to a comic portrayal of behind-the-scenes sexual shenanigans and to demonstrations of Welles’s supposed will to power.
Like most movies about Welles, Me and Orson Welles seems to take more relish in depicting his character flaws (at least one of which, womanizing, he no doubt possessed) than in his artistic accomplishments. In this case we’re shown a quarrel between technician Samuel Leve, who wants credit on the show’s playbill, and Welles, who thunderously declares that Julius Caesar is “my vision.” (Where this quarrel is concerned, I recommend that readers consult producer John Houseman’s Run-Through: A Memoir, pages 296–98, where we’re told that Leve’s job, under the direction of Jean Rosenthal, was simply to convert Welles’s design sketches into blueprints.) The film nevertheless gives a fine sense of how a romantic, idealistic theater company on the verge of great things can become an ambitious young man’s family of choice, albeit a family with as many rivalries and disillusionments as any other. As its title indicates, it depicts not just Welles but nearly everyone in the Mercury Theater as amusingly self-preoccupied; even Efron, the star of Walt Disney’s High School Musical franchise and the heartthrob of millions of teenage girls, cleverly reveals the calculation lurking behind innocence. Chief among the virtues of the film, however, is McKay. Welles has been played by many actors, including Paul Shenar, Eric Purcell, Jean Guérin, Vincent D’Onofrio (aided by the voice of Maurice LaMarche), Liev Schreiber, and Angus Macfadyen—but none have come this close to his looks, voice, and slightest movements. In contrast, the actors around McKay do little to imitate the real-life figures they represent: James Tupper looks a bit like Joseph Cotten, but Eddie Marsan, Leo Bill, and Ben Chaplin have no resemblance at all to John Houseman, Norman Lloyd, and George Coulouris. Almost the entire responsibility of creating a persuasive historical representation falls on McKay, who, before appearing in the film, had performed successfully in a one-man stage show about Welles and apparently come to know his model intimately. He captures the booming voice, the vaguely mid-Atlantic accent, the twinkle in the eye, the forbidding glance, and the heavy yet somehow buoyant walk. He’s slightly too old (Welles was twenty-two at the time of Caesar) and never displays Welles’s infectious laugh, but he merges with the character more completely than a star could have done and is just as convincing when he tries to seduce a young woman as when he proclaims ideas about theater. To hear him read aloud a passage from Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons is to feel as if one were in the presence of Welles. Even so, the actor McKay is always present to us alongside the impersonation, taking obvious pleasure in the magic trick he performs, enabling us to see that Welles was not simply a flamboyant personality but an actor and director of seriousness and importance who could bring audiences to their feet.
Whenever we encounter an overt, creative impersonation such as the ones performed by Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Douglas, and Christian McKay in the films I’ve mentioned, we can easily appreciate the singular skill of the performers. But imitation in all its manifestations has always been an important, even crucial, feature of the art of movie acting. The various forms of imitation discussed here—the copying of conventional gestures and accents, the rote repetition of predetermined gestures and movements, the development of model character types, the repeated performance of personal eccentricities, and the impersonation of historical characters—may not be the most valued aspect of what actors do, but they are sources of pleasure for the audience. They contribute to the system of genres and styles (as in the distinction between comedy and drama or between conventional movie realism and a director like Bresson), and more generally to the rhetoric of characterization and the formation of personality on the screen. In a more subtle and general sense, they complicate our ideas of personal autonomy and individuality; they make us at least potentially aware of the imitative aspects of our lives in the real world, as both personalities and social beings.
The Death and Rebirth of Rhetoric
We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 1917
Most commentaries on film and rhetoric are indebted to the neo-Aristotelian school of literary criticism once practiced at the University of Chicago, and particularly to Wayne Booth’s highly influential The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), which is less preoccupied with overt argument or eloquence than with problems of ethical clarity and “the art of communicating” (i). Again and again, Booth emphasizes the artist’s effort, through techniques of narration and characterization, to help readers grasp the full implications of the work and to impose a fictional or illusory world upon an audience. In a similar though more overtly ideological fashion, writing on the rhetoric of film has tended to deal with issues of point of view, focalization, and enunciation, and especially with debates over what Avrom Fleishman describes as the “narrator-effect” of fiction cinema. (Besides Fleishman’s Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History, see Nick Browne, The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration; Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film; Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film; and George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies of Cinematic Point of View.)
Granting the importance of such matters, I plan to say relatively little about them. I want to define rhetoric more broadly and theatrically, as an art of suasion and seduction that secures our belief in claims of truth and our pleasure in representation. The rhetorical event in this sense is only secondarily concerned with the clarity or veracity of its evidence (as in the “realism” of documentary photographs); before anything, it’s intended to move us by means of verbal skill, bodily eloquence, spectacle, color, performance, and all the well-known elements of cosmetics, stagecraft, and mise-en-scène. Explicitly aimed at arousing the passions, it proves its worth or lack of worth through the emotional effects it creates on auditors or spectators at specific occasions.
As Jacqueline Lichtenstein has shown in her important book The Eloquence of Color (1993), this broad conception of rhetoric, which is quite old, has long been connected to acting, painting, and the visual arts in general. In ancient Greece, it was a techne that controlled the entire empire of communication, and at a later, more specialized, moment in its history, it became one of the three crucial disciplines of the Roman trivium, which eventually shaped the curriculum in European schools. Even so, as John Bender and David Wellbery have pointed out in their anthology The Ends of Rhetoric (1990), rhetorical art was never without critics, who usually accused it of fostering luxurious excess, irrational power, and demagogic manipulation. Plato, in his quarrel with the sophists, distinguished between the language of rhetoric, which deals in mere adornment and emotional affect, and the language of philosophy, which deals in truth. Francis Bacon and every major scientist from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment denigrated rhetoric in contrast to the neutral, transparent discourse of scientific discovery. Immanuel Kant described the major part of rhetoric as “the art of deceiving by a beautiful show” and attacked its use in both the law court and the pulpit on the grounds that it was designed “to win minds to the side of the orator before they have formed a judgment and to deprive them of their freedom” (Critique of Judgment, 171). Not long afterward, the romantic poets forsook what M. H. Abrams calls the “mirror” of neoclassical art with the “lamp” of individual expression, thus asserting the primacy of the literary artist’s imagination over the need to communicate with an audience.
From the time of Plato and Aristotle until the nineteenth century, rhetoric was usually subordinated to philosophy and devoted to the study of inventio, dispositio, and elecutio in verbal language. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had narrowed to a typology of figures of speech, all of them labeled with Latin names, and to a genteel, highly controlled application of these figures and their appropriate gestures to the arts of acting and public address. The printed word had long since gained ascendency over oral communication, and verbal and visual rhetoric of the more flamboyant kind began to take on negative connotations associated with bourgeois pretentiousness, populist politics, and the newly emerging mass-communication and advertising industries. At this point, artistic modernism attempted to administer a deathblow to rhetoric. In the first two decades of the twentieth
