CHAPTER 046: James–Lange Theory
CHAPTER 046: James–Lange Theory
After finishing my makeup and stepping onto the set, I stopped in my tracks at the different atmosphere.
‘Why are there suddenly so many people on set?’
I knew today’s shoot was an important scene, but did it warrant this many?
Besides the staff, several unfamiliar faces were scattered around, watching us.
As I looked around with a bewildered expression, Park Juwon waved.
“Oh, Sunho, you’re here?”
When I walked over to him, he tapped my shoulder and said,
“Sunho, you’re gonna be nervous today. There are a lot of spectators.”
Spectators?
“Those people you see over there are the Youth Blue team. They finished shooting early, so they came to watch.”
Ah, that’s why.
Their visuals weren’t ordinary.
So actors build camaraderie like this too.
Learned another new culture.
‘Wait, but. Youth Blue…’
No way—did Director Yoon Gyeonghwan come too?
My gaze naturally moved toward the director’s chair.
Sure enough, Director Yoon Gyeonghwan was standing next to Director Ji Seongwoo.
Our eyes met. He stared at me with hawk-like eyes.
No wonder the back of my head had been stinging.
‘…Is he still holding a grudge?’
From the perspective of a hit director with back-to-back successes, I could see how a rookie actor rejecting his work might bruise his pride.
And on top of that, it was a project by someone who hadn’t even debuted as a director yet, so it probably felt even worse.
‘Not like I need to apologize, though.’
The entertainment industry is small. You never know when you’ll run into someone again, so I’ll just greet him lightly.
I dipped my head slightly to Director Yoon Gyeonghwan in a brief nod, then turned my gaze away.
‘…?’
From where I looked, I could feel another stare fixed on me.
This time it was from an idol with flashy features.
When I looked closer—
‘Lee Yuna?’
We weren’t personally close.
She was so famous that I only knew the general vibe.
A female idol with a delicate, sentimental image.
The kind of look that screams she hates soccer and hates games.
So Lee Yuna is in Youth Blue too.
But why is she staring so intensely?
Since our eyes had already met, I gave her a light nod of greeting too.
She flinched, startled, and quickly turned her head away.
‘……?’
What’s with everyone today?
I should stop wandering around and just sit still.
I should prep for the shoot while reading the script.
Just like Park Juwon said, there really are a lot of spectators today.
Because of that, our staff also looked visibly tense.
They’re shooting around the same time, so it’ll feel like mutual wariness, and at the same time, like you’re showing your bare face to a competitor and being evaluated.
So today’s shoot wasn’t just ours anymore.
As for me, that didn’t make me nervous or scared.
If anything, my heart was pounding.
The tension and excitement I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my past life came back vividly.
I show my prepared ideas to my team members, to executives, then go to a competitive pitch and show them to competitors and the client.
Repeat that every two to three months.
When you’re always under the shadow of evaluation and feedback, there’s only one way not to get nervous.
Belief in your idea, and perfect practice.
Then you get impatient to show your hand as soon as possible, and the tension gets replaced by excitement.
‘Same today.’
Director Ji Seongwoo had emphasized over and over that today’s shoot was the most important scene in the script.
When I read it, I could also tell by instinct this scene was the film’s climax, and I needed to pour out the most intense emotion possible.
A time that required deliberation and practice as an actor.
Rather than relying purely on the system, I used what I knew and looked for a method.
That’s when I thought: what if I applied psychology to acting?
And a theory came to mind.
‘The James–Lange theory of emotion.’
It’s the theory that emotion is a response to physical changes in the body.
Put simply, people don’t tremble because they’re scared—rather, they feel fear because their body is trembling.
If that’s true, then if I control the body’s physical changes first, wouldn’t the corresponding emotion naturally burst out?
Right now, my physical acting ability is A-rank.
By imagining a certain state, I can control my body’s sensations.
If I use A-rank physical acting to induce emotion, and then use A-rank emotional expression to amplify it…
That synergy would be beyond imagination.
So today, I felt confidence more than tension.
Yeah. The more spectators, the better.
The larger the sample size, the higher the reliability.
I slowly exhaled and took in the dozens of stares pouring onto me with my whole body.
Prep was almost at the final stage.
The cinematographer checked the final blocking.
“A-cam, the moment the actor drops to his knees, get right up on him in a low angle! We can’t miss a single emotion!”
“Boom mic, when you track the actor’s movement, be careful not to cast a shadow! Capture even his breathing!”
Director Ji Seongwoo’s voice, too, was firm as he directed the staff for the first time in a while.
