Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)
2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19346018.74.3.4.01
ISSN1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
Resumoin the extensive body of scholarship devoted to George Romero's groundbreaking film Night of the Living Dead (1968), rarely has anyone asked an obvious question: who is Duane Jones?1 The casting of Jones, a black actor, in the lead role with an otherwise white cast has been recognized as one of the film's defining features. Many scholars have followed the lead of Richard Dyer, who argues that the film radically breaks with the power of whiteness to disguise itself through the mantle of the ordinary (46). And yet the celebration of the film's transgressive representation of race has long been framed by two paradoxes. The first is a critical consensus that the acting in the film is “bad”—so bad, in fact, that it “works.” The second paradox was posed by a New York Times reporter in the following way in an interview with filmmaker Jordan Peele: “Night of the Living Dead is one of the few classic horror films about race, but its director, George Romero, said he didn't intend it to be” (Zinoman). Peele's response is typical: “I partially believe Romero, but even if that's true, the way that movie handles race is so essential to what makes it great” (qtd. in Zinoman). Romero long insisted that Jones had been cast solely because of the acting skill he brought to a part that originally had been envisioned for another actor who was white (Kane 31). When asked about a connection between casting Jones and the “racial turmoil” of the time, Romero replied, “It wasn't on my mind at all” (qtd. in Williams 196). The critical judgment of the acting in the film as universally “bad” has led many to only “partially believe” Romero's disavowal of any intention to make a statement about race.Another paradox follows: Duane Jones has been considered simultaneously the most and the least important person in the making of Night of the Living Dead. Described as a color-blind accident, his casting is understood to have made all the difference, while his acting presumably made none at all. Ben becomes “the black man,” as he is often referred to in scholarship: for example, “the black man in Night is the sole character in the film who is both sympathetic and capable of reasoned action” (Shaviro 88). Eliding the names of both character and actor, such comments carry the troubling implication that to be black is a role in itself, and thus any black actor, professional or amateur, would have had the same significant effect. The erasure of acting reverts critical recognition of racial difference to a reductive dependence on type. As the invisible man says on the opening page of Ralph Ellison's classic novel, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (3).Motivated by the belief that credit is due to black actors when representations of race are theorized based upon their work, I want to consider Night of the Living Dead as a counterintuitive example of the difference acting makes to a film's meaning. Rather than seek to reverse the long-standing judgment of acting in the film as “bad”—a fool's errand that would reinscribe a very limited understanding of how to critically engage acting—Iwant to elaborate how and why acting does make the film “work.” Unlike readings of cult film in which “bad acting” is praised as an agent of camp self-consciousness, critics claim that in Night of the Living Dead “ham-fisted” acting contributes to the film's “‘realistic’ atmosphere” (McFarland 25). This realism-in-scare-quotes falls short of the illusion of “expressive coherence” that James Naremore posits as central to realist acting, in which the actor's display of conflicting emotions, attitudes, or thoughts reveals a complex, unified character (71–72). But those scare quotes also invite reconsideration of realism's central place in the meanings that through long use have accrued to the terms “good acting” and “bad acting” in popular and scholarly film criticism. This reconsideration is key to my project, in which I will attempt to thread a critical needle: acknowledging “good acting” and “bad acting” as historical tropes but not applying them as valid terms of evaluation.Within the collaborative experiment that was the making of Night of the Living Dead, Duane Jones had the deepest expertise in acting, a singular strength recognized by all involved in making the film. As a result, his expertise had an outsized effect, shaping an unusual merging of actor and role that proved crucial to the film's success. Jones created the character of Ben, a claim supported by accounts of the film's production. This character does in fact make the film “work,” but not because of a realistic effect predicated on a naive rejection of the artifice of acting. Rather, the film's iconoclasm, which erodes many of the tenets upon which realism depends (e.g., well-developed character motivation, arcs of emotional development, plausible