Something an Actor Shouldn't Do

I don't think any actor in performance, or any artist for that matter, should try to please anybody.  This does not pertain to taking direction which is completely on the purpose line of the actor , to evince just what is needed and wanted to make the story work.  It is the audience he should not be trying to please.  Because then it is always going to be a generality.  For there is no specific person or personality he is trying to please- it is "them".  It is a generality. 
And only specifics endure, only specifics actually occur or have any presence in art.   Either say it or do it the way you see it or you have said or will have done nothing.

SENSELESS SHOOTINGS - WHAT IS TO BLAME?

We have never had kids going into schools and shooting students in the history of man. The history of man- that’s a long time.

What has changed?

For hundreds of years, people have had guns.

For hundreds of years, children have endured poverty, orphanages, cruelties of every kind.

What is new on the scene? Think about it.

Every child who has committed these homicides has been on psychotropic drugs and under the “care” of a psychiatrist.

People, taking psychotropic drugs are committing suicide and committing homicides.  If you take the time to investigate, you will find that these deaths are going on about you all the time. It’s not like six degrees of separation. It’s like three degrees.  Someone you know knows someone who has had a bad experience.  Mighty prevalent, yet somehow we have bee induced to totally overlook this thing staring us in the face.   One of my best friends took a sort of muscle relaxant and said to her husband:  lock me in my room. Don’t let me out of my sight, or I will kill myself.” She knew it was the drug.  Others do not and think it is themselves.  My costumer on a recent film’s friend walked into the ocean when he  stopped taking a psychotropic drug.   A smart witty terrific pal of mine was given a drug by his doctor for a cold or regular sickness and he woke up in the night and started hallucinating blood pouring down his walls.  He found out from that doctor it was the drug, and asked the doctor why he hadn’t been warned.

There is a group of drugs called benzodiazapenes and if you want to take one of them, you might as well take your brain out and put it on a silver platter and hand it over to the nearest passerby.  It is no longer your own.  It may make you take your own life.  I know you’re a nice guy, but it may make you take the life of another.

Some years ago, on the internet, I could bring up the number of suicides of children in some city in Canada.  There had been six that week.  About three years ago I read in the paper that a lad had “woken up” and found that he was facing people holding a gun.  We are no longer, in this culture, privy to these facts.  The media does not disclose them to us. 

There is another class of drugs called neuropathics.  These also can make you take your own life.  Watch TV ads.  I know the wife of the man who lobbied to get the information that psychotropics can make you commit suicide into the warnings. After years, he finally did. The box says something like “suicidal ideations”.  This means that your brain, not being your own anymore, can make you take your own life, and this is just to get over body aches and pains! So you may not feel that pain in your knee anymore, but the reason for that might be simple: you are no longer here to feel it.

- Karen Black