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Jan. 7, 2023 - The Michael Knowles Show
17:22
Dylan Mulvaney's Rise To WOKE Hero EXPOSED | Michael Knowles

Dylan Mulvaney exploded on the scene in 2022 and went from a nobody working on plays in New York to wearing a dress and interviewing the President of The United States. Michael Knowles finally answers the question of how this all happened. Want more? Check out DailyWire+ here: https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe-plus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Who is Dylan Mulvaney?
Nobody seems to have any idea who this guy is, but we see him everywhere.
This is the guy who was virtually unknown, and then he decided that he was going to become a woman, and then 221 days later, he was interviewing the President of the United States.
Sitting there in a dress, pretending to be a woman, talking about women's issues with the supposed leader of the free world.
And this just exploded people's minds.
And there are all sorts of theories going around as to how this unknown person became such a phenomenon so quickly.
And some people think it has to do with social media, and there's just something about the social media culture that allows a figure like this to just explode out of nowhere.
People think, rightly, to some degree, that this has to do with the transgender movement, and it's all just about the rise of transgenderism.
But everybody seems to be missing the most obvious point here.
Dylan Mulvaney is an actor.
He is an actor.
I don't mean that to say that Dylan Mulvaney is faking it or something, or that he doesn't really think that he's a woman.
That was another theory that cropped up, is that Dylan Mulvaney is just the greatest troll of all time.
And he's just revealing how ridiculous the transgender ideology is.
Because on his very first video, Dylan Mulvaney comes out and he says, Okay, I've been a woman for 10 hours, and I've already cried like three times.
Day one of being a girl, and I have already cried three times.
I wrote a scathing email that I did not send.
I ordered dresses online that I couldn't afford.
And then when someone asked me how I was, I said, I'm fine, when I wasn't fine.
How'd I do, ladies?
And he just keeps performing all of these caricatures of women that are very offensive to a lot of women, but are generally kind of funny.
So people think, well, he's just faking it.
I don't think he's just faking it.
I think Dylan Mulvaney is an actor.
And the reason that people are missing this is, one, they haven't Googled the guy.
And he is a trained actor.
He attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music for Musical Theater.
He had a pretty good career working around New York.
He played one of the roles in Book of Mormon on Broadway.
That's a pretty big deal.
And then the pandemic hit.
And then the lockdowns hit.
But even before the lockdowns, apparently Dylan Mulvaney was a little bit upset at the limits that were being placed on him as an actor because he still could only play male roles.
And so the reason I think that his being an actor is central here is because...
of modern acting theory.
This is something you wouldn't understand if you're not familiar with modern acting theory and what happened.
But modern acting theory represents a major psychological break With old forms of the theater.
And I think it actually leads people into all sorts of craziness and helps to explain what the guy is actually doing.
Modern acting theory and technique began in America in the 1930s with something called the group theater.
Lee Strasberg was probably the most famous of these acting teachers who popularized the method.
You would know Lee Strasberg from Godfather Part II. He plays Hyman Roth.
He's the Jewish gangster.
This is the business we've chosen!
But this technique was controversial, even as Lee Strasberg was developing it and teaching it.
My own teacher, who knew Strasberg and worked with Strasberg, Wynn Hanman, he referred to Lee Strasberg as a pervert and a voyeur.
Because what he was doing on stage and in his classes was probing so deeply into the psychology of his students and of his actors that he would push buttons, rip off old scabs, create and play on various passions and lusts and desires, even if they were not healthy for the individual.
In the old school of acting, the classical school of acting, Actors have never been particularly respected by society.
They've often been lumped in with prostitutes and criminals.
But in the old school, at the very least, an actor could go out on stage with a costume on, play his part, and then take the costume off.
In the new school of acting, the costume is not on the outside.
That's sort of incidental to the performance.
The costume is on the inside.
The costume, the thing that demarcates the character and delineates the character, It's in the actor's own psychology, and frankly, in the actor's own soul, that you're bending your own desires such that when you are on stage, you really are feeling the things that the character is supposed to feel.
You really are thinking the things that the character is supposed to think.
You really are desiring things that the character is supposed to desire.
And so it is much more transformative of the person.
And depending on how well you can control this sort of technique, can really warp an individual's sense of self.
Lee Strasberg was not the only guy working on this new natural style of acting.
The other members of the group theater were people like Sanford Meisner, Ilya Kazan, Stella Adler, Harold Klerman, Uta Hagen, lots of other people.
And what they were doing was creating an American version of what was called Stanislavski's system.
It's this Russian guy who ran the Moscow Art Theater at the end of the 19th century.
