Tag: Identity

Acting and the Sense of Personal Identity

The outside world tends to celebrate the most trivial superficial aspects of an actor’s life, lifting their personality to a plastic God-like status, but the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality. In taking on and inhabiting the accoutrements of another’s being—where they are from, their accent, their clothes, their background—you realize that every element of your own personality is malleable. You can do it, you can wear the skin of another human being—and yet still you are you. This, in its own small way, feels profound because it illustrates that none of the things you point to as identity are intrinsic. You are something far more mysterious than a person who is funny, who is angry, who is hurt, who likes Marlboro cigarettes, who is Presbyterian, who is a playboy, who is Nigerian, who is a Real Madrid fan—all of that is dressing.

A Bright Ray of Darkness
Ethan Hawke

Cringe – Fake vs Authentic – Viral Hit Interpretation

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/20/nx-s1-5507263/it-pays-to-be-cringe-lean-in

According to the internet, Brendan Abernathy was unequivocally cringe.

Abernathy is a singer-songwriter living in Texas who went viral earlier this year for an earnest performance of his song “married in a year.” He was relatively unknown before this moment, but the video garnered millions of views along with countless parody videos from comedians and social media users.

Ramtin Arablouei, co-host of NPR’s Throughline, spoke to Abernathy about how to cope with the criticism and shares his insights with It’s Been a Minute host, Brittany Luse. They also get into the rise of cringe culture: where it comes from, how it’s hurting us, and how leaning into cringe is good for art.

Episode Highlights
What happens when a “cringe” video goes viral?

BRENDAN ABERNATHY: It was really hard. Also, some of it was really funny. And I can recognize both of those things at the same time.

ARABLOUEI: Well, what parts of it were hard?

ABERNATHY: People were treating me like I’m selling out stadiums … I’m struggling to sell a hundred tickets, and people are acting like I’m some massive industry plant who they can just tear down. It’s like, you can’t tear me down, guys. I’m poor. I lived out of my car for four years. You can’t really tear me down any more than I’m already down.

ABERNATHY: You hope for a long time that you’re going to get a breakthrough into – just more ears having an opportunity to hear your music. And then when it happens and you’re getting mocked, laughed at, told to take your own life, you know, whatever, it – it’s just really confusing because everything that I know about myself and my music, the internet is saying the polar opposite of that. If you searched my name on TikTok, the third result was, Brendan Abernathy fake. That’s what hurt the most, was that everything I’ve built my life on, which is being authentic and being vulnerable, I was being viewed [as] the complete opposite of that. That’s what hurt. And most people who reacted negatively – it created this, ew, cringe.

Being Yourself When You Are Mitt Romney

“Populism may not place a high premium on honesty, but it is all about authenticity. Virtually every Trump voter I know loves that he speaks his mind and says what other people are thinking but are too afraid to say. Lots of people have lived rather messy lives, and they can see themselves in the politician who doesn’t hide his warts — and sometimes even in the politician who revels in his transgressions.

They’re seen as real, while even the most honest politician can seem fake for coming across as too polished.

(I remember once being in a room with Mitt Romney during his second run for president, in 2012, and listening to a number of activists and consultants urging him to “show America the real you.” Exasperated, Romney responded, “This is the real me!” He was authentically polished and polite.)

The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease

Life Is Always Beginning

If such an episodic life dooms us to inauthenticity, then I say: So be it. The self is not a story.

But a discontinuous self forces us to live in the here and now rather than in the retold past and imagined future. We might even have the feeling that the self is constantly just beginning.

Life doesn’t need a narrative arc. We don’t have to be the stories we endlessly tell and retell about ourselves. Those stories are fabulation and — if told too often — falsification. The more gusto with which we tell stories about ourselves, the further we risk slipping from the truth. One doesn’t have to control one’s sense of self by constantly tying it back to some fictional story of identity.

To live episodically is to allow for the possibility of surprise in relation to the self. Sure, sometimes those surprises are bad. But sometimes they can be rather good.

Life Doesn’t Need a Narrative Arc
The story of the self is not always a grand tale.
By Simon Critchley
Mr. Critchley is a professor of philosophy and an author.