causality in plot), thrives on mixing modes and styles of acting. Ben's reactions to what the television newscaster calls “incredible events” that “are hard to believe” but “appear to be a fact,” reactions that exist only in Jones's cool, measured performance rather than in dialogue or plot, are critical to the film's unlikely ability to sustain credibility. This credibility in turn allows the film to sustain elaborate readings of racial representation such as Richard Dyer's article “White,” as well as broader theoretical discussions of the subversive vision of Night of the Living Dead.2In what follows, I more fully consider critical claims linking “bad acting” to the film's realism, as well as claims regarding Romero's subversive vision, in order to demonstrate how theories of acting can add depth and complexity to these questions. I am interested in the limits of realism as a standard of performance, attending instead to the variable relations among stimulus, response, and emotion offered by Andrew Higson as a way to close the gap between “two ways of thinking about acting,” which Higson summarizes as “the intentions of specific traditions of acting, and the effects of acting in . . . the production of meaning” (145). I then turn to a detailed account of how Duane Jones created the character of Ben, the affective range of the performances, and the film's profound construction of a world suspended between the strange and the normal in which the question of race cannot be reduced to theme, plot, or character.With surprising consistency, critics draw a direct connection between “bad acting” and heightened realism in Night of the Living Dead. Ben Hervey describes the acting as a major limitation, albeit one that “enhances the film's effect” (13). Noting the “theatrical” tendencies of Jones and Judith O'Dea as Barbra, Hervey contends that “the sometimes-mediocre acting perversely helps Night feel real, feeding a nagging, back-of-the-mind sense that these are not actors, but actual people under threat” (49). For James McFarland, “the very crudity of the movie's surface, its anachronistic black-and-white cinematography . . . , its ham-fisted acting and lack of sophisticated crane and dolly shots . . . all contributed to the ‘realistic’ atmosphere it created” (25). According to Pauline Kael, “[t]he film's grainy, banal seriousness works for it—gives it a crude realism; even the flatness of the amateurish acting . . . add[s], somehow, to the horror—there's no art to transmute the ghoulishness” (413–14). The actorly “art” capable of such “transmutation” was almost certainly understood to be Stanislavskian realism, with its focus on character motivation and depth of emotional range as the embodiment of dramatic action. Realism thus figures as the heart of the paradox: the film's “bad acting” is more real than the presumed “good acting” of the realist school. “Amateurish” acting became a marker of the film's disruptive style, which is credited to director Romero. Duane Jones was acutely aware of this critical narrative: “For whatever reasons, the reality of who we were in the first place was never clear. Critics assumed we were all a group of amateurs from Pittsburgh. The so-called ‘amateur’ they decided to bestow professionalism on was George Romero” (qtd. in Kane 37). Jones's claim is demonstrably true; professionalism was “bestowed” on Romero in 1970 when the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) featured Night of the Living Dead in a film series dedicated to “new auteurs.”Night of the Living Dead offers an exemplary case of the ways film acting disappears in scholarship, subsumed as an element of mise-en-scène into the coherence of the director's vision. Consider Steven Shaviro's insightful characterization of Romero's accomplishment in Night: Romero turns the constraints of his low budget—crudeness of presentation, minimal acting, and tacky special effects—into a powerful means of expression: he foregrounds and hyperbolizes these aspects of his production in order to depsychologize the drama and emphasize the artificiality and gruesome arbitrariness of spectacle. (91)For Shaviro, the ghouls center this powerful aesthetic: “These walking corpses are neither majestic and uncanny nor exactly sad and pitiable. They arise out of a new relation to death, and they provoke a new range of affect” (85). The production of this new range of affect evokes comparison to Walter Benjamin's account of film actors in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “the zombies’ residual, yet all-too-substantial, half-lives reproduce the conditions . . . of film actors separated from their charismatic presence (which the camera has appropriated)” (Shaviro 85). Actors remain hypothetical in Shaviro's account; no particular actors are identified. Rather, actors serve purely representational, politically progressive functions inseparable from character. “All three films [of the original Living Dead trilogy] have women or blacks as their chief protagonists, the