♪ When you're smiling When you're smiling ♪
- Oh, shit! - I SAID OVER EASY!
- Now, why did I do that?
[Music]
When people evaluate great actors, what often gets mentioned most is range:
how many different characters they can play;
how many different emotions they can realistically, movingly show.
But I think a criterion that's just as telling as range is depth:
how many different ways an actor can portray the same emotion.
I spent the last few weeks watching pretty much every film
Jack Nicholson ever made.
And it's clear that the man can do it all,
but it's also no mistake that intensity is his calling card.
Today I'd like to explore the ways that Jack Nicholson conveys
and uses anger in his work;
the angles he approaches it from,
the spins and emphases he puts on it
in order to see what makes Jack Nicholson so great.
[Screaming]
Anger is an emotional response,
a reaction to something.
That reaction manifests psychologically but also...
physically.
Everyone's had that sensation of being...
convulsed with anger.
What Nicholson shows again and again in his roles
is how anger can literally possess the body like a spirit.
- Because I really want to know.
Because if it's a mistake, maybe we can do something about it.
This is the moment when anger becomes aggression.
Half the time, that aggression in Nicholson's work
is realized as actual violence against someone else
whether it's psychotic violence or in some way...
justified.
The other half of the time, this theatrical anger takes place
in Nicholson's own personal space.
He flails around—
sometimes as a threat or a suggestion of violence to come.
A lot of the time, it's just a release— a discharge of pent-up energy.
To me, these moments
(the weird contortions and spasms that Nicholson makes)
are more poignant than
actual attacks on people.
They're a kind of exploration of...
the relationship between body and mind.
And it never feels like overacting.
I think that's because these gesticulations are all unique to the particular anger
that they spring from;
whether it's focused, pointed anger or generally frustrated anger
or petulant childlike anger.
- You see that sign, sir?
Yes, y'all have to leave.
I'm not taking any more of your smartness and sarcasm.
- You see this sign?!
For Nicholson
—and everybody else, for that matter—
anger can be a form of desperation,
a noise so loud that you don't have to hear your own insecurities.
In Mike Nichols' "Carnal Knowledge" for example,
Nicholson plays a playboy who objectifies women
and refuses to commit.
One of his lovers asks him to get married
and he...explodes.
- Where the fuck is my shoehorn? This place is a mess!
There's not any food in the house.
Half the time, you look like you fell out of bed.
Nicholson acts a kind of anger here that it's easy to see right through.
The larger and louder it is,
the closer he is to recognizing a vulnerability in himself.
- You want an extra $50 a week?
TRY vacuuming!
You want an extra hundred?
MAKE THIS GODDAMN BED!
TRY OPENING SOME GODDAMN WINDOWS.
That's why you can't stand up in here.
THE GODDAMN PLACE SMELLS LIKE A COFFIN.
That's the challenge for an actor playing this emotion.
You're not just playing anger;
you're playing what's under it.
Most anger isn't psychotic.
It's only a thin veneer for what's brewing below,
and you have to be able to turn up the volume
while preserving traces of this deeper motivation.
That's what Nicholson excels at.
In "The Border", for example, Nicholson plays a border agent
who gets caught up with his partner's human smuggling operation.
When the partner starts killing his competition, Nicholson realizes that
he's gotten in too far.
The key emotion in this exchange
isn't anger
but fear.
Fear at what he's gotten himself into.
Fear that he won't be able to get himself out.
Nicholson bursts with anger here.
But it's in the silent moments where the actual feeling lies.
- I don't care about your fucken money.
- But you took it...
- Your fucken life is gonna be fly shit before I ever get involved 'n murder.
You understand what I'm saying to you?
Do ya?
This is why Nicholson's characters seem real in their anger.
Even with great writing and great direction,
it's only the actor who can make a character...
polyphonic;
like more than one thing is happening at the same time.
And even when you do that, the particular expression of anger
has to rise out of the particular character's personality.
For example,
take these two examples of anger which are both underlaid
with a strong sense of superiority.
- You can't handle the truth.
Son, we live in a world that has walls,
and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.
Who's going to do it?
You?
You Lieutenant Weinberg?
- Never! Never...
interrupt me. okay?
Not if there's a fire.
Not even if you hear the sound of a thud from my home
and one week later...
there's a smell coming from there that can only be a decaying human body.
And you have to hold a hankie to your face
because the stench is so thick that you think you're going to faint.
Both of these men feel smarter
and more important than the person they're lecturing to.
But the first is a lifelong military man
in a court of law.
Nicholson barely moves his body or head.
Every swivel of the neck is measured and exact.
He's so restrained that a simple lean forward
feels like...
he's lost it.
- I did the job - DID YOU ORDER THE CODE RED?
- YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!
The second man is smug and in his own space.
His movements are freer, looser.
And they even seem to mock Greg Kinnear's homosexuality.
- Don't knock!
Not on this door.
Not for ANY reason.
Do you get me, sweetheart?
No two expressions of anger are the same;
not in real life and not in Nicholson's work.
Sometimes his anger is comedic,
sometimes...cartoonish.
Sometimes it's quiet.
Sometimes it's misplaced and sometimes
it's deeply, deeply wounded.
- Freddy,
whatever you're doing stop it.
- Freddy, whatever you're doing stop it.
- I hope you die.
- I hope you fucking die.
Watching so much of Nicholson's acting,
you start to get a sense of the larger shape of anger
as a human phenomenon;
its extremes, its physicality and its dangers, but also its...
necessity in the course of a life.
None of us can avoid anger.
You can't remove it from the constellation of feelings.
But you can understand it.
Jack Nicholson has a wide range of talents, as wide a range as an actor as anybody else.
And yet if all he ever did was give us these sixty years of insights
into anger, it would still be a career well spent.
[Music]
Hey, everybody. Thanks for watching.
That was a lot of Jack Nicholson movies to see.
But it was totally worth it. You learn a lot by watching a master.
Thanks for watching that and thank you to The Great Courses Plus
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Thanks guys for watching
and I will see... the rest of you next Wednesday.