Episode 71: Justin Rawlins on Method Acting (February 2024)

Justin Rawlins, Rawlins’ book title, Marlon Brando

Stephanie Brown chats with Justin Rawlins about his new book on method acting (Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance) and the discourse “the Method” has generated over the years. Meanwhile, Michael tries to channel his inner authentic podcaster and nearly goes full-Leto.

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Aca-Media Episode 71 Transcript

[Music]

Christine Becker  00:14

Welcome to the Aca-Media podcast brought to you by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

 

Mhael Kackman  00:20

All those prepositions just like that. Boom.

 

Christine Becker  00:22

Yep. and full of energy. Yeah. Yeah, it's week two, and I'm exhausted already.

 

Michael Kackman  00:30

You're Exhausted Already. I'm Michael Kackman at the University of Notre Dame, and I'm here with Exhausted Already.

 

Christine Becker  00:39

Otherwise known as Christine Becker.

 

Michael Kackman  00:41

Chris, I gotta say, though, I'm having a little bit of a hard time. I was getting really psyched up for this recording session, so I completely redid my office. I've got like, these posters of Terry Gross on the walls, and I put up a big flashing, you know, On-the-Air sign, and I keep getting these huge fights with, with Mary, who's like, asking me to like, take out the dog. And I'm like, I'm getting ready to be on the air. You got to leave me alone. I have this, I gotta get eady. I gotta get ready. We're doing a podcast recording. Back off, man. This is my process.

 

Christine Becker  01:16

So you're saying you're a method, a method podcaster? ,

 

Michael Kackman  01:20

Yeah, yeah. And I'm really amped about it. That's the thing. I just feel like I just have to, like, get into this, like really special place. I've been watching like old episodes of WKRP. And like, I'm gonna, I feel like, I feel like I'm almost there.

 

Christine Becker  01:37

I'm not certain Terry Gross has that method. But well, you know, we all have to find our own niche.

 

Michael Kackman  01:43

Yeah, I mean, I really want some of that, you know, 1970s cool, dude passion. I think that's kind of part of the whole method thing, right?

 

Christine Becker  01:52

It is yes. And I'm prepared to go along with it. Because I understand the potential genius that could be produced on this podcast, if I just let you run with your method.

 

Michael Kackman  02:02

You know, I didn't want to use that word. But, you know, hey... if the word fits,

 

Christine Becker  02:09

Right. If you wondering what is the little scenario going on here, that's because of our guest, who has written a book about method acting, and Michael is apparently very inspired by this model.

 

Michael Kackman  02:22

Oh, man, I am so inspired by it. I am taking it to the, to the ... yeah, to that place.

 

Christine Becker  02:28

Well, maybe then we should attach a warning before we run this interview. You could be inspired to do method acting and yeah, the consequences could be problematic.

 

Michael Kackman  02:36

Could you imagine like, somebody's going through their life, like everyday life, as like Jared Leto?

 

Christine Becker  02:42

Oh, my God. No. I mean in various, like, a number of levels, no.

 

Michael Kackman  02:48

A whole bunch of ways. Yeah. Yeah. Terrible idea. Yeah. You know, I just like try to live really authentically, man.

 

Christine Becker  02:57

Right. Authentic.

 

Michael Kackman  02:58

Yeah.

 

Christine Becker  02:59

It's real. Well, we're about to get real about acting here.

 

Michael Kackman  03:04

Okay, so so we have a really, really great interview here. We have a great interview. I feel like I'm talking too much. And I'm going to, I'm going to steal Stephanie Brown's authentic interaction with our guest, because it's a good one.

 

Christine Becker  03:18

Yeah, it is. And so this is our producer Stephanie Brown. She's talking with Justin Rawlins, who is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Film Studies and Executive Producer of the TUTV Media Lab at the University of Tulsa. And he has a brand new book out, titled Imagining the Method, so they have a really excellent conversation about it.

 

Michael Kackman  03:38

So if you are, if you're feeling like you have to like dig down to your deep, authentic inner core, or if you're just tired of people who are indulging in that nonsense, this is the interview for you.

