Key to Power: Acting, Trauma & Primal Charisma
How to Utilize the Big Picture of Charisma in Your Own Life
Definition of charisma
1: a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader)
His success was largely due to his charisma.
2: a special magnetic charm or appeal
the charisma of a popular actor
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charisma
If one were to take the long view of the scope of human history, one could argue that the aristocracy of the modern day is no longer based on hereditary titles, replete with landed estates and nobles oblige to a king, but instead has come to be highly correlated with the movie business. The profession of the thespian may now be the dominant social strata.
If we look at the basics of what make up an aristocracy in short; immense wealth & disproportionate social influence, one would be hard pressed to find another group of professionals who hold such sway in modernity. At the highest levels, people like Angelina Jolie & Johnny Depp hold more rent-free space in America’s collective unconscious than many of the founding fathers, politicians and businesspeople of our day besides the very top of those respective cohorts that have solidified themselves within the domain of public awareness.
Why is this? For millennia, this profession was often looked down upon by the long, prim noses of royalty & other social elites. It is only in the last 100 years, since cinema & television became the dominant media formats of the masses, that actors have assumed their roles as the presiding aristocracy of the most powerful nation on the planet.
Though this may be less so in Europe where the roots of aristocracy are deeper, and this insight could also be applied more broadly to entertainer’s writ large, it is still seemingly actors who hold the most sway. Not only inside their domain but they're also are able to parlay their power into fields, particularly politics, with tremendous success. Though it isn’t necessarily rational as to why that should be. Why would Ronald Reagan or Jennifer Lawrence be in any way more politically sagacious than an ivy league Poly-Sci professor? One would find the comparison in pure knowledge laughably in favor of the professor. But we are not a nation run but intellectuals. The former hold much more social cache than the latter. There’s more at play here.
In this article I want to take a deeper dive into the evolutionary underpinnings of this current state-of-affairs. To do that, it is useful to explore the evolutionary telos of the bodily mechanics that the acting profession so clearly has mastered.
In order to shed light on a subject of interest, it is often useful to contrast it with it’s opposite. In the book The Body Keeps Score, by eminent Dutch psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk, is elucidated a summary of the profound research of embodied trauma. Despite what many a CBT practitioner, self-help Guru or Cogito Ergo Sum utterer Descartes himself would have you believe, human beings are not merely floating minds or Deus Ex Machina’s. We are in fact evolved mammals operating on millennia old hardware that is straight out of the animal kingdom.
The book is fundamental for anyone who would wish to understand this fact in full but I will not go into it further here. Suffice it to say for the aims of this article that your body very much is ‘Keeping Score’.
In general, when human beings experience trauma, that is, any event that leaves a lasting psycho-emotional impact on us, it is stored kinetically in our bodies. This trauma will manifest as painful sensations, emotional overreaction, black & white thinking among a host of myriad other suboptimal behavioral and internal processes relevant to the particular traumatic stimuli. This is because our reptilian and mammalian brains take over from our rational pre-frontal cortex when we experience trauma that we are unable to integrate in a healthy manner.
This is often the source of much of the negative behavior manifested by those in society who are unable to inhabit or exude any sort of charisma. This is because when ‘lower brain’ (the reptilian and mammalian brain) is in control, it quickly shuts off our neo-cortex and give us only three options to interact with the world – fight, flight or freeze. There are thousands, if not millions, of ways that this is exhibited by human behavior.
To go to the extreme for clarity’s sake, addiction is a perfect example. Many addicts experience deep emotional and physical trauma that they self-medicate with through their drug of choice. When they do this, they are essentially at the mercy of the cruel behest of their lower brain. They’re stuck in fight, flight or freeze and they are unable to deal directly with the trauma afflicting them.
What is the effect of this on their body? They’re often quite skinny or obese. They generally have acne, they look gaunt, weathered, older, their eyes are shifty & without clarity or luster. Their shoulders are often drooped, heads down, with quick, twitchy & reactive movements. Their speech is slurred and their voices rough. Social interactions are often difficult, clunky and abrasive. They're more prone to myriad diseases. One must exert quite a bit of effort both in compassion and attention in order to get to a point. This is the opposite of charisma.
Compare the differences in your own mind between the last homeless addict you’ve seen and that of your favorite movie star. A strikingly stark contrast.
So why are we then the not tender hearted, loving people we know we all are deep down and shower our homeless with our time, love and attention? Why do we instead shower the same on people we will never know, who are already immensely powerful and wealthy? Why will millions of people across America pay million of dollars to go see the latest Fast & Furious movie when it is the same exact movie every time?
If we were the kindhearted, generous, compassionate people we generally think of ourselves as, we’d probably spend more time doing the former and realize how foolish the latter is. But we don’t, and the movie/streaming industry is made rich off it. So why is this?
The answer is, as alluded to above and as is the theme of this remarkably brilliant website, in our evolution.
