#vegasblog | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

trueishcolours · 2 years

Text

Status Games in KinnPorsche: The Series

There’s a school of acting which draws on the idea that humans spend a lot of time playing what are called ‘status games,’ and that acting will be good, engaging and believable if it can recreate these status games. I first read about status games in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro, a guide to improvised theatre, and though he didn’t come up with the idea, I think he puts it across very well. He argues that, because humans are social creatures who depend on our place in the group for our survival, we are constantly preoccupied with jockeying for position, projecting the status we think we have or think we ought to have, and attempting to raise or lower the status of those around us.

It’s important to note that I’m not talking about status in the sense of having a ‘high-status’ job; being officially senior within one’s workplace; being born into the nobility; or anything like that. I’m talking about the subtle and unconscious gestures we use to signal our social relationship to the people immediately around us, from moment to moment. Everything, from posture, to eye contact, to speed and volume of speech, to word choice, to the seat we choose when we enter a room, can indicate our status in relation to others.

When playing status games, attempting to raise your own status and lower others is not your only option – you can also choose to ‘play low status,’ deliberately lowering yourself and raising others. Johnstone argues that most people become habituated to playing either high status or low status, depending on which they find to be the most effective strategy for getting by in life. When faced with strangers, I personally tend to be a low-status player. For example, if I need to speak to the receptionist at the front desk of a building, I may start by hovering a little way back from the desk, so that they can choose to acknowledge me in their own time, rather than looking up to find me already in their space and demanding their attention. When they look at me, I might begin, ‘um, I’m sorry, but – ’ before voicing my request, and follow it up with a quick smile. My overall strategy is to signal, I’m not acting entitled to your time and attention, so please don’t be mad at me and give me what I want. Meanwhile, a high-status player might walk straight up to the desk and ask their question, projecting I am entitled to your time and attention, so give me what I want. There are further nuances within these roles; the high-status player could choose to be gracious or threatening, for example, but their status is still high. Status roles are usually also fluid and responsive. During an interaction, people will incrementally adjust their status to match one another, usually preferring to be only very slightly higher or lower than the other person or people. That way, an order of precedence is established, but nobody is either grovelling or dominating. To go in very high status and stick with it would be unusual behaviour, the sort of thing that, say, a member of the Mafia might do.

So, how is this behaviour used in acting? Johnstone argues that, in order for acting to look naturalistic and convincing, the actors need to learn how to project the status role that their character would be projecting. If the status relationship between the real actors is visible, the action will look fake, even if the audience can’t put their finger on why. This is especially important on the stage, where actors have to work to switch off their status relationship not only to one another, but to the audience. When there are rows and rows of people all staring at you, it’s very difficult not to take on a status relationship to them. Actually, come to think of it, I expect this is equally important in film and TV when you’ve got the cameraman right up in your face and have to fight off the instinct to acknowledge him in any way. Have you ever been in a school drama lesson and watched the kid who is nervous and amplifies their nervousness into utter helplessness, signalling to the audience, look, see, I know I can’t do it, no need to judge me? – playing low status? Or the one who acts totally cut-off and sullen, as though the whole exercise was beneath them – attempting high status? But learning to control your status signals isn’t just about keeping your acting from looking fake. Johnstone argues that a performance where intricate status games play out will actually be enthralling for the audience. We’re a social species and social inclusion is everything to us; therefore we are endlessly fascinated by watching status games.

Why are they called games, anyway? It’s not in the sense of something that you do for fun, or ‘playing games’ in the sense of being manipulative. Rather, a status game is a ‘game’ in the sense that it’s a test, with rules, to determine a winner, without anything real having to happen. A game of football establishes which team is ‘best’ without the teams having to come to blows; a status game allows people to determine who is going to speak next in a conversation or step out of the other person’s way on the pavement, or whatever it may be, without anybody having to definitively prove that they are stronger or smarter or to win or lose in a way they can’t come back from.

Right, so let’s talk about KinnPorsche.

KinnPorsche is set in a world in which status games are particularly important, because the characters live outside the law, and therefore the only power they can wield is the power they can project. If I utterly fail to display any authority in my role in society, my workplace or the law of the land or societal norms will prop me up to a certain extent. But the Theerapanyakuls have nobody else to prop them up. They’re ready to prop themselves up with violence if need be, but, because not even the bloodiest tyrant wants to spend their whole life lopping off heads, they also prop themselves up through status games, which signal ‘I could lop off your head if I wanted, so don’t try me.’ For the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss the high-status players in the Mafia: Kinn, Tankhun, Korn, Kim and Vegas. I think that the different ways they project their status are very informative and interesting to the audience, revealing a lot about their characters and bearing out Keith Johnstone’s claim that acting with nuanced status roles is compelling to watch.

