From The Prop, by Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes, published by Fordham University Press, the first in its Cutaways series of small-format books guided by a single motif or formal device.
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016).
Beth is a beleaguered young lawyer who drives four hours away from her regular job to teach education law in a small town called Belfry, Montana. In a scene set in a diner, Jamie, with no food of her own to distract her, watches as Beth eats a meal of burger and fries. Jamie, played by Lily Gladstone, is a ranch hand who has shown up for Beth’s evening class. Beth, played by Kristen Stewart, in this seemingly throwaway moment, performs a bit of prop-business both subtle and disarming in neo-neo-realist filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016). The scene begins with Beth having already sliced her burger in half. Beth takes a bite, then picks up what food-service workers sometimes call a “roll-up,” or what patrons of a diner like this might call a “place setting”: flatware tightly wrapped inside a paper napkin. Beth clearly must have already withdrawn the knife from the napkin in order to cut the burger, but she goes on to do something that is both prosaic and bizarre: She uses the roll-up as if it were an unfolded napkin. She presses the napkin, which still contains spoon and fork, to dab daintily the corner of her mouth. This prop—the roll-up—is quotidian, familiar, banal—something found in any greasy spoon. This tiny but arresting gesture is repeated a few moments later, as Beth chews, talks, and explains the duress of her long commute. Jamie, we begin to realize, is smitten with Beth. In her handling of this ordinary object, Stewart (as Beth) makes conspicuous this prop via what seems to be an improvisational gesture. The roll-up announces the modest customs of middle-American foodways and allows the opportunity for the performer to articulate something about the character she plays. Beth must make haste; she needs to keep moving, and her impatience is communicated through her strange handling of what would otherwise be a generic, forgettable prop, something that might ordinarily escape notice entirely. Beth cannot entertain Jamie’s offer of friendship to her momentary companion. The tightly bound confection of paper napkin and industrial flatware stands in for the emotional tenor of this nascent relationship between two strangers. What pressures—temporal, psychic, material— make unrolling a napkin and using it appropriately a seemingly impossible task? This minor scene is emblematic of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s notion of the “expressive object.” Stewart’s fugitive moments of prop play offer deeper insight into Beth’s character, as well as into Stewart’s peculiarly diffident, slouchy performance style. Pudovkin insists on the power of inanimate objects in the cinema when he argues that “an object, linked to an actor, can bring shades of his state of emotion to external expression so deeply as no gesture or mimicry could ever express them conditionally.”1 Undemonstrative and mundane, the roll-up—this tightly wrapped bundle of serviceware—unwraps a view of film performance’s entwinement with the cinematic prop’s necessity.
The relationship of props to the embodied performer, the integral role they play in the gestural labor of the actor, is threaded through our entire discussion, but it is worthwhile here to tease out the investments and entrenched relations between performance and prop value. Cinema’s foundational fascination with bodily movement entails a frequent lingering on the prop and the role of objects; this preoccupation is noticeable across the history of cinema, from pre-cinematic motion studies and early cinema’s development as a narrational medium, all the way through actor training exercises in various schools of performance, including The Method and its multiple tributaries and variants. In numerous attempts to account for the essence of cinema, theorists suggest that the capture of corporeal movement entails a grappling with things that is central to the prop’s circulation through the diegesis, and thus to the unfolding of the diegesis itself. As plot vector, currency, relational mediator, agent of memory, appendage or illuminator of character, and dramatic catalyst, the prop buttresses and expands the very energies of cinematic narration and the articulation of character. The hands that hold and grab props set fields of activity in motion and generate horizons of narrativity. The prop’s status as an expressive resource is bound up with the performer’s bodily activity. In his account of film acting, James Naremore suggests that “actors need to touch things” by necessity, and this necessity of handling the prop world is a vital means of producing screen presence, key to the construction of a coherent fictional self. He further notes that “part of the actor’s job is to keep objects under expressive control, letting them become signifiers of feeling.”2 Concerned with how the border between prop and performer breaks down or becomes porous, Naremore points to elements of screen performances, from Charlie Chaplin’s cane to Barbara Stanwyck’s subtly wielded handkerchief in the tearful ending of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), as examples of how acting techniques extend from an intensified relation between prop and character. In their different generic registers Chaplin’s comedic hyperbole and Stanwyck’s melodramatic realism demonstrate how prop work generates the gestural flow between action and expression.