only characters with whom the audience positively identifies as they struggle to remain alive and to resist and escape the zombies” (88). For Shaviro, as for Hervey, McFarland, and Kael, “minimal acting” serves the film's aesthetic. An uncomfortable irony burdens such readings, however: on the one hand, they claim that the director, with his prosthesis the camera, drains power from the actors, while on the other hand they credit Romero with a radical critique of patriarchy and whiteness signified primarily by those same actors’ bodies.3Theories of acting also offer ways of understanding the creation of “new ranges of affect,” “the depsychologizing of drama,” and the “arbitrariness of spectacle” (Shaviro 91). A relatively flat or ostentatiously theatrical performance style, rather than indicating a lack of professionalism or talent, may embrace surface as an ideological imperative or a dramatic necessity. When Night of the Living Dead was screened at MOMA in 1970, the film was still showing at a “fleabag” theater in Times Square (Hervey 17). Key principles of realist performance, such as the logic of psychological motivation and arcs of emotional development, are often set aside in art and exploitation films alike. Ben's character fits this mold: he has no backstory or emotional ties, and he acts in response to the circumstances before him. Such exteriorizing marks a distinction between two often opposed theories of acting: realism (naturalist) and modernism (anti-naturalist). Most judgments of “bad acting” presume the efficacy of a realist logic of emotional response. However, many of the terms used to criticize the acting in Night of the Living Dead—flat, theatrical, amateurish, iconic, minimal—can carry a positive valence in anti-naturalist traditions. So, too, “good acting” can be viewed with suspicion as a form of ideological falsification, a concern central to Naremore's Acting in the Cinema, for example.4 The ideological critique of realist acting often entails a preference for the instantiation of anti-naturalist performance. Indeed, realist acting can be considered “so good that it's wrong,” obfuscating social reality in the revelation of individual experience.I want to follow a different path, however, one suggested by Andrew Higson in an article on acting styles for independent film, albeit in the 1980s British context. Higson proposes that one helpful way of understanding the difference between realist and modernist concepts of acting lies in their different understandings of the relationships among stimulus, response, and emotion, which he outlines in this way: Logic of realism/identificationI saw a bear (stimulus)I was frightened (emotion)so I ran (response).Logic of modernism/distantiationI saw a bear (stimulus)I ran (response)because I was frightened (implication).As Higson notes, these approaches connote different assumptions about the relationship between interiority and exteriority, as well as that between the individual and social relations (145–46). Realism is understood to depend on internalized motivation (e.g., using Stanislavskian sense memory exercises) to elicit action: fear motivates running away. A modernist anti-naturalist approach, in contrast, privileges bodily response to external circumstance (e.g., Meyerhold's biomechanical schema) in which physical actions elicit emotion: running away triggers fear (Higson 145). This distinction supports the conceptual difference between the psychological coherence of character and its social construction, which in turn is often framed as the distinction between engendering bourgeois individualism in the merging of actor and role sought by realism (exemplified in the writings of Lee Strasberg) and Brechtian distantiation, in which awareness of the actor's performing creates critical space for the audience to think rather than simply feel.Higson complicates this distinction, as have many scholars writing about film acting since 2000.5 “It would be wrong,” Higson warns, “to operate upon a rigid distinction between the ideological efficacy of naturalist and anti-naturalist acting, where naturalism automatically means empathetic identification = bad, and anti-naturalism automatically means distantiation = good” (146). This simplified “rigid distinction” often has been invoked in film studies, however, to highlight a conflict between two sets of apparently opposed values: “good acting” and social meaning.6 In Peter Wollen's canonical account of Godard's “counter-cinema,” acting embodies core values of the “old cinema”—“identification” and “fiction”—as the respective sites of the audience's empathetic involvement and the dissembling falsehood of appearances (120–22). Counter-cinema opposes “identification” and “fiction” with their revolutionary counterparts: “estrangement” and “reality” (127–28). Wollen's elaboration of this hierarchy of values helps explain why so many critics claim that “bad acting” adds to the “reality” of Night of the Living Dead. As the “the black man,” Jones is understood