To a large extent, modern methods of acting tend to deal with the internal experience, as it was largely ignored before our era. Communicating in archetypes was de facto in western culture for thousands of years. The further back you go, the more reliance on archetypes you find. But one must realize, that also to a large extent, most acting in today’s society is still archetype based. Few of us grew up watching high drama. We were raised on cartoons and network television, rife with stereotypes and archetypes, sometimes mistaken for plain bad acting. But maybe the acting wasn’t so bad, villains were villains, and heroes were heroes. Internal struggle was not needed. But the high drama, the ‘real’ acting of our modern world, is squarely laid on the foundation of internal pretense. Despite numerous exceptions, the underlying advertisement for modern acting is “The more you can fool yourself you are other than, the more we will believe you”. Of course there is a limit to how much self fooling is allowed. I haven’t heard of anyone yet supporting self induced schizophrenia as an acting style.

So what am I trying to say? I dunno. Cause sometimes archetypes look like emotional memory and vice versa. The needed levels of each vary from person to person and piece to piece to ensure success. When it comes down to it, some get it right, and some don’t. And after that, no one is even consistently right or wrong, and the archetypes keep shifting, morphing, and falling in and out of favor.

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