Three Ways to Answer a Question

FISHER: Over 50 percent of Americans do want a partner who shares their political views. About 43 percent want a partner who is of the same ethnic background. About 46 percent want somebody of the same religious background. What’s interesting to me is the huge percentage of people that don’t care.

DUBNER: Is it that they don’t care, or they say on a survey they don’t care because they may want to appear to be the type of person who would say that they don’t care when, in fact, they may care?

FISHER: You never know, Stephen. I do a lot of questionnaires and you can answer a questionnaire in one of three ways:
with who you really are,
with who you want to be,
or with who you want others to think you are.
But because we have so many thousands of people, and there’s a bell-shaped curve, we can be pretty confident of what we’re doing.

Why Did You Marry That Person?
Sure, you were “in love.” But economists — using evidence from Bridgerton to Tinder — point to what’s called “assortative mating.” And it has some unpleasant consequences for society.

Public vs Private Voice – Examples of

Paris Hilton’s voice change
by u/snoo-apple in popculturechat

firstgirlonmars
Me when I worked in customer service

Hedgehogwash
I become approximately 25% more southern whenever I have to call a stranger, I don’t know why.

PrettyPossum420
Same! I also found myself doing it a lot in the service industry. The thickness of the accent would increase in proportion to just how mean the customer was. Particularly nasty customers could get me sounding like Forrest Gump real quick.

PrettyPeaceful
Yes! When I worked in customer service I would go the opposite direction and lower my voice when I talked to older people. Louder and lower was easier for many elderly people with hearing loss. My coworkers would say “you’re using your old person voice.”

parley65
OMG!! When I was a junior in high school one of my friends said something like, “I didn’t know your mom was British!! Why didn’t you tell us?”

I had no idea what the hell was happening. Apparently she was answered the phone with an accent and I had to explain that she was from Georgia and just nuts. She also used to do a soft shoe tap routine for my friends. (No, she couldn’t tap, she just put salt on the floor and faked it). Gosh I miss her.

Thank you kind stranger for reminding me.

Interior Voice – What Does it Sound Like

GROSS: By the way, I noticed that when you do your inner voice, when you’re impersonating yourself in telling a story, it’s not your voice. It sounds more like it would be the voice of your father or grandfather.

GRAY: When you listen to yourself on tape – not that you do or should – does it sound like you think you sound?

GROSS: Well, I’ve listened to myself enough that, you know, I’ve learned that that is how I sound. But the first few times I heard myself, I was really just totally embarrassed and thought like that can’t be true.

GRAY: That’s right. So what I’m doing for you is the idiot that I think that I actually am to you. That’s – I’m trying to apply – you know, the opening of “Mean Streets” where Harvey Keitel…

GROSS: In the church?

GRAY: No, it’s when Harvey Keitel sits up in bed. It’s the very beginning of the film.

GROSS: Oh, oh, oh, yeah.

GRAY: Right before that, you hear a voice sing you do it in the streets. And it’s this little bit kind of this pre-film, maybe two- or three-sentence monologue that you hear. And it is supposed to be Harvey Keitel’s inner voice, but it’s voiced by maestro Scorsese. And Scorsese says it’s because you hear your inner voice differently than others hear you. Your inner voice is different. So I thought it was so beautiful. And so maybe that’s part of the reason the inner voice that I have is kind of this idiot voice, you know?

GROSS: James Gray, it’s been so great to talk with you. Thank you so much.

GRAY: Great to talk with you.

Armageddon Time’ director explores how the world is ruined by ‘well-meaning people’
FRESH AIR
NPR

Noises off – Intro, Quote from

It was during the run of my very first professional show, The Two of Us, four one-acters in which Lynn Redgrave and Richard Briers played eleven characters between them. Five of those characters were in the final farce. One night I watched it from backstage, and as I saw Lynn and Richard running desperately from door to door, doing quick changes as they went, it seemed to me that this was at least as funny as what was going on round the front. It also struck me that the overwhelming obligation actors feel to make their next entrance on time, come what may backstage, was the archetype of the obligation we all feel to keep up our appearances in the world, despite all the difficulties of circumstance and the inherent waywardness of our nature. What would happen, I wondered, if the strictly ordered disorder of a farce onstage was overrun by the real disorder of the actors’ lives off…?