 

[Music]

 

Stephanie Brown  03:59

Hello everyone and happy 2024. Today I'm talking to Dr. Justin Rawlins, who is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa. And his book, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity and American Screen Performance  is out from University of Texas Press as of January 16! So one of the first things I always like to ask people, especially for their first book, is how they came to the research agenda or the research topic in the first place. So how did you first get interested in the reception of and discourse around method acting?

 

Justin Rawlins  04:42

This book started with a research project for a, I don't even recall the class, I think it was a genre class. But regardless, I ended up working on this film called The Conqueror, which was a Howard Hughes produced film starring John Wayne. John Wayne plays Genghis Khan. And I was intrigued by this because it was such an obvious case of miscasting, and the movie is terrible. Like it's, you know, it's not good. So I was interested in how this movie came to be how it was received. And in the reception discourse, I was really struck by the number of people who said that Marlon Brando would have made a better Ghengis Khan than John Wayne. And I was like, okay, you know, in addition to what we obviously know is Hollywood's racist casting practices, right, and its representational regimes and all of that stuff. What, what is the assumption being made here about one's acting potential and acting style that would make them say, oh, Brando, specifically, who's a very different kind of performer, would be a better person for this role. And so that got me started, on, what is it that people make of acting as a practice? When the time came to work on my dissertation, I really gravitated toward this idea. And that eventually then gave rise to this book.

 

Stephanie Brown  06:04

Oh, that's great. I always love hearing about grad school seminar papers that ended up becoming people's ongoing research projects.

 

Justin Rawlins  06:10

I know right? And you know, if there's one piece of advice I can give to graduate students it's that seminars are not just things that you're checking off of a list, right? Like those papers that you write can be journal articles. They can be the seed of something much, much bigger.

 

Stephanie Brown  06:24

Yes, definitely. I also ended up writing my dissertation, and now what will be a book, based on a seminar paper that I wrote pretty early in grad school.  So I'm sure everyone has heard of method acting. But for anyone who maybe isn't clear on its history, or what exactly it is, could you give us just like a brief explanation?

 

Justin Rawlins  06:44

I think the easiest way to understand method acting, and to understand that the broader world of like Slavic dramatic realism -   that it is related to, but is in some important ways distinct from - I think that the big intervention in that overall approach to acting is that you are aiming for a realistic understanding of your character and their circumstances. Does that mean you become the character? Not really. Does that mean that you delve into some of your own past trauma? No, not necessarily, that depends on your school of interpretation. The approach is, you know, someone like Stella Adler would say, you do deep research on your character and their circumstances, and you just you come to know them. And that way, the thinking goes, you can then represent them in a realistic way. Now, there are widely varying interpretations of what it means to take on a character, what research means. I mean, this is one of the big sticking points between folks like Strasberg and Adler, is, you know Strasberg believed that you need to go into your own kind of memories and feelings and you know, that's been critiqued by many, including by Adler for being dangerous and self indulgent and allowing for bad habits. And, but it really is about taking on a character in their complexities. The way that one gets to that point is a matter of much disputation.

 

Stephanie Brown  08:12

So now that I've made you define method acting, I will say that your book actually isn't interested in sort of figuring out what it is method acting as, or defining it, or exploring the performance of method acting. What you're interested in, as you say, in your intro is in what method acting does, not what it is, which, to me, that line really encapsulated succinctly the aim of your project. So can you unpack that a little bit and what that means?

