The Method

After “The Method,” Jon Rafman, 2024.

The Actor’s reputation for being difficult, though not yet impossible, preceded him. This, overwhelmingly, was due to his adherence to what is commonly referred to as The Method, which, The Actor had been taught, and believed, was a conduit to the extraordinary, a quality he found lacking in himself, and in others, and in the world. 

Before refining his craft through adherence to techniques and philosophies of The Method, The Actor achieved a not-insignificant level of celebrity, first through his work on a children's television show, and then as a beloved fixture on a long-running sitcom. He did not then have the reputation he had later; in those days, few emotional demands were made on him and his work. The sense that The Actor had then about himself, and perceived on the faces of people who recognized him with increasing frequency, was that he was not a serious person. He was, he felt, a joke. The Method was a way for him to redeem himself, to become not only serious, but extraordinary—a conduit for extraordinary things, so rare in the world and in others and himself. But his colleagues, employers and agents, amongst whom circulated concerns related to increasing difficulties associated with The Actor, understood neither the means nor the ends of The Method. They did not care for the extraordinary. The Method did not appear, to the professionals with whom The Actor worked, to be a conduit for much at all, besides a bit of needless torture. 

The Actor had been young when he moved to Los Angeles. This was a beautiful time for The Actor, before the many terrible things that happened in small rooms and on leather couches in the valley, and later in bigger rooms and on bigger couches, in the comfortable homes of Hollywood producers, the men whom, in those days, did not know that The Actor was uniquely gifted, a conduit to the extraordinary, a quality with which his destiny was enmeshed, a quality that was capable of being expressed, if only once, so long as someone was there to see it. If enough people could see it, this secret extraordinary thing could change their lives.

When The Actor had just come to Los Angeles, and did not yet know about The Method, he discovered there was something in him people responded to. This quality, enhanced by the strange harmony of his facial features, made The Actor professionally viable. It was easy to find work. 

The first apartment The Actor leased, when he was still a teenager, was a carpeted and unclean room at ground level, with vertical blinds, in a complex in Burbank. The building was two stories, with a narrow exterior corridor along its second level that overlooked a small courtyard with a shallow, heavily-chlorinated pool. 

There, he encountered a man weeping in the courtyard on a hot and particularly dark night. He frequently thought about it, though the event was brief, and so long ago, and of no obvious significance. He couldn’t remember the man's face, just the grief it conveyed, and the sounds it emitted, like an animal. 

“Hey man,” he said, seeing The Actor. “Come over here.” 

The man was not yet middle-aged, but his youthful style of dress came off oddly, like a representation of someone trying to look young; like an abstraction. When The Actor approached, the man's eyes were wet and shining. He was extremely drunk and wailed in a tone that oscillated between agony and anger. The Actor gathered, through his sobs and garbled wailing, that this man was also an actor, and that things in his life had not turned out the way he had hoped. The man once had great promise, with a future that augured toward a long career in the entertainment industry, but this promise had gotten smaller and more remote, and its opportunities foreclosed gradually, becoming fewer and fewer—the man felt not only foolish and delusional, but exploited and targeted, as though the misfortunes of life were coordinated, the world conspiring against him and his talents deliberately. 

“Come here,” he said again with a haunted expression. 

When The Actor walked over, the man grabbed his hands. 

“Do you feel that?” 

The man’s damp hands made The Actor recoil. The man was a loser. His confusion and failure were disgusting. There was repulsion, then fear: fear that contact with this man’s tears, his tragic and palpable loserdom, like leprosy, would contaminate The Actor, spoiling everything. Though The Actor was then very young, and would soon experience remarkable success, the man with wet hands, reaching out in the dark, and the smell of chlorine and the blue rippled light—it would never leave him. 

As he approached his life's second half, The Actor began to experience increasing unease, and though he was by no observable metric a failure, he no longer felt the prismatic potential of his destiny unfolding, but rather that his middling fame was a burden of some kind. In part due to his young celebrity, The Actor had been unable to form meaningful relationships, and when he felt lonely, as he often did, he would summon young women to his expensive Laurel Canyon home via an app that paired so-called creative professionals together with discretion. 

Many women wanted to be with The Actor, though his fame was second-rate, because, The Actor thought, they were stupid. Besides the obvious novelty of having sex with a celebrity, there was a deeper narcissistic fulfillment they hoped to achieve through intimate contact with someone famous. In his middle age, The Actor was pleased to find that many of the young women not only tolerated but performed their enjoyment with pornographic enthusiasm. The low opinion he had of these women felt like a kind of justice, as they did not really see him, and much like sex itself, which was obscured by the modes and postures of pornography, saw only in him a false value conferred by his secretly pathetic and equally illusory fame. The more adoration with which they looked at him, the less seen he felt, and gradually The Actor adopted a more and more punishing disposition towards the women. Though they were attractive—they were mostly, but not exclusively, aspiring actresses—The Actor found it challenging to maintain himself at the sight of their eager and adulating faces, and had taken to habitual and forceful smothering, depriving them not only of air but of what he imagined they sought to gain: a moment of contact with a thing The Actor did not even really have. 

