In introducing a screening of Golda
(2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near
Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew
Helen Mirren” plays Golda Meir in the film. Rather than evincing gratitude that
the excellent actress would play an ugly character, the implication is that an
actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own
background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting belies her credibility
in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. That another of her courses
was Israeli Identity and Culture may explain why her knowledge of film was eclipsed,
namely by an ideological agenda or orientation. I contend that underlying her
delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) is a much larger problem: that
of the artificial monopolization by one group identity. In actuality, each of
us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very
identity is problematic.
The craft of acting lies
precisely in being able to inhabit a character in spite of the fact that its background
is other. Hence actors do research in advance on a character to be
played, whether it is fictional or nonfictional. Such research includes, for
example, the character’s occupation and even the location where the character
lived or is set to live in the film. Emotional work is also involved as an
actor considers what within oneself can be drawn on in playing a given character.
Johnny Depp, for instance, said in an interview that he regularly draws on more
than one person (or character) in coming up with how to embody a character. To
claim, therefore, that an actor can only inhabit characters having the actor’s
own background is to deny what acting is, namely, inhabiting someone else. No
one would criticize Depp for not having grown up in a crime family in Boston in
playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). In fact, quite the contrary.
That I realized that Depp was the actor playing the role only well into the film
attests to the actor’s skill precisely in inhabiting a character of a
personality and background so different from Depp’s own. Moreover, that Depp had
such versatility as to be able to play a pirate, the owner of a chocolate
company, and a serious mobster demonstrates just how wrong it is to claim that
an actor can only play a certain kind of character—one in line with the actor’s
own background. This is such an obvious point concerning acting that that any
claims to the contrary must surely involve false-belief and even delusion:
qualities that ideology can have, according to Raymond Geuss in his book, The
Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.
An ideology, such as one stemming
from a suffocating group-identification that seeks to foist itself over a craft
such as acting, can be “dependent on mistaking the epistemic status of some of [the
ideology’s] apparently constituent beliefs.”[1]
In other words, an ideology may hinge on a false-belief. Indeed, the human mind
seems to be vulnerable to circuit-failures as an ideologically important false-belief
is presumed to be true as if it could not be false. In other words, the
mind doesn’t seem to do a good job at flagging its own false beliefs especially
if an ideology being held is dependent on them. Hence, a group-identification
ideology can get away with utterly misconstruing the craft of acting. Geuss even
includes delusion as pertaining to ideology pejoratively.
I contend that delusion pertains
to an ideology in which one group-identification is established monopolistically
for an individual. To be sure, Geuss insists that “(h)umans have a vital need
for the kind of ‘meaningful’ life and the kind of identity which is possible
only for an agent who stands in relation to a culture.”[2]
The kind of identity is here that which is informed by a person’s relationship
to a culture. Each of us is connected to more than one cultures, and,
relatedly, more than one group-identity applies.
I’m a Midwesterner; that’s my
ethnicity. Identifying as an American in terms of culture is a looser or more
general and even secondary ethnicity for me, whereas my group-identity as an
American is foremost politically. My vocational group-identity as a scholar goes
beyond vocation, and I have more than one religious group-identifications
informing my religious identity. Other group-identifications apply to me as
well. My racial group-identification as a Caucasian, or “White,” is actually
not one that I an conscious of very often, so other people who are constantly
referring to themselves and others by race strike me as unnaturally obsessed
with the racial group-identification at the expense of others.
Seldom do we realize that one’s group-identification
and that of another person may be different not only on the same axis (e.g.,
being of different racial groups), but also in emphasizing different types.
One person might say, “I’m a Black person,” and the hearer might reply, “I’m a
Catholic.” The types, or bases, of the two group-identifications are different:
race and religion, respectively. This essentially relativizes a person’s
favorite basis because others could alternatively be the person’s favorite. The
choice seems arbitrary. The hearer could have replied, “I’m an American.” It is
not self-evident that a Black person should view oneself primarily in terms of race
rather than nationality (or religion or ethnicity, which is yet another
category rather than isomorphic with race). More than one Black person has told
me that only in leaving the U.S. and living in the E.U. has that person been
able to de-prioritize his race-identity to other bases on which to
self-identify. It seems to me, however, that a person has more control over
which basis upon which to predominately group-identify, even if one basis is
foisted upon oneself by a group to which one is accustomed to identifying with
primarily.