Top: Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937). Bottom: The Pawnshop (Charlie Chaplin, 1916).
Chaplin’s work as a performer demands greater attention in order to understand how props, in the slapstick tradition, animate the causal chain of the comic gag. In The Pawnshop (1916) we see the articulation of an ethos of prop-ness as the spring that sets Chaplin’s comedy in motion. The prop is crucial to his Tramp persona’s critique of the terms of capitalist modernity. The Tramp is hired to work in a pawnshop, a site of value appraisal which also becomes the testing ground for the limits of objects and commodities when they cross paths with the deranging principles of the performer’s disorderly chaos, famously the Midas touch of Chaplinian contingency. Chaplin’s hands pervert the functionality of objects and redirect from their intended use. Transformed through gags, a clothes wringer becomes a dish dryer, a donut becomes a dumbbell, a ladder becomes a cage and a weapon. In one of the film’s most prolonged and intricate gags, an alarm clock morphs through Chaplin’s handling: It is tapped and palpated like a mechanical patient, next inspected like an open can of sardines, and finally dissected like a frog in formaldehyde. Eventually, the Tramp pulls out the insides of the clock as though they are slippery entrails. Once reduced to incoherent uselessness on the pawnshop counter, the clock’s parts begin to move in insect-like animation. The Tramp uses an oilcan as if it were insect repellent in order to stop the crawling screws and springs in their tracks, before sweeping the dissected parts back into the bewildered customer’s hat and sending him on his way. Noel Carroll describes this comedic sight gag as a form of “mimed metaphor” in which the prop is a vehicle for the “play of interpretive incongruity.”3 Yet we might think further about how The Pawnshop represents the prop’s motility at work in Chaplin’s aesthetic sensibility: The prop is an agent of metaphorization, but simultaneously it is the very grounds of the performance. The exchangeability and convertibility of the prop enable it to act as vehicle for performative virtuosity, on the scale of what Lesley Stern calls the histrionic function of cinematic gesture. In Chaplin’s performance the misuse of the prop unleashes a chain of signifying and figural transformations that undo the prop’s initial and normative diegetic function and thus usher it out of the domain of literality. Chaplin’s propped performances initiate and sustain processes of chaotically rigorous transformation that underscore the alchemical nature of the performer’s power to translate the prop’s properties into strange new idiom. In Chaplin’s cinema the control of expressive feeling through the use of the prop that Naremore describes is directed toward an undoing of control itself, a sort of laborious unmaking that points to the arbitrary status of the prop’s normative utility or use value in narrative fiction.
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954).
Seemingly far away from Chaplin’s acrobatic hyperbole of slapstick prop-play, realist modes of performance place the prop in a quotidian register. In a famous scene in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), the improvisatory nature of the moment in which Marlon Brando takes Eva Marie Saint’s glove out of her hand and then puts it on his own, in an act of eccentric and urgent courtship and reconnection, might be seen as a precursor to Stewart’s performance, in the hamburger scene, of the involution of the self in a state of precarity. In the realist and dramatic acting traditions known as The Method, Lee Strasberg’s adaptation and interpretation of the teaching of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the prop plays a foundational role. Strasberg’s introductory and most well-known training exercise, frequently referred to as the “coffee cup” or “morning drink” exercise, activated what he termed “sense memories” through the faculties of touch, taste, and smell.4 The morning drink exercise invited the rehearsing actor to establish a physical familiarity with a coffee cup, to track its shape, weight, and feeling in one’s hands. This handling of the cup triggered the resuscitation of a range of sensual experiences: the heat of the cup, the smell and taste of the coffee inside it. These actions were next performed by the actor, but this time without the cup. In variations on the exercise, the group in training would be asked to recognize what was being handled by the mimetic gestures of the actor with an absent object in their performed possession. The ghostly object, despite its not-there-ness, nevertheless animates the actor’s performance. This strange, ghostly comportment demonstrates the prop’s indispensability to the techniques, psychic operations, and training regimes that underpin the actor’s work in narrative cinema. To see the phantom prop, the absent coffee cup through the actor’s performance of its fictional presence offers another iteration of what we call prop value, that quality of the object that enables the performance to “work” to produce realism. The prop—both a spectral vessel and an animating presence in the scene of Method performance—thus activates a whole range of mental and corporeal operations in the actor’s practice. The phantom prop’s grounding of performance might also be glimpsed in the contemporary domain of a digital production regime within which actors must act against a green screen and interact with objects and beings who are not there, or not yet there, and who will be made present through CGI.
Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983).
Method acting’s radical cathexis of the prop bears late season fruit in surprising contexts—in filmmaking and performance practices that might seem the antithesis of Method authenticity, such as the unlikely arena of the teen sex comedy of the 1980s. Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983) is, if not at the origin point of this genre, then surely its most celebrated iteration. At its center, of course, we find Tom Cruise, that most durable star commodity, who, according to numerous anecdotal accounts of the film’s production “became” Tom Cruise in this film.5 But Tom Cruise became Tom Cruise not so much in this film in general, but in its most iconic and imitated scene, a mere one minute of screen time that occurs ten minutes into the film’s duration.
Cruise plays Joel Goodson, an allegorically named character, apparently the only child of upper-middle-class parents with whom he resides in a Colonial Revival two-story house in suburban Chicago. (This is a setting one associates with a film like Ordinary People [Robert Redford, 1980] or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [John Hughes, 1986.]) He is good looking, of above-average scholastic aptitude (we learn he has scored just below 1200 on his SATs), and a virgin. His parents are pushy, seemingly comfortable in their blandly but expensively decorated home, but at the same time, neurotically overinvested in its luxuries: There is a Porsche in the garage, a fancy hi-fi tastefully stored in a wooden cupboard, and a Steuben crystal egg, roughly the size of a small football, that sits in the middle of the mantel. The parents’ only salient characterological trait is, actually, their precious concern for these commodities. Are they “new money,” we might wonder, and therefore a bit too attached to these things? The film does not tell us, but in telling us that these things preoccupy them, it grants itself the occasion to dwell on them—the car, the stereo, the crystal egg—and thus to make manifest its visual and narrative investment in its props in a more general sense. When Joel’s parents leave him alone for the weekend, their main advice has more to do with care for the suburban estate than care for him: “Don’t forget to water the plants around the patio, and the ficus in the dining room.” When concern for Joel is expressed, it is primarily via the $125 that, while bidding him farewell at the airport, Joel’s mother offers him ($50 for food—“Which should be more than enough”—$50 for “emergencies” and “another $25 just in case”).
The scene of the parents’ departure begins in the Goodson home and occasions our first glimpse of the latter. Throughout, the camera maintains a point-of-view cinematography reminiscent of Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947), in which Joel’s parents seem to address him by addressing the handheld camera, which bobs and weaves as if responding to them. The camera-as-Joel (we hear his mumbled reactions to their litany of advice and warnings) follows Mr. Goodson from the kitchen, where the scene begins, to the living room, where Joel’s father admonishes him against the misuse of his hi-fi, and in particular its equalizer: “If you can’t use it properly, you’re not to use it all—my house, my rules.” As this line is spoken, the camera glides towards the mantel above the fireplace to frame in close-up the aforementioned crystal egg, flanked by a pair of matching brass candlesticks. As the camera draws even closer to the mantelpiece, the egg is briefly framed entirely on its own. What is this senseless, expensive-looking globular shard of translucence? Given that we are inhabiting Joel’s point of view, the shot’s brief emphasis on this tony tchotchke presents something of an enigma. Are we to believe it is of special concern to Joel? Or is it a symbolic condensation—both metonymic and metaphoric—of the Goodsons’ class position, their curatorial concern with their possessions? Their concern with Joel’s good behavior, his SAT scores, his application to Princeton (which, along with the whereabouts of the egg, is one of the film’s running jokes and sources of narrative anxiety). Their objectification of Joel’s qualities renders him hardly more than an enfleshed and sentient crystal egg: decorative, modern, isolated, expensively banal, nearly perfect—and flanked by two more traditional presences (the brass candlesticks) that have little to do with him, apart from their mere proximity in the confines of the Goodson home.
