Sometimes when a moment in the work falls perfectly into place, people will be tempted to say “That worked on so many levels!” It’s meant as a compliment, or recognition of someone’s skill, but I’ll tell you a little secret: no, it did not work on “so many levels”. At most, it worked on two. It worked on two levels – what was said, and what was done. That’s it. (Or perhaps a third level ”“ which is all that wasn’t said and wasn’t done that also was part of the entire experience.)
Acting classes will come up with terms like “You need more layers!” or “I need to see more layers in your work!” We don’t walk around with layers in life, like some platitude out of the movie Shrek. Well okay, yes, like the titular ogre, people are multifaceted. If I’m relating a story to someone about my parents and all the things they have lived in their lives, I’m feeling all kinds of things that come out of me in the telling of their story.
Layers are useful for studying the rock formations in the Grand Canyon, but not so much with people. It would be nice to think of our inner life as an orderly pile of thoughts, feelings, neuroses, and struggles that can be neatly separated, but we’re so much messier than that. And thank God for it!
In reality, everything is so much more connected. Think of it more like a spider-web. Every piece of the web, though it may vary in size or shape, fits exactly as it should. If one piece is disturbed, it will reverberate throughout the whole, because it’s all connected. So it is with our thoughts, feelings, and actions. They are each inseparable from the other, and each one affects the other in profound ways.
Laughter often turns to tears in an instant. Our secret weirdness exists in relation to what we allow to be seen. We get freaked out, we get angry, we love, we fight, we make love, we sit in stillness, or rage like a storm. All of these things exist within us, and each affects the other. See what I’m saying?
Recently, I visited a good friend of mine in the hospital. No one knew what was going on with her, she’d been hospitalized for days, unable to get out of bed.
First of all, hospitals are a very interesting place that evoke all the layers out of your being! You’re walking down the hallway, trying not to be rude or nosy and look in the open doors ”“ but you can’t peel away your eyes, and you see room after room of human fragility. You see sickness, disease, hope, prayer, grief, boredom, futility and death. It makes you confront your perception of reality. Oh shit.
What is life? Why am I here? Why am I wasting time with garbage that doesn’t matter ”“ especially when you witness the conclusion. If you’re lucky, or maybe not so lucky, depending on how you see it, all of a sudden you start grappling with something real, something true.
So I enter the hospital room and I see my friend, and she’s so fragile, and I’m like, “Oh my god.” I don’t want to freak out and make her more anxious than she already is. So I try to work through it. But of course, I start to cry. Then I crack jokes. Then we both laugh as my friend puts on mascara to look pretty for the hot nurse on duty, even though she could very well be near death. It’s not just Horror of Horrors! Likewise, these various, seemingly disparate feelings don’t come out one after the other in an orderly fashion. They’re not layered.
So if someone says to you in an acting class, “You need more layers in your work” what they’re really trying to say is, “Stop playing your idea of how this is supposed to look and let all of yourself be expressed, even if it doesn’t make sense.”
That’s more accurate. Or you could also just turn to them and say, “Look man. I’m not a piece of cake!”
The legendary psychoanalyst Carl Jung put it like this: “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” So why settle for layers, when there is a universe inside you?