in this industry. Moreover, what I have to say is couched in the philosophy that those in the industry have a social responsibility to Western Culture and to the population at large. I will also offer my thoughts as a writer and a theatergoer, for what it is worth.
I invite anyone to share their knowledge and experience, so long as it is on topic, or to ask any questions about "the business" that they want. Go ahead and use the widget at the bottom of this page, or leave questions in the comment box.
That being said, please enjoy, and be respectful. Without further ado...
This blog is still in its infancy, but hopefully it can grow to find its place on the internet. While I am not deluded enough into thinking that my opinions and feelings are interesting to anyone except myself (and a select few... hi mom), I finally found cause to create a blog recently, as I began my foray into the world of agenting in New York City. The way I see it, blogs can - and should - accomplish two things.
1) Advocacy - While I am the last person alive to enjoy political blogs, there is a need for advocacy in this day and age. It wasn't until I hit the blogosphere as an "audience" member that I learned the meaning and importance of such a thing.
2) Education - Teaching isn't just for professors and experts, and learning isn't just for students. The internet is valuable for sharing information and experiences, and works as an important community and sounding board for learning new things.
It is my hope that this blog can fulfill both roles. While I am not an expert by any means on the business and the world of entertainment, I want to share what I learn day by day with anyone who is seeking a life in this industry. Moreover, what I have to say is couched in the philosophy that those in the industry have a social responsibility to Western Culture and to the population at large. I will also offer my thoughts as a writer and a theatergoer, for what it is worth.
I invite anyone to share their knowledge and experience, so long as it is on topic, or to ask any questions about "the business" that they want. Go ahead and use the widget at the bottom of this page, or leave questions in the comment box.
That being said, please enjoy, and be respectful. Without further ado...
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