Once Joel is finally on his own, we are given an initial and proleptic glimpse of the libidinal freedoms enabled by this short-lived period of unparented autonomy. A close-up shows us Joel’s left hand pouring a measure of Chivas into a glass, and then his right hand sloppily filling the rest of the glass with the contents of a can of Coke. A TV dinner in a disposable aluminum tray is out of focus in the near background. Joel regards his dinner with a look of satisfaction, but his fork meets the apparently still frozen contents of the aluminum tray. In a gesture that descends directly from Chaplin, Joel picks up a frozen lozenge of what looks like roast beef and gravy—and begins to suck on it. The Chivas and Coke, the frozen TV dinner: These comestibles and Joel’s awkward consumption of them help describe Joel’s unsure embodiment of inexperienced not-quite-adulthood. Already, in this brief scene of dinner table insouciance, we can sense the transgressions to follow: the props tell us this. Next, another close-up shows us Joel’s hands turning on his father’s stereo, the use of which he has been sternly admonished against, while we hear him humming the opening piano chords of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” the actual sounds of which (cleverly mixed with the sounds of an audience cheering) take over the soundtrack as Joel switches the music on full blast. (The cheering seems to belong to the track itself, but, in fact, does not appear on the original recording. It assumes, therefore, an ambiguous reality.) Next, we are offered a long shot of the framed threshold that separates the Goodson’s entry hall and stairwell from the living room, inside which the camera is positioned—almost exactly in the space occupied by the crystal egg. As the opening bars repeat again, Joel slides from screen left into the frame, into the proscenium made by threshold’s architecture. His back is to us, to the camera, and his ass is arched up slightly. He slides into the shot, dressed in white socks and an Oxford cloth shirt, the tails of which just cover the protuberance of his buttocks. Only when he, in the next second, turns to face the camera, to face us, do we discern that he is also wearing white cotton briefs (whether Jockeys or Hanes, it is hard to tell). He is holding, in his right hand, one of the brass candlesticks last seen on the mantel, which he uses as a make-believe microphone as he aggressively begins to lip-sync the lyrics of Seger’s fake nostalgic anti-disco hymn, while strutting his half-naked way into the living room and into film and cultural history. In a sense, it is not Joel who slides into the frame, nor is it Joel, his muscular thighs luminescent in the chiaroscuro lighting, who cock-walks his way into the living room. Rather, some strange alchemy occurs such that it is now Tom Cruise who enters this space. Innocence becomes experience through the virtuosity of a performance of ingenious onanistic self-enjoyment, in a closet karaoke performance made possible and, indeed, unforgettable, by the dexterity with which Joel/Cruise employs a candlestick to play-act the phony masculinity of Seger’s overcompensatory manly lyrics and corny, white-man rhythm and blues.
Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983).
As Joel/Cruise enters the living room, the film cuts to a medium close-up at his shoulder and then to a high-angle medium shot in which he approaches the mantel as we see the egg eerily spotlit and now only one candlestick—the other clearly in Joel/Cruise’s grip. A few seconds later, Joel/Cruise turns to the camera, ditches the candlestick by hurling it onto one of the pair of matching chintz sofas, picks up the small shovel next to the fireplace, mounts the coffee table, rams the shovel’s blade into his crotch and suggestively air guitars his way across the table top before jumping and landing on his knees, at which point the shovel becomes an imaginary microphone again. Next, he dispenses with the shovel in order to do a half split, then ricochet into a slightly perfunctory but nonetheless impressive (if only in its manic superfluity) shuffle backwards. He then flings himself back-first onto the sofa on screen left, and—in the grip of what seems like a masturbatory frenzy—kicks his legs in the air, high enough for us to see clearly the cleft of his ass, the indentation of which is indexed by the white cotton jersey that clings to the mounds of his buttocks. He then flips onto his stomach to dry-hump the cushions, his ass now luxuriously (if a bit too frenetically) on display for the high-angle camera.
To describe this scene in this detail (although, in fact, we have omitted any number of details that might have been noted) might seem, well, ridiculous. But it is worth our attention because it performs an apotheosis of the reciprocal condensation and consolidation of prop value and star power (itself a kind of value). This scene is, without a doubt, the most famous in Tom Cruise’s entire filmography. (The most cursory search for “risky business dance scene” garners over six million hits.) It captures and foresees how Cruise’s celebrity and star persona have been underwritten by his commitment to unembarrassed and reckless physicality. This is the star who eschews being supplanted by the stuntman, who continues, even past the age of sixty, to place his bare body before the camera’s gaze. Although it is entirely possible that Cruise might have become the star that he is without having filmed this scene, his star persona is impossible to imagine without it. But given our concerns here, the scene is also impressive, indeed crucial, because of its deployment of and dependence on the prop. Because Cruise’s performance is so kinetically charged, so manically uninhibited, one might nearly miss his agility with the candlestick and fireplace shovel and thus fail to register the essential role that these props play in grounding it. Cruise handles the props so adroitly, and with such sprezzatura, that we almost might miss them. Of course, the POV cinematography in the preceding scenes of parental admonishment has underlined their presence in the house as latent resources—symbolic, narrative, performative—to be, potentially, used up at some later point in the film. They are not, in Stern’s sense, “histrionic” in themselves, but they give rise to and enable a performance that must be characterized as such.