And Stanislavski rises up, not just coincidentally, I think, around the same time as Freud.
And what are both of these men working on?
What both of these men are doing are...
They're turning the focus, when they're thinking about human behavior, away from outside forces, away from class, away from social role, away from manners and moral order and all the rest of that, tradition.
And they're turning it in on the inner psychology.
For Freud, that would be obviously the psyche of his patients.
And for Stanislavski, this would be the inner life of the character.
So to really oversimplify it...
The old kind of acting technique is much more about taking the outside and bringing that in, and having the external elements create the performance, whereas the new acting technique is all about the inner life and having the inner life impel all sorts of behaviors on the stage.
It sounds kind of pie in the sky, so to bring it down to earth, a good example of this would be Streetcar Named Desire.
If you ever saw the movie Streetcar Named Desire, you've got one actor, From the old school and one actor from the new school.
You've got Vivian Leigh, probably the greatest actress of her age, in that old classical style of acting.
And then you've got Marlon Brando, who is the greatest actor of his age, maybe of any age, in the new naturalistic style of acting.
And when they're in scenes together, the difference is so stark.
Vivian Leigh is there, you know, this is the woman from Gone with the Wind.
She's so theatrical and so over the top and so mannered in her acting.
And then you have Brando there, and he's just kind of mumbling around.
And you think of Brando in On the Waterfront.
He was my brother, Charlie.
He sort of looked down for me.
I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody.
And in this modern style of acting, you will often see people begin to mumble a lot more.
This is why it's kind of annoying when you watch modern shows.
Sometimes it's hard to hear what the actors are saying, because the emphasis is so on naturalism.
One of the consequences of this new style of acting is that it can mess up people's psychology a fair bit.
A classic showbiz story of this is when Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier were doing Marathon Man.
And according to the story, Dustin Hoffman shows up to the set and he hasn't slept in three days because he's been preparing for this role.
And for the role, he's got to be underslept and disheveled and all that of sorts.
And so what does he do?
He actually does that with his own body.
And he shows up and he's complaining about this on the set.
And Laurence Olivier, who's a great example of the old school of acting, just turns to him and he says, My boy, have you considered acting?
You don't actually have to do all of this stuff.
You can just try acting.
You can just sort of play pretend.
Another story with Dustin Hoffman, actually, was from...
I have a little bit of insight on this because, though I'm ashamed to say it, in my wayward youth, I worked as an actor.
Are you talking to me, ma?
And I trained as an actor with one of the very famous teachers of this kind of new school of acting, a guy named Wynn Hanman, who was Sanford Meisner's assistant in the 1950s, and who actually was Dustin Hoffman's teacher.
And he tells this story of he was directing a play, and Dustin Hoffman was in the play, and he had to be cleaning a fish on stage.
And so in...
The old representational kind of acting, what would you do?
You just kind of pretend.
But in the new style of acting, you want everything to be real and organic.
And so it's a very tiny theater.
Dustin Hoffman's cleaning the fish.
There's bones and guts going into the audience.
Everyone's kind of grossed out by it.
But that's what it's all about.
It's all about this very real inner life.
You are not just approaching a role and saying, what would this character do?
I don't know.
He'd wear a hat like this, and he'd move his arm like this.
No, you're thinking, what does this make me feel like?
What does this remind me of in my own life?
What is this wound that I'm going to pick open?
And this is why a lot of the famous method actors Of the modern era have had a lot of psychological problems.
Actors have always been crazy, but actors in this new naturalistic style seem to be a lot more crazy.
Marlon Brando had all sorts of problems.
You think of people like Philip Seymour Hoffman.
You think of people like Joaquin Phoenix.
You think of people...
I don't know.
All of these kinds of modern actors who...
You think of Heath Ledger after playing the Joker.
I mean, this kind of absolute messing up of one's psyche, okay?
And this didn't arise out of nowhere.
It's not just that one day in 1897, Sigmund Freud and Konstantin Stanislavski decided to upend the way that the West viewed itself.
This was a process that was developing in the 19th century as all forms of art became much more personal.
You see the development of the novel begin to turn the attention away from the external circumstances of society.
And in on the personality and desires and dreams of the individual.
And you see this reflected in the society broadly.
By the end of the 19th century, you're seeing a breaking down of Europe and Russia as well, of the West, which had been formal and had formal social roles.
And if you were a man, you were going to act this way.
And if you were a woman, you were going to act this way.
And if you were a man of a certain class, you were going to behave one way.
And if you were of a lower class, you would act another way.
