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I suffer from height sickness, especially on planes. Sometimes I panic when driving at night on unfamiliar highways. Claustrophobia, however, is not something with which I am burdened, or any similar anxiety related condition.
I am aware that these are not particularly interesting disclosures, but nevertheless provide a necessary premise for what follows.
The other day I was watching for the first time an episode of ‘ER’ entitled “Blood Relations”, from the show’s tenth Season. After assisting in the delivery of a baby boy, Neela is locked up in the hospital’s hyperbaric chamber with the new born. She is initially uneasy, but shortly after entering the chamber, this develops into a state of panic and anxiety symptomatic of claustrophobia. Hard to believe, but the scene caused me to jump off the sofa and pause the DVD player. I felt a weight on my chest and had difficulty breathing. My heart was pumping like hell, and my legs felt weak. I had to walk around the room for few minutes …I was almost laughing. Then I sat back and resumed watching.
What had happened? – Nothing particularly strange, actually. Vittorio Gallese, a Professor of Human Physiology, would say that “there are at least two types of identity to be explained:
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(1) the identity we experience as individual organisms, by means of which the self is uniquely individuated (i-identity) and
(2) the identity we experience in other individuals, by means of which the self is identified within a larger community of other beings (s-inentity)" (V. Gallese, "Roots of Empathy", Psychopathology, n.36, 2003, p.172)
The experience of s-identities rely on the so called mirror neurons. "Whenever we look at someone performing an action, beside the activation of various visual areas, there is a concurrent activation of the motor circuits (the mirror neurons) that are recruited when we ourselves perform the action. Although we do not overtly reproduce the observed action, our motor system becomes nevertheless active as if we were executing that very same action." |
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Gallese calls this process "embodied simulation". This solution is undoubtedly fascinating; nevertheless I think that something is missing.
First of all, what happened to me cannot be explained simply by the embodied simulation. I wasn’t merely ‘imitating’ Parminder’s actions (shortness of breath, dizziness etc.). In that moment, I was claustrophobic. Secondly, even if I do suffer from vertigo, it has never been triggered by watching a film, so how could I experience the symptoms of a condition that I do not have?
I believe that in both cases Parminder Nagra is the answer to my problems. To be more precise, I think that the solution to my little enigma has to do with polyphony and truth, two aspects directly connected to Parminder’s acting skills.
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The Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni once said that when we love, hate, rejoice or feel sorrow or sadness, when we experience every shade of sentiment, we always bring with us our ‘sentimental history’. That means two different things: (1) we love, hate, rejoice… through our previous experiences of love, hate, joy… ; (2) in all our emotional states we carry parts of all the others, therefore we can’t love without bringing with us a little bit of our previous experience of hate, fear, joy and sadness. In this respect it is almost pointless to talk about single sentiments, since they are more a ‘polyphony’ than a ‘monody’.
One of Parminder’s greatest abilities is to re-create the characteristic ‘polyphony’ of real sentiments. When she expresses love, joy, fear or sadness, she doesn’t follow the easiest track. She doesn’t use an artistic but stereotypical manifestation of these sentiments (a choice made commonly in performance), but she instead re-creates the complexity of every one of them, giving the appropriate weight to all their components.
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In a way, we are talking about person and mask: a mask expresses only a single sentiment (see masks in Greek Theatre), while a person always expresses the complexity of sentiments.
In support of this, I return to my ‘claustrophobic’ experience. I started to feel unease when Neela is first directed to accompany the baby to the hyperbaric room, and she simply asks: “You’re sending me?” At that moment we are unaware of her claustrophobia, we might suspect it if we recollect the “N.I.C.U.” episode (Season 10 – Episode 12,) but we cannot foresee her reaction once she is locked in the chamber.
This means that in a way, Parminder expresses a claustrophobic feeling without openly performing it. How does she do that?
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I think that Parminder Nagra is able to convey sentiments without overt expression because she bases her performing process on truth. Approaching the subject from a purely logical perspective, the logician Gottlob Frege affirms that acting has nothing to do with truth. Obviously, I don’t want to question Frege’s authority, nor to falsify his logical assumptions, but nevertheless, I do think that there is at least a way in which an actor can portray ‘truth’.
An actor can be true if s/he uses her/his performing abilities, honed through schooling and years of practice, to give bodily evidence to her/his real sentiments. When we watch a movie where two characters are in love with one another, we know that the sentiment between the actors is not true (at least in the majority of cases). We are aware that the performers are not really in love, but at the same time, they can be completely convincing only if they carry with them all of their past experiences of love, fear, hate, joy and sadness. So, if in a movie ‘X’ says to ‘Y’ “I love you”, the logical connection that ‘love’ establishes between ‘X’ and ‘Y’ is not true (i.e. ‘X’ doesn’t love ‘Y’), but what could be true is the expression of love itself (i.e. ‘X’ and ‘Y’ could express their experience of love and of being loved, even if they do not love each other). It goes without saying that the expression of true sentiments is necessarily ‘polyphonic’.
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I believe that this is how Parminder works. When she acts, she is able to be almost ‘skinless’ (please forgive this rather unkind metaphor, but this is the best way to describe it). She recognizes the need to lose all of her ‘inner protection’ in order to express her deepest emotions through her acting. She never wears masks, and you can always recognize the person beyond the role she is playing, even when the role is that very special character named ‘Parminder Nagra’ – the one you might meet on Red Carpets or at official events.
This seems to be an innocent and harmless strategy, but it is not. If you are disposed to forget your own “i-identity” and to experience Parminder’s “s-identity”, the power she achieves on you is devastating. She crawls under your skin and makes you feel everything she feels and/or she has felt. Through the adoption of a ‘polyphonic’ method of acting, in every single moment of a performance, she recollects and expresses a great variety of different sentiments, all of them ‘true’, even if not from a logical point of view, and hence she can let you perceive something you have never experienced (like claustrophobia). It doesn’t matter if she is relying on her own experiences or not. Parminder Nagra may not suffer from claustrophobia, but can create this feeling using a different combination of sentiments that she has experienced. Moreover, Parminder can make you feel every little change of sentiment even without expressing it openly. A comparison might be an orchestral composition. You can almost unconsciously recognize the main theme played by a limited number of instruments, while all the others are playing something different, as Parminder can make you feel the claustrophobic fear of being trapped in an hyperbaric chamber, even if she is not openly expressing it.
In conclusion, we could say that Parminder Nagra uses a polyphonic conception of acting and her almost ontological predisposition to truth in order to reach the roots of empathy, the very place where the emotional participation and engagement in a movie takes place.
Shardy (shardy@libero.it)
(Images from the 'ER' episode 'Blood Relations' - click on each to view full size)
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