The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

The Method suffered instead the same fate that befell the postwar consensus in which it had been so firmly ensconced. Both began to lose their grip on America in the mid 1970s as the blockbuster, the inflation crisis, and revelations of decades of government wrongdoing struck the nation simultaneously; both stumbled in the 1980s, punch-drunk and overmatched by a new vision of American society and its citizens. Before, our tax dollars went to advance the common good; now they would be returned to us so we could express ourselves through our purchasing power—helping others, the conventional wisdom went, through helping ourselves. Before, we were bound in common cause—individuals, yes, but part of a society and dedicated to its advancement; we were now to be consumers in a marketplace. This central metaphor of society as a market made up of citizen-customers seeking self-gratification may have been right-wing, but it intersected quite neatly with the liberal left’s project of individualizing higher education. Beginning with the revival of progressive education in the 1960s, America’s schools grew more interested in allowing diversity of thought, disrupting canons, and hosting disagreements about every facet of American life—including acting, which had, for decades, been bound by the dogmas of the various post-Stanislavski gurus and their opponents.