Friedrich Nietzsche Asks George Clooney, “Jay Kelly,” and Us: What is an Actor?

“Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Why is understanding the answer to this question so important, and why is it so hard for people to understand it?

After all, Jay Kelly is only a new film starring George Clooney, a famous Hollywood leading man and women’s heartthrob.

On the other hand, Nietzsche, a German philosopher (1844-1900) whose name and works were barely known during his lifetime, was far from a famous actor and a man whose appeal to women was minimal, if that. He was just a lonely genius, a writer falsely accused of antisemitism, who died insane, from unknown causes. But posthumously he came to be considered the most challenging and important modern philosopher, which is a familiar story.

On the face of it, Clooney versus Nietzsche is not a fair matchup today. The celebrity actor can easily wipe the floor with the writer whose examination of the central role of the actor in human life is so old school complicated. But perhaps they are not fully at odds, at least when asking, but not answering, the question – what is an actor?

For the actor stands at the center of the question: What is a human being?

And the movie Jay Kelly, directed by Noah Baumbach, is too cute to venture that far for an answer. It titillates while tumbling into clichés. Many will say the movie is about the dangers of seeking fame, but that is an incorrect and superficial interpretation, for it is about acting, but not in a deep sense.

A few nights ago my wife was starting to watch the film when I entered the room. Since I am an actor, writer, and a philosopher, or an acting philosopher who writes, she paused the film and said, “This might interest you.” It did, and so I watched it with her.

The film is a bit of a picturesque travelogue showcasing Clooney’s good looks and stardom. He plays the character Jay Kelly who is a conflicted, very famous movie star. Where Clooney begins and Kelly ends – or vice versa – is meant to be indeterminate. I think it fair to say that Kelly is portrayed as Clooney’s alter ego – or vice versa – to entice the audience. Only an incandescent movie star can play a movie star; for the play’s the way to sway the audience into suspending any suspicion that these Gemini Twins can be separated.

Kelly luxuriates in his fame and fortune as he is waited on by those who work for him, notably his manager, played wonderfully by Adam Sandler. Others fawn all over him and he is of course recognized and regaled by movie fans everywhere. All his memories are movies because he has become his role as a movie star. He revels in it, even while pangs of conscience over the price he has paid for fame and fortune gnaw at him.

His is an old, hackneyed lament: I should have been kinder to people and more faithful to my family; I should have spent more time with my children when they were growing up.

This latent inner doubt about his lifelong obsessive pursuit of the actor’s life starts to bug him as he realizes his daughters, one starting college and the other grown and working, are beyond his control, with the older one seriously wounded because he was never there for her as she grew up. (Interestingly, as far as I remember, no wife or former wife is mentioned for Kelly; in fact, the only romance is between Clooney and his female fans who might watch the movie).

Jay meets an old friend whom he betrayed when both were young struggling actors. The friend, played powerfully with nuance and dynamite by Billy Crudup, eviscerates him with raging words and a maniacal glare for the betrayal, and they have a fist fight, which, of course, Jay, being the star, wins, injuring his erstwhile buddy.

We learn he has also cruelly treated his mentor who has just died. Even his 24/7 staff ultimately revolts and abandons him because they lose patience with his megalomania. They realize that the personal price he has paid for his compulsive pursuit of the famous actor’s life has also robbed them of personal contentment.

Kelly’s story of never being home for his children as he was always elsewhere, panting after fame and the unmentionable moola, is quite common across occupations. But he is a professional movie actor, playing characters living lives opposite to his “real” fake life, thus creating a public image that follows him back and forth from screen to street.

Kelly, like most celebrities, lives in a bubble where maintaining his public persona at all time seems necessary. Exhausting as it may be, the illusion must meet the demands of the public’s delusions. Yet we are meant to feel the poor star’s pain. So the film ends with Jay sitting in a theater in Italy watching clips of his movies during a ceremony honoring him. Misty and as helpless as a kitten up a tree, he seems disturbed – sort of. The viewer thus is invited to the pity party.

The film’s epigraph is from the poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide. It reads: “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be someone else or nobody at all.”

And so we are left with the impression that the misty-eyed Jay regrets his soul destroying obsession with fame, even as the film adds to Clooney’s stardom.