Human beings were evolved broadly over millions of years in small tribes of approximately 100-300 people. Everyone knew everyone. Your social standing was dictated by your place in the tribe. If you belonged, then you survived and quite probably thrived, as your tribe’s populace naturally relegated their differentiated optimal skills to the respective domain of most success. Hunters hunted, weavers weaved, story tellers told stories & so on. Everyone had myriad roles in order to aid everyone else in the struggle of making ends meet in an often hostile and scarce world.
We are still on that hardware nowadays. Therefore, magazines on newsstands have close up pictures of celebrities faces. This draws you in, making them feel as if they’re one of your tribe. You ‘know’ them and therefore are going to take an interest in the details of their lives, even share resources with them, given that one day they could do the same for you. This is the operating system that our brains are playing out in our subconscious. Though the probability of friendship with a celebrity for the vast majority is exceedingly low.
But most of us know this intuitively, right? We don’t need to read any evolutionary theory to understand that actors having outsized influence in our lives is something relegated for plebes who’re too dumb to do anything but gossip about the latest high-profile divorce such as the Heard- Depp trial. Yet many intelligent people were glued to the Hear-Depp trial, streaming services are booming, and the movies continue to make huge profits despite a pandemic & an disrupted economic model that shuttered their main source of income for two years.
This is because fundamentally, actors and actresses are demonstrating conspicuously their mating fitness. Striking physical symmetry combined with lucid articulation of complex information combined with calm under intense pressure combined with emotional subtlety; movies are where people who have great genetics show off their stuff and where we go to watch, in hopes to absorb this energy through the screen.
Aside from the fact that stories are deeply evolved ways to mimetically transfer complex information about reality through time, this is one of the primary reasons we go to movies.
This really struck home for me when I attended a screening of Baby Driver, circa 2017. The ensemble cast was magnetic even though the story is something entirely cliched. A bank heist/getaway movie, where the good guy is taken in by the bad guys and in order to get the girl and escape, he need to do one last job. A classic Americana action movie, entirely unoriginal on paper.
But the outstanding soundtrack, fantastic performances and the deeply compelling story, had me leaving the theater feeling like a movie-star, in awe and not giving a damn about the $20 I'd just spent.
Ansel Elgort, AKA Baby Driver, is a partially deaf getaway driver who has been taken into his current life of crime when he was young by the nefarious (in more ways than one) Kevin Spacey, AKA Doc. But despite his life of crime, he’s a great guy, taking care of his blind foster parent who’s a geriatric and he falls in love with Lily James, a humble, sweet as apple pie, diner waitress.
The interesting part about this movie are the connections between its success in demonstrating desirable evolutionary traits by its actors. They’re all highly confident and able to secure resources quickly, efficiently and through any means, including violence, if necessary. These were all deeply desirable traits to our ancestors, especially if they were possessed by your fellow tribe member.
Think of all the times that a leader had to rally his tribesmen to move to more fertile territory days away, go out and fight a rival tribe, or face down a monstruous predator like a lion. These are highly risky endeavors, that if successful bring immense power and resource access. If unsuccessful they often brought disastrous consequences, probably even death. Our ancestors who made a success of these endeavors over a lifetime passed on their knowledge and traits, those who failed did not. This is multiplied by millions of years.
Think about it, what would it be like for you to convince a bunch of people you were close to that they would be able to go into a highly stressful, dangerous situation and not only would they be successful on the other side but you would lead them through it? They would need to believe in you, they would need to feel your own belief in yourself. They’d instantly lose trust and confidence if while you were explaining this plan you couldn’t make eye contact with them, you walked with a limp, you stuttered, you spoke haltingly and with hesitation and you weren’t able to convince them you had the experience to handle that particular scenario.
That is exactly what the actors in Baby Driver and all films like it are getting at. They’re aesthetic demonstrations of archetypal tribal leadership. Acting is a simulacrum for an important evolved traits in our forebearers very real negotiating with a hostile, dangerous world.
This is exactly what is very difficult to manifest if someone is traumatized. Being stuck in flight, fight or freeze means that your lower brain has not processed fully the event that initially traumatized you. You are still a victim of the circumstance that was thrust upon you, and the same will be true for the next time that you come across that scenario once more. This is why traumatized animals, across numerous species, exhibit the same body language of submissiveness, flight or over reaction.
Contrast this with the actors in Baby Driver, you’ll see that they’re all deeply confident and exude experience. This is because it took thousands of takes to get those shots, combined with thousands of hours of editing, combined with the highest quality technology & acting skills. But when it is all pieced together, it’s as if we literally cannot help but to be sucked into watching it. Because we can’t.
There is something tremendous to take away from this insight. By understanding that charisma is eminently desirable and that what prevents it from being embodied is trauma, one would need to only look to one’s own trauma to heal and thus inhabit & exhibit more charisma.
We may not all be actors, but by inhabiting more charisma, by mastering those events that traumatized us, we can tap into the magnetism that one of the most powerful industries and socio-economic stratum is built upon.