 

Justin Rawlins  08:38

That's yeah, that's a really good point. Thank you. Thank you for picking up on that. Approaching this as a question of discourse and reception and the kind of cultural and ideological work that that meaning, that body of meaning, does in the world. It opens up a lot of interesting possibilities and questions and allows us to sidestep this long standing quagmire that we often find ourselves in when we're trying to parse out what is the method at its core. So one of the things that I kept running up against is this long running question of what do we make of of acting, especially something like method acting, which is been such a prominent part of our experience of the movies over the last 70 odd years. But it is also by definition somewhat elusive and somewhat interior. And we tend to afford it that kind of elusivity and that interiority, which subsequently make it difficult then to get at what is it that we're talking about here. Right? And one of the things that many of our fellow scholars working in screen performance have tried to do over the last several decades is to try to parse out what is method acting on screen, right. And one of the things that they continually run up against is that there's a misunderstanding about what method acting is, and when it came about, and it's kind of taken on this mythic status. And so that fixation for me is as much about the kind of question that's been asked, which is, what is method acting? And I found that in reframing that underlying question and thinking about not trying to understand what it is as if it has like an irreducible meaning that's just being misunderstood. I wanted to think about, well, what is it? What does the misunderstanding itself mean? What does that represent? What does that say about us as as critics as scholars, as audiences, as you know, film producers, PR folks, what does that suggest about the meaning that method acting and method actors carry in the networks of discourse? For me, that changes the question from one of: what's its irreducible meaning, to what is it doing in the world as a collection of meanings that are accurate or inaccurate. They're doing work.  They are part of the way that we not only understand the method, but then also the way in which we contribute to its meanings.

 

Stephanie Brown  11:11

So, you're really using reception, sort of as a methodology in addition to cultural history to really get at this discourse. Can you talk a little bit about why you find this to be useful?

 

Justin Rawlins  11:24

The rewarding part of that kind of approach is that I feel like it gives you a sense of how a culture coalesces around a piece of of art, right? And how people collectively come to a shared understanding about what a thing or a person means. It's less a matter of me interpreting a movie and me trying to stitch together how other people are interpreting the movie and me looking for the threads, right?

 

Stephanie Brown  12:58

Yeah.

 

Justin Rawlins 

I, as someone who was trained as a cultural historian, I take a lot of pleasure in that, like, I find that to be very intellectually stimulating, to do that kind of detective work to try to reconstitute a moment in time and a feeling and a framework for understanding. Like I use the concept of the "interpretive landscape," trying to recreate the world and the collection of meanings and connections that people use and relied on to, to make sense of this form of dramatic realism. And the people who they believe practiced it, or the people they thought should be practicing it. But I feel like it affords us a perspective that's otherwise difficult to derive if we just look at a film. And if we, if we become too fixated on any particular text.

 

Stephanie Brown  12:58

And so the term you use to get at this idea is "methodness," which I love as sort of a concept. So do want to talk a little bit about the concept that you coined for the purposes of sort of describing the way that you're coming at method acting.

 

Justin Rawlins  13:13

Yeah, Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. So that yeah, so that, especially bringing it up now, because what we've been talking about so far has largely been "methodness," like it's the... "Methodness," I coined to, to represent the received idea of method acting and method actors. I do that in part because I think that there's been such a long history of disagreements over what method acting is that are very freighted. And they've made the word method somewhat difficult. I would argue to work with on a critical level at this point, without kind of inserting yourself in one very particular argument. So thinking about "methodness" as the discourse surrounding method acting and actors that bears some resemblance to method acting, but also has a life of its own, was a useful way for starting the project. And getting us to think about what it means to approach screen acting and actors in such a way that we're thinking about how their meaning accrues outside of films themselves. So it's meant to convey its own curious place in the larger ecosystem of screen performance, that it bears some similarities to the thing, but it has an identity and a life of its own, that has, I think, in many ways, outstripped the actual practices and philosophies of method acting.  But it is a thing, you know, that has taken on a tremendous cultural status. Um, to the point where, as I alluded to earlier, the word method is often absent from methodness, but there's those kind of connotative terms like immersion and dedication, and, you know, the kind of reactions we have, the reverence or the revulsion, that are very much bound up in what "methodness" is and what it does out in the world. Yeah, I mean, this is something that I've puzzled over, some of the reasons that the book took it as long as it did, is I really puzzled over how to talk about something that is, it's a lot of esoteric connotations, and just trying to do that, that added detective work of giving shape to something that is by its nature, pretty elusive.