Let’s start with Kinn. Of the four I’ve mentioned, his performance of a high-status role is the most by-the-book. By which I mean that his techniques are very effective, but they’re also what I’d expect to be taught if I attended a seminar entitled something like ‘How To Speak More Confidently In The Workplace’. Kinn stands tall, with good posture. He wears a good suit. He gives instructions firmly but calmly. There’s a Tumblr user writing excellent meta about his use of his voice. When people speak to Kinn, he takes his time answering, sometimes smiling a little as though amused by his own thoughts on what you’ve said, in a way that he’s not going to share with you. And although these actions successfully signal his high status, to me they also give Kinn vulnerability, precisely because they’re so clear and traditional. Kinn’s method of projecting status hints that perhaps he has had to learn this role; it doesn’t come naturally to him. Moreover, he doesn’t seem to dare experiment with different ways of signalling status, much less stop signalling altogether. What does he think will happen if he stops asserting his rights and watching for challengers?

Another reason why Kinn makes his high status so easily legible, and projects it so constantly, is because by doing so he provides some clarity, stability and security for the lower-status people under him. As long as he is clearly winning the status games, people are less likely to escalate to a real contest, with guns. He won’t get shot – and he won’t have to shoot others. His people will rely on his status to protect them, and won’t feel that they have to jump ship to protect themselves. They are clear about the deference he expects from them, and therefore less likely to misstep and force him to re-exert his authority by punishing them. I think this is what Pete meant when he told Porsche that Kinn is actually the best to work for and cares about his people. He knows that Kinn sets himself at the top of a coherent hierarchy which others can then more safely inhabit. By consistently projecting power, Kinn has moved the battle from the real world of bloody violence to the world of status games. And he’s attempting to move it further still, into the world of formal hierarchy, where even a momentary lapse in your ability to project status doesn’t result in total chaos, because there’s a system to shore you up. Contrast with the minor family’s house. I bet nobody knows how to behave if they want to avoid punishment there. More on that later.

Porsche is of course profoundly disruptive to this dynamic, which is simultaneously good for Kinn, who is miserable in his high-status role, and bad for Kinn, because the whole Mafia structure depends on the power that he can project and will come violently crashing down if he falters. Kinn’s cruelties to Porsche in the early episodes were not pointless: they were attempts to bring Porsche into the dubious safety of the Mafia hierarchy, for the sake of everybody involved. A major part of why Kinn’s actions in ep. 5 were so shockingly cruel to Porsche was because he himself had chosen to lapse out of his status role in ep. 4, first by taking care of Porsche himself instead of delegating the job to one of the many staff he had on hand, and then by having sex with him. When I first heard the premise of KinnPorsche, I assumed that Kinn would treat his bodyguards as a sort of informal harem and Porsche would be The One Who Was Different, but I now see why that wouldn’t work for the story that KinnPorsche the Series is telling. Kinn didn’t just cross the Line Of When It’s Acceptable To Have Sex With People (not when they’re impaired by drugs!) but also the line he’d drawn between himself and his staff. He then punished Porsche as though Porsche had been the one to challenge Kinn’s status by crossing that line. It was this unfairness, from somebody who Porsche and the audience had grudgingly come to see as fair, that was so cruel.

So, Kinn inhabits a very classic high-status role. He inhabits it a little uneasily, and he inhabits it partly to create stability for others. Contrast Tankhun. I could write a whole separate post on how Tankhun isn’t as erratic as he appears – he knew how to deal with Vegas, and with Kim; he knows how to make his own volatile behaviour and agoraphobia serve him, even as they also cause him significant difficulties. And one of the things that he’s able effectively to do is to project high status. More excellent meta has been written on his tailoring choices and how they add bulk to his body, literally allowing him to take up space. He gestures big, he speaks loud, he makes demands and assumes that they will be met. But unlike Kinn, he is not making any effort to project dignity or self-control as elements of high status. Nor is he consistent about his status. If you’re Kinn’s bodyguard and you cross a line, you’ll get in trouble right away, so Kinn’s bodyguards don’t cross the line. They at least benefit from some measure of certainty. Whereas Tankhun is totally happy to let his bodyguards cross the line if it’s fun for him. Most of the time he treats them like babysitters or entertainers, not staff who he’s in charge of. He lets Porsche literally butt heads with him as Porsche cajoles him into doing something he ostensibly doesn’t want to do. I imagine that if Tankhun suddenly wants to reclaim his status and punish you, you get zero warning. Unlike Kinn, who is to an extent serving the status role, Tankhun is making the status role serve him. He plays it because it benefits him and drops it when it doesn’t.

