I got to thinking the other day while watching television (what a shock! I usually don’t) that acting on television is so unrealistic at times. Although there are good and bad actors, I discovered something: you accept it anyway. Often we don’t even recognize that we’re being fooled—we simply blindly accept this contained reality that we know is so obviously unreal.
As just one example of many I could give, I’d like to mention a realization I had where I realized that I had been fooled. Having once been extremely—blindly, even—religious, I had owned and watched the movies based on Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind series. In them, actor Brad Johnson plays Rayford Steele, an airline captain who ponders cheating on his wife Irene with one of his flight attendants. Then the rapture happens, taking his wife and son and leaving him and his daughter, Chloe, behind. Rayford feels ashamed and eventually becomes saved and follows God. This was the only time I had ever seen Brad Johnson in anything, and I suppose that, in my mind, I had associated Rayford Steele with Brad Johnson.
Thus when I saw Wild Things 3 (which I wouldn’t recommend), and I saw Johnson as a corrupt man conspiring with two bisexual twenty-somethings—whom he was having affairs with—to steal diamonds worth a lot of money, it just didn’t seem right to me. Surely Brad Johnson wouldn’t lower himself to play such a role as that? That’s just not in his character! Wrong: that wouldn’t be in Rayford Steele’s character.
Now this doesn’t necessarily make Brad Johnson a good actor, but I was—subconsciously, at least—fooled by his act. Thinking more about it, it’s more like that in real life than we think. People generally think they’re fooled by good actors—people who pretend, rather successfully, to be that which they aren’t. However, I’ve come to realize that sometimes the worst actors fool us the most because we see them that way. Sometimes the people you think you know most completely have, in fact, fooled you completely.
I will likely expand upon this topic or similar ones eventually, but as for the moment, I have no time.