Because this was an important shoot, everyone was keyed up.
The Youth Blue actors gathered on one side swallowed dryly without realizing it.
‘This atmosphere is completely different from our film.’
Used to bright, lively sets typical of youth dramas, the Vacuum State set—where even breathing felt heavy—gave them an unfamiliar, strange tension.
Their eyes naturally went to Ryu Sunho.
‘Pouring out emotion in the first take? That won’t be easy. Does that mean the staff trusts the actor that much?’
Seojuhak, the male lead of Youth Blue, stood with arms crossed, scrutinizing Ryu Sunho with sharp eyes.
Lee Yuna also couldn’t take her eyes off Ryu Sunho.
A gaze with a different meaning than Seojuhak’s.
‘It’s another different vibe from earlier… The moment he stands in front of the camera, he looks like a completely different person. That kind of focus… This is on a different level from an idol stage.’
Director Yoon Gyeonghwan, standing next to the director’s chair, also watched Ryu Sunho with complicated feelings.
‘That bastard Ji Seongwoo set up three cameras for a single scene. How many different cuts is he trying to get? From the actor’s standpoint, that should be a burden… but he doesn’t look tense.’
Receiving all those gazes and expectations on his own, Ryu Sunho quietly took his position.
Director Ji Seongwoo looked at Ryu Sunho in silence and gave a nod.
Then, Director Ji Seongwoo’s voice rang out across the set through the loudspeaker.
“Ready… action!”
The camera framed Dogyun’s back amid scattered debris and lights.
Dogyun dragged the axe along as he walked over the sidewalk blocks. The sound of metal scraping the ground spread like an echo.
Dogyun suddenly stopped and stared blankly into empty space.
‘At first, it definitely worked.’
Every time he chopped the car with the axe, every time glass shattered and metal crumpled, some passersby turned their heads and looked at Dogyun.
Each time, his heart beat fast, and Professor Baek had shouted like he was cheering.
“You saw that, Dogyun! My hypothesis was right! When the waves are intense, the vacuum state gets disturbed!”
But before long, the reactions faded again.
Even if he smashed cars, set off fireworks in the middle of the street, and pulled off all kinds of bizarre, unthinkable stunts, people kept their heads down and only stared at their smartphones.
The stimulation of blue light spilling from the rectangular screen. Their gaze was fixed there, unwilling to move.
Dogyun’s breathing turned rough.
“Professor… why—why is no one looking again? Why, even though it’s gotten more intense…!”
Professor Baek’s face hardened too.
The measuring device in his hand blinked nonstop, drawing curves.
The waves were definitely intense, but the response had vanished.
“Is the world… becoming vacuumized…?”
Professor Baek’s voice dropped low and heavy.
“If that happens, the vacuum state is no longer just your problem alone, Dogyun. From the individual to the space, and then to people themselves…”
Dogyun blinked, bewildered.
Professor Baek’s finger cut through the air, sketching a vibration graph.
“An unobserved space closes itself. Interest in others breaks off, gaze disappears, communication disappears… and existence itself closes.”
Professor Baek’s voice sank heavier and heavier.
“When it closes into a complete vacuum state and external pressure disappears, internal bodily pressure becomes relatively higher, and it expands outward—”
Before he could finish—
A man sitting on the café terrace across the street suddenly started trembling all over.
His skin swelled, and the surface of his eyes began bubbling as if blisters were forming.
“Z…uhp…tzz…”
A bizarre noise leaked from the man’s mouth.
Then a sound like air filling something—buuuk—rang out, and the man’s body twisted and burst like a balloon.
“……!”
In reality, it was just an actor shaking and collapsing from his chair. The bursting scene would be composited with CG in post.
But in his head, Ryu Sunho was already perfectly recreating the image of flesh and air scattering.
As if someone had truly exploded to death right in front of him.
That imagined scene spilled directly into his facial muscles, his gaze, his trembling breath.
Dogyun, unable even to blink properly, spoke with lips shaking.
“…W-what… is this… a person…”
He couldn’t finish the sentence.
This time, a woman across the street underwent the same mutation.
Swelling skin, boiling bodily fluid, and the pop at the moment she burst.
Pop, pop, pop.
One, two, three.
Short tearing sounds rang out like a metronome across the street.
People were bursting in a chain.
Only the hands holding smartphones remained briefly suspended in the air—then even those fell to the ground.
Dogyun stared at the scene with a vacant face.
In Dogyun’s eyes, the blood scattering and the belongings left behind in the empty spaces layered over each other.
