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Playing Your Character
Since somebody else brought this up in the comments, I thought I would just dive right in. The topic of the moment is the notion of living your life as though you were playing a character.
As a simple experiment, try the following: for one day, instead of using the words, “I”, “me”, “mine”, etc. use the words “my character” instead. So it would go something like this:
You’re thinking: I’m hungry or, I have to go to work.
And then you transpose that into: My character is hungry or My character has to go to work.
I can’t guarantee your results, nor can I necessarily guarantee the psychological healthiness of the exercise, but I can guarantee that you will probably have a weird time doing this. For an even weirder time, see if you can find another character who is willing to play along, so that you can really see the psycho-social implications this way of thinking opens up:
PERSON 1: I hate you.
PERSON 2: No, you don’t. Your character just hates my character.
PERSON 1: No, see - this is what I mean. I really hate it when you talk like this.
PERSON 2: So what you’re saying is that your character has a negative reaction when my character speaks in such a way as to reveal that both of us are in fact only characters playing roles. It’s a social construct…
PERSON 1: You’re a social construct!
PERSON 2: Right! That’s exactly what I’m - I mean my character - is saying.
PERSON 1: Just forget it.
I’ve talked to a couple people about this and there seems to be a general consensus that this may be a dangerous road to commit yourself to psychologically. I haven’t been implementing it a lot in my life, but I have become a lot more aware of it lately since I started writing a lot of fiction again, and have numerous characters running around acting out various facets of my so-called life.
The usefulness that I have found in it is that it opens up new ways of dealing with your life. It allows you to look at the ways in which you are an actor and the ways in which you are a director or writer of your own life. Or you could think of it as a soldier and a general. We tend to be both with varying degrees at most times during our lives.
The danger I see in the whole practice of “playing as your character” is of course that you may become hopelessly disconnected from your own life and begin feeling like a sort of ghost unable to connect with actual experience. But if I could hazard a bit of a guess, I would say that there are a great many of us who feel like that very often as it is in our lives. So maybe it would be wise to look at what those feelings stem from and figure out practical methods by which we can change them.
What do you think? Or, I should say, what does your character think?
PS. One other thing: this is precisely why I could never play Dungeons & Dragons or other role playing games. Because I could never make the leap backwards from saying, “My character does such and such” (swings his +2 Elven blade for example) to “I do such and such” without feeling really cheesy about the whole thing. Maybe the two issues are connected…?
- I don’t need no stinkin context
- Here’s a person
- In-Blog-nito
- He thought to himself
- Jumping Out of the Movie
- Prev: Dreaming Yourself Awake
- Next: Moments of Consciousness
December 14th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
if you want to push it even further, you can start to develop multiple characters.
if intentionally crafted Multiple Character (dis)Order isn’t crazy enough for you, conjure a different spirit to possess or tutor each character.
December 14th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Very interesting!
Then you could probably also start investing your different characters into objects and so forth, right?
December 14th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Without verbal conceptual constructs like this interesting “game”, you can begin to explore the process of self-analysis or, even self-observation. It (somewhat crudely) points toward ways to become a bit more impartial about the “self.”
December 14th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
Do you mean “it” as in this language game?
December 14th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
If you’d like to see a movie about a guy who lives his life as a “character” and treats everyone he encounters as though they are other characters on his set, check out “The Movie Hero” (starring Jeremy Sisto). I loved the idea of the movie, but couldn’t really get into the movie itself.
December 14th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
I think that “My Dinner with Andre” has some great scenes exploring this issue. I highly recommend it.
Andre’ Gregory spends the first 30 minutes talking about a drama commune he was part of for a few months where they would “improv” scenes — but the characters were “themselves”. Trippy stuff.
Somewhere I have some quotes from John Cassavetes about learning to play the part of yourself that you have been rehearsing and rehearsing your entire life up until that point. I’ll dig around.
December 14th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Sounds awesome! Thanks!
December 15th, 2006 at 12:09 am
I think what is more likely is that you may become more self-aware, by observing yourself in this way without identifying with the “I” that is doing or thinking.
December 15th, 2006 at 12:11 am
see The Horse and the Driver
December 15th, 2006 at 2:26 am
Hey Br. Thomas, my name was Br(ooke) Thomas before I got married. It’s actually kind of weirding me out, looking at ‘my’ name, knowing it’s not me.
I agree with you that ‘playing as a character’ will make you more aware, both of yourself and of the dynamics going on around you. But it doesn’t really conflict with Tim’s point. That will disconnect you from your life (as you’ve known it) in certain ways; you will become more detached from the habitual role you’d been thinking of as yourself, but that’s not a negative.
