Thespian Homogeneity

I was struck recently by comments made by Tom Hanks to The New York Times Magazine this summer. The Hollywood icon made some rather puzzling remarks regarding his (first) Oscar-winning performance in the film Philadelphia:

 

“Let’s address, ‘Could a straight man do what I did in Philadelphia, now?’ No, and rightly so. We’re beyond that now, and I don’t think people would accept the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy.” 

 

Strong medicine. Particularly so, considering Mr Hanks’ performance in Philadelphia, was and remains a career-defining moment. It is a magnificent performance; a tender and heart-wrenching portrayal of an able lawyer, wrongfully dismissed by the senior partners at his firm after discovering he is an HIV-positive, gay man. When Philadelphia was released in 1993, it was nothing less than an act of courage and compassion for Mr Hanks, then a fast-rising star, graduating from a comedic pedigree in films like Sleepless in Seattle and Big, to take on such a risky role. It was a time when fundamental recognition of the rights of our homosexual brothers, our fellow human beings, was entirely lacking.

Simply put, the equal humanity and dignity of homosexuals was not recognised anywhere in the world. Far from it, in fact, the vicious stigma of “the Gay Plague”, as it was pejoratively (and widely) called back then, only served to aggravate hatred towards the gay community. Philadelphia was a significant motion picture, sensitively and humanely exploring issues of the AIDS stigma and the corollary second-class status of a class of human beings simply because of their sexual orientation. Had it been a shallow, crude caricature of the AIDS epidemic and the badges of servitude branded on the gay community, Philadelphia would have deserved condemnation upon release and today. That is how we judge art and entertainment, or at least we used to. 

Today, none of that matters – of course – to the morality police and its ever-shifting code of extra-legal mortal sins. Vapid, unthinking cohorts in society that reserve the unreviewable judgment to brand anything and everything as a matter of discrimination and historical prejudice. Everyone in every profession should “stick in their lane”; there ought to be no cultural or artistic cross-pollination. Incidentally, it is apt to note that the ugliness of such identity politics, where human beings are viewed less than the entire sum of their parts, but rather according to labels (black, white, gay, straight, religious, irreligious, etc.), as if each label represented a monolithic entity of harmonised individuals, is precisely the mantra of the extreme right and its philosophy of segregation and racial supremacy. Naturally, the idea that straight actors should not play gay actors is aeons away from the moral repugnance of legally enforced segregation and race codes. Still, both philosophies share a disturbing commonality: the failure to recognise a common humanity in all of us, Homo sapiens. 

On a practical level, how would this ascendant politically correct doctrine of rigidity be defined in the domain of acting? Can a Muslim actor portray a Christian? Can a lesbian actress portray a straight woman? Can an actor portray a mentally ill person, even though the actor has never been diagnosed with any mental health condition (re: would Mr Hanks condemn his second Oscar-winning role in Forrest Gump?)? How about playing someone with a degenerative brain condition? The inanity of such questions should be self-evident. The acting profession is premised on the elementary presupposition that the actor is not the person they are portraying. I was never under the misapprehension that Robert De Niro was actually a homicidal taxi driver, a self-destructive heavyweight boxer, or the patriarch of an organised crime family in his real life. I was even more confident that Sir Daniel Day-Lewis was not Abraham Lincoln (or an American for that fact). The important thing was that I was absorbed and moved by all these performances in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Godfather Part II, and Lincoln. These were masterclasses in acting, embedded in thoughtful, challenging motion pictures. That should be the alpha and the omega of the matter. In fact, the less we know about an actor’s personal life, predilections, their sexual orientation, their religiosity, or political affiliation, the better. A performance’s authenticity bears no relation to the beliefs or identity of the actor behind it. 

Perhaps Mr Hanks ought to have been a little embarrassed if the studio behind Philadelphia actively dismissed more able actors simply by virtue of their sexual orientation. Even if that were the case, that would detract precisely zero from his performance's authenticity and emotional resonance. Nor would a selection of an actor because they are gay, to play a gay role, guarantee in any way that the performance would be more authentic or poignant, no more than it would be to say that Richard Nixon could have delivered a greater performance as himself over that of Sir Anthony Hopkins.