As Ellen Ripley in Aliens (Cameron, 1986), Sigourney Weaver conveys a wide range of believable emotions, from her taut suspicion of Burke (Paul Reiser) to her maternal tenderness toward Newt (Carrie Henn) to her reluctant bravery against the mother alien. As Morpheus in The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999), Laurence Fishburne communicates the beatific confidence of the sage leader, but also, at times, the stumbling vulnerability of the over-invested zealot. As Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Verbinski , 2003), Johnny Depp plays a Rabelaisian roustabout who wavers unpredictably between clear-eyed command and irresponsible lunacy. As the Joker in The Dark Knight (Nolan , 2008), Heath Ledger performs recognizable dementia, ardent nihilism, and a certain free-flowing derangement that make the Joker’s actions difficult for a first-time viewer to anticipate. Are performances like Weaver’s, Fishburne’s, Depp’s, and Ledger’s incidental to the themes, meanings, and experiences of their films? To judge by most scholarship on blockbusters, the answer is yes; to judge by the book you are beginning, the answer is a firm no.
My argument counters decades of film criticism inside and outside academia, and anyone who has read such discourse could be forgiven for believing that “great acting” is rare or even antithetical to big-budget films. Perhaps there is something about the formal strategies of popular and spectacle-heavy films—say, the rapid-fire editing, or the importance of kinetic action—that prevents or diminishes opportunities for strong acting. Perhaps performing in front of a green screen reduces an actor’s chances to produce performative excellence.
Certainly, one gets this impression from leading scholars. Thomas Austin writes that “high concept blockbusters” are “frequently regarded as a hostile environment in which to attempt, or look for ‘real’ acting” (2002, 29). Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman write, “[s]pecial effects extravaganzas, heavy on situation, light on character and theme, can be assimilated easily by any culture, in any language” (2010, 364). They quote Lawrence Bender, who says: “Tent-pole movies rely on stories that incorporate large action set-pieces, and the emotions between the characters seem to be less complicated. When you’re dealing with drama you can explore the complexity between people, but a more commercial movie has to appeal to the lowest common denominator” (2010, 407). Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White concur:
“Artificial” and “cartoonish” are not words we associate with strong acting, yet is there not something compelling about performances in big-budget films?[T]wo trends dominate the contemporary period: (1) the elevation of image spectacles and special effects, and (2) the fragmentation and reflexivity of narrative constructions. On the one hand, contemporary movies frequently drift away from the traditional focus on narrative and instead emphasize sensational mise-en-scènes or dramatic manipulations of the film image. In this context, conventional realism gives way to intentionally artificial, spectacular, or even cartoonish representations of characters, places, and actions. (2012, 370)
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson say: “Teenagers and twenty somethings … want films featuring well-known performers in simple stories displaying humor, physical action, and awesome special effects.” Bordwell and Thompson’s take is limited to the period after the 1970s: “Leaving risk-taking to the independent sector, Hollywood wanted movies to be dominated by stars, special effects, and recognizable genre conventions” (2002, 695). The hegemonic post-1970s blockbuster was not necessarily like its historical antecedents, as Bruce Kawin explains:
An emphasis on action is directly related to a de-emphasis on acting. And this bias fits with conventional wisdom that holds that “stilted” or predictable performances in post-1970s blockbusters are common and regrettable elements comparable to lens hairs or obvious anachronisms, aspects that audiences simply look past on their way to enjoying other pleasures.Instead of the intellectual and emotional complexity of such previous big films as Lawrence of Arabia and The Godfather , the typical blockbuster became a wide-screen color ride, full of action and special effects, constructed for speed and thrills rather than contemplation, and with a simple, forceful, unthreatening message (for example, cheaters never prosper). (2012, 346, italics in original)
Are performances in blockbusters really as bad as we have heard? Do we really know what “bad” means? What does a focus on acting in blockbusters reveal about longstanding debates surrounding screen performance? How do films, including blockbusters, use performances to explicate their meanings and themes? How does genre affect our perceptions of quality in a performance? If a blockbuster is edited for speed, thrills, and simplicity, would it make sense that its performances are edited that way as well? And that portrayals should be read by keeping that in mind? How do actors work in concert with their fellow performers, and how does “ensemble acting” affect blockbusters? Are female performers in blockbusters freighted with double standards, and if so, how can or do they transcend them? When it comes to studying blockbusters, performance has long been neglected, and this book means to perform something of an intervention.
Of course, definitions are an immediate concern. What are blockbusters, and what is great acting? We are no doubt stuck with both terms, as they permeate both popular and academic discourse. We know that both terms are historically contingent; definitions of blockbusters and great acting have changed over the decades. This book joins in conversation with other works, and is not meant to essentialize fungible terms, but instead to explore and re-evaluate popular perceptions. Let us begin with “the blockbuster,” which is less a genre than a mode of considerable complexity. While the blockbuster mode has identifiable criteria—for example, big budgets, spectacle, special effects, amusement-park-ride/video-game-like aspects, the hero’s journey, and the three-act structure—the mode is nonetheless flexible enough to integrate and elaborate aspects of more traditionally defined genres. In fact, the structure of this book asserts and elucidates this complexity: it shows that science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction films, among other types, contain “blockbuster performances” that often differ from one another because of genre-based choices. When the late Richard DeCordova suggested that performances and their reception tends to vary by genre (2001), he pointed to a world of research that has barely been undertaken, although Christine Cornea’s (2010) collection Genre and Performance: Film and Television is an admirable intervention.
That which scholars consider “great acting” is even more subject to controversy and disagreement than definitions of blockbusters. It turns out that very few books about acting provide incontestable terms for “excellent performances.” Some actors have written that their craft is difficult to teach, using words to the effect of “you know it when you see it”; some of that amorphousness bleeds over into the words that describe a convincing portrayal. And when it comes to unconvincing, “stiff,” “stilted,” “ordinary,” “normal,” “plain,” “bound,” “vanilla,” and “plastic” are all problematic; herein I reluctantly lean toward “predictable.” In her 2017 book about performances in big-budget Hollywood films, Making Believe, Lisa Bode uses the word “protean” to mean well performed without explaining the choice. Matt Zoller Seitz prefers the term “honesty”: “Real honesty in acting is a rare thing. It comes from a m...