Hopefully you come to the realization that you have been playing a role all along, because once aware of that, oh, the fun you can have… You are freed up to play around with dynamics of interaction that everyone else is just blindly reacting to. You don’t have to let on that you know; that’ll just annoy the piss out of people, like Tim’s little dialogue scenario illustrates. Why not, instead, just know what you know and put it to good use, consciously develop your character as you’d expect any good storywriter to do, and proceed to live an interesting, fruitful life.
December 15th, 2006 at 4:56 am
Interesting that about role-playing games. I always fell naturally into calling myself ‘I’ when I played them as a kid. But then I always projected something of myself into the character, no matter what he or she was ’supposed’ to be.
Now, having tried to write for a while, I can describe the related experience of trying to get properly inside the head of a character I’ve invented, to feel/see/hear what he or she feels/sees/hears. There’s always ‘me’ in the background, but now and then I learn something from imagining myself as someone else and take it on board. Very interesting.
This idea of not having any fixed point to fall back to, just playing with other people, sounds a bit like the trait of a psychopath.
*
My own thoughts this morning are along the lines that each of us does indeed have a self distinct (to a degree) from the rest of the universe, and that virtue (a la Socrates) consists in the relations between that self and the rest of the universe. Though selves are the source of much trouble they are also required for this.
December 15th, 2006 at 5:09 am
Mind you, THIS is interesting:
I deliberately chose the alias ’speedbird’ to comment on topics like this. It was a very very personal choice and seemed /really really important/. But I’m not sure exactly /why/. Just feels right, like I can think/see/feel more clearly.
December 15th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
Exactly–the question isn’t whether we’re role playing or not–it’s whether or not we are aware of it, and how much input we have in building the character we’re palying…
December 15th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
This relates to writing in another way, too–when your books get reviewed, and you see all these strange things, nice and mean, people say about you, the author, it becomes very easy to disconnect from that name/identity you’re reading about. You become, to yourself, just another blip on the media radar, if that makes any sense. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I wish I had started publishing under a pseudonym, which would make that whole disconnect much easier to take. Although in a way, of course, it’s good, because it’s a very good exercize in not getting attached to your identity or what people think of that identity; you have to either become obsessed, or let it go…
December 15th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
Are you (your character) saying that I (my character) was suggesting that?
December 15th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
My most important work is done under a pseudonym, which like you say allows a certain detachment from how others perceive ‘that’ character. I find it especially useful for the way it both protects the ego from the work, and the work from the ego. It allows the ego to relax and let the true self do it’s thing more easily, because no mistakes or criticisms are going to come back to bite it, directly. It also disallows the ego from inappropriately exploiting any positive attention the work receives, or from becoming too self-conscious in the future as a result of that attention.
Meanwhile the ‘character’ I play as under my ‘own’ name (chosen by my ‘parents’ actually, so is it more, or less, my ‘own’ than one I’ve chosen for myself?)… is actually less revealing of who I really am, and more me putting on a show, than that which I express through the above-mentioned alter ego with the different name.
So which is more the ‘real’ me? Well, each is a different aspect of me with different purposes and priorities, that’s all. It’s the old ‘both and neither’ answer I guess. I don’t know… Brooke doesn’t like to think about these things that her alter ego tries to get her to think about all the time. Brooke just wants to ROCK.
December 16th, 2006 at 7:53 am
But wait, so our *actual names* are already pseudonyms to begin with. Why would we even need another ever?
December 16th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
It’s not so much a matter of whether or not the name used is a pseudonym, it’s a matter of whether or not it better serves one’s purposes to use just one name, or more than one. All pros and cons considered, for me there are more advantages (at least for the time being) to having more than one. That might not be true for everyone. I just find there to be less hassles and more room for creativity this way. But I’m probably weird.
December 18th, 2006 at 1:00 am
…my character is laughing her ass off.
December 18th, 2006 at 5:17 am
> our *actual names* are already pseudonyms to begin with. Why would we even need another ever?
Dunno. But my pseudonym here sometimes feels like a ‘truer’ name. I was taught (though I don’t really know the truth of the matter) that native Americans take an adult name after a vision quest. That, and this by TS Eliot, are the only things I can relate it to:
*
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, or George or Bill Bailey -
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter -
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum -
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover -
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
*
(The ‘trait of a psycopath’ comment was directed at Brooke’s earlier words, ‘… oh, the fun you can have… You are freed up to play around with dynamics of interaction that everyone else is just blindly reacting to.’)
December 18th, 2006 at 10:54 am
I think you be reading a little too much into that.
I love the TS Elliot thing.