resting bitch face and the
badge of appeasement
Was reading this article on “Resting Bitch Face”, about the
phenomenon where women whose faces seem to express hardness or
harshness when the women in question are in fact merely
pensive or spaced out. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and one
I think I may suffer from, although it’s supposedly only a
female phenomenon. I am often told that I look “serious”. I
guess the point is that women are expected to appear friendly
and reassuring, and when they don’t, well, they get accused of
having Resting Bitch Face.
I have some thoughts about Resting Bitch Face and acting, but
they are still crystallizing, so I think I’ll hold off on
going into them at the moment. But something else in the first
article, above, caught my eye. It was part of a discussion of
how women tend to smile more than men, that they are expected
to smile, so they then get unfairly taken to task for RBF. :
Nancy Henley, a cognitive psychologist, has theorized that
women’s frequent smiling stems from their lower social status
(she called the smile a “badge of appeasement”). Still others
have pointed out that women are more likely to work in the
service sector, where smiling is an asset.
Now, this is a sociological observation about the place of
women in society, and how smiling is a response to that. But
here’s the thing: I see a lot of unhelpful smiling during
scene work in class. Of course, people smile in real life, so
there is no reason they shouldn’t in acting as well, but the
problem arises when the smiling is part of the actor’s
response to the situation of acting a scene, rather than the
character’s response to the evolving circumstances in the
scene.
Stanislavsky famously began with the insight that actors face
self-consciousness: because of the awareness of being watched,
scrutinized, judged and evaluated by an audience, they are
inhibited, sometimes paralyzed, unable to enact what is asked
of them. This situation is complicated by the fact that
scripts call for actors to enter into fraught, charged, or
awkward situations, and to make themselves vulnerable in those
situations. So there is real danger in acting a scene. Often,
what I observe is that actors who are uncomfortable with
confrontation (and this is a lot of us, since acting comes at
least in part from a desire to please, to entertain) will tend
to pull their punches by smiling as they speak. If it happens
once in a while, it is not a concern, but when it happens
chronically, it is. This smiling is actually physical tension
that hardens the face and drains it of responsiveness. Also,
after an actor speaks, she needs to receive off of her
partner: she needs to take in the partner’s response, both
verbal and non-verbal, and she needs to be fully absorbed in
that receiving. Every fiber of her being, every cell, very
nerve, needs to be tuned into the partner. The held smile
means that a part of the actor’s physiognomy is abstaining
from that process of receiving, it is holding back. In the
same way that the smile effectively undermines the process of
sending, what we call “throwing the ball”, it also means that
the actor is not fully entering into receiving either.
In other words, it’s a problem.
But the good news is, it’s usually an easy fix. Once the
actor’s attention is drawn to it, he (and this is a problem
for both sexes, RBF notwithstanding), can usually make the
adjustment pretty easily, and the results can be rather
dramatic.
quantum leaps
The expression “quantum leap” is
kind of tricky to use correctly.
As one physicist explains:
Some people think that a quantum leap is a particularly large
leap. This is incorrect. In fact, in quantum physics, where
the expression came from, a quantum leap is usually a very
tiny leap indeed, often smaller than the diameter of the
nucleus of an atom.
In defense of the people who are using the term incorrectly:
if I recall correctly, quantum leaps can produce radiation, so
while the leaps themselves may be very small, the results of
said leaps can be significant, to say the least.
So what does all of this have to do with acting?
There are certain types of behavioral tics that crop up again
and again when people are acting that, once they are
addressed, can unleash enormous acting power. It’s as if the
actor has everything in place, internally, but some part of
her is using the tic in question to hold back and remove
herself from the fray, to stay safe. Once that little bit of
interference is removed, the actor’s work catches on fire,
becomes radioactive, in a good way.
So what are some of these tics?
LOOKING AWAY BEFORE STARTING TO SPEAK:When I see an actor
CONSISTENTLY look away from his partner before starting to
speak, I always take notice. The actor is not looking at
anything in particular, but is simply looking to the side or
down, into space, for a moment, before starting to speak.
Then, as soon as he starts to speak, he makes eye contact with
the partner. Why is he looking away? It would seem he is
formulating his response to what he has heard, find the right
words, or something of the sort. We do this in real life.
However, when an actor does it CONSTANTLY, every time he
speaks, or more than half the time, this is a sign that the
looking away is not arising from the situation he is
attempting to inhabit, but is rather a response to being an
actor in front of an audience, and the anxiety that goes along
with that. Often, the actor will be using that disengagement
to recall the next line, and will also use it to “compose”
himself before speaking. As such, this looking away is a bid
for control, an unwillingness to allow the impulse to arise
from the connection with the other actor, but rather to
reserve the right to shape or control the utterance he is
about to undertake. Eye contact is intimate, and is therefore
scary. Invariably, when I call an actor’s attention to this
and INSIST that he make eye contact with the partner upon
starting to speak (this usually takes a little work, first to
make the actor aware of what he is doing with his eyes, and
then to get him to stop doing it), there is a DRAMATIC
flowering in the actor’s work. And to be clear: the goal is
not “eye lock”, which occurs when an actor maintains eye
contact with the partner only because she is directed to, but
to inhibit HABITUAL looking away before starting to speak.
SMILING:Again, smiling is part of our repertoire for
expression as human beings, a regular part. However, an actor
who is smiling more often in a scene than she isn’t smiling is
simply holding tension in her lips, probably out of anxiety.
This will dramatically affect her ability to “throw the ball”,
that is, to use her words to impact her partner, to place
pressure on him. She will be effectively pulling her punches.
When I see this, I ask her not to smile, and again, the
results are often remarkable. Suddenly she is no longer
fighting herself in her verbal expression, and she starts to
really get her words out into space and into her partner.
STANDING OFF CENTER:When I see an actor standing with their
weight over one leg or the other, rather that equally
distributed over the two legs, I will ask him to stand over
his center, by which I mean the abdominal core of the body,
the Pilates core, if you will. When the weight is entirely
over one leg or the other, the core muscles are “off the
hook”: they do not need to be engaged to hold the body
upright. When the actor’s weight is equally distributed over
the two legs, the core has to engage to help maintain balance
between the two. And when the core is engaged, the chances
that the actor is doing something interesting increase
exponentially. But what if it’s a character choice to stand
with the hip popped and the weight over one leg, like Fonzee?
Well, let’s just say that that is like a handicap in golf: the
actor is making her life more difficult. Not that it can’t be
done, but it is harder, because the actor is choosing a way of
standing that actually undermines the engagement of the allimportant abdominal core. So it’s a kind of advanced
challenge. The actor first needs to learn what it is to engage
with his core in a scene, to use it to put his words out and
also to receive with it from his partner and from his
environment. Once he has mastered that, he can start working
at adopting alternate physical attitudes WHILE engaging from
the core. But as always, first things first.
These are just a few examples of the kinds of tics that can
undermine actors’ efforts to engage fully in a scene. It never
ceases to amaze me the difference addressing them can make. We
get to see an actor catch fire, in a good way.
Andrew Wood Acting Studio