I’m not going to discuss any habitually low-status players in this post, but what about some low-status plays? What about a character who deliberately lowers their own status, either to graciously come down to another’s level, to wrong-foot an observer, or just to show off that they can afford to do it? Enter Korn. Unlike Kinn and Tankhun, Korn is not dressing sharp and taking up space. A lot of the time, he looks like an unassuming old man in a cosy jumper. But people see him and know that despite his appearance, this man is the head of the Mafia. The fact that he doesn’t project that power only drives home the point that he doesn’t need to. He’s unassailable. And it strikes me that the character with the most similar playbook so far is Kim. Where Korn is an unassuming old man, Kim is a babyfaced boy. He’s a Youtube star, but one who’ll condescend – in the older, positive meaning of the word – to his fans. When he meets his father, it’s with an obvious act of service – bringing him his favourite snacks. And here’s how status roles and status games can make a narrative so engaging without a line being uttered, because the similarity between Korn and Kim's status playbooks makes me sense that, although they may be at odds right now, Korn respects Kim the most of his sons. He sees the game that he himself is playing reflected back at him. Kinn’s obedience in his role makes him exhausted; Tankhun’s defiance of his role makes him absurd; for now, Kim is exactly where he wants to be, and so is Korn, and each of them sees and admires that success in the other.

So far, all the characters I’ve discussed play a fairly consistent status role. What about a character who chooses different roles to suit their needs in different situations? Oh, Vegas, you manipulative bastard. You lying liar. My problematic fave.

Vegas’ default is a classic high-status villain. Low-status villains absolutely exist – they’re often motivated by resentment – but your juicy, card-carrying, love-to-hate-’em villain is usually a high-status player, with a particular playbook. Relaxed. Smug. Sauntering. Who was the Tumblr user who said that the heroes are always sprinting, but you’ve never seen Darth Vader run? Though Kinn and Vegas are fairly morally even so far in terms of actual harm done, with Kinn’s only redeeming feature being a fledgling desire to change, they are nonetheless legible to the audience as hero and villain because of their differing status roles. Kinn is responsible for his high status; Vegas is entitled to his.

But this classic villain default changes drastically when Vegas tries to gain Porsche’s trust, deliberately lowering his own status in order to encourage Porsche to perceive him as safe, as a friend, and, crucially, as a contrast to the authority that Porsche is chafing against from Kinn. Okay, the whole audience get why Vegas is doing this. What I want to do is unpick the how. Was this entire post just an excuse for me to go through the fine detail of Vegas’ body language at the start of ep. 4? Yes.

Cigarette lighter scene my beloved. Okay, so Vegas starts out with a high-status gesture here, because he can’t resist asserting himself and making an entrance. He appears unexpectedly in Porsche’s space, expression dispassionate. He lights his cigarette with his arm at full stretch, opening up his torso, taking up space and displaying confidence. And then he drops the arm, lets his whole torso soften and shift with the movement, shuffles his feet, and breaks into a smile. And all these little fidgets suddenly make him non-threatening. He’s not drastically, implausibly lacking in confidence, but he’s signalling that he wants to make a good impression, and, crucially, that he’s willing to give and take. With that mobile, slightly uncertain stance, he’s ready to minutely adjust his body language in response to the status signals he receives from Porsche as they begin to work one another out. Remember that real-life status roles are malleable and responsive, and most people want to closely match their status to the person they’re talking to, landing just a little higher or lower! In a world full of dudes assuming power poses and refusing to yield an inch, Vegas truly just looks like a guy meeting another guy for the first time. He doesn’t know where they stand, but he wants to be friendly! He’ll be a little awkward, but nice, play not too high and not too low, and they’ll adjust! Acting!

I think 4.16 is the exact time stamp where he shifts from a villain projecting power to a normal dude projecting friendliness. It’s beautiful. I’ve looked at this for five hours now. His hands-in-pockets shuffle. His head-jerk as he accounts for his presence. His choice of words, ‘I’m here to run some errands.’ If you don’t believe me, observe this gifset. Gif number 3 is from his scene with Porsche at the start of ep. 4; in all the others, he is using the high-status villain playbook. Look at his smiles in gifs 4 and 5. They don’t reach his eyes, which stay open, focused on the target of his current power play. Meanwhile, when he smiles at Porsche, his eyes crinkle; he breaks up his gaze with a blink, and his stance with a big shift of his weight.