The world was collapsing.
“Why… you can still see each other… so why…”
Dogyun’s voice trembled hollowly.
But strangely, Professor Baek beside him wore an unexpected expression.
His lips trembled with excitement, and his eyes flashed.
“A new discovery… complete vacuumization where existence closes itself! Once communication is cut off, a separation system forms, and in the end they deleted themselves. Like the boundary of the universe shrinking…!”
Dogyun stared at Professor Baek as if he couldn’t believe it.
“People are dying… what kind of bullshit are you talking…?”
Professor Baek wasn’t even paying attention to Dogyun anymore.
Staring into empty space, he murmured while drawing invisible formulas with his finger.
His hand shook violently, but his eyes burned with excitement.
The “pop, pop” sounds echoing around them.
To Dogyun, it was terror—but to the professor, it was data.
Dogyun clutched his head with both hands and screamed.
“Shut up! You should be thinking about how to stop it!”
“Unobservable, collapse of the wave function, completion of truth…!”
His voice was like a spell already cut off from the world.
Then, a horrifying change entered Dogyun’s sight.
The professor’s eyeballs were bulging out more and more.
Hot steam started leaking from the protruding eyes.
His skin expanded like an inflatable doll, and he gasped and wheezed like he was starved of oxygen.
“Wait… no! You f**king—stop!”
Dogyun howled and reached out, but Professor Baek whispered with a smile.
“I was the one who saw the tru—”
Before he could finish, the professor’s body swelled like a balloon.
The stretched skin creaked as it expanded, then—
Pop!
With that brief tearing sound, he vanished.
Only flesh and blood in the air, and the glasses rolling on the ground, remained.
Dogyun’s fingertips scraped emptily through the air and stopped.
His breath came as if it would snap, and his knees buckled without strength.
Thud.
His body collapsed onto the cold, filthy sidewalk blocks.
When his palm scraped the ground, blood smeared out.
Dogyun shoved his head down and wailed.
It wasn’t a simple burst of emotion.
Ryu Sunho, recalling the James–Lange theory, deliberately broke his breathing to inflict pain on his lungs.
He twisted his muscles to create tremors close to convulsions.
Once the body screamed first, the brain left behind only the emotion to interpret that physical pain—absolute despair and loss.
“Ghk… ghk.”
Now even his voice couldn’t be distinguished as crying or screaming.
With a shriek that sounded like it tore through his lungs, his whole body convulsed and shook.
The axe he’d let slip rolled away with a metallic clang, and the sound spread like an echo of his crying.
In the hollow silence around him, only the “pop, pop” sounds of people disappearing continued like background noise.
Tears and snot mixed together, spreading into the blood.
Dogyun’s wailing was no longer human language.
Unable to form a single coherent word, he cried like a beast.
The place where the only person who had seen him disappeared—its emptiness felt like it was wringing and tearing his insides apart.
Swish—
When he looked up at the sky, all that reflected in his eyes were the lights of an empty city.
Even those looked like they were fading and going out one by one.
Dogyun covered his face with his hands and screamed as if squeezing out his last strength.
“Aaaaaaaah!”
That wail split long across the collapsing world and rang out.
While Ryu Sunho was delivering insane acting at that moment,
hot air flowed through the conference room of the film distributor Playty.
A crucial meeting to decide the direction of the marketing strategy for the film Vacuum State.
In front of the executives, the head of the film marketing team—his hair half-thinned—was speaking passionately.
“As you can see, the core strategy this time is minimizing the entry barrier.”
On the screen he pointed to was a bright, upbeat poster draft.
“The black comedy genre has weak appeal outside of a specific niche. So our initial promotion needs to approach the public with an easily digestible ‘fantasy comedy’ vibe.”
A few executives nodded.
“A stable direction.”
“To recover the investment safely, reducing risk is important.”
Encouraged by the fact they were being persuaded, the marketing team leader raised his voice.
“First, we get audiences into theaters by framing it as a light entertainment film, then we gradually expand through word of mouth from viewers who recognize the film’s true value—”
Before he could finish—
Bang—
The conference room door swung open roughly.
All eyes turned toward the doorway.
With his tie loosened slightly and a displeased expression, Han Seungwoo stood there.
Han Seungwoo slowly walked into the room and clapped.
Clap— clap— clap—
“Nice presentation.”
His tone was relaxed, but there was a cold edge inside it.
“But if you do it well a second time, it feels like you’re going to completely ruin the movie.”
“……Pardon?”
“Don’t do it. That won’t work. That’s not happening. Money too—”