You Are What You Act (2018)

(On TV, December 2020) A feature-length examination of the old saw “fake it ‘till you make it,” You Are What You Act begins by examining incidents in which actors (actors!) were involved in real high-risk situations and practically became true action heroes at a time when many people would have simply frozen in place. Writer-director Albert Nerenberg uses this as a springboard to an examination of the field of “embodied cognition” – the idea that physical practice, visualization, and role-playing can prepare your body and your mind to be ready for future situations. You Are What You Act’s big crush on Tom Cruise is a bit amusing (seriously – he comes up three or four times during the course of the film), but the point is that Cruise, playing an action hero and often doing his own stunts, is exposing himself to high-risk situations and learning how to react during them. Not that the film stops there – noting the very high prevalence of affairs between on-screen romantic partners, Nerenberg explores whether there are shortcuts to human emotions – if it’s possible to fall in love by telling another that you love them until you both believe it. Midway through the film, there are plenty of ways you can poke holes at its theory – not the least of them being that actors have publicists, but more realistically that acting exercises have been with us for a long time. Almost on cue, that’s when You Are What You Act does become more interesting, by criticizing itself and exploring the history of drama exercises that create rapid emotional intimacy between actors required to fake it until we believe them. It all ends up in a big ball of multidisciplinary ideas thrown in a blender, but hard to dismiss. Nerenberg himself makes for a very likable host, well informed and willing to portray himself as exploring doubts in his own thesis. One tangent I would like to have followed is the idea that expertise stems from repetition driving conscious actions into unconscious reactions – but maybe that’s implicit in the rest of the film. I was, at first, somewhat skeptical about You Are What You Act –Tom Cruise obsession included – but eventually warmed up to the film as it kept re-examining its thesis for flaws or links with other theories. It’s a clever film about a clever topic, and it deserves a look if you have even a passing interest in self-improvement.