Despite later telling Kinn that he’ll talk to anybody who talks to him and was just showing good manners, Porsche is instantly uncomfortable with Vegas’ lower-status play. At this point I don’t think he’s all that aware of the threat that Vegas specifically represents, but he’s definitely already learned some lessons about the importance of deference and respect towards the family, and is wary of what the backlash will be if Vegas blurs those lines and lures him to overstep them – even if he doesn’t suspect that Vegas is doing this on purpose. He tries to lower his own status safely back beneath Vegas’ by apologising for injuring Macau, and Vegas replies,

‘A boy like him deserved that. Sometimes I even want to hit him myself,’ and he laughs a bit while he says it, and I am OBSESSED with the acting choices here. You know when you’re meeting a new person, and you’re just slightly shy like most of us are around new people, and you want to be friendly and put them at their ease so you reassure them like ‘lol my brother probably deserved to get hit,’ and then you second-guess yourself like ‘wait fuck that came out way too harsh they’ll think I’m a jerk,’ so you laugh to show that you were joking? And also you’re joking but you’re worried that they won’t get that you’re joking, or that they will get that you’re joking but will think that the joke is totally lame, and a comedian or habitual jokester would play high status by delivering their joke totally deadpan and leaving it to their listeners to react with laughter, but you don’t quite have the nerve so you laugh a little bit yourself to signal to the other person, ‘by the way, that was a joke, and the appropriate thing for you to do now is laugh along with me’ which actually undercuts your status by betraying your lack of confidence?

And you don’t have to have massive social anxiety to be doing these things, and you probably won’t think any of them through consciously; it’s just part of the little dance of ‘make a social gesture, re-evaluate, adjust, overcompensate, adjust the other way’ that we all do when we’re calibrating a social relationship with a new person. Unless we’re automatically in a much higher or lower status role than the new person, for example because we’re the heir of the mafia, in which case much less calibration is needed.

So by even attempting these naturalistic little calibrations, Vegas is signalling to Porsche that they’re equals, in a status relationship that they’re going to have to work out for themselves, bit by bit. And you can see Porsche getting drawn in in spite of himself, because it is so, so difficult not to adjust your status to complement the status of the person you’re talking to. Porsche struggles to stay in the artificially low-status bodyguard role, but instinctively wants to step into the equal-status role that Vegas is cueing him into. His hands are particularly expressive of his uncertainty here; he’s got no idea what to do with them. As a bodyguard he’d leave them at his sides as he stood to attention, but that’s wildly unnatural in a chat between equals. And then Vegas says of Tankhun ‘that one is quite something,’ as though he’s not quite high-status enough to get away with saying ‘that one is stark staring bonkers,’ with a warm smile and chin-tilt that invites Porsche to weigh in with his own opinion, and then we get that lovely wide shot of Porsche’s body language dissolving into animation in response – though his hands keep drifting towards the fronts of his thighs, attempting to snap back into bodyguard stance – just in time for Kinn to appear in the doorway and stare wrathfully and with jealousy at Vegas moving in on his man.

ACTING!!!

Vegas then escalates this strategy much further in ep. 5, taking it beyond the body language realm of status games as Keith Johnstone understands them and into a more tangible blurring of the lines of power between them. He lets Porsche ride his bike! He lets Porsche drive his bike! He allows full body contact! He makes like he can’t stand upright after the bike right, swaying vulnerably so that Porsche will catch him! And it is all super, super effective. By the end of ep. 5, Porsche is so convinced that this is his friend and not his superior, much less his enemy, that he is the one pulling Vegas into a big squishy hug!

So I came up with all of this analysis after the end of ep. 5, and then I was delighted with ep. 7 for how much it corroborated and added to what I had been saying. ‘Status’ in this very specific sense of what’s projected by body language from moment to moment is not the same thing as a character’s overall power, importance, or authority, but it can be a good predictor, and what I’ve found is that Vegas’ status games in eps 4 and 5 were excellent predictors of how Vegas wields authority more broadly. Remember when I said that Kinn’s harsh authoritarianism is partially for the benefit of his subordinates, who at least gain some stability in the volatile and arbitrary Mafia world? Yeah, good luck knowing where you stand in the minor family household. I bet it’s all sitting in your shirtsleeves drinking beer until you piss Vegas off and then suddenly he’s ripping out your ear bones. Never trust a workplace where they say ‘we’re like family here.’