Noises Off
Michael Frayn

Anti-Image as Preferred Image

“So, I hear you’re not really into the whole image thing,” she says.
“Not really,” I say, which of course couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s just that the image thing I am into is the anti-image thing.

Everything I’m Cracked Up To Be
Jen Trynin

It was 1994: post–Liz Phair, mid–Courtney Love, just shy of Alanis Morissette. After seven years of slogging it out in the Boston music scene, Jen Trynin took a hard look at herself and gave “making it” one last shot.

It worked. Suddenly Trynin became the spark that set off one of the most heated bidding wars of the year. Major labels vied for her, to the tune of millions of dollars in deals. Lawyers, managers, and booking agents clamored for her attention. Billboard put her on the cover. Everyone knew she was the Next Big Thing. But then she wasn’t.

In a series of dizzying, hilarious, heartbreaking snapshots, Trynin captures what it’s like to be catapulted to the edge of rock stardom, only to plummet back down to earth. Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be is the story of a girl who got what she wished for—and lived happily ever after anyway.

Who’s More Real – The Character or the Actor Playing the Character – Pirandello Quote

FATHER …On the contrary, I was inviting you to come out of this game [with a warning look at the LEADING LADY]—of art! Art!—which you play here with your actors; and I ask you once again quite seriously: who are you?

DIRECTOR [turning to the ACTORS, astonished and also irritated]. Well, what a bloody nerve! Someone who claims to be a character comes and asks me who I am!

FATHER [dignified, but not overbearing]. A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character really has a life of his own, marked by his own traits, which means that he is always ‘someone’. But a man—I’m not talking about you, but about man in general—a man may well be ‘nobody’.

DIRECTOR Maybe. But you’re asking me, me the Director, the boss! Have you got that?

FATHER [almost under his breath, modestly soft-spoken]. It’s a matter of knowing, sir, whether you, as you are now, really see yourself … in the same way, for example, as you see in retrospect what you once were, with all the illusions you then had; with all those things within and around you, as they then seemed—and indeed truly were for you. Well, sir, when you think back on those illusions which you now no longer have, on everything that no longer ‘seems’ what once for you it ‘was’—don’t you feel, not the boards of this stage, but the earth, the earth itself, give way beneath your feet? For you must conclude that in the same way all ‘this’ that you feel now, all your reality of today, as it is, is destined to seem illusion tomorrow.

DIRECTOR [not understanding much and stunned by the specious argument]. So what? What are you trying to prove?

FATHER. Oh, nothing, sir. Only to make you see that if we [indicating himself and the other CHARACTERS] have no reality beyond the illusion, then maybe you also shouldn’t count too much on your own reality, this reality which you breathe and touch in yourself today, because—like yesterday’s—inevitably, it must reveal itself as illusion tomorrow.

Six Characters in Search of an Author
Luigi Pirandello

Paul McCartney Interview – Fresh Air

On why they chose to go with a persona on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

“We’d been The Beatles for quite a while. And when you made a record, you knew you were making a Beatles record, and so you imposed certain parameters on it. So we can’t get too far out because people just go, ‘What the hell’s going on? They’ve gone mad!’ So you had certain standards for Beatles records [and] you were always trying to advance those standards, but there were limits that you felt. And also when you stepped up to a microphone, you were conscious of all that background of, ‘I’m Beatle Paul, and I’m going to do a Beatle Paul song.’

“I don’t think it really was terrifying or even boring, but I had this idea to just change our identity and make ourselves think that we were kind of another band. So it meant now anything goes, we don’t have to sing like The Beatles. We can sing like whoever they saw the band is. In the end, the name came out of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. So the idea was so that when you stepped up to a microphone, it was not now John Lennon Beatle doing his song. It was a guy out of this strange band, and in some way, it was just liberating.”