Because each of us has several group
identifications, any one of which a person could perceive as primary, allowing
one to monopolize one’s group-identity temporally or geographically can be seen
as dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In getting into character, a good
actor does not ignore the subordinate group-identifications. In the case of
Golda Meir, she was actually from the Ukraine in the Soviet Union, so the claim
Helen Mirren’s portrayal suffers because the actress was not Israeli can be understood
to be fallacious. In the film, Golda tells Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary
of State, that during her childhood in the Ukraine, people would beat up Jews in
the streets with impunity. The character doesn’t even identify mostly as an
Israeli. Furthermore, her ethnic and religious group-identity as a Jew, while
salient, does not monopolize her self-identity.
In fact, the film shows actual television
footage of Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat in which Golda says, “As a grandmother to
a grandfather, . . .” She could have said, “As a Jew to a Muslim,” or “As an
Israeli to an Egyptian,” or “As a politician to a politician,” but her
group-identification as a grandmother is on top at that moment. I submit that in
her depiction of Golda Meir, Mirren draws significantly from her own group-identity
as a woman and a mother.
Three times in the film, Golda empathizes with the typist whose husband is
fighting in the war. It is clear from her facial expressions that Mirren is having
the character react as a woman to another woman’s experience. Golda is even
crying when she watches her assistant inform the typist that her husband has
been killed. In listening to a soldier being attacked in battle, Mirren has
Golda react as a mother would: to the boy’s anguish. Even in urging Henry Kissinger
to eat borscht, a Ukrainian soup, Mirren portrays Golda as a mother—admittedly,
as a very Jewish mother. But even in that scene, Golda’s Jewish group-identification
is not the only one in play.
To be sure, Mirren does a great
job in playing Golda’s specifically Jewish group-identity. In a scene in which Golda is talking with
Ariel Sharon, then a general, she tells him that all political careers end in
failure. She even adds fatalist, “huh,” at the end of the sentence. Mirren portrays
Golda’s Jewish ethnicity most stridently and explicitly along with Golda’s identification
as a mother in the scene in which Kissinger is eating the soup. As an immediate context, Golda makes explicit
the primacy of being Jewish in Israel to Kissinger (e.g., “In Israel, we read
right to left”) and even says that her cook is a survivor (i.e., of the
Holocaust. It is the posture that Mirren adopts while watching the Jewish
American eat the Ukrainian soup that may be Mirren’s most Jewish statement,
and, given her skill as an actress, she didn’t need to be Jewish herself.
So, the rather pedestrian, non-intellectual comment of the faculty member at Yale that the non-Israeli, non-Jewish actress would be playing Golda Meir in the film says more about the sordid motive to impose an ideology containing a false-belief (and a delusion) as a weapon than it does about the actress or her (ability to play the) role. The group-identifications of Golda Meir that Helen Mirren uses most are actually as a woman and a mother. Even in this respect, whether Mirren was a mother at time of filming is not terribly important because her craft would have included the ability to play a mother regardless. To be sure, being able to draw on a common background or group-identity is an asset for an actor, but the viability of the craft does not depend on having a common background. That any given character has more than one group-identity makes it more likely that an actor can draw on personal experience in some respect and thus have an experiential connection with the character. This is not to say, however, that such experience is necessary, and even less that experience in one of the several group-identifications of a character is necessary. Besides, the most obvious group-identification of a character to an observer may not actually be primary either to the character (or the historical person on which the character is based) or to the actor in portraying the character. Part of Mirren's talent may be to assess which of a character's group-identities really drives the character, and, relatedly, which is decisive in pulling off the role. As observers, we bring our own ideological agendas, and this is especially problematic if we allow one of our group-identities a monopoly over our self-identity.
2. Ibid., p. 22.