to embody racial difference and thus signifies an estranging reality that makes acting (although not the director's vision) irrelevant. To escape this impasse in which acting not only can but apparently should be ignored, I will adapt Higson's focus on the relationships among stimulus, response, and emotion to read the performances by Jones and other actors in the film.In its long original run, Night of the Living Dead was sui generis, building to an unprecedented critical and financial success that broke with the conventions of both Hollywood filmmaking and art cinema. Its originality, as well as its power to speak to its historical moment, has everything to do with the nature of Ben's characterization. Jones's performance maintains a naturalistic register, one that stands in provocative contrast to the bizarre circumstances the characters face. The normal standards of realism fail to apply to the film, not simply because of its fantastic scenario, but also because the actors do not maintain the “united front” that Naremore rightly identifies as crucial to the illusion of expressive coherence widely recognized as “good acting” (70). Instead, Jones's measured reactions stand in edgy contrast to the more histrionic performances of Judith O'Dea as Barbra and Karl Hardman as Harry Cooper. I am not suggesting an intentional design of stylistic incoherence by Jones, Romero, or anyone else. Rather, as the actors worked together, I believe Jones's greater experience and talent allowed him to anchor the affective range of the acting in a dramatic register that never falls into parody and thus supports the film's widely cited realistic effect. My claim here is admittedly speculative, but no more so than familiar appeals to the agency of the director's vision, such as made by Shaviro, as previously quoted: “Romero turns the constraints of his low budget—crudeness of presentation, minimal acting, and tacky special effects—into a powerful means of expression” (91).I want to consider a more basic question: who defines a character in the making of a film?7 Narrative films are presumed to be scripted; characters are written, actors are hired, and their performances are directed. The very words “scripted” and “directed” diminish critical understanding of an actor's freedom to develop, let alone create, a character. The production history of Night of the Living Dead demonstrates how plastic a scripted character can be. According to soundman Gary Streiner, Jones “adopted his interpretation of Ben in the casting session and for evermore was the holder of the character” (qtd. in Kane 33). The production process for Night of the Living Dead was collaborative, with responsibilities and decision making shared among the Image Ten production group formed to make the film; technical knowledge was respected and dispersed among the group (Hervey 12–13). Jones already had substantial training as an actor when he was cast in the film. Like many members of Image Ten, Jones had been active in the Pitt Players as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh. Jones had subsequently moved to New York City, where he studied acting at the storied American Academy of the Dramatic Arts and performed with the Actor's Company repertory theater (Russo 10).8 He was visiting his family in Pittsburgh when a college friend recruited him to audition for the film (Russo 43).Jones's expertise is evident in the development of Ben's character. The film was shot largely in sequence over a period of months, allowing Ben to take form as part of the film's overall creative evolution. Crew members describe Ben's character becoming more like Jones, displaying the actor's characteristic intelligence and professionalism (Kane 32–33). This should not be taken as a sign that Jones “played himself,” however. To cite one example, Jones had a deep aversion to guns, and Ben holds a rifle through much of the film. Jones “really hated that gun,” Romero recalled. “So, we had to have somebody hand it to him. It had to be taken from him right after” (qtd. in Kane 35).The most tangible sign of Jones's interpretation lies in Ben's voice. In his popular book on the film, Joe Kane compares the scripted lines attributed to the main character called “Truckdriver” to what Jones says when he first enters the farmhouse: ScreenplayTruckdriver: Don't you mind the creep outside. I can handle him. There's probably gonna be lots more of ’em. Soons they fin’ out about us. Ahm outa gas. Them pumps over there is locked. Is there food here? Ah get us some grub. Then we beat ’em off and skedaddle. Ah guess you putzed with the phone.FilmedBen: Don't worry about him. I can handle him. Probably be a whole lot more of them when they find out about us. The truck is out of gas. The pump out here is locked—is there a key? We can try to get out of here if we get some gas. Is there a key? [Ben tries the phone] ’Spose you've tried this. I'll see if I can find some food. (33)Jones's interpretation rejects the script's ersatz working-class vernacular, a clumsy attempt to endow the Truckdriver with “character,” a marked particularity for an actor to perform. With his first line in the film, Ben tells the terrified Barbra (Judith O'Dea), “It's all right.” Jones's resonant, reassuring, masculine voice relieves a psychological strain that has built over the seven minutes without dialogue in which Barbra fled the ghoul in the cemetery and hid in the farmhouse. Barbra's plea to her brother—“Johnny, help me!”