But I am not writing a film review. Nietzsche and I thought we might take this matter of acting to a deeper level. After having appeared together in the Off-Off-Broadway comedy based on Friedrich’s  book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, we were both startled by how Jay Kelly stopped short of examining the nature of the actor and therefore the nature of the human being. We agree that it is much easier acting as if we are someone else, but “being” somebody else is impossible. The film, at least, seemed to recognize that. And although we have heard of a book titled “The Diary of a Nobody,” who could have written it?

I am reminded of what I once wrote about the movie star Paul Newman’s memoir, Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man:

‘I was my mother’s Pinocchio, the one that went wrong,’ he tells us right away, leading us to the revelations of his human, all-too-human reality. His was a life of facades and dead emotions, false faces, and his struggles to become who he really was. He tells us he wasn’t his film roles, not Hud or Brick or Fast Eddie or Cool Hand Luke, but he wasn’t really the guy playing them either. He was a double enigma, an actor playing an actor. He writes:

‘I’ve always had a sense of being an observer of my own life. . . . I have a sense of watching something, but not of living something.  It’s like looking at a photograph that’s out of focus . . . . It’s spacey; I guess I always feel spaced out.’

It sounds like Jay Kelly, the fictional actor.

It sounds like everyone who follows a script they didn’t write to please the faces that they face on the social stage.

It sounds like life in a selfie cell phone world of the internet and images.

You will agree, I’m sure, that everyone is an actor, not of course of the stature and fame as George Clooney or Paul Newman. Not an actor on a film set; not an actor on a wooden stage somewhere. But an actor in the Shakespearean sense of “all the world’s a stage and men and women merely players.”

What other person could act like Jay Kelly, quite a cruel and self-centered character, crying almost imperceptibly and sensitively for having missed his real life as he watched a tribute to himself on the large screen, and as a result become a more popular and adored actor for that scene? Fritz and I submit that was a prodigious feat. Perhaps it was meant as a joke. Jokes are good.

Of course we have the treacherous actors on the political stage who are no joke, reality TV stars and other hypocritical bastards whose actions lead to the suffering and death of millions but whose blatant falsity is accepted by so many as genuine. How is it possible that such atrocious actors, the blatant and the subtle, can be supported again and again, when their acting skills are so feeble that they wouldn’t even be cast in a elementary school production of the Emperor’s New Clothes? One might think that such lying creeps, serving the interests of the super-rich and the war machine, might be seen in their naked falsity – but alas, they are not. Why this might be so when the lies are so obvious is an interesting question. In a society where life has become an ongoing movie, where propagandists and Hollywood and an entertainment culture provide formulaic scripts for the public to follow, and the mass media provide an endless hall of mirrors to venture down, the flow of political depravity is endless. Playland as a bitter joke.

And then there are the family scripts from childhood, deeper than deep, learned by osmosis and followed by habit, that stymie free thought and living as a genuine actor.

But if our movie star Jay Kelly were capable of becoming himself, would he stop acting? That is impossible; for to act is to do (from Latin actus “a doing”). Everyone acts in that sense. Not just imaginary movie characters and those who play them. And yet the film suggests there is a “real,” authentic Jay hiding behind the public persona that he might possibly abandon. This is a false conceit that plays to the audience; that implies that film actors and the audience as well just need to shed their hypocritical (from Greek hypokritēs “stage actor; pretender, dissembler,”) charades and be sincere. As if a professional actor is a doer but a real person just is; as though if you search enough, are sincere and sensitive enough, you might find yourself hiding somewhere.

The old saying – acta non verba (action, not words) – suggests we are not hiding somewhere but are constituted by our actions, by what we do and not by what we say or imply. The rendezvous of persons that many play with shameless assurance – now this person, now that, the multiple personas to fit the occasions  – can only be surpassed by a unified doing in the present. To make a distinction between the stage and off-stage and to suggest one can return to one’s true self when off-stage is another form of mimicry.

A genuine actor never stops but identifies with all one’s actions and realizes that to be is to become without end. And to do so while dismantling the scripts others have provided to make us copies of actors in a culture of the copy.

When rehearsing for our parts in Ecce Homo, Fritz and I had a good laugh one day when he startled me by saying that when he wrote the book, he finally realized that through his writing he had become a great actor and that the play might best be thought of as a spectacle without spectators, a kind of cosmic joke we were playing for ourselves. It is why I wrote the script for the play.

At the time I laughed but really didn’t get it. Now I do. I really do.

“Hi-diddle-dee-dee
An actor’s life for me”
Pinocchio

Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His new book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press)

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