Listen, people are rightly very critical of systemic power as it actually is, but the idea of systemic power – power that functions impartially, not influenced by individual interests, and that can continue to function consistently without depending on the presence, qualities or whims of any particular individual – is actually a pretty good one. Kinn’s power remains necessarily very personal, because he and his dad are the only ones enforcing it, but an attempt has been made to make it feel a bit more systemic, with clear expectations, a dress code, boundaries etc. Meanwhile, the power Vegas commands is utterly personal. The bodyguards fear him as an individual because he’s a mad dog who might choose to do anything to you, but there’s no system, no set of rules that will let you avoid his ire. This is why Vegas is just Vegas and Kinn is the Mr Kinn, and more broadly I think it might be why the minor family is the minor family and the main family is the main family. The minor family’s power and status are too personal. They haven’t set up a system that can operate, even briefly, without their continual input. Unlike Papa Korn, who can sit back in his sweater vest and watch his plans unfold.

What else did we learn about Vegas in ep. 7? He leads from the front – impressively brave, but not a good idea if you get shot and there’s nobody to replace you. Unless, of course, your leadership wasn’t important enough to make you irreplaceable in the first place. While Kinn supervises torture but finds it distasteful, Vegas is right in there doing it himself – because he enjoys it. So what does he do about the parts of the job that he doesn’t enjoy? Does he ensure they are delegated to somebody who is competent to do them? Or do they just not get done?

And let’s look at how he spends the power he does have. Those low-status plays I was discussing before? Yeah, while Kinn and his dad were having a Serious Talk about what Kinn’s people might think if they knew Kinn had slept with a man who’d failed his task, Vegas is laying his own obsession bare to his people as he involves them in his plan to drug and kidnap Porsche. Vegas is determined to get to Porsche, and to get to Kinn through Porsche, and he is willing to play any and every card in his hand to get there. All those liberties he let Porsche take in eps 4 and 5? Even if Porsche doesn’t take them for granted, others in the Mafia are going to see and take note. Porsche may be Kinn’s weakness, but he’s also Vegas’, glaringly. Another card that Vegas has failed to play close to his chest is his hatred for Kinn himself. Even if the main family still trust him enough to let him help them, even if there’s no proof that he was the one who sent assassins after Kinn (and I’m not actually sure that he was?), Kinn himself is completely aware that Vegas hates him.

Vegas strikes me as somebody who hates losing a battle even if it’s necessary to win the war. Look at his reaction at the end of ep. 7, when Kinn burst into the bathroom and interrupted him with Porsche. I’m assuming that Kinn finding out that Vegas had kissed Porsche was part of the plan – he can’t be threatened and destabilised by something that he doesn’t know about, after all – sure, Vegas might have hoped to get a little further than a kiss, and to get away without getting his face punched, but overall he’s achieved his aim. And yet his face contorts with genuine fury as he – recklessly! – slaps Kinn’s gun aside and storms out of the bathroom. I think that he can’t stand that Kinn has the power to take Porsche away from him in that moment, even if it serves his ultimate goal. He’s not, seemingly, a big-picture thinker.

So, how effectual or ineffectual is Vegas, really? Not as ineffectual as my last paragraph may have made him seem, I think. I think that the low-status plays he used to win Porsche’s trust are a strategy he uses more broadly – counterintuitive, for a guy who is as widely feared and mistrusted as Vegas! But I think he knows that people see him as the wielder of personal power, the mad dog, out to spite Kinn and torture his enemies and steal the things others want. Playing the short game. I think he’s banking on people underestimating him, assuming that he doesn’t have the patience for the long game – a complete takeover of the family, is my guess. And yet, he can’t stay cool as he deploys this smokescreen because it’s resentment at being seen this way, as only a member of the minor family, not fit to be the mastermind or wield absolute power, which is motivating him to play the long game in the first place. When he’s in the bathroom, gun to gun with Kinn, who is taking his bait in the long game – he wants to win the short game.

Will Vegas succeed in his takeover, if that is in fact his plan? I suspect that if he does, he still won’t be able to get over his resentment of Kinn – his fear that at the end of the day, he can’t project the same status. It seems weird to end this marathon of a post with a Disney reference, but I’m picturing the way Scar feels after he’s assassinated Mufasa. And more than that, will Vegas actually enjoy being in Kinn’s shoes…much less in Papa Korn’s? With so many responsibilities, after all, you don’t have so much time to look around.

Edited to add: more gifs of non-threatening, non-villain smiles.

#kinnporsche #kinnporsche the series #kinn theerapanyakul #vegas theerapanyakul #keith johnstone #status games #theatre techniques #under the cut cos this got long #it clocks in at 5k sorry not sorry #half of it is vegasblogging as is right #monstrous blogs

18 notes · View notes