 

Stephanie Brown  15:16

I think this is such a useful approach. And at the same time, I imagine it's difficult at first to articulate it because you're more interested in essentially talking about how we talk about method and the material implications of that discourse, rather than defining the form itself, which is, I'm assuming people think that's what you're doing at first when they first hear about your project. And I found that that's similar to how I study authenticity and stand-up and I am writing my book right now. And sometimes I find it hard to succinctly articulate that I am not interested in defining authenticity in performance. But looking at how we talk about authenticity in performance. Yeah. And that people sort of take for granted like, oh, you know what I'm talking about, like when I say method acting like, yeah,

 

Justin Rawlins  16:25

And we roll our eyes, we roll our eyes, right, when we hear stories about Jared Leto staying  character. You don't have to say method at that point. We know what it is, or Jeremy Strong. We think that he, after that New Yorker profile, he takes his, he takes himself and his roles too seriously, right. Brian Cox is quoted as seized on us like, oh, yeah, this is kind of classic concern about method actors going too far, hurting themselves, losing themselves, what have you. And it gets the point where, even though we don't, we don't necessarily need to see the word "method" to have a shared understanding that oh, yeah, we're talking about method actors, right. And we tend to, we tend to roll our eyes, but we also tend to valorize that, you know, if not on an interpersonal level than often on a kind of social level, certainly, at an industrial level, that kind of acting that kind of performer is still highly valorized.

 

Stephanie Brown  17:20

Yeah, it really struck me in the intro when you say "revulsion and reverence has marked it since Tootsie in the 1980s."

 

Justin Rawlins  17:27

Tootsie I use as an example of when I think of a film that is built around a shared popular understanding of method acting, then like Tootsie is that film to me, that like that's, that's the plot of Tootsie, right? And even though no one can stand Michael Dorsey, he's such a good actor, and his approach, performance is so convincing that everyone believes that he is Dorothy, right? And that's what presents all of the interpersonal conflicts. That's what drives his self discovery and his improvement as a human generally, but specifically as a misogynist.

 

Stephanie Brown  18:08

Yeah, and what this "revulsion and reverence" as you say always reminds me of is this joke that Linda Holmes made, I don't know, a long time ago on Twitter or in an article she wrote, and she's the NPR pop culture critic. So she always jokes about the kinds of shows that are really popular on like USA and TNT about troubled white men, usually detectives, and she described the premise trope as characters who don't "play by the rules, but whose organizations need their talents." And I always think of that when reading conversations about bad behavior on set that gets excused because of the so-called, like, artistic genius of method actors, but also, more generally, just those that get labeled as artistic geniuses.

 

Justin Rawlins  18:50

Yeah, and there's a great, there's a great line I use in, I think it's the last subsection of the conclusion, where it's a, it's an interview with Brian Tyree Henry. I think he was asked about whether he did method acting, and he just basically did a, you know, a "pshaw!" and was like, if I tried to do what my white colleagues, my white male colleagues can get away with, I would be arrested, right, like I would be hauled off, like that, that is an affordance that is not made for me as a Black man, right, on a set. It is part and parcel of a very particular allowance that is given to transgressive white male behavior on set. We critique it, right? But we still normalize and we just kind of say, well, well, that's method acting, right? Like why are method actors jerks, right? Well, it doesn't have to be that way. And that's those people don't represent all of method acting. I mean, one of the things that really struck me when I dove into this book project was just how little conversation there was about women or performers of color as method actors even when like you know, there are so many women and people of color who studied at the Actors Studio but did not get the industrial recognition, did not get the popular plaudits, right, are not talked about in such reverent tones as you know, the Brandos of the world. And to me, that's, you know, that's telling of how our prevailing assumptions about method acting is inextricably tied up in our our racialized and gendered assumptions about, you know, who can perform what.

 

Stephanie Brown  20:30

Yeah, I remember reading over the summer in the lead-up to the Barbie movie and all of the constant press around the movie stories of Margot Robbie getting into character by giving Ryan Gosling little presents every day. But we usually don't hear like, quote unquote, nice stories around method;  it seems to always only be about negative behavior on sets as justification.

