Never underestimate the importance of body language.
Last night I was watching Brick while ironing my gi (fabulous movie, btw; noir set in a high school, and it works), and thinking about how Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of those actors I don’t often see, but generally enjoy when I do. Then I thought about N.K. Jemisin’s guest post on Whatever about Inception, and a comment in the thread there about JGL, and I realized what it is that gets me about his performances:
He understands how to use body language.
Most guys look good in three-piece suits, but as Arthur in Inception, he doesn’t just wear the suit, he wears the posture that makes the suit look good. In Brick, when he’s been beaten up something like four or five times in as many days and is coughing his lungs out, there’s a shot of his feet stumbling down to the path that will lead him to a very dangerous confrontation — and then he stops, and his feet settle, and then he walks off as if nothing’s wrong. (Gamer-brain says, “that’s what spending a point of willpower looks like.”) He doesn’t just act with his face and his voice; it goes through every part of his body, so that the telling details might be in his hands or his shoulders or something else you maybe don’t even notice, not consciously, not unless you’re looking for it.
I’ve realized this is a common theme among actors I like, the ones where hearing they’re in a movie will instantly get me more interested. Johnny Depp does it, and brilliantly. Cate Blanchett does it, though at the moment she’s about the only actress I can think of who does. (I blame the industry, not the actresses; they don’t often get as wide a range of roles to play.) Paul Bettany does it, and he was the one who made me realize body language was a key point for me, after noticing the subtle physical cues he works into his performance. When Vin Diesel remembers to do it, he can hold the entire screen by presence alone; one of the most bad-ass shots in all of Pitch Black is him simply standing up.
And when people forget to do it, that failure can undermine an entire performance. (Now I’ve got kitsunealyc in my head, ranting about Gwyneth Paltrow’s terrible posture in Emma, that made all her dresses look like sacks.)
This drives me a little crazy because of course I want to make use of this idea in fiction, and I can’t — not exactly. The kinds of physical quirks I’m thinking of work best when they’re done subtly, in the background; in prose, though, I have to describe whatever I want you to see, and that automatically draws your attention to it. Especially because getting the nuance of a gesture or twitch might require an entire sentence of description, when the act itself takes half a second. You have to approach it differently: well, duh, it’s a different medium. I think the equivalent in prose is finding that precisely-calibrated angle from which to describe something, that will carry a whole weight of implied meaning without taking up a lot of space. Dunnett does this brilliantly (as she does so many things), particularly with Lymond’s hands; she’ll say something about his face being caged behind his fingers or whatever and somehow her descriptor manages to make me see everything else surrounding it: posture, white knuckles, the whole ensemble of body language, from that one perfect detail. It won’t always work, because one reader’s metaphoric connections aren’t the same as the next, but it’s the only way I can really see to accomplish what I want.
So, I just have to become as awesome as Dorothy Dunnett. <g>
I’d love other examples of this, either in the form of authors who really pull off physical nuance on the page, or actors/actresses who make good use of it in performance. Do you find it as effective as I do, or are your particular buttons of a different sort?
