It
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Often heard now as slang for sexual allure and familiarly associated with the so-called “It Girl,” silent-screen star Clara Bow, It refers to a widely acknowledged but largely unexamined attribute of the performer. Popular usage has turned the pronoun into a noun, referring implicitly to sex while evading precise definition or explanation, even though acting theorists have long noted the phenomenon of a less narrowly sexual charisma, an elusively idiosyncratic attraction exerted by performers of either sex on the public at large. It was evoked by Diderot when he spoke ambivalently of the “unfortunate talent to be able to please everyone,” by Stanislavski when he deprecated what he called “Stage Charm,” and most suggestively by Zeami when he described the highest excellence of the actor’s art as “The Flower of Peerless Charm.” Their accounts, especially Zeami’s, taken together with the anecdotal record of exemplary performers, point the way toward a new understanding of It as a special capacity to fulfill the desire of the audience to witness the embodiment of contradictory qualities—strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, novelty and inevitability, projection and introspection—simultaneously.
Everyone will have some idea of what I'm talking about. It is a word that remains poised on the tips of many tongues whenever theatre people meet. When someone asks, at an audition, perhaps, or at any other similarly probative spectacle of uncertain human possibility, "Has she got it?" or "Does he have it?," the interlocutors rarely require elaboration. They think that they know it when they see it, and very often they do. Even innocent civilians now test their acumen while viewing a cable TV cross between A Chorus Line and Survivor called The IT Factor, BRAVO's entry in the "factor" genre of reality shows, up against O'Reilly and fear. Following a group of aspiring young actors "as they try to prove they have 'it,'" the show is accompanied by a website whose text implies that "it" is self-evidently visible: "Want to see for yourself that Ingrid has it? Click here."1 But what does everyone see, really? What do they think they know? What do they actually know? In deference to the larger mystery suggested by these questions, it, as a pronoun aspiring to the condition of a noun, will hereafter be capitalized, except where it appears in its ordinary pronominal role. Poets have It. Saints have It. Actors must have It, or they don't work much. By It I mean the easily perceived but hard-to-define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people.
Some are born with It; others have It thrust upon them. Those of the first type are truly blessed—or cursed—by their gift: they are always interesting. Those of the second type require a lucky break or a lurid calamity—the fortuitous convergence of personality and extraordinary circumstance—to activate the fickle prurience of average people. Those of the first type, the ones who seem to come by It naturally, complicate the question of whether It can be implanted artificially—the allure and dubious promise of so many of our BFA and MFA degree programs. Only on the stage or screen—not in dance, not in music, not in fine art—can an untrained beginner walk on and make a success (this doesn't happen often, but it can't ever happen in the ballet or a symphony orchestra). The power of It can magically enable such a prodigious accident. It isn't the same thing as talent, but the two tend to show up together. A shade or two closer to skill, talent is a gift for making something difficult, like juggling or yodeling, look easy. Talent may draw a crowd, but it alone will not hold one for long unless the performer also has It. Talents abound. Fewer have It, but those who do make charisma look easy. True, not every actor who has It becomes a celebrity or even a success, but no one stars without It. [End Page 555]
The much-discussed phenomenon of theatrical and cinematic celebrity offers a promising place to start an investigation of the largely unexamined...