 

Justin Rawlins  20:50

Yes! I wish that would be more a part of that conversation. Because I think that's a really, those are really interesting questions, right? When you know, Jared Leto sends, you know, "gifts" to his Suicide Squad costars, right, when he's sending Viola Davis, you know, a dead pig, and he's sending... I mention in the book, all kinds of really interesting stuff, you know, used condoms, to his castmates, that was talked about as like, Oh, this is method acting, he's in character this whole time, blah, blah, blah. Why don't we have nice method actors, right? Like, why, why is it just people being jerks. There's this really telling moment in the documentary about Tootsie where Sydney Pollack, who himself was trained in that acting style, and you know, he's not only acting in Tootsie, but he's directing, listening to him talk about what it takes to make a movie and to talk about performance. And then listening to Hoffman talk about those same topics. It's like they're living on different planets. Hoffman insisted on there being conflict, he's like, I have to have conflict with my director every single day. So every single day, he would, he would agitate and he would try to fight Pollack. And you can just see the look on Pollack's face, but he's just so worn down by this. And they make up at the end of every day, and it's a very intense relationship. But it's just that, to me, it was very emblematic. Here's someone like the director, who's trained in the style, who's basically saying, that doesn't have to be this way. And the actor is like, no, no, no, that's how this works.

 

Stephanie Brown  22:28

So in closing, I wanted to ask you about your conclusion, where you point towards sort of future research that you're looking to do where you take the discourses you've looked at in this book and look at the intersection of that and the future of AI acting.

 

Justin Rawlins  22:46

Sure, what, did, first of all what did you think of the pictures of the digital Brando? Were you getting Brazil vibes? Yeah, his face all stretched out. I will say that I had a back and forth with the cinematographer who worked with Brando to create those images. Brando had just become so disillusioned with filmmaking that he saw this technology as a way potentially to archive his entire acting repertoire. And then with those, all of those different gestures, a digital version of him could be created, and Brando could still cash the check. And the sense it's like, oh, that's, that checks out for Brando like what, kind of his reputation for really coming to dislike his profession. But it also I think speaks to this very timely question about screen labor, about what the implications of AI are for the living and the dead. I think that it, it raises questions about who is it that writes the code that creates a digital method actor. What are the data points that go into conceptualizing a virtual performance style? And so I use a couple of examples in the conclusion, one of which is these engineers who, as far as I can tell, don't have a background in method acting, saying that they are going to train a virtual performer in method acting, and why they chose method acting is not entirely clear. They allude to it a little bit. But even the allusion doesn't really check out. They say like they, they taught them method acting, because method acting has us tap into our own experiences. Well, that's Strasberg's interpretation. And that's, you know, much disputed, but okay, sure, let's take that on its face. But then they turn around and say our virtual performer has no life experiences to draw upon. Okay, well, then I don't understand how this works. But the fact that they were so adamant about like, we're going to teach this, the "synthespian" method acting. That to me is really an intriguing question about something that people in STS have been working on for a while now, which is like, not only observing that algorithms themselves are reflective of their creators' biases, but interrogating the data points that inform the algorithm. But what happens when we have it stitching together the world of the Performing Arts and the world of technology? And what does that mean to have a company digitally, resurrect James Dean for a role nearly 70 years after he passed away? So speculative acting is kind of meant to be a bridge from this current project and thinking about what do we make of method acting and how is that reception doing work, to thinking about, well, what happens when that reception then becomes the code for creating future performances. You know, that's where the conclusion kind of leaves us. And that's where, you know, it's where I'm starting to do, to do more research, hopefully will connect to some of these people working on these projects. So I'm, I think a future project will explore that ecosystem a little bit more, because I'm very, I'm very curious what these folks hope to gain and what they make of performance. Yeah. And I thank you for having me on. Yeah, I hope you like it. I think you'll, I think you'll enjoy it. All of the silly dad puns aside. [laughs]

 

Stephanie Brown  26:33

They were terrifying, I was like what, what is this? It's a selling point. 