This one-minute scene’s furious density is also interesting in the way that it sutures itself to and elaborates the film’s central preoccupations (Joel’s coming of age, his reckless endangerment of his own person and his parents’ possessions), but also segments itself from the larger narrative. It is a miniature music video made in the era of MTV’s nascent arrival on the cultural scene. This scene is its own commodity, its allure constituted by Cruise’s manipulation and creative “misuse” of commodities, and it serves to consolidate the commodity form of Cruise’s star persona.6 Cruise, then a nearly unknown performer who up until this point in his career was merely one among several post-adolescent newcomers in early 1980s Hollywood, becomes a star through the labor of this scene, a scene in which he clasps props to his body, and ends up being clasped, irrevocably, to the history of cinema. The prop is a tool, a weapon with which Cruise dazzles an unsuspecting audience, but it also becomes a fastening device, a grommet that fixes Cruise’s body to the body of film history and to the history of film performance. The scene is a dance of subjects and objects. The excessive POV-ness of the scenes that precede it, in which we are fictionally (however clumsily) in Joel’s head, is exchanged for the dance scene’s exhibition of Cruise as star, which is to say of Cruise as both subject (star as performer) and object (star as commodity).7 Moreover, the scene becomes a segmented site of cultural fantasy that sustains itself through a cathexis (often mistaken) of this scene’s and the larger film’s props. One frequently asked question on the internet for devotees of this film runs something like: “Does Tom Cruise wear Ray Bans in the dance scene in Risky Business?” Answer: He does not. The Ray Ban “Wayfarers,” of course, are featured across the film, including in the first close-up of his face, just following the title sequence. Sales of Ray Ban Wayfarers shot up 2000% in the aftermath of the film’s successful release. They became indelibly associated with the 1980s and its ascendant neoliberal values of ruthless upward mobility and carefree luxury expenditure. They became, in other words, one of the props of the decade’s ideology, a periodizing marker of the Reagan era.8
- V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting: The Cinema Writing of V. I. Pudovkin, trans. Ivor Montagu (London: Vision Press, 1954), 115. ↩
- James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 33–38. ↩
- Noël Carroll, “Notes on the Sight Gag,” in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 25–42. ↩
- A gloss of this exercise is provided in Edward Dwight Easty, On Method Acting: The Classic Actor’s Guide to the Stanislavsky Technique as Practiced at the Actors Studio (New York: Ivy Books, 1981), 28–32. Stanislavsky’s chapter “Concentration of Attention” might be Strasberg’s precedent, as it focuses on the selective observation and description of objects as central to the actor’s imaginative arsenal. Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (1936; London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 63–82. ↩
- See, for example, Curtis Armstrong, “My Wild Summer with Tom Cruise: Women, Sean Penn, and the Making of ‘Risky Business,’” Hollywood Reporter, June 21, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/my-wild-summer-tom-cruise-women-sean-penn-making-risky-business-1014670 (last accessed July 28, 2022). ↩
- The scene might be compared to the one in A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954) in which Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester, played by Judy Garland, performs for her husband (James Mason) a pastiche of the musical number she has been shooting on set all day. Garland makes use of a variety of household artifacts as substitute props for the props she would have been using on set. Jane Feuer calls this sort of musical performance a “bricolage number.” See Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 126. A close analysis of the scene can also be found in John David Rhodes, Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 115–119. ↩
- For a perceptive reading of the film, one that touches on some of our concerns here, see Matthew Bernstein and David Pratt, “Comic Ambivalence in Risky Business,” Film Criticism 9, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 33–43. ↩
- They and Risky Business itself were made to metonymize this period even, as well, by the opening Saturday Night Live skit in which Ron Reagan Jr. sends up the scene in a make-believe Oval Office. In this pastiche Ron Jr. does wear the Ray Bans, as if the skit could not do without the full array of the film’s iconic signifiers in order to make its point. The question that apparently hangs over the appearance of the Ray Bans in the original scene in the film may spring from this widely disseminated skit. ↩