The ‘Last Tango’ controversy and truth in acting
As jobs go, acting is both a peculiar and a difficult one. The essential problem is how to do something as if you’re doing it for the very first time, although in fact you’ve previously rehearsed it, probably many times. If the concept of ‘truth’ in acting means anything, most basically it means solving this problem.
It helps to keep this in mind in re-visiting a controversy that arose in November/December 2016 over Bernado Bertolucci’s methods as a director in filming Last Tango in Paris (1972). This followed the rediscovery of a 2013 interview with Bertolucci in which he admitted to not having fully informed Maria Schneider about what was to happen to her in that day’s shooting of the famous anal rape scene. He had withheld something, he said, “because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress…. I wanted Maria not to act her humiliation and her rage; I wanted Maria to feel, not to act, the rage and the humiliation”. Although Bertolucci expressed feelings of guilt about this, he did not regret it. He did not regret it, one assumes, as an artistic choice, but the cost of this choice was the guilt he felt for causing Schneider to hate him for the rest of her life.
Schneider had said in a 2007 interview that she had felt “a little raped” in the shooting of this scene. With the resurfacing of the 2013 interview, many people (including numerous actors) jumped to the conclusion that what had been withheld from Schneider was that her character was to be raped in the scene, and even, as a consequence, that she was actually raped in shooting it. In response to criticism of him Bertolucci released a statement clarifying that Schneider had been fully aware of the violence against her in the scene, since it was in the script. What had been withheld from her was the idea of using butter as a lubricant, an idea formed with Marlon Brando on the morning of the shooting. The film’s cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, also felt obliged to point out that the anal rape was simulated. There had been no penetration.
What I want to focus on here is the argument put forward by Jessica Tovey that, even given these clarifications, what happened to Schneider was still a “violation”. I’m broadly sympathetic to this claim, in fact, but I think the implications of the way it is argued need some scrutiny.
I’ll assume the following as a best guess based on available evidence. 1) Schneider was aware from the script that she was to be raped but the precise nature of the rape was not made clear in advance of the shooting. 2) Bertolucci and Brando conceived the idea of using butter as a lubricant on the morning of shooting the scene in question and did not inform Schneider of this in advance of shooting. 3) Anal intercourse was simulated not real. What I’ve left vague in the first point above is whether or not Schneider knew the rape was to be anal. Bertolucci suggests that she knew “everything” except about the butter, but it’s not clear this should be taken wholly literally.
What I think is fairly clear (from the way the scene was shot) is that the application of the butter was not entirely ‘simulated’ and that it possibly involved Brando’s fingers ‘penetrating’ Schneider’s anus, if only ‘superficially’. My liberal use of scare quotes here reflects the difficulty of reconstructing what was involved, given the style of shooting. I also think it’s clear that such digital penetration (if that’s what happened) would be different in kind from – i.e. more real than – most simulated sex, even simulated non-consensual sex.
But the odd thing is, this isn’t part of Tovey’s argument.
Tovey’s argument is essentially that actors are actors. Their job is to act. Thus they must know what they are required to do. Where a director tries to get an actor to do something other (or ‘more’) than acting, by withholding from them some part of what they are supposed to do (so that they react more ‘naturally’ instead), this necessarily goes beyond the actor’s contract which only obliges them to act. Tovey doesn’t put it quite as legalistically as this, but the point follows directly. For her, the key term is ‘consent’ (which is, in a way, a kind of contract). If an actor consents to do something (within the acting process), then doing it can only ever be ‘acting’ it.
Consent is, of course, a key term in relation to accusations of rape and other kinds of sexual assault. But Tovey’s argument seems not to be that the actor’s consent is needed only for sex scenes, but that it is needed in general. There would thus be something inherently unethical in a director withholding information from an actor in order to get a more ‘natural’ or spontaneous reaction in any kind of scene, although the inherent ethical problem might only emerge where this gave rise to more or less unpleasant emotions.
Tovey admits of course that ‘consensual acting’ itself often gives rise to unpleasant emotions. Acting is not mere ‘faking it’ (even in the elaborate sense proposed by Diderot). When actors ‘pretend,’ they tend to conjure up something emotionally real as well. Referring to her own participation in a well-rehearsed scene of violence, she says, “when the camera rolled and my fellow actor performed with all of the aggression required to make their performance believable, my adrenaline kicked in. My innate fight or flight instinct made it difficult to remember it was all pretend, and as a result the experience felt close to reality.” But this is acceptable as ‘part of the job’. Nonetheless her argument seems to become a little blurred when she builds on the point by saying, “[h]aving to portray violence involves an element of real fear and distress, because removing oneself completely is impossible. But once trust is lost between an actor, their co-star and director, the veil of performance drops – and the threat is real.”
“Removing oneself completely is impossible…” – these are key words for understanding what actors do, and they tend to complicate Tovey’s crucial point, which is that “the argument that [behaviour such as Bertolucci’s] is justified for the sake of an authentic reaction is bogus. It is called “acting” for a reason. It’s not supposed to be real, it is pretending. The magic of an incredible performance comes when an actor delves into their imagination and taps into emotions that are very real.” To see the problem here, let’s put the last sentence a little differently: ‘the magic of an incredible performance comes when an actor goes beyond merely pretending.... ‘
It remains true, however, that the “veil of performance” (usually) remains in place in situations where the actor experiences real emotions. That is to say, even if the threat ‘feels real,’ you also know on some other level that it is not real, although it may occasionally be difficult to remember at the time that it is “all pretend”. When Brando tried to reassure Schneider by telling her not to worry because “it’s only a film,” he was in effect trying to establish post facto that it was “all pretend”. But that seems to me to be false. For one thing, it was not “only a film,” it was making a film. Thus Brando was implicitly asking Schneider to project herself into the future position of the audience, as though the actor should see herself only in the product and not in the process (something impossible in theatre, of course).
What we need to see here is that there are two domains in which the pretend/real distinction arises. Firstly, it arises in the actor’s subjective experience of playing the part, in particular in relation to the emotions they really feel or pretend to feel. Secondly, it arises in the performance event, in relation to the acknowledged fictionality of that event. We might call the latter the ‘game’. When animals engage in play fights, they give each other various signals that this is ‘only play’ or ‘only a game,’ it’s not the ‘real thing’. But play fights can turn into the ‘real thing’ for the simple reason that such play can only exist on the edge of being the real thing.
It’s with that in mind that I think Tovey’s argument needs to be cast a little differently. Actors are at liberty to do whatever they want to solve the essential problem of acting, which is to play a scene as if the words and actions in it are all occurring for the very first time. But it must be the actor’s choice to do anything that achieves this. It is always illegitimate for a director to leave the actor out of the loop in solving what is, after all, the essential problem of acting, not the essential problem of directing.