 

Justin Rawlins  26:38

Yes, exactly. That's, that's it. That's just it. But thank you, Stephanie. Really appreciate it.

 

[Music]

 

Christine Becker  26:44

Good stuff there.

 

Michael Kackman  26:45

Yeah, really good stuff. I feel like this is the book that has kind of needed to exist for a long time.

 

Christine Becker  26:49

Yeag, I think it's been talked about, which is why I really love his concept of methodness. I think that's a it's a very clever, you know, deceptively simple gateway into this topic, because it's been talked about so much.

 

Michael Kackman  27:01

Yeah. And I mean, I've had this conversation with colleagues, we're in a, we're in a department that also has theatre practitioners, and they know just as well as, as everyone else, that what passes for the method culturally has so little to do with Stanislavski or, you know, Stella Adler or Strasburg. It's just this like, what often seems like a whole bunch of fairly self indulgent nonsense.

 

Christine Becker  27:28

And the way that folds into the kind of that model of angsty bad men television of the past, you know, 15 years or whatever, it's sort of like a perfect storm of those two coming together.

 

Michael Kackman  27:39

Yeah. And it doesn't it doesn't really need to be fed. Although it's kind of seductive. I mean, you ought to try it, you really ought to try the, like, I could get...

 

Christine Becker  27:48

But see, guys, you know, according to the to the methodness discourse, guys are given that rope and I'm not so, which, by the way, I have to point out so Oscar nominations just came out. And the fact that Ken was nominated, and Barbie was not for actress is pretty telling.

 

Michael Kackman  28:04

Yeah, and of course, that just kind of recapitulates the whole premise of the film. Yeah.

 

Christine Becker  28:09

 Right. So, it's perfect, really.

 

Michael Kackman  28:10

Yeah, there was an awful lot of well, there were some interesting, there were some interesting oversights.

 

Christine Becker  28:17

Yeah, as there is every year, and of course it's not a meritocracy. It's not the best thing wins. It's all politics and industry, you know, behind the scenes stuff and all that which is why it's fun to talk about but also can be kind of tiresome to have to talk about it every year. Similar to the kind of method acting discourse, so...

 

Michael Kackman  28:35

Right, which showed up in in spades in the Emmy Awards just last week before

 

Christine Becker  28:42

Right, yeah, we've got this crunch of awards right now because of obviously the strike delayed the Emmys, so yeah, we went from the Globes as you know, talk about specious awards, but the Globes to the Emmys now to the Oscars. And yeah, so you know, Jeremy Strong was mentioned in that conversation with with Justin, and of course it was Kieran Culkin who won the award over Jeremy Strong, and you know, there's some speculation, did that New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong kind of tank him, but I also think it was perceived that Kieran Culkin just kind of made a bigger leap across seasons, which again, just shows you know, if Strong was the better one all along, doesn't he deserve it? But no, we get like, a little more impressed by Kieran crying or whatever, in that final season of Succession. And then, yeah.

 

Michael Kackman  29:21

Right, yeah. And it's you know, it's it's kind of interesting to think about how the, how acting awards work in series television, where you have not just a particularly interesting character, but a an interesting character that audiences feel like they have an extended emotional journey with, not just, you know, kind of strong moments, but a much longer and kind of delayed resolution to character drama.

 

Christine Becker  29:51

Which is also an interesting angle on that notion, which I saw a few tweets about, that often the nominations are not for the best acting but for the most acting...

 

Michael Kackman  30:00

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the Best Actress category. I think Carey Mulligan did enormous work with a role that is mostly observational, you know, and it's, she's just kind of there as a, as a foil against the maestro. You know, it's not not a particularly well-titled film. But that's a really interesting role, and especially Lily Gladstone, who is really the witness to all of the drama around her and fraud and murder and deception. And, you know, she is so much at the heart of our reaction to that story world. But it's definitely both of those are really, really strong performances that are not most acting kinds of performances, you know, they're.... Oh for sure, for sure.