You see here the rise of feminism.
Around this time.
Also reflected in the American theater through plays like Dollhouse, Head of Gobbler, and lots of other plays as well.
You see this, speaking of women and speaking of plays from around this time, this new kind of acting in a very famous moment recounted by Sanford Meisner in his book On Acting.
And he's recounting a story that he was told by George Bernard Shaw, who was a very well-known socialist playwright around this era as well.
George Bernard Shaw goes to see a play called Magda.
And in this play is one of the famous actresses of her age, Eleonora Duza.
And in the scene, Duza is meeting her ex-lover 25 years later.
And the ex-lover shows up and hands her a bouquet of flowers.
And as Shaw is watching this scene, Duza blushes on stage.
This astounds Shaw.
And she didn't do it every night of the performance.
But she blushed.
And this was so amazing because it shows you that this new style of acting does work.
It's not just all a bunch of pretentious gobbledygook.
It actually does push buttons in one's psyche.
You can't fake that.
It's not as though she had a makeup brush come out from the ceiling and put blush on her.
Something from within her actually made her blush.
And so what does all of this have to do with Dylan Mulvaney?
What the new style of acting has led to is far greater naturalism in the theater.
A kind of naturalism that would have been bizarre to earlier audiences because earlier audiences were just less naturalistic in their behavior.
They were less casual in their behavior.
They were much, much more formal in their social structures.
As that breaks down, it's reflected in the theater.
It's reflected in all of our personal lives.
And so you see far greater naturalism.
It's what dominates today.
It's what every single actor in the world is trained in today.
It's all audiences have come to expect today.
And what that naturalism tells you, and what that building of the inner life tells you, that focus so much on the inner life of the character tells you, is that you can play any character you want.
Anybody can be anybody that he wants to be.
You don't have to look a certain way.
You don't have to be of a certain race.
You don't have to be a certain height.
You don't have to be a certain sex.
You can just...
Women can play men.
Men can play women.
Black guys can play white characters.
White guys are still not allowed to play black characters.
That's owing to political correctness.
What do you mean, you people?
Huh?
But you can be whatever you want.
And so, again, it's not just one aspect of art taken out of broader social trends and psychological trends.
This is reflected everywhere.
We are told in our society, you can be whatever you want to be.
You have no obligations to anybody.
You have no limitations whatsoever.
If you are a pygmy, you can play in the NBA someday.
If you are a dunce, you can be a mathematician.
You can't, but this is the sort of thing that we tell ourselves.
If you're a man, you can be a woman.
If you're a woman, you can be a man.
And so, Dylan Mulvaney reflects in an interview with LA Magazine.
He was very upset.
He said the theater industry was incredibly gendered, and he was only able to get male roles.
Well, that's not fair.
He can build up the inner life of any character he wants, and maybe he even feels a little bit like a woman.
Why doesn't he get to play female roles?
In comes the COVID lockdowns, and when the COVID lockdowns strike, Dylan Mulvaney is taken out of the Broadway theaters, and now he is left locked up in his room with a new stage.
The stage is TikTok.
So this stage is the most intimate and open stage you can possibly have.
He can be whoever he wants to be on the stage of TikTok.
And he decides that he is going to be a woman.
And he instantly picks up 9 million followers.
He's got over 9 million followers right now.
He does this series called Days of Girlhood.
He builds a character just like any actor does, and he ends up getting sponsorships.
He ends up now becoming this sort of social phenomenon, so much so that he's sitting down with the President of the United States.
Why?
Because in the old school of acting and in the old school of our society, People were expected to do the sorts of things that were prescribed for their roles.
Their roles on stage and their roles just in society.
Today, people are expected to do whatever their inner psychological state impels them to do.
According to the old school, the way to give a good performance on the stage and in life Was to fulfill one's duty according to one's external circumstances.
According to the new school, in order to perform your role correctly on stage and in life, you have to ignore the external circumstances.
You have to ignore all of the demands of the society and only follow what is supposedly your authentic inner psychological state, even if that inner psychological state is utterly divorced from the physical world.
That is what is happening in our society, on our stages, on our TikTok, watching this man wearing a dress sit across from Joe Biden.
What is he?
Who is Dylan Mulvaney?
Is he a troll?
Is he a transgender phenomenon?
Is he a social media phenomenon?
No, he is the greatest actor of our generation.
He is fully inhabiting the role.
He is the natural flowering of modern acting technique, which is the flowering of our modern view of psychology, which is the flowering of the collapse of Western civilization at its height.
That's it.
You got it right there.
Who knows what star will appear tomorrow?
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