—constitutes the last words spoken before Ben's “It's all right.” It's clearly not all right, but the line isn't laughable. The film needs the Ben who arrives: practical, authoritative, reasonable, and unlike Barbra, not incapacitated by shock. The lines Kane quotes immediately follow, as Ben canvasses the house, speaking and moving quickly with a sense of urgency but not panic, in vivid contrast to the slow, tentative gestures of Barbra.Indeed, Jones's dramatic objective is to establish a new normal: a new range of affect that “depsychologizes” the drama and accepts the gruesome arbitrariness of the spectacle, to return to Shaviro's terms. Ben's movements are practical, fluid, paced, and constant. The scene is not smooth, however, in the way “good acting” is expected to be, a technical rather than performative effect. When Jones raises his voice in this scene and others, it doesn't have the expected dramatic force but instead sounds harsh and canned because of what soundman Gary Streiner calls the “barbaric” way in which the dialogue was recorded with “a microphone [placed] in the most common spot” in each scene. According to Streiner, “[t]he fact that you can actually hear what people are saying in Night of the Living Dead is actually a bit of a miracle,” especially since most of the dialogue recording was “live,” not looped afterward (qtd. in Kane 59–60). Recording dialogue in this way requires the actors to project toward the microphone, a violation of professional standards that gives an amateurish sound to some lines. Jones's generally appealing voice and delivery, which is far less emotive than that of Barbra or his antagonist Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman), aligns Ben's character most closely with the television newscaster (Charles Craig) who normalizes the “incredible” events with his professional diction, factual reporting, and practical advice. The script's hackneyed language of “skedaddle” and “putz” lacks such authority.Naturalistic responses to irrational stimuli endow both Jones as actor and Ben as character with an authority that exists outside the technical standards and narrative conventions of Hollywood filmmaking. Rather than eliciting a performance of emotion, this odd pairing of naturalism with the unrealistic circumstances “depsychologizes the drama,” to return again to Shaviro's term, and offers Jones a rare freedom from the imperative to justify the presence of a black leading man. Jones's interpretation of the role did not require the script to be rewritten. Nor was the script revised to reflect the racial difference that Jones's casting introduced, although that possibility was considered. The strength of the script ultimately lies in its refusal to situate the characters outside of the crisis. Why, for example, does Ben refuse to make his stand against the ghouls from the basement, with its lack of windows and impressive lock bar on the inside of the door? (My students invariably ask this question when I teach the film.) A more conventionally scripted film would psychologize this point to give Ben an internal motivation, such as claustrophobia or a traumatic memory from childhood. When Ben does retreat to the basement, he would overcome this personal aversion, transforming a weakness into heroic resistance. Such a traumatic event could easily be scripted as racist in nature, embedding racial difference in both narrative and characterization. This would be the classical Hollywood narrative turn, affirming “that action will spring primarily from individual characters as causal agents” (Bordwell and Thompson 76). Night of the Living Dead, in contrast, has an existential conception of the relation of character to plot, one that resists the internal motivations of well-rounded characters and richly detailed performances central to the “good acting” of the realist tradition.De-psychologizing the drama narrows the affective range of the characters and therefore the performative range available to actors. In Night of the Living Dead, anger and fear dominate, punctuated by moments of disgust and weariness. Once inside the farmhouse, the characters have heated arguments about a contrived situation: whether to stay upstairs or lock themselves in the cellar. In the end, this choice proves meaningless when Ben retreats to the cellar only to be shot by the human posse as he emerges. Characters are not “causal agents” in this film; they are wholly reactive to circumstance. The excessiveness of the circumstances locks the plot into a fatalistic repetition of