 

Christine Becker  30:00

...so subtler performances, so some were really annoyed that Julianne Moore didn't get nominated for May December and Annette Bening did for Nyad, a film that has, seems somewhat specious background to the stories that are being told in it. But, you know, when you do the most, and maybe again, that's like, you know, Kieran Culkin's performance was very much most and quite showy. And so that can sometimes earn you some, some gold, and quieter performance as well. And especially it's kind of the they're a piece of a whole, but their piece almost makes the whole in that regard. So, yeah.

 

Michael Kackman  31:17

Right. Whereas Annette Bening and Nyad is is definitely more in the most acting kind of category.

 

Christine Becker  31:23

Yeah. or Poor Things. Emma Stone and Poor Things. I haven't seen that yet, but I've heard people rave about her performance in that.

 

Michael Kackman  31:30

Yeah, I haven't seen it yet, either. But I.. yeah, looking forward to seeing it. Well, this is interesting stuff to think about. And Justin Rawlins' book is a really great introduction to some of these issues.

 

Christine Becker  31:40

Yeah, we want to also plug it a little bit just because if you happen to hear this before January 31, you can save money if you want to buy it from UT Press directly. They have a 40% off discount. A, some sort of, I don't know, New Year's discount, something like that, through January 31. At UT Press, and that's on any UT Press book. So lots of good stuff there. So

 

Michael Kackman  32:02

That's a heck of a deal!

 

Christine Becker  32:03

It really is. The other thing is. you'll pardon us for plugging a friend's book. As Michael mentioned, our colleagues in theater and their work on the method and race and specifically, Siiri Scott, one of our theater colleagues, and our former theater colleague, Jay Paul Skelton, they have an edited collection called Stanislavski and Race: Questioning the System in the 21st Century. And it's billed as the first book to explore the role that Konstantin Stanislavski's system and its legacies can play in building, troubling, and illuminating today's anti-racist theater practices. So I thought that would be a good book to plug, and we'll put a link to that on our website. Aca-media.org.

 

Michael Kackman  32:40

That's the place to be.

 

Christine Becker  32:41

got it.

 

Michael Kackman  32:42

And yeah, that book is a really nice response to and extension of exactly the kinds of issues that Rawlins alluded to in this conversation about the kind of the racial dynamics of who is able to and who can benefit from that kind of discourse of methodness.

 

Christine Becker  33:00

Yeah, again, that notion of some get closed off by the method in this discourse.

 

Michael Kackman  33:05

Yeah. All right. Good stuff, check them out. And thanks for listening to us. Aca-Media would not be possible without the support of the University of Notre Dame, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

 

Christine Becker  33:17

We are also grateful to our coproducers Stephanie Brown at Washington College, Frank Mondelli. at University of Delaware, -- there's a long list of people now -- Jonathan Nichols-Pethick at DePauw. David Lipson at University of Strasbourg, and Michael Newman at UW-Milwaukee,

 

Michael Kackman  33:31

And it's all brought together thanks to the golden years of Todd Thompson at the University of Texas.

 

Christine Becker  33:36

All right, so you still feel an angsty or you calmed down a little bit now or?

 

Michael Kackman  33:40

I'm kind of coming down. That's that's one of the things is, man, the crash. It's really, it's pretty intense.

 

Christine Becker  33:45

I hope you're gonna send, I don't know what you would send Mary that would be...

 

Michael Kackman  33:50

Well, if I was a decent person, I would then volunteer to be the one to take the dog out in the snowy slush, but I'm so worn out from this emotional ordeal. I think I just had to go take a nap.

 

Christine Becker  34:01

Well, and also you have to take care of your voice, right?

 

Michael Kackman  34:03

I do.

 

Christine Becker  34:04

Your podcast voice, you can't risk going outside.

 

Michael Kackman  34:06

You know, I need to respect the instrument.

 

Christine Becker  34:09

Understood.

 

Michael Kackman  34:12

Oh, it's so easy to be a self-indulgent person. Alrighty, thanks for listening to us. Enjoy the ... winter.