the play’s the thing
Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2
Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream
Julius Caesar, Act 2 Scene 1
The term ‘method acting’ encompasses a range of training and rehearsal techniques that encourage sincere and emotionally expressive performances, as advocated initially by Konstantin Stanislavski. Many of today’s film and television stars are method actors. By focusing on a ‘task’, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and to define what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment.
Perhaps channelling Meryl Streep in the appropriately named film A Cry in the Dark, Jacinda Ardern – who is surely New Zealand’s preeminent purveyor of the modish leftist idiolect – didn’t quite manage to parallel those infamous words ‘the dingo’s got my baby’, but she was able to launch several times, chin a-quiver, into ‘heartfelt’ emotional appeals to ‘hope’ and ‘empathy’, using the broadest possible brush strokes. This got the sweaty-knickered social justice warriors in the audience clamouring.
It’s odd that there were socialist groupies in the audience at all, given that attendees were supposed to be politically ‘undecided’. But then it’s not unusual for the left to cheat. Having gleefully abandoned the West’s foundational value of moral objectivity, Marxists fall readily into a state of guile and delusion. This is a state which many, in fact, rarely seem to leave. To do so requires a degree of reflection and self-awareness which habitués of the ‘new reality’ find greatly discomforting.
We all know who the socialists in the audience were. They were the ones hiding ‘selflessly’ behind their fascist face masks: those most unpleasant instruments of anonymity which seek to merge the physical realm into the innominate nightmare known as ‘social’ media. Incognito in the studio, as online, they appeared as naïve visitors to a local madrassa, masticating toothlessly behind their vizards, faceless druggies getting their fix by inhaling the PM’s verbal flatulence.
The left exuded a similar palpable joy this week when Trump, following his debate with Biden, was diagnosed with COVID-19. Former Obama staffer and Hillary Clinton spokeswoman Zara Rahim said:
“It’s been against my moral identity to tweet this for the last four years, but I hope he dies.”
She also posted a smiling selfie with the caption “this f***ing rules”, and in a third post she said, “we wait for D E A T H”.
While the smiling spokespeople of the left employ formal acting techniques in order to appear nice, we now see that no mantle is too sacred to be cast off – even that of humanity itself. ‘Moral identity’ has been personalised; right and wrong replaced by each individual’s subjective moral compass, which is able to point in any direction he or she likes – except True North.
Ardern’s dramatic sotto voci can be read very much in this context – in that they are designed to mean whatever the listener wants them to mean – and challenger Judith Collins was correct to dismiss them as “waffle”. But she is only partially correct. It is targeted, weaponised waffle, concealing a much more exacting meaning, which few people would countenance were it to be enunciated clearly.
Afficionados of the television screenplay will, by now, be aware that Ardern has been improvising the role of Prime Minister since 2017 only in preparation for a greater role at the supra-national or global governance level over at the UN. In this respect her acting career has been almost as brilliant as that of the other thespian minx, Meghan Markle, although without – and I say this thankfully – the sex scenes.
The People’s Prime Minister had clearly invested in a few sessions with the drama coach before this second debate, and she projected herself more ‘purposefully’ and in a less adolescent and sulky manner than before. Although she did sulk, a bit. Responding to questions is still clearly not one’s thing when one’s objective is to be, simultaneously, a banana republic dictator in jackboots, and a social media starlet gracing the cover of Vogue (for whom, coincidentally, Ms Rahim has also worked).
This film star/dictator dualism is not as incongruous as it might sound. To be successful, the socialist paradigm must rely on ‘pleasant’ distractions in order to conceal both its greater tyranny and its near total disrespect for freedom and the human condition.
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