Acting the Part

Abstract: This essay explores Joanna Hogg's recent films The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II as exemplary revisions of Michael Fried's concept of absorption, focusing on their presentation of actors and acting. Using Joan Copjec's psychoanalytic reading of Fried, it argues that realist acting as it appears in the films demonstrates absorption as a mode of attachment. In contrast to the motivated realist acting that fulfills Lauren Berlant's description of the heroic model of sovereignty, this realist acting rejects the primacy of motivation, insisting instead on an emphatic tautology: I love it because I love it.