Tag: education

The Problem With Stopping Bullying

On By Christopher LansdownIn Bullying, Uncategorized2 Comments

A little while ago, I was watching a Chris Williamson podcast with a guest who studies bullying. One interesting thing about it was the finding that bullying is primarily among popular people. Which makes sense, if you think about it, because they are actually a threat to the status of others and so putting them down can actually accomplish something. But the thing I found really curious was the discussion of how to get people to stop bullying, because both of them didn’t seem to notice that within a secular framework, this is basically impossible.

It’s impossible for the simple reason that bullying works. When you are vying for social status with other people, bullying can discourage them and get them to stop trying to be popular too, paving the way for you to be popular. This isn’t the thing one typically sees in movies where a big guy picks on some small kid. It’s not that that never happens, but it doesn’t usually happen like in the movies. That kind of thing really is just simple theft—you don’t threaten to beat a kid up for his lunch money because it brings you a warm glow of satisfaction or makes you popular with others, you do it because you want more money and don’t want to put in the effort to get it honestly. In movies, mostly the bullies are just externalized versions of a person’s own conscience, and pick on him for his vices or at least the things he doesn’t like about himself because Hollywood writers are bad people and their consciences frequently bother them so they want to externalize their conscience so that they can eventually beat it up to the cheers of onlookers.

In real life, bullying is primarily done among popular kids because they have something of value—social status. Bullying them makes them feel bad and retreat from the things that make them popular. This kind of bullying is covert—in real life you don’t get crowds cheering for you when you bully someone, so you have to do your best to keep anyone from knowing what you’re doing. (Or else tell them stories which justify what you’re doing as protecting yourself or, at the worst, justice for what was done to you.)

In this context, bullying works. You can, through bullying people, make them feel bad. People who feel bad are not as charismatic. They don’t always show up to parties. People stop liking them as much. When you’re around and as charismatic as ever, your popularity goes up.

Worse for the people who want to stop bullying, bullying is one of the more subtle activities human beings engage in. If you try to have any kind of official anti-bullying campaign, some of the first people to use it will be the bullies. They will accuse their victims of bullying them, or the more sophisticated ones will provoke their victims into some kind of retaliation then bring that retaliation to the anti-bullying authority to get the victim punished.

All of this is especially true of female bullies, since females tend to take advantage of other females’ extreme sensitivity to rejection by females. Skilled girls and women can be artists with this kind of subtle signaling which is virtually undetectable to anyone else.

For these and other reasons, bullying is something that authorities (for the most part) can’t directly stop. But what you can’t directly stop you may be able to indirectly stop—you can try to persuade people to not bully others. The problem with this is that bullying works. Asking people to not bully others amounts to asking them to forgo a benefit. Why should they do this?

Within a secular context, now that quasi-religious feelings for nations have been discredited and no one cares, the only viable way of getting people to change their behavior is to show them why it’s to their own benefit to do or not do whatever it is you want them to do or not do. Hence, with drugs, you clearly communicate all of the many side-effects of drug abuse. To try to stop kids from having children out of wedlock, you try to persuade them that having children will suck and tell them in detail about every STD you can think of.

But bullying works and, if the bully isn’t caught, it has no immediate side-effects for the bully. All you can do is to ask them to forgo a benefit to themselves for the sake of another. But the idea that you should love people who can’t give you anything is a religious proposition; it stands or falls on the truth of metaphysical propositions such as God loving us and creating us to love each other (where love is defined as willing the good of the other for his sake). That’s not exclusively a Christian idea, but it is very far from a universal idea.

Chemistry Between Actors

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Chemistry between actors—specifically romantic chemistry between a male and female actor—is a complex thing and for that reason often taken to be undefinable. While it is certainly too complex to put into precise words, this doesn’t mean that nothing profitable can be said about how to achieve “chemistry.” And we can do that by looking at the term we all use to describe it, “Chemistry,” because, as G.K. Chesterton once said

The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

Chemistry is the study of how chemicals interact with each other, that is, how they react to each other. Some reactions are not that subtle, but most of the ones studied by chemists are. And this is the essence of “chemistry” between actors. It’s all about how they react to each other’s subtleties.

The art of chemistry, which is just faking attraction—the art of acting is, at its core, faking sincerity—consists of doing the things that people who are attracted to each other actually do. This is subtle, and is divisible into three main parts:

  1. Being extremely attentive to slight signals from the other
  2. Being very attentive to what slight signals one is giving to the other
  3. Being around the other person is just positive in its own right

Taking these in turn, the first of them consists of watching the other carefully. That’s not enough in acting, though, since we (the audience) can’t tell what’s going on in the character’s head. Which isn’t even what’s going on in the actor’s head, so even if we were telepathic it wouldn’t work. What the actor needs to do is to signal that he’s paying careful attention. That is done through reactions—mostly subtle—to the signals the other is giving. The reactions can be fake, but the paying attention can’t be. The actor needs to actually watch the other like a hawk and improvise appropriate sorts of minor reactions. A slight sign of interest should result in a slight indication of excitement or happiness. A slight sign of annoyance or frustration should result in a small sign of concern.

Of course, reactions are not necessarily linear. If the man is in a mood to flirt, the woman showing slight frustration might result in the man doubling-down on the frustrating behavior. The point isn’t the particular reaction, but that there is a reaction. (Some of this will be contained in the dialog, which is the job of the screenwriter, not the actors, but a great deal can be done with stance, facial expression, where the actor looks, etc.)

Another important part of this is that the actors do actually have to look at each other. You can’t be attentive to what is the focus of your attention without looking at it. This can be long, lingering looks; it can be sly, furtive looks stolen when there’s the least chance of them being observed. There’s a wide variety in how to do it, but it must actually get done, and it needs to be connected to the actions which follow it.

The second item—being very attentive to what slight signals one is giving the other—will typically manifest itself in a certain amount of awkwardness, though that’s by no means the only possible approach. It’s somewhat inevitable that people who are preoccupied will take very slightly longer to respond to everything. The feeling of extra care being taken in phrasing, at least some of the time is very helpful to communicate this, too. It will get more subtle the older the characters are, of course, since experience simply helps one execute better. Teenagers can stumble over their words; people in their thirties should have only slight delays if we’re to think of them as adults and not old children.

The third item—being around the other person is positive in its own right—needs to manifest in at least a slight uplift in all reactions to everything. If you’ve got a pitbull clamped onto your leg, it’s still better to have a pitbull clamped onto your leg with the love of your life around than when he’s not there. It’s not that people ignore everything—again, you can at best kind of get away with that in teenage puppy love—but that there is some improvement needs to be evident. This is going to be particularly hard to pull off because it means remembering to (slightly) lower the reactions in all scenes without the love interest, but without that the effect won’t be communicated to the audience.

These three things, if done, will go a long way to giving two actors “chemistry”. It’s not easy, but then there is a reason why people are impressed with good actors.