violence. Dramatic tension is generated less by the different ways in which the characters respond to circumstances than by the different styles of the actors’ performances. Characters’ expressions of anger and fear exemplify different patterns of stimulus, response, and emotion. Stimulus is often arbitrary or chimerical in the film, as is most apparent in the beloved opening sequence. Barbra is afraid from the moment she steps into the cemetery, pulling the collar of her trench coat protectively around her neck. As she and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner) complete a visit to their father's grave, he reminisces about scaring his already frightened sister when they were kids. The story repeats in the narrative present, with Barbra increasingly afraid and angry as Johnny antically pretends that the old man wandering in the background is a threat, which, of course, he will turn out to be.The emotions elicited by horror films condition Barbra's fearful response. Johnny mimics Bela Lugosi as he teases his sister with the film's most famous line: “They're coming to get you, Barbra,” a self-conscious allusion to genre expectations at work in the diegetic world as well as for the audience's benefit. Ernest Mathijs aptly terms such gestures “referential acting” (141). Consider how referential acting could intervene in the logic of stimulus and response: Referential acting: “They're coming to get you, Barbra”Because I was frightened (emotion)a ghoul attacked me (stimulus)so I had to run (response).The genius of the opening scene lies in its blurring of the relationship between actual and imagined stimuli (“He's coming to get you”) as Johnny plays on Barbra's irrational fear. The broad gestures of O'Dea and Streiner align with the uneasy verisimilitude of the scene. Johnny playfully feigns fear by hiding behind a tombstone (see figure 1), a gesture Barbra will repeat moments later as a sign of terror as her brother fights with the ghoul (see figure 2).For the characters, as for the movie audience, horror elicits anticipation and fear but also promises pleasure. The film attacks this familiar affective range with what Shaviro calls its “gruesome arbitrariness of spectacle,” while simultaneously undermining the ostensible realism of quotidian experience as the dull ritual of the annual visit to the cemetery takes its irrational turn.The emotion expressed by the actor is framed by stimulus and response, which has an elemental, evolutionary logic in relation to fear: fight or flight. Ben and Barbra respond to fear in these dramatic and classically opposite ways, suggesting perhaps why Higson makes fear the exemplary emotion in his comparison of acting styles. The film invites this comparison by having Ben repeat the same sequence of actions taken by Barbra upon entering the house: locking the door, catching his breath, going to the window, bumping into a chair at the dining room table, trying the phone. Jones's cool performance begins in stark contrast to O'Dea's highly emotive one. Compare their reactions to the farmhouse telephone: Barbra grabs the telephone receiver in desperation, only to get a busy signal. She holds the receiver in front of her, gripping it with both hands, and stares at it in wide-eyed disbelief before her face contorts into a desperate, silent cry (see figure 3). Whereas Barbra becomes even more distraught, Ben responds with simple frustration, raising his hand in a dismissive gesture at the busy signal and acknowledging, “I suppose you already tried this” (see figure 4). Barbra looks like a character in a horror movie; Ben does not. Ben's expression of fear is of a different register from the moment he and Barbra first meet. Startled by headlights, Barbra clutches her hands to the sides of her head in a histrionic gesture of fright (see figure 5). In contrast, the first image of Ben in close-up presents him as unnaturally impassive (see figure 6).This is more than a gendered difference between female hysteria and male stoicism (although it is that too), since Ben's lack of affect invites comparison to the ghouls. In the next shot, however, he turns his head and looks over his shoulder at a ghoul; the look back has become an iconically human gesture because the ghouls lurch face-forward with shoulders squared. O'Dea works the familiar shocks and scares of horror films into an ever-deeper sense of panic, playing to the audience's anticipation and apprehension in much the same way Johnny plays with Barbra's fears in the cemetery. Jones's measured responses define a counterbalancing naturalism within the film; his reactions are proportionate to the immediate circumstances. Those circumstances are so bizarre that even extreme actions appear commonplace. The audience never wonders why Ben lights a body on fire, punches the hysterical Barbra in the face, or ultimately shoots Harry Cooper. Jones's reaction shots are short and stoic. In each case, he moves immediately to the next act
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