He says: “Lying for a living, that’s what acting is. All I’ve done is learned how to be aware of the process. All of you are actors. And good actors because you’re all liars. [More]Gosh, if we can't let our opinions on the issues of the day be kneejerk swayed by those of our favorite celebrities, whose can we trust?
I used to have a VHS tape labeled "Marlon 'n Me," from when his screwed-up kid was on trial in Santa Monica for murdering his screwed-up sister's screwed-up boyfriend, and he showed up to plead for mercy, probably because he felt guilty for being a screwed-up father. I was on jury duty that day, and was standing right behind him when he gave an impromptu press conference, and my buddy called me up that evening and said "You're on Channel 9."
That same day, I saw the guy who played Bobby on "Taxi," who was at the courthouse over his continued criminal abuse of drugs, from before he blew every advantage given to him by his show business lottery win and OD'd. Plus I saw the guy who would be OJ's lawyer, not Kardashian, the other guy, Shapiro, just radiating an expensive tailored suit, shoes and hairstyle.
Anyway, if you want to see celebrities up close and personal, forget wearing your tight sweater to Schwab's Pharmacy and hoping to be discovered -- the "in" places to meet the beautiful people are where they go for sentencing, and of course, rehab.
In the words of the "immortal" love goddess who apparently killed herself because she was incapable of giving or receiving love, "That's the last..."
And that's why the opinions of stage props mean so much to me.
Indeed. I would go further.
ReplyDeleteAmericans love celebrities and celebrity gossip. Any supermarket checkout stand has racks and racks of Hollywood gossip magazines, upon whose covers the actors and musicians and whatnot are referred to by their first names.
To a lot of Americans, who have been encouraged to be an atomized, anomic, infantilized people who exist only as consumers, who have been encouraged to spend their incomes profligately in exchange for a constant 24/7 stream of intravenous "infotainment," who go to the movies every weekend and who are wearing a shiny spot on the centers of their TV screens with their noses the rest of the time, these morally depraved Hollyweird types are their virtual friends, neighbors, and family. The people on those gossip magazine covers are more real to them than the faceless shmoe who actually occupies the adjacent apartment, whom they've never spoken to, ever.
So all of these Hollywood types walk around with a megaphone permanently attached to their mouths. Any string of syllables they can put together and blurt out, the worldwide "news" media will scream into the ears of half the population instantly.
And--these actors, these musicians, all they really have is looks. Yes, musicians too, in an age of music videos and MTV. So some actor who's got a big cleft chin and a thousand-dollar-a-week coke habit and IQ of around 80 can emit whatever borborygmus and a hundred waiting TV cameras will broadcast it instantly, and by noon it'll be the water-cooler talk at 80% of the white-collar job locations in North America, repeated breathlessly by people who talk like they know the actor because he plays "nice guy"/"romantic lead" roles, when unbeknownst to them he's a cokehead and a screaming queen who abuses puppies.
A lot of these actor types are pretty opinionated. So's my barber. So are most bartenders. And so what? The only reason--the ONLY reason--anyone takes some Hollywood actor's opinions seriously is that we have a culture that encourages people to think of these twerps as being just as virtuous and heroic as the characters they portray in our pop-culture entertainment, and because we have a culture of infantilized quasi-adults who live and breathe Hollywood gossip and think these people's opinions are more worthy of an audience than anyone else's.
Johnny Ramone was fond of saying "Don't take me or anything I say seriously. I'm just some knucklehead who plays a guitar." Which I have to say was pretty refreshing.