It was during this era that The Actor became interested in a more systematic approach to his craft. The Method to which The Actor dedicated himself was developed by a Russian in the early part of the prior century, and was controversial and often maligned. To say The Actor had become disenchanted with his work would be inaccurate, as it had never especially enchanted him to begin with, however, over the course of his long and unfulfilling career, made all the more bleak by the loneliness of his celebrity, he felt he had lost his agency. Then, due to the clownish roles in which he was cast and with which he was identified, he lost most of his dignity. 

The Method was first and foremost serious, a project that promised a technique through which The Actor’s will was crucial to its chief task: to be a conduit to the extraordinary. That everyone found this basically laughable, tortured and pretentious, redolent of a mid-life crisis, was lost on him. Much like the attitude The Actor adopted towards those who deigned to know him intimately, his new approach to his professional life was retaliatory and sadomasochistic. To the frustration of his agents, The Actor began to turn down the lucrative work for which he was best suited, opting instead to act in low-to-mid budget independent dramas, delivering overwrought and indulgent performances under the pretense of giving life to his most authentic torments. 

It was in this way The Actor found himself cast as an alcoholic Catholic priest—a witness to a satanic ritual at The Vatican. The script was confusing, and the production unprofessional, but The Actor was the most famous person attached, and this afforded him ample opportunities to inflict his twisted techniques on his colleagues. 

His approach was immersive, and The Actor felt strongly that the only way to convey the priest's agony was to lose himself in it. His passing familiarity with Catholics was gleaned from movies like the Da Vinci Code, which intrigued him initially, as he understood their religion sanctioned various mortifications and masochistic rituals, but as he began to prepare for the role using the techniques of The Method, something began to change. The Actor was unbaptized and had never known a priest. He considered himself to be a spiritual person and partook in the Californian practices of yoga and meditation. In short, The Actor thought Christianity was boring, and for losers. He had been told, by Christians he had encountered in his life, not least his family growing up, that God so loved the world he sacrificed his son, Jesus, and anyone who believed in him wouldn’t perish, and that this was Good News—but this all seemed implausible to The Actor, who in many ways felt he had already perished. He did not like to dwell on those ways, nor on death, and especially not sin, and he did not like the look on the faces of Christians when they told him their so-called good news, which made him feel inadequate, confused, and afraid.

The role was challenging for The Actor to inhabit for these reasons, though he felt his weight gain and bloated drunk look were impressive, and he liked to don the priest costume, and the scenes in which he was explosively angry or in morbid despair. With the exception of the emotional extremes, however, the priest and his interior life felt obscure. The Actor learned that Catholics believed in something called “transubstantiation”—that through prayer and invocation a priest was able to change bread and wine, literally, into the body and blood of Jesus. He found this to be not only implausible, but creepy, and frankly gross. The Actor planned to attend at least one Mass in preparation for his role, but the thought of being surrounded by people who believed something so preposterous as eucharistic presence made him feel anxious and sick. 

The Actor was nearing the end of his time on the film and lingering one afternoon in his trailer. An assistant stood outside, waiting for The Actor to emerge and be escorted to set, a small fake church in which we see the priest in silent humble prayer, contemplating the satanic atrocities he had seen. The director and crew stood by, the scene lit with a stand-in, who knelt patiently in place. The Actor, in his dedication to the role, and per his understanding of The Method, had developed a serious drinking problem and was, though the scene did not require it, belligerently drunk. The Actor’s alcoholism was by now common knowledge, and though he had at many points behaved monstrously, and was generally volatile, bordering on dangerous, the production accommodated him, because they had no choice. When he was brought to set he could barely stand, and the director pleaded with him to get him in position. The Actor closed his eyes, clasping his hands together, as though in prayer. He was meant to fix his gaze upward, towards Heaven, conveying helplessness and spiritual turmoil. The Actor kept his eyes closed and held himself very still, as though dead. Once it was clear The Actor wouldn’t, or perhaps couldn’t open his eyes, the director yelled cut. The Actor didn’t move. 

He didn’t know he had been crying until he felt his own wet intertwined hands. 

“God have mercy on us,” he said. “God have mercy on us all.”