Paul McCartney knew he’d never top The Beatles — and that’s just fine with him
Fresh Air

Seeing Your Life Onscreen – Aaron Sorkin Discusses The Social Network – Deadline Interview

DEADLINE: We know Mark Zuckerberg didn’t cooperate but did you ever meet Eduardo Saverin, the character played by Andrew Garfield?
SORKIN: Once Eduardo signed that non-disclosure agreement after his settlement, he disappeared off the face of the earth. We don’t know exactly how much he received, but it’s in the hundreds of millions. And it will probably go over a billion because he also does now own a lot of Facebook stock. But on October 1st, the movie opened and that’s the day I met Eduardo. I got a phone call from our producer Scott Rudin that a representative for Eduardo had contacted him late at night. He wanted to see the movie. So we set up a private screening for him in New York right before Lady Gaga’s private screening. It’s true. I went to meet him when the movie was over and you could have performed surgery on him without anesthesia at that point in time. I gotta say, he was a deer in the headlights which is an understatement. He did certainly expect to like the movie a lot, but you could tell in his face that he had just relived the thing. It’s an unreasonable experience that hardly anybody, including myself, knows what it’s like to have a chapter from your life suddenly written, directed, lit, shot, and performed by actors. That was the first and only time I met Eduardo.

Deadline

“An actor is a man who pretends to be someone who is usually pretending to be someone else.” – Kenneth Tynan

How much of theatre has to do with imposture! Walter Kerr, in his brilliant book The Silent Clowns, points out that Chaplin’s genius lay in his ability to assume any identity at the drop of a hat – to become, in a split second, according to the demands of the plot, a great lover, a great gymnast, violinist, skater, thief, gourmet, conjurer, etc. etc., while having, at bottom, no true identity of his own. This leads me to reflect how much of world drama concerns people pretending to be what they aren’t. Hamlet feigns madness; the noble King of Thebes is an incestuous patricide; Kent pretends to be a serving-man, Edgar to be a mad beggar, In Too True to Be Good (which I saw last week in Clifford’s excellent production) nobody is what he seems – the humble Private Meek is in fact the military commander, while the commander himself is a frustrated water-colourist; the confidence trickster is a priest; his henchwoman poses first as a nurse and then as a countess. Throughout Shaw, burglars turn out to be philosophers, and villainous exploiters turn out to be heroes; even Saint Joan dresses up as a man. Mistaken identity is not only what the craft of acting is all about; it is what much Of drama is all about. An actor is a man who pretends to be someone who is usually pretending to be someone else.

November 16, 1975

Kenneth Tynan. The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan

You and Other People – Drama and Character

…the distinction we live with each day remains simply that between oneself and other people. And the primordial group of other people – our family – makes up the original cast of characters in the drama of life, a drama that we keep on reviving later with more and more people cast for the same few parts. As for oneself, one is the invisible man. One cannot see oneself, one can only see those with whom one has chosen to be identified.

The raw material of character, then, is not very raw after all. It has already been worked over. It has already been turned into a kind of art: the art of fantasy. Life is a double fiction. We do not see others so much as certain substitutions for others. We do not see ourselves so much as others with whom we are identified. When Plato said we see, not life, but shadows of life flickering in the firelight on the wall of a cave, he was an optimist. Or perhaps he made allowances for the extraordinary distortions and suppressions of shadow play.

Eric Bentley. The Life of the Drama
From chapter 2, Character

Context Collapse

As social beings, we adapt our communication to the situation at hand — the “context”.

If you’re a 25 year old student attending University, then you probably talk about different topics, use a different vocabulary, phrase yourself differently and in general behave differently in these situations:

A thanksgiving dinner with your parents, siblings and grandparents.

A pub-crawl with friends your own age that you study with.

A private conversation with a small handful of close friends of yours.

A political meeting discussing policy in a political party you’re a member of.

Colleagues and/or bosses that you talk to during your part-time job.

Context collapse is what happens when all these widely different social contexts all collide.

If you share something on Facebook with the default “Friends” setting, then you’re effectively sharing it with ALL of the groups above and more. Your different contexts have collapsed and become one; and you might find that you don’t have a lot to say that you’d really like to share with ALL of these people.

Quora